How easy do you think it would be for Google and / or Delicious themselves to segregate users based upon how many links they add to their bookmarks that there are zero other users having favorited?

Think about it. Innumerable SEO experts and backlink building strategies all use Delicious and other social bookmarking tools to build links to their own websites, or to their client’s websites. Of course, when 99.9% of those bookmarks are first submitted that particular user is the only one to have submitted that particular favorite webpage.

In order to filter out those throwaway profiles that exist for no reason other than to build self-serving backlinks to their own online pages, a simple algorithm that checked to make sure a specific percentage (say 30% if you were looking to just weed out the worst abusers, or 50%+ if you were looking to really separate the wheat from the chafe) of favorited sites were also favorited by at least one other person (or maybe even 10 other people) would eliminate virtually all of the users who just create a profile in order to link their own stuff.

That would allow you to crawl sites like Delicious without having to worry about giving too much credit to spammy links while at the same time being able to capitalize on the giant crowd sourcing power that runs sites like Delicious.

Of course, you would have to keep such an algorithm secret, which Google, at least, is good at doing, in order to avoid having sneaky Internet Marketing types throw in a good good link every 2 or 3 junk links.

Does Google do this?

How would I (or anyone else) know?

All I know is that it is probably worth it to send in a favorite from time to time that I know has a lot of other favorites out there already in order to make sure I don’t look like one of "them."

It isn’t that I’m particularly spammy, it is just that I don’t really use services like Delicious (Firefox + Xmarks = all the portable bookmarks I need without the lag of being online) and I don’t think that I necessarily should incur any sort of penalty for that fact. So, if you stumble upon (another example of a site that this would work good for) my Delcious bookmarks or Stumble Upon profile, rest assured that in addition to links to a lot of my writing around the web, you will also be sure to find plenty of other links that are used by a lot of people out there.

The best part is, that there is no deception necessary. I only think to links, favorite, bookmark, or stumble my best resources anyway, unless I’m in a feisty mood. So, end the end, I guess it is a win-win for everyone involved.

Phew, 508 words. I guess it isn’t a micro-post after all

Update: It seems that Amazon is going out of its way to make me look foolish   Just kidding. Actually, just got an email update, partially excerpted below, from the Amazon Associates folks about a new way that the affiliate program will integrate directly with Twitter. Basically, it makes the rest of this post moot, but if you want to read, go nuts

The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account (you may be asked to log in to your Twitter account). That message will include a shortened URL that already includes your Associates ID. You’ll have the option to edit this message or simply hit the ‘Update’ button to post to your Twitter account. When Twitter users click on the link in your post and make a qualifying sale, you’ll earn referral fees. That’s it.

A bit of a rumble making its way around the Blog-o-Go-Round regarding Amazon’s denial of commission payments for sales made via links shortened and then posted to Twitter.

There are many different ways to make money using the Internet. One of the most common is by enrolling in what is known as an affiliate program. Basically, “affiliate program” is an euphemism for getting commissions for sales or traffic that you generate by linking to the website or products of the selling website.

Amazon Associates is the brand name of Amazon’s affiliate program which pays commissions to people who refer buyers to Amazon’s website via links. In the Utopian version of this referral program, people sign up to become Amazon Associates and then link to various Amazon products that they recommend or endorse based upon either personal experience or research. In the real world version of the program people try numerous ways to game the system, oftentimes providing links either indiscriminately, or deceptively.

Of course, such trickery is only valuable to those in it for the quick buck. The Internet Marketer (another euphemism) doesn’t really care if the person who follows the link feels like they were treated well, or honestly, as long as they buy something after they follow that link to Amazon.  Amazon feels differently, and for good reason. They are a multi-billion dollar business that depends, in no small part, on its overall reputation as a legitimate online retailer for sales.

Consider the number of people willing to pay a few dollars, to many dollars more for a given product in order to buy it from Amazon, instead of some other website that they have never heard of before. Couple this with free shipping for orders over $25 and the trust that people have about Amazon’s return policies and you have one of the only ways possible to defend against smaller cheaper competitors.

I, myself, routinely shop around online using a variety of websites, tools, and just plain old Google searches of the shopping type and to a lesser extent Microsoft shopping searches that offer cash back. In the end, however, unless the price difference, including shipping, is at least ten bucks or more, I’ll just buy it from Amazon. It is worth the extra money to avoid the potential hassles of not knowing whether or not that other online store is a good one or not.

