Just saw this featured on TV. The National Science Foundation has launched a site about the Birth and history of the internet. The coverage called the internet the 2nd greatest invention right after the wheel – I dare to differ as I would see book press on the number two slot.

The site covers the story from the idea to the first e-mail all the way to the web 2.0. Illustrated with quite a few images, graphics, Videos and interviews. The birth of the internet  

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The Birth of the Internet – National Science Foundation

I would spend hours a week browsing through all the “news feeds” I have subscribed through my RSS reader – but again I more and more got the feeling that I did rarely really get something really useful out of this daily routine. And website stats – oh my these dammed stats. You can – and I did – spend hours a week browsing through your analytics accounts.

So at some point I decided to try a little experiment and go on a news diet.

I came up with the following 5 Rules for me and thought I share them.

Master RULE:

Everything you do on these time eating monsters of websites – do with purpose, do it with a reason.

Sounds weird but really I did realize that loads of the time I spent surfing was just giving in on habits I did take up over the last years.

Rule 1: What do you really need? Think about being stranded on a lonely island.

Only read RSS feeds once a day during the week – did this in the morning.
I did set up a brand new reader account with only the 5 subscriptions I thought I just could not do without. That’s 95 subscriptions down from what my usual daily dose was in the month past.

Here go my 5 remaining RSS feeds – and believe me I did not miss anything (big).

http://searchengineland.com/

http://allthingsd.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/

http://www.techmeme.com/

http://www.seroundtable.com/

Rule 2: No news is no news

Check your Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and Twitter account only once a day. If you really really can’t follow this one you can do twice a day. Set the time and follow your own rule. I did check the accounts twice in the first week and then reduced it to once a week for LinkedIn and Friendfeed and once a day for Facebook and Twitter.

You say that Twitter or Facebook once a day is not possible – it’s even against what’s making these services so great? Well ur right up to a certain extent but guess what setting up e-mail alerts can help you massively to avoid checking in randomly.

Go check out Twittermail and the Notification settings in Facebook – you can get almost everything delivered to your inbox.

Rule 3: cut back on stats for ego surfing

Website statistics are the greatest single source of information for your website. You can learn loads about your users, good and bad content and simply what works and what doesn’t.

BUT – you can spend hours and hours without getting anywhere playing around with new comparison features of your preferred analytics software with no real result. Its just another way of ego surfing – this time not googling your name but getting high on the fact how many people from Australia did visit your latest article on green laptops.

This is a waste of time! Get your stats delivered to you via mail or check them once a day – just the most important figures – to make sure the server does not go down.

Install email alerts to check if your server is down – cause that’s when you really want to check something – maybe even some stats.

I’m down to an email once a day with the most basic numbers – maybe I’ll get to once a week.

Rule 4: Dump RSS

Dump RSS for real news discovery – your friends will let you know if something really important is going on.

Probably the most important learning in the last couple of weeks – so once again.

People will let you know if something important is happening.

I do use my feed reader with the 101 subscriptions every couple of days to browse through these /mostly/ high quality sources of ideas and interesting information.

Rule 5: Use more email alerts

I can’t emphasis enough on this. Email alerts from your favorite search engine, social media site, web analytics provider – use them!!!

I found email clients so much better to get a handle with the sheer volume of blips of information I have to deal with on a daily basis.

You can very efficiently search, sort, delete all the elements once delivered to your inbox. And with a couple of additional rules and metas applied to your inbox you stand a much better chance to be the master of your own domain again. here is some further reading on how to manage your inbox even with a video.

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How to gain back hours of time a week you waste on ’social’ media sites

After you install WordPress on your server you might be greeted with this message in your browser when you try to open the page.

“Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

Or this one in Safari:

“Too many redirects occurred trying to open this document.”

I do run into this issue with WordPress from time to time or better from one provider/hosting package to another. In some cases the canonical URL feature in WordPress does compete with a server setting or a line in the .htaccess file. (The .htaccess file might not be editable in the hosting package you have.)

