Content Is King -- Even Better When It's Free

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The Latest Webhosting News

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Video of the Day: How To Get on a Site That’s Been Blocked By Your Employer

Here is a how-to video from Howcast.

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Information On Webhosting That You Can Use

These economic times will demand more from all of us -- including your website.

In the search for business, many companies will need to reach even more customers to stay afloat in this severe downturn. IT staffs will be stretched and people will have to learn new skills and knowledge to help make it happen.

That's where web hosting tutorials can come in handy. These articles are written for the layperson in mind and are intended to pass on needed Web information and concepts quickly.

Speaking of the recession, you might want to check out the articles on e-commerce, to make sure your merchant site has everything going for that it should so that you can maximize every sale.

Another key area you need to stay on top of, no matter your role in your organization, is computer security. Find out what the hackers are doing, who they are attacking, and what your company's vulnerability is -- and how to defend it.

In these times of rising unemployment and instability, you need all the knowledge and skills you can muster to keep yourself useful and employed. Let these articles help.

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Articles To Help You Build A Better Website

Everyone, or at least every business -- large or small -- seems to need a website these days. And that's just the start. There's all kinds of talk about optimization, monetization, and on and on and on.

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The Right Cheap Web Hosting For You

It seems everyone wants cheap web hosting these days, but searching for such services for your website can be terribly overwhelming. Try putting that in a search box as a search term and see how many hits you get back.

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My Take: The Good News In The Bad Propeller Redesign

By Scott Nance

Today, on the one-week anniversary of the rollout of the redesign on Propeller.com -- despite all of the unhappiness vented on the 'Net over the last seven days about Propeller's new look and feel -- I can report some good news.

The silver lining amidst the pervasive bugginess and interface clunkiness is that that the folks who run the website do seem to care what we longtime users think -- and they are responding.

Propeller.com enjoyed a loyal following among many online even after it was separated from its once-home as Netscape's social news element. Many were even looking forward to this new facelift to lift Propeller out of the shadow of Digg.com and other competitors and finally give Propeller the prominence we felt it deserved.

Instead, we were all left bewildered and disappointed.

Last week's redesign roll-out annoyed and tested many of us long-time Propeller users as we became lost and frustrated in what appears to be a needlessly cumbersome new system.

Within hours, bloggers and others began to complain loudly about the new Propeller under such banners as "Propeller. Fail." (Ironically, early on many of these Propeller criticisms became the top stories on the Propeller home page.)

Alarmingly, many Propeller users began saying they were bailing out of the new Propeller site and were going to look for greener and easier-to-use digital pastures elsewhere.

Let me be upfront: we here at Life, The Universe..., and its sister sites have more than a passing interest in the health of Propeller.com and its user community.

We have long relied on Propeller as a main avenue to bring our content to the attention of the those across the Internet.

Immediately after the redesign rollout, our sites began to see precipitous drops in site traffic beginning last Tuesday and essentially continuing until today.

But in the midst of all the naysaying and hand-wringing, something impressed me. Tom Drapeau, Propeller's director and general manager, stepped right into the controversy. Drapeau commented in a critical thread on another site's message board, asking for patience -- and offering his direct email for those who wanted to contact him personally.

I was truly impressed that Drapeau would put his email out there. Given Propeller's place within the larger AOL hierarchy, he could have easily dodged that responsibility I think. Instead, what Drapeau seemed to be saying is, "The buck stops with me."

Given our dire traffic drop-off on our sites, I took Drapeau up on the offer. I wrote him and told him of our traffic decline.

I wasn't sure I would receive a reply, but I did -- within an hour. (And this was over the weekend, no less.)

Drapeau easily could have sent me a generic "thank you for your concern" reply, even told me that my site traffic was not his or Propeller's problem. (I was even a little afraid, he would have seen me as nothing more than a parasite for my reliance on his site for my web traffic.)

Instead, he was very friendly and forthcoming. He explained that his team was continuing to modify Propeller, and expressed hope that I ultimately find satisfaction with Propeller.com once all of the fixes are in place.

"I think the bugginess of the site on first launch, compounded with the lack of some of the distribution features, are the causes of the loss of traffic," he says. "We're fixing both ends of that equation... and we hope you'll find Propeller more attractive very soon."

Yes, the Propeller team could have done a better job addressing user concerns and general bugginess prior to the rollout, as many frustrated users have said in recent days. I understand that.

But Drapeau's attitude and responsiveness tells me he and his team do care what we users think and that they are making a sincere effort to address them.

