Ebay Express. So you get to put all of your new ebay purchases into one shopping cart at a “Buy It Now” price… but you still have to pay each merchant individually…What was the point of this again?

Technorati Tags: Ebay

Two things about e-commerce related items.

First, I will show my bias and announce that I love, just love the design of jcrew.com. Clean, simple design that evokes their brand.

Secondly, the New York Times had an article about a new shopping search engine cum wiki powered review site called ShopWiki. ShopWiki is in beta (good grief their crawler has been around for at least the last 6 months) and the idea is that users will posts reviews of products, it is these reviews in addition to the usual shopping comparision site features which is supposed to make this site unique.

Third, I think I may have mentioned this site before, but here’s roosster, a site that aggregates a number of RSS categories, including shopping deals announced via RSS. Roosster deals RSS feeds

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, online shopping, wiki, search engine, web design, RSS

I’ve been seeing this piece of work in my log files recently…

1)Spammer is working around the fact that is “buy-cheap” site could be blocked, so that’s why he’s using the legitimate wizards.com site for the redirect.

2)Spammer is taking advantage of the fact that Wizards.com is allowing outside visitors to the leaving.asp page. In a perfect, logical world, the only visitors going to the leaving.asp page should be visitors who are originating from the wizards.com domain.

3)Check out the “Widows NT” user agent.

4)I thought that I have seen something not too long ago about this phenomena, but I can’t seem to find anything related to this tonight…

Technorati Tags: site logs, referrer, spamming

Hospital visits to sick relatives, sea monkey hatchlings, talking to friends I haven’t heard from in years and oh my goodness, it’s already late April…

Two Google related items for today…

1) I don’t get the hue and cry surrounding the finding that the Adsense related Google Mediapartners bot is now apparenly indexing for the Google Main Index. See, the thing is that it is hurting folks who thought they were all clever and serving different content to the Mediapartners bot and the Main Index bot, and they are getting smacked with dupe content penalties.

As for the briefly mentioned idea that maybe advertising on Adsense boosts up Google rankings for the URLs… well, it used to at least. Back in late 04/early 05 I was seeing a boost in the number of links listed for a domain in the Google Main Index. What I noticed is that some of the links in the Google Main Index were MFA sites which displayed the ads for the domain.

2) Apparently PDFs of HTML content is not apparently considered dupe content. Not that I would ever offer a copy of content via PDF.

Update 04/23/06: Matt Cutts posts an explanation about the different googlebots, googlebot caching information and Google’s attempts at saving bandwidth. His one statement of “Just as always, participating in AdSense or being in our blogsearch doesn’t get you any “extra” crawling (or ranking) in our web index whatsoever”. Is making me curious though and I commented as such in his entry.

Technorati Tags: Google, Googlebot, Webmaster, AdSense

Here’s something interesting that I just noticed, I blogged about a new topic (i.e. one that just had two results on both Google and Yahoo) a few entries below and 24 hours later, that topic is easily findable on Yahoo and on Google Blog Search.

However, no love on just the regular Google Web search at this moment.

I’m wondering if Google delays new blog entries being found on the regular Web search until traffic justifies it.

Update: 9:39pm 04/16/2006 - now getting referrers from MSN on the topic in question. Still nothing on Google Web.

Update 2: 04/17/06 Google Web showed the blog entry a full 48 hours after it was posted.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo, MSN, SERPS

This Easter Bunny dude is pretty slick, he not only leaves two baskets for my daughter and I, but he also left a few Easter eggs to find and a Sea Monkey kit.

Also, when shopping for some last minute items last night, we found some hot cross buns in the bakery, which reminded me of the nursery rhyme.

Hot Cross Buns Hot Cross Buns One a penny, two a penny Hot Cross Buns

cleverhack results

… but only a miniscule percentage of visitors ever come from that search engine.

Technorati Tags: Search engines, SERPS

Over at WebmasterWorld they’re discussing whether Google incorporates traffic patterns into their results algorithm.

There’s a bit of speculation (say it ain’t so) about the subject, but the question of just exactly how Google uses the Google Toolbar information collects is intriguing. What about returning visitors? Also, another question asked is whether traffic influences Googlebot visitation frequency… on cleverhack, I see Googlebot everyday (and also the Google mediapartners bot which I believe is because of my AdSense ads) and nearly all (like 98% or some such) of my search engine traffic is from Google.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Toolbar, Web page ranking, SERPS

Doc Searls I still read plenty of blogs. What’s different is that I no longer subscribe to specific blogs. Rather, I subscribe to subjects.

I’ve been pondering this idea of “there’s so much information out there, how do I find, organize and rank it in order of accuracy, importance and authority to meet MY needs”.

Janice Kucher-Patenaude, longtime Music Department teacher at Montville Township High School, passed away on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 after a long illness. Her husband and daughter survive her. K-P was one of those unique once-in-a-lifetime personalities and for those of us who were lucky enough to know her during our high school careers, a profound influence. K-P taught us how to stage a good musical, how to breathe properly while in chorus and most importantly, how to develop our personal strengths (even if it was being the chorus attendance taker during senior year). To this day, I still sing along to the Pirates of Penzance. Thanks, K-P.

A memorial service is planned for Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 2pm at the United Methodist Church of New Providence in New Providence, NJ. A benefit concert to celebrate her life will be held Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 8pm at Drew University in Madison, NJ.

Update: 04/17/06: There’s a great number of folks finding this entry from the search engines. Feel free to comment, and I’ll archive this entry and your comments for the future. Also, if anyone sees an official newspaper obituary, I’d appreciate a link sent to my blog@cleverhack.com address.

Update 2: More details at the Alumni site

Fellow students/alums blogging remembrances:

The other Joy from 1992 blogs

A friend

When I read this blog entry by trimMail, I thought something was a bit amiss, (I mean besides the fact some email delivery company was complaining about the problems with Yahoo mailservers). As it turns out, the discussion on Slashdot has been pretty enlightening. My one takeaway is the comment about Yahoo’s use of greylisting, which from what I know about Yahoo delivery, sounds like it’s on target. Basically, if you act like a probe (like the trimMail mailserver tool monitoring port 25), you’ll get greylisted while if you act like a legitimate MTA and resend later, you shouldn’t have problems.

Technorati Tags: Email, Email Marketing, SPAM, Greylisting