Twitter, Link Shorteners, and Scams

Amazon has decided to not pay affiliates who link to their products via links that have been shortened. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that by shortening a link, it conceals what the link is, and where it goes. It may be the case that most people don’t watch the status bar when they mouse over the a link to see where the link goes, but for those who do, a shortend link is a unknown link.

Another reason Amazon is not too keen on shortened links is that the destination of those links can be modified at will. The idea behind Amazon’s program is not to link to Amazon whenever their commission is the highest, or there is a hot product available, but rather to link to products and pages as part of a bona-fide recommendation.

Obviously, making arguments against these points is difficult. However, those opposed to the Amazon policy to not pay commissions for referrals via short links have finally found their rallying cry. As with all unsavory things, it is necessary to find a squeaky clean example to lead the protest, otherwise, people just tune out the cries of the “gray area” crowd as the whining of people who are getting what they deserve.

For the no short-links policy, the rally point is Twitter. Since Twitter messages, or tweets, must be a relatively short 140 characters or less, a full Amazon link including the associate ID or affiliate ID is pretty much out of the question. The only answer, for these clean cut, all-American, Twitter folks is to use a link shortener for their earnest, well qualified recommendations.

The reality is that the vast majority of Twitter users spewing out affiliate links via short links are exactly the kind of hucksters that Amazon doesn’t want using its program in the first place. Twitter’s number one danger for becoming a second-rate, spam only, destination, on the Internet is the number of charlatans using the service to find suckers customers. The traffic they send is less likely to convert, and worse, more likely to complain.

Of course, there are those who make legitimate recommendations via Twitter. They would have to use link shorteners as well. However, even they, have a bit of a weak spot. The idea that Amazon considers something like, “I love these new Chewy Chips Ahoy Cookies – http://bit.ly/NOTAREALLINK” to be one of the ways they want to get traffic to its site isn’t very convincing. Sure, publicity is good, and so are well-meaning referrals, but Amazon knows that whatever good these limited cases might bring, it pales in comparison to the negatives the vast majority of link shortened links provide.

In the end, the Amazon policy is better for the “straight” Amazon Associates membership, better for Amazon, and better for Amazon’s customers. It stings the sneaky, weasel, membership right where it hurts by taking away one of their most prevalent tricks. It may catch a handful of good guys along the way, but I think given real unbiased consideration, without the emotional attachment of a missed commission, even they would approve.

It started happening right after I uninstalled Outlook Connector.

Hidden Vampire Processes Suck Your Computer’s Blood

Of course, even uninstalling programs is not enough. There are plug-ins, add-ons, hidden processes, and all kinds of other shifty tricks and shenanigans that software makers use to hide the fact that they are indeed wasting my computer’s resources for their purposes and not for mine.

The worst offender in this category has to be Adobe. Adobe pre-loads part of Acrobat Reader during system startup on every single boot. The reason? Acrobat Reader has grown so bloated and inefficient that loading the program takes so long that many computer users re-click the icon or otherwise try and start the program again, assuming, correctly, that there is just no way any normal computer program would take that long to startup. Of course, when people figure out just how big of a dog Acrobat Reader is, they complain, or even worse for the company, they uninstall it and use one of the many vastly superior, better performing, and free alternatives. (I use Foxit Reader myself, but there are several others that are just as good. Check out FileHippo.com to see and download Acrobat Reader alternative utilities.)

In order for Adobe to save face, they have decided to waste memory, increase bootup duration, and interfere with the startup process of every single computer in the world with Reader installed just to make itself look a little bit better.

Not just no, but HELL NO.

So, when I decided I didn’t need Outlook Connector anymore (mostly because Outlook wouldn’t stop deleting all my cell phone contacts every time I plugged my phone in and ran ActiveSync) I didn’t just use the Microsoft sanctioned removal process, I ran Revo Uninstaller.

Revo runs the regular uninstall program from any software and once that program is done, Revo searches the registry and the hard drive to see if the remove process didn’t manage to get everything, either deliberately, or through sloppy coding. It then displays what it found and asks you if you want to delete that other stuff too. I always Select All and then choose Delete.