In today's world of faceless and largely unresponsive corporate culture, the Propeller team could have taken a "Take it or leave it" approach, willing to alienate us longtime fans in favor of a more general Internet public. Instead, Drapeau should be commended for his positive steps and for putting the "social" into social media.

No, Propeller is not yet "fixed," and my site traffic has not yet recovered. But Drapeau's attitude leaves me optimistic that, sooner or later, all will be well again on Propeller.com.

Scott Nance is the publisher of Life, The Universe..., and its sister site, On The Hill.

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Forum: Curbing International Domain Name Abuses

This past Thursday, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) held its London Online Brand Abuses and Internet Governance Education Forum.

Broad in its geographical scope, the forum welcomed companies from the US, UK, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland, with half of the attendees representing Global 500 companies, according to an announcement of the event.

These attendees came together because of concerns over issues such as online brand dilution and the often-ineffective governance of ICANN. This was the first of two international Online Brand Abuses & Internet Governance Education Forums to be hosted by CADNA, both aimed at
creating a global network of brand owners in order to share the latest in proactive, reactive and preventative domain name strategies.

there are over 1.4 billion Internet users, and online advertising is projected to grow to over $80 billion in the next 3 years. The Internet makes it easy for brands to move into new markets, but unfortunately criminals enjoy the same perks- inexpensive and easy access to services and
consumers. This forum brought together brands from across the globe to share collective knowledge, experiences and strategies for combating brand infringement, harmful diversion, phishing and other online abuses such as counterfeiting. With the high margins posted by online criminals--many cybersquatted domains that are simply used to post sponsored advertisements produce $10,000 per year and cost just $10 to maintain--it is clear that this form of online abuse needs attention. CADNA forums open avenues for communication and cooperation between brand owners so that they can have a collective voice with which to effectively protest these practices.

The keynote speaker at this CADNA-hosted event was Jonathan Zittrain, chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, principal of the Oxford Internet Institute and a Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he co-founded Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Zittrain's presentation reviewed the evolution of the Internet from an open, simple, and informal environment to a structured corporation. He argues that this evolution came about because of entrepreneurial, technical and regulatory opportunities that the Internet provided, and was dictated by the individuals at the helm of ICANN, who often took decisive positions
on a piecemeal basis, without a holistic understanding of the Internet landscape that they were creating.

Also among the speakers was Martin Sutton, a representative for prominent CADNA member HSBC. HSBC represents the type of global company that can contribute to and benefit from an international coalition aimed at raising awareness and combating online abuse. "The Internet is young, and online abuse will continue to occur," says Sutton. "It is key to have an
effective strategy and policy, as well as the type of industry collaboration that CADNA offers, in order to protect brands and consumers."

Member representatives of Bacardi & Company Limited and DIRECTV, Inc. also
shared their views on domain name system challenges and solutions.

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More Than 875 Million Consumers Have Shopped Online

More than 85 percent of the world's online population has used the Internet to make a purchase -- increasing the market for online shopping by 40 percent in the past two years -- according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits. Globally, more than half of Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen.

"The Internet is no longer a niche technology -- it is mass media and an utterly integral part of modern life. Almost no aspect of life remains untouched by online media. As our lives become more fractured and cluttered, it isn't surprising that consumers turn to the unrivaled convenience of the Internet when it comes to researching and buying products," says Jonathan Carson, president, international, Nielsen Online.

"When The Nielsen Company conducted its first global survey into Internet shopping trends two years ago, approximately 10 percent of the world's population (627 million) had shopped online," says Bruce Paul, vice president, customized research, Nielsen U.S. "Within two years, this number has increased by approximately 40 percent (to 875 million)."

Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97 percent), Germany (97 percent), Japan (97 percent) with the U.S. eighth, at 94 percent. Additionally, in South Korea, 79 percent of these Internet users have shopped in the past month, followed by the UK (76 percent) and Switzerland (67 percent) with the U.S. at 57 percent.

Globally, the most popular and purchased items over the Internet are books (41 percent purchased in the past three months), clothing/accessories/shoes (36 percent), videos / DVDs / games (24 percent), airline tickets (24 percent) and electronic equipment (23 percent).

Among Germany's Internet users, 55 percent say they bought books, 42 percent had bought Clothes/Accessories/Shoes and one in four had purchased Music/Videos/DVD's in the past three months.

During the same period, among Internet users in the UK, 45 percent bought books online, followed by Videos/DVDs/Games (44 percent), Clothing/Accessories/Shoes (38 percent), music (37 percent) and one in four Internet shoppers also purchased and airline tickets/reservations online.

Among U.S. Internet users in the past month, 41 percent bought Clothing/Shoes/Accessories, 38 percent bought books and one in three Internet shoppers bought Videos/DVDs/Games.

