St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for April, 2009

That’s right, 55% of Americans used the internet to research candidates and issues in the last election.

If you are going to run for any office, from a local school board to President, remember this one thing:
It takes around 12 months to get a decent search engine presence.

the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 55% of Americans used the internet to not just ceck out a web page but:

• 45 percent of Internet users watched online videos related to politics or the election
• 33 percent of Internet users shared political content with others
• 52 percent of those on a social network used it for political purposes

By the way, it was only 11% in the 2000 elections. What do you think it’ll be by the 2012 elections?

If you have any doubt that a strong internet presence and an engaging website helped Obama secure the Presidency read this quote from the study:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama used the Internet to mobilize an army of volunteers that helped him defeat Republican John McCain in the November 4 election.

Obama supporters tended to be more engaged online than McCain backers, the study found. While 26 percent of Obama supporters active on the Internet posted their own thoughts or other content in an online forum, only 15 percent of McCain-backing Internet users participated, for example.

Still think you can run for office without at least one website?
Well, than keep thinking that, I guess we don’t need leaders who are so out of touch with the populace.

In case you haven’t heard, The conficker worm/trojan/virus whatever, is one bad mama-jama! Most anti-virus software can’t detect it, none can actually do anything about it. they’ve been trying for months. They have learned lots about it. This article isn’t going to talk about that or the drama surrounding the Conficker. But we will tell you about a really easy way to find if it’s infected your computer.

The conficker blocks your computers access to many anti-virus software makers websites. Using that info, Joe Stewart made a handy little test to see if you have the Conficker. He calls it The Conficker Eye Chart.

Hope this helps, and I hope you pass the test!

Writing about the Coleman data leak is going to be tough to do without sounding like a paranoid extreme left winger or an extreme right winger. Let me assure I’ve alway been disappointed with both parties and I am a confirmed independent.

With that out of the way, lets get on with the paranoia:

The Main stream media is definitely reporting untruths about this story. They are saying that the data leak was the result of a hacker and that federal crime has been committed. This is entirely untrue. the only person that’s even saying this is Colemans attorney, well I’m sure some extreme supporters are saying this too.

What really happened.
The developers running colemans site asking for donations to his legal fund screwed up the site. It left the website down for an extended period of time.
While investigating Adria Richards stumbled across the websites database completley unsecured. she did this with a web browser and nothing else. This is not hacking. This is “surfing the internet”.

links:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19912.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=Adria+Richards&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://butyoureagirl.com/2009/01/28/did-norm-coleman-fake-his-own-website-death/

http://washingtonindependent.com/33674/norm-colemans-donor-database-exposed-campaign-claims-political-motives

The new Digg Bar seems innocent enough.  But there are things that could be bad for SEO, bad for search engines, bad for searchers and especially bad for website owners.

1. The Digg bar routes all Digg articles and links to the Diggbar URL, thus robbing you of Page rank in an effort to have their Digg article about your page replace your page in the search engine results. It works too!
2. The Digg bar frames your content and presents it as their own to the Search engines and some users are even confused into thinking the content s on digg.com
3. The short url (tiny url), raises duplicate content concerns. Perhaps a mini-flood of it real quick.
4. Digg claims a page view for itself every time a user views any web page with the toolbar active.
5. The Digg bar rewrites all the links on the page it’s displaying into Digg urls thus robbing the user of being able to bookmark your site properly and generally screwing up some web applications.

Expect another article on this subject after this software is tested by our staff. There’s a lot of positives to be found here too.

– TxS