While I was in there, I went ahead and mashed Microsoft Office Groove too. Groove is for sharing and collaboration, and I do neither, so I don’t need it running sometimes, all the time, or even just rarely. No means no.

Fix Office 2007 Not Genuine Error Without Crack or Hack

It is hard to know exactly when the error started occurring relative to uninstalling Outlook Connector and Groove because I don’t reboot my computer every day. When I do shut my PC off and then turn my computer on, it is often automated. (Orbit Download Manager has an option I love that shuts down the PC when it has finished downloading all the files you queued up.) I also don’t necessarily use Microsoft Office programs every day either. However, the error message did start occurring very shortly after the uninstall, so while I can’t say with certainty that is what caused it, I see pretty strong circumstantial evidence. If you started having the same error message occur after uninstalling Office components, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to come to the same conclusion.

How to get rid of Office 2007 not genuine error message pop-up windows is the question. Supposedly, I can post some sort of message to Microsoft, run some utility, give them the dump file, and they’ll "get back to me" with an answer. Yeah, I’m going to wait for that.

There is supposedly a Office 2007 Genuine Validation crack program out there, but

• a) I don’t like installing things from hackers unless I have to, and
• b) Cracking Office Genuine Validation sounds like one of those things that is going to get messed up later via some live update or service pack or even some Microsoft Live download.

So, that sounds like a pass.

What other option is there?

It turns out that some registry entries determine whether or not the Microsoft Genuine Software Validation program bothers to check the software being run. Change these registry entries from their default "Run Validation Check" to "Don’t Run Validation Check" and the not genuine error messages will go away and stop appearing.

Even better, because the Validation check software is still installed and functional (it just isn’t getting the message to startup), your computer won’t keep prompting you to install the validation utility every time you try and update your software or download a Word template, Excel template, or Office template from office.microsoft.com

The registry entries are in HKEY_Local_Machine. Run your registry editor and search for OGAAddin.connect. There can be several depending upon whether you have Office 2007 Professional, Office 2007 Enterprise, or Office 2007 Home & Student. Plan on at least 3 and maybe several.

Change the value of Load Behavior from 3 to 0. Ignore any keys you find called OGAAddin.connect without a Load Behavior value. (These are not in HKEY_Local_Machine, but the Find function of regedit isn’t very precise.)

Voila, your Office 2007 software is running again without bugging you about being genuine, or not genuine.

*****

Once upon a time, all web hosting companies sold hosting plans with a cap or limit on how much bandwidth you could use and how much disk space you were allowed to have. Then, a web hosting arms race of sorts began and web host companies competed against one another by offering more bandwidth or disk space for the same, or even less money, than competitors. This was a good thing.

Eventually, however, someone decided to be an unethical weasel and make a bald-faced lie.  They did it in such a way that technically, if you were a lawyer and you pulled you usual find print shenanigans out of the bag, it wasn’t a lie per se.

The lie was an offer of unlimited traffic. Infinite bandwidth available for a rock-bottom price. It was slimy and I sincerely hope that whoever came up with it feels even a shred of the shame they deserve.

It was, of course, all a fantasy of marketing, and it made finding unbiased fact-based shared web hosting provider feature comparisons even harder to find.

Terms of Service Limitations

Every web host provider has a Terms of Service agreement which govern the relationship between the webhosting company and the webmaster or customer. Much of the typical terms of service from any webhosting company is boilerplate legal wording used in one form or another not only by web hosts, but by numerous other types of companies as well. It includes things like disclaiming implied warranties, and the like.

Where is gets unpleasant (or worse, depending upon your point of view) is somewhere in the middle of a shared hosting agreement where the web host reserves the right to limit how much of the server’s resources a single user account can use.

What makes this so unseemly is that many webhosting providers make a very big deal out of features like unlimited bandwidth, unlimited traffic, unlimited disk space, and the like, while making only a tiny fine print mention of the limitations that the account will be subject to due to the terms of service. When, the whole truth is that no site can use unlimited traffic, because there will be a point where the memory or CPU usage is too high and the account will be limited in that manner.

To their credit, Dreamhost makes this clear if you click the More Info link under the offer of unlimited disk space and bandwidth. However, even then, they make it sound like triggering these limits is something that is hard to do and rarely happens.