The number of Internet consumers buying books over the Internet has increased 7 percent in the past two years but the biggest increase has been in Clothing / Accessories / Shoes which increased from 20 percent to 36 percent. "Some of the biggest buyers of books on the Internet are from developing countries -- China, Brazil, Vietnam and Egypt -- indicating massive growth potential for online retailers that can specifically target these fast-growing markets," says Carson.

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Web Hosting Made Simple

Web hosting seems like it should be a straightforward affair, but often it is not. You can become lost in minutae of storage and bandwidth and more.

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Education, Lotto Sites Gain on Web in August

Education-related sites had a strong presence in this month's rankings as schools and universities across the country began another academic year. August also saw traffic increases to lotto/sweepstakes sites as lottery jackpots reached near record highs. Humor sites gained on the strength of Comedy Central's spike in traffic, and sports/outdoor retail sites grew in anticipation of the fall sports season.

That's according to a monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties for August released by comScore Media Metrix.

With students and teachers heading back to the classroom in late August, education sites experienced strong growth for the month. The training and education category grew 15 percent to more than 12 million visitors, making it the top gaining category for the month. College resource site Fastweb led the category with 2.5 million visitors (up 13 percent), followed by The College Board with nearly 1.9 million visitors (up 12 percent) and Nellnet, Inc., an education planning and financing
company, with 1.4 million visitors (up 11 percent). The education information category increased 8 percent to more than 63 million visitors, as Dictionary.com Sites led the category with 11.8 million visitors, followed by Answers.com (9.3 million visitors) and Pearson Education (8.6 million visitors).

Multi-state lotteries Mega Millions and Powerball both reached massive jackpots in August causing lotto/sweepstakes sites to rise 8 percent to more than 31 million visitors for the month. Powerball.com surged to 2.3 million visitors (up 123 percent), while Megamillions.com saw its traffic swell to 1.1 million (up 100 percent).

The humor category grew 8 percent in August, reaching more than 30 million Americans. The increase was largely propelled by gains at Comedy Central from its "Indecision 2008" coverage. National Lampoon Humor Network led the category with 5.6 million visitors, followed by Comedy Central with nearly 5 million visitors (up 105 percent) and Jokeroo Entertainment Inc.
with nearly 3 million visitors (up 37 percent).

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China's Eye on the Internet

The "Great Firewall of China," used by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable, is actually a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than a true firewall, according to researchers at University of California Davis and the University of New Mexico.

The researchers are developing an automated tool, called ConceptDoppler, to act as a weather report on changes in Internet censorship in China. ConceptDoppler uses mathematical techniques to cluster words by meaning and identify keywords that are likely to be blacklisted.

Many countries carry out some form of Internet censorship. Most rely on systems that block specific Web sites or Web addresses, says Earl Barr, a graduate student in computer science at UC Davis who is an author on the paper. China takes a different approach by filtering Web content for specific keywords and selectively blocking Web pages.

In 2006, a team at the University of Cambridge, England, discovered that when the Chinese system detects a banned word in data traveling across the network, it sends a series of three "reset" commands to both the source and the destination. These "resets" effectively break the connection. But they also allow researchers to test words and see which ones are censored.

Barr, along with Jed Crandall, a recent UC Davis graduate who is now an assistant professor of computer science at the School of Engineering, University of New Mexico; UC Davis graduate students Daniel Zinn and Michael Byrd; and independent researcher Rich East sent messages to Internet addresses within China containing a variety of different words that might be subject to censorship.

If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet, Barr said. But the researchers found that some messages passed through several routers before being blocked.

A firewall would also block all mentions of a banned word or phrase, but banned words reached their destinations on about 28 percent of the tested paths, Byrd said. Filtering was particularly erratic at times of heavy Internet use.

The words used to probe the Chinese Internet were not selected at random.

"If we simply bombarded the Great Firewall with random words, we would waste resources and time," Zinn says.

The researchers took the Chinese version of Wikipedia, extracted individual words and used a mathematical technique called latent semantic analysis to work out the relationships between different words. If one of the words was censored within China, they could look up which other closely related words are likely to be blocked as well.

Examples of words tested by the researchers and found to be banned included references to the Falun Gong movement and the protest movements of 1989; Nazi Germany and other historical events; and general concepts related to democracy and political protest.

"Imagine you want to remove the history of the Wounded Knee massacre from the Library of Congress," Crandall says. "You could remove 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' and a few other selected books, or you could remove every book in the entire library that contains the word 'massacre.'"

