Garmonca’s Weblog

For those of you who are interested in protecting your computer from unwanted viruses, spyware, malware and the likes, read this article for tips and tricks you can use to protect your PC (or MAC).

Ellyssa Kroski article, The Hype and the Hullabaloo of Web 2.0, discusses the why’s and how’s of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a Platform that Harnesses the Collective Intelligence and uses the Wisdom of Crowds to create better, more effective Network. This article sums up Web 2.0 quite nicely.

In class we discussed searching the static and dynamic web. I found an article that explains how these dynamic webpages are indexed. Since most dynamic web pages contain query strings, or a “?” in the url, the spiders stop at the query string and will not index the page further to avoid “spider traps”. To get around this, the article suggests web masters to include links to important dynamic content on the static pages, remove the query strings and replace the “?” with a “/”, like Amazon, and create pages with good content, META-tags, and keywords. Doing these fewe things could increase your search engine rankings thus increasing your web page hits.

For all those out there that love and use Facebook for social networking, I found a great article in PC Mag about how to to do damage control since Facebook will not take down pictures unless it violates their terms of use. It is simple, when photos are uploaded with your image and it is not particularly flattering, you need only remove the tag. While you cannot remove the photo without petitioning Facebook, this fix stops the image from being accessed on future newsfeeds.

Since blogging is a huge part of social networking and user generated content, I thought the article, Succeed at Blogging the Gawker Way, is great information for the entire class. Douglas points out the inportance of being specific, blogging about your interests, and blog about wierd topics. Not only does the author provide tips on blogging successfully, he includes information on how to get paid $$ for blogging.

Yet another useful service to the public provided by Google. Google has provided a service to stop drunk emailing. The application is called Mail Goggles. Late Friday and Saturday night, after hitting the send button in your gmail, a list of basic math questions pops up giving you opportunity to think before you send.  Now if only Google could focus this technology on phones.