However, there a numerous users who have small, low traffic, blogs or other websites that get limited or taken offline because they use “too many” resources. The worst part is that no one will tell you what too much is.

What is really hard to stomach is that the TOS does not tell the user what exactly is “too much” usage or “too many” resources. Ironically, Comcast and other cable companies were recently taken to task over a similar policy in which they reserved the right to limit the bandwidth or otherwise “shape the traffic” of users who used an ambiguous “too much” bandwidth. These companies were eventually pressured into revealing an actual number for the limit to their customers.

Unfortunately, no such pressure has been placed upon the various webhosting providers as they simply decide when and how to limit hosted account based whatever they feel like.

See for yourself:

• Dreamhost Terms of Service (10-09-2010): Servers are shared with other customers, and as such IRC-related activities or severely CPU intensive CGI scripts (e.g. chat scripts, scripts which have bugs causing them to not close properly after being run, etc.) are not encouraged. Any application that listens for inbound network connections (even if the application would otherwise be allowed) are not permitted. BitTorrent clients, proxy servers/scripts, IRC bots and bouncers (BNC) specifically may not be run on any DreamHost Web Hosting server. If your processes are adversely affecting server performance disproportionately DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the offending processes.

Not exactly clear about what limits there are on your account. In fact, this sounds very much like you won’t have any trouble unless you are using these IRC, CGI, BitTorrent, or proxy things. Unfortunately, that isn’t true. Poke around their “documentation” wiki long enough and you’ll see that WordPress blogs often use too many resources. Apparently that is doubly true for certain plug-ins, including one of the most popular WordPress plug-ins, and one of the most recommended.

If you have a WordPress blog chances are you have heard of All-in-One-SEO. In fact, there is a pretty good chance you use it on your blog. But, guess what?

8. Customer agrees to not engage in activities pertaining to Black Hat SEO, Spamdexing, and so-called “Scraper sites.” These can all have a severely detrimental effect on server performance and are not permitted. Pursuant to this policy, the poorly-written WordPress plugin “All in One SEO Pack” is expressly prohibited on DreamHost shared hosting servers and may only be installed on DreamHost Private Servers (VPS).

That’s funny. I don’t remember seeing that on any of the webpages telling me how Dreamhost is a great host for WordPress blogs.

While you are at it, search the Dreamhost support wiki for popular WordPress caching plugin WP-SuperCache. It seems Dreamhost doesn’t run so well with it either. If they can’t make two of the most popular WordPress plugins on the planet work, then exactly how well do you think they work with WordPress in general?

Compare Dreamhost’s whenever we decide hosting your account is too much of a burden, we can limit you TOS to this one from competitor Host Gator. (Host Gator is one of the other web hosts I’ve been trying out.)

• Host Gator Terms of Service – 7. Resource Usage User may not:
  a) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.

Does that make Dreamhost a bad web hosting provider?

Not really.

• WestHost Shared Web Hosting accounts TOS — Server Resources: The use of your account must be reasonable, you may not place excessive burdens on our servers. If you use a high amount of server resources (such as, but not limited to, CPU Time, Memory Usage, and Network Resources) at our election, you will be given an option of either upgrading the service level or reducing the resource usage to an acceptable level, or your use of our servers may be limited.

• 1&1 Web Hosting Shared accounts Terms & Conditions — 7.16 …Should your use of the 1&1 Services result in an overly high load on the 1&1 Equipment, in 1&1’s sole discretion, 1&1 may suspend your account until the cause of any such overload is determined and resolved.

• Go Daddy Universal Terms of Service – Go Daddy reserves the right to terminate Your access to the Services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever….Go Daddy may review every account for excessive space and bandwidth utilization and to terminate or apply additional fees to those accounts that exceed allowed levels.

In other words, there is a lot of variation out there in the actual amount of service provided by each hosting company. Remember, the key in this whole thing is how many users, using how many resources, are put on each server. That makes the number at which the usage becomes “excessive” very different depending upon the initial load.

A shared hosting company whose servers have a lighter load are probably willing to allow higher individual usage by customers, especially when that usage is only for short periods of time. But, a web hosting provider that loads their servers right up the maximum will have to suspend your activity quickly to keep you from crashing the server.

