This past weekend there’s been a conversation about Shyftr a new RSS service that allows people to read and comment on full text stories on the Shyftr site, rather making the reader click through to the originating blog to comment. The thought is that folks who care about pageviews for advertising will lose out in such a scenario.

So, in the spirit of helping the wider, feathers in a ruffle, blogging community out, I’ve pasted the Shyftr RSS bot info below. The good news is that you can block the Shyftr IP address from accessing your blog (if you already have that capability through your blog hosting solution, etc.). As of present, the IP address is 66.234.234.34.

Unlike other annoying bots, I would not block the user agent in your .htaccess file as the RSS bot software the Shyftr folks are using is the generic MagpieRSS toolset, which is used by other RSS services. Hopefully, the people at Shyftr will rename the user agent to something more uniquely identifiable in the future so you can block via .htaccess.

(Note: Blocking a future unique Shyftr user agent via robots.txt probably won’t work as the crawler would need to fetch the robots.txt file first before fetching your feed and I didn’t see that behavior tonight.)

Host: 66.234.234.34
*
/feed
Http Code: 200 Date: Apr 12 19:48:28 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: 6244
Referer: -
Agent: MagpieRSS/0.72 (+http://magpierss.sf.net)
*
/favicon.ico
Http Code: 200 Date: Apr 12 19:48:28 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: 1406
Referer: -
Agent: -

Technorati Tags: Shyftr, RSS, RSS toolset, robots, crawlers, bots, lost pageviews, comments, blogger brouhaha

Building upon a discussion elsewhere on the Web, here’s some brute force SEO for you.

Apparently, the NY Times is inserting tagging in the page META title tag, in the instances where it seems that article headlines lack sufficient keywords. Normally, the Times just carries the article’s headline into the page META title tag.

For example, in the article headlined The Falling-Down Professions, the page title tag reads as “Economic Conditions-Economic trends-legal profession-lawyers-prestige-doctors - New York Times”.

You see, the page title tag is important for SEO as Google in particular lends much weight to the text contained within the title tag.

All in all, the NY Times approach is definitely an interesting methodology for organizations deploying content management systems and who wish to build traffic from search engines.

Technorati Tags: SEO, tagging, title tag, keywords, NY Times, CMS, search engines, search engine traffic

I was browsing YouTube tonight for that baby got back wedding dance video, which is actually quite hilarious if you haven’t seen it yet.

Anyway, there I was searching (view search results) and as you can see, that same video was posted multiple times by multiple people. Honestly, I can’t tell who was the original poster.

But I guess my question is why did people repost the video? My best guess is that people are reposting videos so they can get views especially for the About This Video text box and populate their channel subscription numbers. Are there any other reasons I’m missing?

Technorati Tags: YouTube, YouTube channel, posting videos, baby got back

Good grief, Yahoo Small Business really fouled it up big time on “Cyber” Monday. It seems that the shopping cart for both Legacy and Merchant Solutions stores went down for at least 11 hours. Holy Moly.

Considering the types and size of stores that use the Yahoo platform, you’re talking a good guestimate of thousands of dollars lost per store. I’m sure people will be looking for alternate solutions after this.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Yahoo e-commerce store offerings, there are actually two types of platforms, the old pre-2004 legacy stores that are built upon proprietary RTML based templates and if I remember correctly, I believe this platform was bought by Yahoo. Needless to say, RTML is an incredible pain to work with and there are a few small businesses which specialize in RTML programming.

The newer Merchant Solutions stores feature HTML based templates, but doesn’t allow for as many products in a store because of performance issues. And yes, Yahoo charges a per product insertion fee.

From what I’ve read, there was a big update pushed to the stores just before Q4, which included an updated shopping cart and cross sell functionality. Apparently some legacy stores which reverted to the old cart during the outage did restore functionality.

When I worked on the platform, Yahoo tech support was wanting in many areas. Aside from the hold times, a clueful tech was hard to fine and system status messages were not at all verbose. For some reason, Yahoo tends to push updates all the way up to Thanksgiving (I’ve seen it happen when I worked on this platform) and it seemed like this one was a doozy.

The official word out of Yahoo so far is not enlightening, but the store owner comments are. After reading about the outage, I agree with the owners, there is no excuse for Yahoo whether it was traffic or a borked shopping cart.

Technorati Tags: E-commerce, online retailing, Yahoo, Yahoo Stores, outage, Cyber Monday, Holiday 2007

Looking through my log files, I find a crawler from a company that doesn’t yet quite exist on the Web, the user agent sans descriptive URL looked sorta spammy, so I had to Google them.

