These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
We’ve all seen a gadzillion of statistics on how many videos are uploaded to YouTube every day or how many Google searches are performed every month. While those are all interesting on their own, combined into a single overview they provide a really good perspective on how active and diverse the Web is.
Via ma.tt.
According to GigaOm:
Go Daddy, the largest domain registrar and a web hosting provider, is reportedly close to being sold to a group of private equity firms including KKR and Silver Lake Partners. The purchase price is about $2 – 2.5 billion, according to several news outlets.
That’s the same Silver Lake that helped so much to screw up Skype. If you haven’t yet found an alternative to GoDaddy, you should be looking. That reminds me that Automattic has become a domain registrar quite some time ago and I haven’t heard any updates on that.
I don’t remember if I blogged this one or not, but since it’s still funny, I’m blogging it.
Pretty much every social network out there is building a custom front page for each user. Such front pages are customized with preferences and previous activity of the user. This is an excellent functionality. But one thing such approach often breaks is a referral URL. Have a look at something I saw in my statistics today morning (click for larger version).
This tells me that someone somewhere on Facebook linked to one of my posts. I know which post was linked to. But I have no way to figure out where exactly on Facebook the link is. I’d like to do so very much – I’m interested to see the discussion and context in which my post came up. I’ve tried Googling for the post, but that didn’t help. I examined logs of my web server and that didn’t help either. I think that’s broken.
And just to be clear, this problem is not specific to Facebook. I’ve had similar issues with Twitter and other social networks. Some of them make the discovery job easier than others. But all of them don’t make the source obvious. And I think they should.
Here is a quote directly from Google’s Inside Search blog:
We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.
If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our help center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well.
[…]
We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.
In simple terms, this means that you should make sure that all your content – no matter where it is published – identifies you as an author. This will help link all your content together, create your author profile, and use that as yet another criteria in ranking and searching. Those of you publishing with WordPress shouldn’t worry at all – adding authorship is either already done or will take a minor modification to the theme. WordPress provided both author pages and XFN markup out of the box for years.