How Much RAM and CPU Usage Allowed

Leave a comment about how much memory or CPU usage you have been able to use with your current webhost, or let us know how much you used before getting limited or banned.

Don’t leave a “I’m happy with” or a “So and so sucks” comment. I will just delete those. There is plenty of that unhelpful junk out there. If you want to tell us who you host with, what your sites are like, and specifically what is good / bad, we’d love to hear it.

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My hope is that others will find this review and point others in this direction so that they can evaluate the FACTS for themselves. My further hope is that this review will inspire others to write up their own comprehensive, fact-based, reviews of other web hosting companies that they have experience with so that we can all start getting the hosting we need without all of the frustration we currently must suffer.

About Web Hosting Company Reviews

There is one thing you must know about web hosts and the people who review them. First, many webhosts, especially the "more popular" or higher volume, hosts offer significant referral fees or other payments to those who send new customers their way.

In other words, if I were to include a referral link with this post, I could get $79 or some other similar amount if you clicked the link and then signed up for hosting services. This is a huge incentive to write glowing reviews and include paid links. So, be very careful about the reviews you read.

Another problem is that people with bad experiences are more likely to go out of their way to both make a big deal out of it, and then to write long, detailed posts about what went wrong. The trouble is, there is no way to know whether this user was wronged, got what they deserved, or maybe was just unlucky. Not even the best company can make every customer happy.

Unfortunately, you have to contrast these long, overblown, tirades with people who insist on chipping in with nothing more than "I’ve use blah-blah hosting for 2 years without any problems."

Just like before, there is no way to know whether or not that user is representative of numerous satisfied customers, or maybe THEY are the lucky one. Or, maybe they have a single, tiny, 5 hits per day, website that you could keep up and running in the background of your laptop if you wanted to.

In other words, the more reviews you read, the more likely you are to come to the conclusion that web hosting companies are just like cell phone companies. They all are terrible at customer service and most of their customers would gladly switch if only they knew for sure it would be any different with another company, but since they all seem to be equally hated, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

The unfortunate thing is that after actually USING a few different web hosts over the last year or two, I’ve learned that there ARE true, comparable, differences between the various web hosting companies. Unfortunately, you’ll never see those tangible differences on any of the so-called web hosting review websites out there.

If you are still reading, don’t despair. There is hope. In addition to being a comprehensive, based on experience, review of Dreamhost, I will also show you how to find the best web hosting companies to try out AND show you how to find out some additional information about any webhosting company you are researching so that you can make the best informed decision you possibly can, and hopefully, save yourself a lot of frustration.

(Yes, it will take multiple parts to cover all of this information. Trust me, it will be worth it. Keep reading. It won’t take long and I’ll bet you a dollar you’ll learn more from this serious than you will from reading a thousand web host reviews.)

Shared Web Hosting Reviews

Like many webmasters and other website developers, I chose a shared hosting plan. A shared hosting plan means that the server running your website also is running the websites for other users. The key element in this equation is that the server be powerful enough to handle the hosting for all users on the server.

The tricky part is that a user who uses virtually no resources today can suddenly start using a lot of resources. The cliché example is that a website that normally gets a low volume of traffic is suddenly hammered thanks to making the front page of Digg, or being "slashdotted" which means being linked to from the very popular Slashdot.com website.

However, this is typically not the issue. Rather, any webhosting company incurs an added expense for each additional server it purchases and runs in its datacenter. Like any business, a webhost’s revenues must exceed its expenses to make a profit and stay in business. Thus, it is necessary for the hosting provider to minimize expenses by only using the number of servers required to properly service its customers. Getting that number right, is the hard part.

If a server is capable of handling 100 customers each using an average of 16 MB of RAM without any disruption of service, then the host will profit the most by placing the full 100 users on each server. Slashdotting or Digg front page aside, a customer may simply become more successful with driving traffic to their site. This may increase their memory usage to 50 MB of RAM. At this point, the host has a choice, either provide an additional shared hosting server and rebalance the load, or hope that other users on the same server use less than the planned for 16 MB of RAM.

There is a nuance here that is difficult for any hosting service to nail down completely. Is the increase in memory usage permanent? How likely are other users to use more memory? How close is the server to its "breaking point" at this load? Are there other shared servers with more room to spare, and if so, would moving this user, or other users, to that server solve the problem. And so on.