The competing redirects lead to the browser giving up – and they can’t/won’t show you your site.

What is a canonical URL?

For instance, say your (WordPress) blog is hosted on

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/

You can likely access the home page of your blog via these alternative URLs:

http://yourdomain.com/blog/
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/
http://yourdomain.com/blog/index.php
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/?paged=1
http://yourdomain.com/blog/?paged=1
…

That might not sound like a problem to you but it is one for search engines. A search engine crawler does not know that the content of all the above URIs is identical. As per definition they could/should all return unique content upon request.

Now in the concept of back links being important for search engine rankings and Page Rank you want to make sure you concentrate all the juice on one URL not many – otherwise different documents of your site would compete against each other.

Now the WordPress versions from 2.3 onwards (if I’m right) does take care of this “issue” and automatically redirects the requests to the one URL defined in the permalink settings. And that’s a great great improvement.

However in some cases as described above the feature does compete against server settings of your provider or redirect rules set in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your domain or subdomain.

How to disable the canonical URLs in WordPress?

As multiple URLs for one piece of content is one issue but an installation of WordPress not working at all quite another one you might consider disabling this functionality – at least for the time being.

Thanks to Mark Jaquith who did work on the Canonical URL feature for WordPress here is a very quick way to disable them via a WordPress Plugin.

Just download the file here (right click and choose save file) and then upload it to the …./wp-content/plugins folder of your WordPress installation. Go to the Plugins Page and activate it – now your WordPress pages should load with no issue at all.

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WP Canonical URLs – the server is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete

I fight with in the new WordPress 2.7 automated update for plugin setting panel.

Although I’m 100% positive the ftp info is right, I get the error message saying it failed to connect. Double checked with my usual ftp client works like a charm. Did some research and found this thread not much help so….

Anybody had the same issue and found the cure? Please do let me know.

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Failed to connect to FTP Server WordPress 2.7 – Auto Update

Lycos Europe started to sell off its assets. Lycos gets 34 million Euros for United Domains its domain registration business. The profitable business was founded back in 2000 and manages more than 1,1 million domains today.

The business is sold to United Internet who amongst others have brands like GMX, 1&1, affilinet, sedo and web.de in their portfolio.

UPDATE: Here is the full press release.

Ad hoc announcement acc. to Sec. 15 WpHG: United Internet acquires united-domains

Montabaur, December 12, 2008. United Internet AG (Elgendorfer Str. 57, 56410 Montabaur, Germany, ISIN: DE0005089031), Montabaur, reached a agreement today with the owner of united-domains AG (Gautinger Strasse 10, 82319 Starnberg, Germany), LYCOS Europe NV (Richard Holkade 36, 2033 PZ Haarlem, Netherlands, ISIN NL0000233195), concerning the acquisition of united-domains by a company belonging to the United Internet Group.

united-domains AG is a specialist for the fast and simple registration of domain names with over 100 international domain endings. The profitable company was founded in August 2000 and has since become one of Europe’s leading domain registrars. united-domains currently administers over 1.1 million domains of around 180,000 customers. The company is still run by the founders Florian Huber (CEO), Alexander Helm and Markus Eggensperger, who will own a shareholding of around 15% of the company in the future.

In the run-up to the transaction, the value of united-domains AG was set at around EUR 34 million. The final purchase price will be determined after united-domains AG has posted its annual financial statements for fiscal year 2008 and an accrual account based on the date of completion. The purchase price will be settled fully in cash whereby EUR 7 million will be held in escrow as a security guarantee for United Internet.

The share acquisition is still subject to the usual anti-trust approval procedures. The transaction is expected to be completed in the 1st quarter of 2009.

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United Internet acquires United Domains – from Lycos Europe

Now you would think that a quick web search would guide you the way to the solution of this nasty handbrake like stupidity – but you guessed wrong.  A quick journey to the YouTube help section then – right?  Again wrong no mentioning here either. A search in their help forum reveals that others have the same issue and even worse ones based on this bug but no solution is provided. Apart from “clear you cache” or “downgrade your flash player”.