By analogy, Chinese Internet censorship based on keyword filtering is the equivalent of the latter -- and indeed, the keyword "massacre" (in Chinese) is on the blacklist.

Because it filters ideas rather than specific Web sites, keyword filtering stops people from using proxy servers or "mirror" Web sites to evade censorship. But because it is not completely effective all the time, it probably acts partly by encouraging self-censorship, Barr says. When users within China see that certain words, ideas and concepts are blocked most of the time, they might assume that they should avoid those topics.

The original panopticon was a prison design developed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Bentham proposed that a central observer would be able to watch all the prisoners, while the prisoners would not know when they were being watched.

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Years Later, Court Upholds 'Vote-Swapping' Sites Famous From 2000

In a decision stemming from a dispute during the controversial presidential election of 2000, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that so-called "vote-swapping"
websites are protected by the First Amendment.

A number of these websites sprung up in the last weeks of the 2000 campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore that allowed third-party supporters of candidate Ralph Nader in swing states to strategize with major-party voters in "safe" states about "trading" their votes to avoid handing the election to their least-preferred candidate.

Ultimately, more than 90,000 voters in Florida voted for Nader. Bush prevailed in a Supreme Court decision which found he won Florida -- and the presidency -- by just 537 votes.

The sites were quickly shut down when then-California Secretary of State Bill Jones sent letters to operators of a website threatening to prosecute them for what he called "vote-buying," even though no money or other type of financial benefit changed hands.

The ACLU of Southern California and the National Voting Rights Institute represented website operators Alan Porter (voteswap2000.com) and William Cody (voterexchange2000.com) and two individual voters, Patrick Kerr and Steven Lewis.

The case, originally filed in November 2000, argued in part that the threats by Jones violated the First Amendment rights of the website operators and exceeded the scope of Jones' authority under California's election code. The National Voting Rights Institute is now affiliated with Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy, research and advocacy center.

The Ninth Circuit's ruling now establishes that the activities that Secretary Jones attempted to squelch "are at the heart of the liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment" and cannot be prosecuted under vote-buying statutes. The decision will be an important precedent protecting the right of website operators and voters to maintain and use such sites in future presidential elections.

"Technology changes the way politics work, but it doesn't alter the basic principles of democracy," says Peter Eliasberg, of the ACLU/SC. "Voters of any political persuasion should be able to meet like-minded voters wherever they are and organize for their candidates without threats to their freedom of speech."

"The court's decision today recognizes the importance of the Internet as a low-cost means of political communication and a vibrant forum for debate about the presidential election," says Lisa Danetz, senior counsel at Demos.

This is the second ruling by the 9th Circuit Court that protects the rights of vote-trading websites. In 2005, the appeals court overruled a federal district court that had dismissed the case shortly after the 2000 election. Today's decision confirms that vote swaps are constitutionally protected.

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Banner Ads Work -- Even If You Don't Notice Them at All

The majority of advertising exposure occurs when the audience’s attention is focused elsewhere, such as while flipping through a magazine or browsing a web site. However, a new study reveals that even this incidental exposure to advertising may have a positive effect on consumer attitudes. Forthcoming in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, the study revises existing theories of exposure advertising, specifically repeated views of web-based banner ads.

"Effects of mere exposure are expected to grow in a marketplace where consumers’ attention is often focused elsewhere," write Xiang Fang (Oklahoma State University), Surendra Singh (University of Kansas), and Rohini Ahluwalia (University of Minnesota). "Regardless of measured click-through rates, banner ads may still create a favorable attitude toward the ad due to repeated exposure."

The researchers investigated whether "mere exposure effect," a condition in which people develop a positive perception of stimuli not presented to them on a noticeable level, was also applicable to incidental advertising. In a series of experiments, the researchers discovered that even if people could not recall the content of the ad, repeated exposure led to familiarity, which then led to positive feelings.

"Our research could have important theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it enhances our understanding of the process underlying the mere exposure effect. Practically, it provides some useful guidelines for advertisers to develop more accurate measures of banner ad effectiveness," the authors write.

Participants had more positive evaluations toward the target banner ad as exposure frequency increased. Surprisingly, participants also showed high levels of tolerance for banner ads on which they were not directly focused. According to the researchers, even after twenty exposures, common wear-out effects were not apparent.

"Our results suggest that the fluency resulting from frequent passive exposure and the consequent spontaneous affective reaction provide a crucial link between exposure and positive impressions," write the authors. "Such spontaneous affect influenced evaluative judgments through a more complex process, likely by coloring the interpretation of the fluency experience and the nature of resulting metacognitions relating fluency with liking."

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