How the hosting company responds to this issue determines how good of a shared hosting provider they are. A shared host company that maintains a large buffer to the end of the server’s resources and errors on the side of more servers (and more expenses) is a web host that will be more stable and, frankly, a better host.

A shared hosting plan provider that chooses instead to error on the side of fewer servers (and lower expenses) is more likely to get the complicated calculus of server resources wrong and thus suffer more downtime, outages, and the like.

There is another option available to web hosting companies. It’s called the Terms of Service, and it is where the real limitations on your shared hosting account are. This will be true of virtually all shared hosting plans.

Make sure you are comparing apples to apples. There are a few different types of webhosting out there and they are very different in how they work.

Any web hosting plan that offers you "unlimited" traffic or disk space is a shared hosting plan.

That is because all of the other types provide you an actual guarantee about exactly how much system resources you get to use. You can’t offer unlimited if you are actually going to try and live up to it.

That should tell you something very important. All hosting except shared hosting comes with an actual guaranteed amount of resources that you get, and they provide much lower limits and they cost more. In other words, those numbers on shared hosting plans aren’t just technically incorrect, they are simply not truthful.

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I’ve been thinking about writing up a review for Firefox plug-in SkipScreen for a while now. SkipScreen has quickly become an important time saver with file sharing sites getting more and more belligerent about making even one time users wait excessive amounts of time and jump through more and more hoops.

What is truly ironic is that 99% of Mediafire’s business is hosting copyright violating files which it takes down one at a time in an effort to “steal” the value of the copyrighted files. Then, it has the nerve to demand that an organization take down a file that does not violate any copyright laws.

You can read the MediaFire Takedown Notice Response here.

It seems as though the EFF lawyer may have missed the most important thing. Even if SkipScreen did do something illegal (which it does not), the same legal precedent that says you can’t sue an ISP for providing the connection that allows a user to do something illegal (like downloading copyrighted files from MediaFire) would apply to this situation.

Mozilla cannot be held liable for UNAFFILIATED USERS violating the terms of service of a website by using UNAFFILIATED SOFTWARE. If Mediafire has a legitimate complaint, it must pursue it against SkipScreen and its users directly. Of course, it isn’t doing that because it has no legitimate legal claim and would quickly lose any such action. Instead it is trying to scare Mozilla with the threat of having to pay legal expenses in hopes that they will cave in before Mediafire has to actually prove anything or cite a relevant violation of law.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, legal extortion. Make it so expensive for the party that is in the right to fend off the party that is wrong, that the good guys decide it isn’t worth fighting.

Shame on Mediafire for its outrageous hypocrisy and its shameful attempt at legal intimidation.

Another involves branding. Any company that hopes to be successful for the long term needs to think about branding. Branding means distinguishing yourself from others who do, or claim to do, similar things to your company. That is why it is Coke vs. Pepsi, not Great Cola Soda vs. Tasty Cola Soda. Both of the latter would be regarded as cheap generic knockoffs, not high-end brands.

Incidentally, this is one of the best ways to distinguish an ongoing concern with concern for the long-term future from one that just hopes to make a splash on the Internet. Trabach Motors (or whatever) is probably a lot more serious about their future in making cars while Best Top Motor Cars is probably a lot more serious about their website generating cash flow in any way possible.

However, in the last few days, I’ve noticed some things that are search optimized even though they were created before there was such a thing as a search engine, or at least before anyone cared what the search engines were looking for. This post, is dedicated to them.

Search Optimized Brands – Accidentally SEO Ready Brands

• Pur – The water purifier brand kills a handful of birds with one stone. First, it’s very name catches the most probably typo or spelling error. No need to register another domain for that. Also, "pur" is part of the word pure. No doubt, this counts at least a little bit when both pur and pure show up in the website text in a way that seems both natural, and like it exists thanks to "stemming." Finally, pur.com (somebody beat them to it) or even purwater.com would be great domain names, especially if they had been savvy enough to grab pure.com and purewater.com too.

Others Coming

Yes, I have others. I just have to find that notebook. It would help if I developed better organizational skills.