Not much on the homepage but a three columned div layout with a Web 2.0 green background, a commented out section in the source code about who is investing in them, and this hyperbole filled description….

“…an exciting new disruptive media and content publishing technology with many interesting applications.”

If anyone can parse that quote (into meaningful dollars), please let me know. All I know is that they are sending a crawler out to fetch feeds, how they are going to parlay that into content, I’m not sure.

Host: 74.86.17.253
/feed/
Http Code: 200 Date: Nov 25 13:42:48 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 21847
Referer: -
Agent: LargeSmall Crawler

Technorati Tags: crawlers, bots, spiders, user agent, logfiles, largesmall

Christmas is a month away and the 2007 holiday season has officially begun. While online merchants have been preparing for weeks, if not months for these next three and a half weeks, let’s go take a look at e-commerce trends for holiday 2007.

-Since Christmas arrives on a Tuesday this year, this means that the UPS ground deadline looks to be about Tuesday, December 18th for the lower 48. This is good, since the usual cutoff is about the 13th or 14th of December.

-I liked this roundup of Holiday promotions the WSJ found.

-Yes, we should be just a little skeptical of the claims that “Cyber Monday” as being the biggest shopping day of the year online. Hint, it’s not. Mondays are usually the highest traffic days for most Web sites (hence Cyber Monday) but you’ll see that the days just before the UPS ground shipping deadline are the highest volume shopping days. So for Holiday 2007, look for the numbers on Monday December 17th and Tuesday December 18th.

-From the “well, duh” department Web Research Drives More Real-World Purchases. You don’t say…

-It’s interesting that Google has reintroduced the Products link at the top of their homepage. Interesting to note that the link reverts back to Video if you click on some internal Google pages, I’ll bet that the Products link is there just for the holiday season.

However, I’m a little perplexed that with the apparent troubles of Froogle and of Google Base and the ongoing promotion of Google Checkout, why doesn’t Google name the link Shopping rather than Products? Don’t they want people to think of shopping with Google? Products just sounds so generic.

As someone who used to work in retail once said to me, “Christmas comes once a year and we know exactly what day it is.”

Technorati Tags: E-commerce, ecommerce, online retailing, online shopping, Holiday 2007, Cyber Monday

Has anyone else seen Google Page Rank drops for e-commerce sites during this most recent PR update?

I’m beginning to wonder if Google is trying to degrade SERPs for specific products.

Technorati Tags: Google, PageRank, SERPs, e-commerce, ecommerce, online shopping

I’ve written about Yahoo deliverability earlier, but now it’s personal.

The mailserver I use is being deferred via a 421 code by Yahoo, and judging by the fact I’m on shared hosting and the mailserver IP has been spotted on some minor blocklists, I’ve got a virtual neighbor with a problem.

Wonderful.

In this case, Yahoo is definitely not deferring my mail because of content (I’ve tested this) but they’re taking action because of the originating IP address.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Yahoo email deliverability, 421, Email Deliverability

Well, not madness, but something definitely weird.

I was wondering if anyone has seen any iPhones getting onto networks they should not be on. I am aware of a situation where an iPhone jumped on a wifi network with WEP and MAC Address filtering enabled.

The thing is, the iPhone only had the WEP key, but the iPhone MAC address hadn’t been authorized and iPhone still was granted an IP address via DHCP.

When I tried my iPhone on the network with the WEP key and but no MAC address authorization, I could not get on.

Another wrinkle is that the successful iPhone had been synched to a Mac laptop that was previously allowed on that network. Could that be it?

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, wifi, wifi networks, MAC

In case you were wondering about the iPhone picture quality, here are two pictures I took on Friday night in Old City Philadelphia. Of course, there is no flash or zoom on the iPhone.

Korean War Memorial Statue

Building bathed in light

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone images, Philadelphia

Oh boy this is so different than I thought it would be. The cool factor for me is the mini multi-communicator aspect.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple

Ok, so it is Friday, the Friday, where we can finally get our hands on the iPhone…. or some of us can, at least…

The most amusing commentary (with terrible religious overtones) I’ve heard so far was someone calling it “Good” Friday since the Jesus phone is coming.

As for me, I will be at the local Cingular/AT&T store at 6pm since I need my number ported from some other wireless carrier which shall not be named. That wireless carrier has quite lamely announced they will be open all day today. The phone that this carrier is trying to tout as an iPhone competitor? The LGV9400. Oooh, checkmate.

Also, getting iPhone should actually save me money since I should be able to get cleverhack email on it, while to do that on my current carrier, I would have to pay $15.00/mo or so for that email synching feature.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple, AT&T, anticipation, I need my number ported, I am gonna be restless all day