A recent study from the UK tested 2500 web users and found that

“The test results indicate that users want Google-style speed, function, and accuracy from all of the Web sites they visit, and they want it now”

Read more at EE Times

However, Internet is used for many social purposes — email, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc.

In 1998, Kraut et al. showed a correlation between Internet use and declines in social relationships and isolation,

Greater use of the Internet was also associated with small, but statistically significant declines in social involvement as measured by communication with the family and the size of people’s local social networks, and with increases in loneliness, a psychological state associated with social involvement.

This paper was titled the “Internet Paradox” because the Internet is heavily used for communication, yet it makes people lonelier. Strong relationships developed online are rare; most people use the internet to keep up with offline relationships.

More recently, Kraut et a. did another study on the original test group, and found that the negative effects of using the Internet had dissipated.

A second study was then done on new purchasers of computer and televisions, and it also showed that the internet had a positive effect on social and psychological well-being. Unsurprisingly, this was more pronounced for extroverts and more socially connected people.

Read More at Tasty Research

A 46 page pdf version of the report is available for reading

A summary and analysis of his report has been posted in the Search Engine Watch blog

Tuzhilin conludes with:

“Google has built the following four “lines of defense” against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.

Since its establishment in the Spring and Summer of 2003 the Click Quality team has been developing an infrastructure for detecting and removing invalid clicks and implementing various methods in the four detection stages described above. Currently, they reached a consolidation phase in their efforts, when their methods work reasonably well, the invalid click detection problem is “under control,” and the Click Quality team is fine-tuning these methods. There is no hard data that can actually prove this statement. However, indirect evidence provided in this report supports this conclusion with a moderate degree of certainty. The Click Quality team also realizes that battling click fraud is an arms race, and it wants to stay “ahead of the curve” and get ready for more advanced forms of click fraud by developing the next generation of online filters.

In summary, I have been asked to evaluate Google”s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google”s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable.”

“The Hype vs. Reality vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News”

There is much confusion over the hype vs. reality of collaborative news and interactive technology’s impact. What is out there? How should the emergence of these innovations be analyzed? How do they differ from the communication and knowledge offered by traditional news formats? How do they change the engagement of citizens to each other and to societal issues? And following from any resolution to this confusion, how can they be used to improve news media for the future? The scope of this paper cannot fully address all these questions, but it will provide a starting outline on some.

You, of course, know that web file names should contain no spaces and that words in a web file name should be separated by dashes – or underscores_. But what other characters can you use? Letters and numbers are generally good. Many other symbols are banned either because they can potentially insert nasty programs into the server or the OS simply can’t deal with them. OS X rejects one set of symbols in file names, Windows another and Linux still another. That doesn’t leave us with much, It’s probably not even a good idea to include apostrophies or quotation marks. Basically, you can’t puncutate web file names.

A good rule of thumb is to Avoid using these characaters for maximum portability:

Asterisk    *
Colon   :
Back slash  \
Forward slash   /
Less Than   <
Greater Than    >
Pipe    |
Quote   "
Question mark   ?
all non-printable characters

Even the period can be a problem if you begin a file name with it. Files like .htaccess are reserved for the operating system and are typically hidden from us.

The best advice seems to be, when in doubt, leave it out. If you don’t, the web server may not serve your pages properly, or if someone saves your page it may not display properly on their system.

Amsterdam-based OneStat reported that Firefox now accounts for 12.9 percent of browsers used worldwide, and 15.8 percent of those used in the U.S. Microsoft’s IE, meanwhile, fell to 83.1 percent globally and 79.8 percent in the U.S.