While the keyboard is your basic enhanced keyboard, it comes with several other buttons and input devices than a more standard keyboard does. Unfortunately, many of these additional buttons are not useful to me. For example, there are 3 search buttons on the left side of the keyboard, each signified by a magnifying glass. One is for web searching, one is for searching on my PC, and the last is for searching pictures.

This is all well and good, but those aren’t the kind of functions that I do often enough to require a specialized button, or even to remember that those buttons are there. In fact, I’m more likely to hit them accidentally with papers or something than to press them on purpose.

Then there are the three buttons in the lower right corner. These buttons are used to make Internet phone calls through your PC either with something like Skype, or Voice Over IP. Either way, I hardly ever do that, so for a long time, those buttons were just dead to me.

Reprogramming Default Logitech Buttons

The power of these buttons comes not necessarily in their default settings, but in the fact that they can be reprogrammed to do almost anything you want them to do instead.

For example, I do a fair amount of watching videos on my computer. A lot of them are training materials that I review and I don’t need to watch every second to get the idea. Using the KMPlayer allows me to skip ahead 5 seconds by using the forward arrow key and backward by using the back arrow key. I can also skip ahead 30 seconds by pressing CTRL+Right Arrow.

The thing is, that isn’t very convenient when you have leaned back and are moving forward and back one handed. I checked in the program options to see if I could set a different, single, keystroke to be the fast forward 30 seconds key. I didn’t come up with anything, but I found something better.

By going into Logitech Setpoint, I can reprogram most of the buttons on my keyboard and mouse to do what I want them to do instead. For example, the green phone button used to make a call has been reprogrammed to be, you guessed it, CTRL+Right Arrow. Now, the key to skip ahead a little is right next to the key to skip ahead a lot. (Anything more and I just mouse click on the slider.)

Uberoptions to the Rescue

There is one other thing that I do all day long. As a freelance writer, I am constantly taking screenshots. Alt+Printscreen plus a screen capturing utility makes this very easy. The only catch is that the PrintScreen button is in the upper right hand corner of my keyboard in the no man’s land between the main keyboard and the numeric keypad.

Finding that key when the keyboard has been pushed back under the monitor stand to allow for a book or other papers to rest in front of my typing fingers is a pain. More than once I have thought I took a screenshot only to realize that I must have hit INSERT or PAUSE/BREAK instead. Sometimes that makes more work for me; sometimes it means that I have lost an important screenshot that I cannot recreate.

I’ve tried a thousand times to program another key, but no dice.

The problem is that pressing the PRINT SCREEN key causes the computer to execute the command. It does NOT cause Setpoint to record that keystroke as my intention.

I posted in the Logitech help forum where someone pointed me to not only the solution to this tiny problem, but a utility that makes my programmable keyboard and mouse EVEN BETTER.

The utility is called Uberoptions and it installs alongside the regular Logitech Setpoint utility. What it does after that is nothing short of brilliant.

Uberoptions adds hundreds of keystrokes and functions that are not available in the basic Setpoint utility to the list of things you can program your keyboard or mouse to do. Normally, certain keys cannot be re-assigned (it varies by model apparently) but many of those keys are easily programmable once Uberoptions is installed.

This alone would make Uberoptions a great recommendation. But, it goes one step further. For some settings, Uberoptions actually allows you to assign functions based upon what program you are using.

For example, the two arrow buttons on the side of my mouse can be set to be Next Email and Previous Email in Outlook while being set to be Page Up and Page Down in my PDF reader and then be set to be Cruise Up and Cruise Down (scroll fast) in Firefox. This, my friends, is gold.

If you have a programmable Logitech keyboard or mouse, I highly recommend you check out Uberoptions Logitech Setpoint Enhancement Utility. It is a free utility that you can download and install as easily as the Setpoint utility itself, and the world of functionality it opens will be well worth it.

Maybe Microsoft isn’t really ready to take on Google yet after all.

After making a big splash with the new search engine Bing, Microsoft has added a few new features, such as the much hyped visual search. Many writers and news stories have declared that Bing’s search results are good. Some have stated that Bing’s results are as good as Google’s search results, though I have yet to find anyone who has said that they are better.