Short answer, it looks likes one or more of the following have a problem with IPV6: FireFox 3, IE6, XP SP3, Flash and the solution (workaround really) is to uninstall IPV6.

Let me explain. Over the course of troubleshooting I noticed that when the browser froze up, sometimes in the status bar it said it was connecting to localhost. I tried looking for why and couldn’t figure out why it was doing that and just threw away that as the reason for this. Tonight however on another thread about this issue I saw someone else also note that he saw connections to http://localhost:8881/crossdomain.xml.

So, after a little investigation I found that firefox seemed to have issues all the time when I tried to http://localhost on any port (50% cpu like before, but when I hit stop it worked again). I then went to a dos prompt and did a “ping localhost” and I saw that instead of resolving to 127.0.0.1, localhost resolved to the ipv6 ip address (::1 or something like that).

So, as a test I decided I’d uninstall ipv6, and after a reboot I have not yet had any problems! All videos both embedded and on the site work fine!

Come on guys you can do better than this. Google and Adobe you should be able to figure something out that’s secure and works – just try – it is Christmastime! 

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

YouTube – Player requests localhost:8881/crossdomain.xml

by Balakov

And while immediately one would say the owner of the sites are responsible or in some cases the site contributors. There is a point in saying that without the search engines millions and millions of sites and trillions of pages of content would never be found and thus nasty surprises like the one for Isabel Macedo would be much more of an exception.

Argentine actress Isabel Macedo heard on the grapevine that her name was appearing on internet porn sites, so she sat down at her computer to Google herself.

She recalls feeling “ashamed and horrified” to find links to sex sites among the top 10 search results, especially as she was then working on a hit children’s TV show, Floricienta.

With the internet being such a global phenomenon and the law being such a local issue this is truly a hard nut to crack.

In the case of Diego Maradona the Argentinian soccer legend this led to a removal of the search results on the Argentinian Yahoo! search whilst the US search still shows results for the same query.

Maradona US SERP with results

Maradona Argentinian SERP with no results

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Stars fight search engines – who owns the SERPS?

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Recession? How will the internet advertising market be affected?

by Lawrence OP

Brilliant as it did save me loads of time – keeping me from doing those unnecessary navigational queries – at least for the top ten sites I visit.

BUT and as you can see its a BIG BUT. It seems that there is no sense of fair competition for the up and coming sites the newcomers and the underdogs.

There you have it the Matthew effect is taking its toll.

To spare you the need to go and visit Wikipedia to remember what the Matthew effect is:

The “Matthew effect” denotes the phenomenon that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” and can be observed in various different contexts where “rich” and “poor” can take different meanings.

In the FireFox situation this results in me visiting the same pages over and over again and even if I happen to like a page a lot it has little to no chance to break into the top ten.

Could someone please fix this?

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

The Matthew effect – or how FireFox curbs my horizon

Haarlem / Netherlands, November 26, 2008 – LYCOS Europe N.V. (“LYCOS”), one of the leading portal providers, online advertisers, hosting, domain and price-comparison platforms in Europe, today announces the results of its strategic review process.

Over the past months LYCOS, together with its advisors, has evaluated the different available options for the business. These options included the sale of the company as a whole, a sale of all or parts of the assets of LYCOS, restructuring and partial liquidation of the business.

As a result of this strategic review process the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of LYCOS came to the conclusion that the best available option of the company is to (i) strive for a sale of its domains, Danish portal and shopping activities and (ii) to discontinue the portal and webhosting activities.

As a result of this conclusion LYCOS intends to distribute an amount of EUR 50 million in 2008 to its shareholders.

The above mentioned steps are subject to the approval of LYCOS’ shareholder meeting, which will be held December 12th, 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The full agenda as well as further information are available on the LYCOS corporate website.

UPDATE: The re kress.de the number of people affected ranges between 500 and 700.

Not a huge surprise, but still a sad thing to witness.

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Lycos Europe we are closing down – fire sale