However, there is more to running a search engine than headlines and splashy result. The algorithm that ranks and displays search engine results, often called SERPs, is complicated and in need of constant refinement. The tweaks to the algorithm are necessary both to stay ahead of the so-called black hat SEOs, users who use "tricks" to rank higher than their page deserves, as well as to keep up with the fast every changing state of the Internet. Content displayed on webpages is seldom static and with each new innovation comes newer and often tougher things to index and rank.

The only help a search engine can get in this area comes from the willing participation of the community of webpage developers and website managers in the form of what is often termed white hat SEO. The so-called white hat SEOs cater to the search engine companies by ensuring that certain elements that are useful for indexing and cataloging the web are present on the websites that they run.

Microsoft acknowledged as much when it published a multi-part article on its Bing Community website outlining what elements the company would be looking for in its search algorithm. Much of what is written on this Bing SEO article series is old news because it is very similar to much of what Google already has already stated that it looks for in its SERP rankings. These elements are things like keywords in the title tags, and proper use of semantic web design and coding, like putting other important keyphrases in header tags, preferably in descending order of importance.

But, in the end, doing the right things to help out the search engines can be tricky business. Many helpful elements, such as a website’s sitemap, are technical files that can be ruined by even the smallest of typographical errors. For this reason, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have long provided a set of "webmaster tools" that allows the developers of websites to track various elements of how the search index robots, the search algorithms, and even the search results are affected by the actions they take on their sites.

Microsoft wisely rolled out it’s new Bing Webmaster Tools right away. Unfortunately, they are broken.

That’s right. The most basic of tools provided to webmasters are not functioning on Bing’s search engine. A thread posted in the Bing forum is piling up with webmasters who can’t add their websites to Bing webmaster tools, not because of access issues, or security issues, or anything of the sort, but rather because clicking on the "Add Site" button brings up an error saying the file cannot be found.

In other words, the Bing Webmaster Tools need to use the Bing Webmaster Tools to find out they have a broken link on the Bing Webmaster Tools.

It would be irony, if it wasn’t so stupid.

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It is like your username and password are your ATM card, and the numbers on the security key are your PIN number. Only, it’s even better because your PIN is constantly changing. Basically, in order to do anything, a thief would have to get your card and your keys. (Now imagine a similar security key device that requires a code to unlock the display and you are getting to security that is pretty much unbeatable except by government agencies.)

The idea is that even if a hacker or phisher were able to get your username and password, they would be useless without the numbers on the electronic key. If they managed to get the username, password, and numbers, they would only be good for 30 seconds.

On the one hand, this is great security. In fact, some method of combining this type of technology with something like OpenID so that it could be used on every website, would pretty much shut down phishing and password theft and cracking as we know it.

On the other hand, the PayPal security key is basically designed to stop phishing attacks where the hacker tricks the user into divulging their username and password. Not surprisingly, these methods work best on those who are the least security aware, or those who have the least understanding of website security. While those who are most concerned with security are likely to be vigilant and thus only fooled by the most sophisticated techniques.

In other words, this security device would best protect the people who are the least likely to get one, and do the least to protect the people who are most likely to get one.

And, while we’re at it, what about people with multiple PayPal accounts (a personal, and a business one, for example)? What about business accounts? If the guy with the number key device is out sick or on vacation, what then?

The bizarre part is the number of security improvements that could be made without requiring someone to order, buy, and keep track of another piece of hardware. ING’s online banking at ING Direct, for example, requires a user to choose an image and a phrase that validates that they are indeed looking at the REAL ING Direct login page before entering a password.

The image and passphrase display over a graphical numeric keypad where the user enters their PIN. Any phishing attempt would fail immediately when the user noticed that the picture and words that are always there are suddenly missing or different.

Even better, entering the password PIN requires clicking the numbers on the screen, so not even a keylogger can capture the password.

PayPal doesn’t even offer this basic security and its next move is an electronic security key?

I know I would feel much more comfortable if when I clicked a button to pay with PayPal if I could see some sort of validation that this isn’t an elaborate deception that looks like I’m entering my PayPal username and password into my PayPal account when I am actually entering it into a form designed to look exactly like the original.  All you have to do to pull of the scam on even the security savvy is a way to make the address in the URL bar say "PayPal" since that is the only means of validation PayPal currently offers.

Maybe PayPal should start by implementing some of the basics, and THEN worry about taking it to the next level.