Gregg Fraley, the author of Jack’s Notebook, is looking to build a panel of 1,000 consumers/owners to provide lightening fast market research. He’s currently up to 86 members.
If you’re a consumer (who isn’t?), creative in thinking and able to express an opinion in under 140 characters, then follow greggfraley2 on twitter or read Gregg’s blog post for more info.
This weekend at Sheffield BarCamp I saw a presentation by Tim Nash about how some SEO providers are achieving high rankings using web spam.
He explained, quite eloquently, how a technique called Markov Chains is used to create alternative copies of some source content that, to a search engine, has the same keyword profile, but cannot be linked back to the original content or to any of the other Markov derived versions.
Of course to a human reader the Markov derived versions are absolute nonsense, but to a search engine, they look like legitimate pages of human created content. So when sprinkled liberally with links to the spammer’s target URL, the search engine rank that URL higher as a popular destination.
Now, I have no problem with people who use ingenuity to find kinks in the systems to bend to their own advantage, but it seems to me that it is not the (big nasty corporate) search engines who are being conned here, and it’s not just the users or the people who just want to create interesting and useful content but it’s the whole community that eventually loses out.
As the spam-arms-race spirals it becomes harder for us to find useful content or to get our useful content found.
While writing this I found that Seth Godin (unsurprisingly) put it much better..
Recently, while making an online purchase, I was asked by a online store to opt-in to the Verified by Visa anti-fraud mechanism. On face value this seemed like a very sensible thing to join up to. All I have to do is provide a password of my choosing that I re-enter each time I make a purchase online using my Visa card.
The structure of the Verified by Visa (and its Mastercard equivalent, 3D-secure) means that an online seller will not be able to keep my credit card details and re-use them later (for nefarious purposes) as I only provide my password directly to Visa NOT to the seller themselves.
Great, I thought! Until I noticed that the site that was asking me to setup my password (and I would presumably have to re-enter my password at a later date) did not identify itself in any meaningful way. Check it out for yourself https://www.securesuite.co.uk. Notice that the ’site owner’ does not appear in the Firefox/MSIE7 location bar and even if you examine the SSL certificate it seems to be registered to a company called CYOTA Inc. The only mention of ‘Verified by Visa’ is buried in the Organisational Unit entry in the certificate.
Now we can obviously google our way to finding out that CYOTA Inc are owned by RSA who probably provide the systems for Verified by Visa, but really…
The whole process is predicated on the buyer knowing that they are providing their password to Visa and no-one else so I find it incredible that Visa, CYOTA and the issuing banks are not addressing the confusion they are causing.
Worse still they aren’t just confusing the public about Verified by Visa, they are also positively ENCOURAGING user to ignore the warning signs of phishing attacks.
I have a friend who works in the innovation team of one of the big banks. He recently asked an open question about the future of retail banking. I’ve had the questions running round my head for past few weeks and feel that I have some thoughts that are fermented enough to be aired. Aden, please forgive me if this stuff is just old hat to you – they are just random ramblings of an over active mind, not the result of any market research.
My first thought about a concept of banking follwoing a utility model. At present we commit to provider for a financial product and service i.e. deposit account, personal loan, mortgage, home insurance. We commit to this provider based on explicit criteria (lowest interest rate, best cover) and value judgements (trusted brand, customer service). When we want to swicth between providers we have to go through a world of pain or pay exit fees.
Now if we could give an online agent our criteria and allow it to move our deposits and loans between providers we would have a utility model for money.
The problem is what needs to happen to enable this:
I find the likleyhood of two or more financial service providers who are willing to disrupt the market by moving to this kind of model pretty slim. Especially as it moves the whole marketplace further from a value-add model to a price driven one.
Crazy thought eh?
My second thought was more grounded. In this age of tightening purse strings I am wondering why my online bank is not providing me with visualisation tools. Something that lets me see where my money goes each month and therefore where I could make the most significant belt tightening moves.
Sure I could (and occasionally do) download my statements and import them into a spreadsheet to categorise and analyse my outgoings. But, surely my bank could save me a lot of trouble by not only allowing me to view my outgoings as graphs and charts. It could use its understanding (or the aggregated knowledge of all its customers) to automatically categorise my expenditure. Perhaps visualisations of my outgoings over time would also help me too. Particularly if they could be compared against the aggregation of other users too.
So how about it banks? Two options there, one that leads you to compete more on price, the other that adds value to your online services.
I’ve been trying to find a way to manage my huge number of website passwords and perhaps store my private data. I came across passpack.com a few days ago and thought I’d give it a try.
After attempting to import my Firefox password list only to told that I had exceeded my allocated number of of entries by -97 (yes, minus 97). Hmmm! a few emails back and forth to the (very helpful) Passpack support team, plus the dicovery that I have third party cookies turned off on Firefox (forgot that) and I got it up and running.
So do I like it? Well it’s exactly what I wanted, but not actually what I need. You see it forces me to be a bit too secure. In order to login to a website without remembering the password, I have to:
Now I know that this would probably be a lot easier if the domains in my password file (not sure why the don’t), but it’s all such a bloody palaver. Compare that to the Foxmarks experience:
Okay so there is a downside.
Well, I’m thinking that I’ll stick a copy of Firefox passwords on my Truecrypt encrypted USB key to cover most of those issues. Sorry Passpack – but you’re just too secure for me!
Now if only Foxmarks would support openID, I’d be have just one password to remember. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my accessing on my iPhone though! Any ideas?
I’m becoming more irritated by organisation who are failing to understand that their secure login systems are anything but.
Any organisation provides me with a ’secret’ number or a passphrase (or restricts what passphrase I can use) that I have to remember to login is effectively putting my data at risk by forcing me to write that passphrase down. I can remember pin for my debit card and another one for my credit card, the password for my email is easy as I use it everyday), being asked to remember 2 more numbers (not of my choosing for an online account I use once every 6 months… Why would I? How could I? So I write it down… and remove any semblance of security!
If they can’t pick-up on the OpenID movement couldn’t they at least have the decency to let me choose my own damn password?
Wooo hoo!
I’m releasing into the wild my first ever released wordpress plugin (I’ve writtne a couple now – but this is the first that might be of use to any one else).
It’s pretty damn simple – all it does is change the default for the image size when you choose to insert an image from your WP gallery into a post. It was written to save Chris Spooner’s sanity as he had to keep making an HTML change to media.php every time he upgraded wordpress.
I might get round to setting up an account on the official Wordpress Plugn directory sometime, but until then – you can down load the plugin here
To install, simply untar and drop into your plugins folder. you can edit the plugin to change what the default image size should be (it didn’t seem worth while adding a menu item for that one option). If you find it useful please feedback, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy and good about myself.
At FOWA (futureofwebapps.com) Kevin Rose (digg.com), Ryan Carson (Carsonified.com), Joe Stump (digg.com), David Recordon (sixapart.com) and Chris Messina (vidoop.com) discussed the issues involved with building social networks on the ‘Open Stack’.
During a FOWA workshop Chris Messina mentioned that Will Norris had released version 3.0 of his OpenID plugin for Wordpress. This version not only allows people to login using OpenID, but also allows WP to acts as a provider or delegator of OpenID.
I’ve been waiting for a good robust plugin implementation that would give me a chance to play with openID as a provider (I want to implement an OpenID/OpenLDAP gateway for a work project), so I downloaded and installed it.
It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to delegate my domain to an OpenID provider and allow me to log in to my Wordpress instance with its own domain as the OpenID url. But it all worked out of the box, first time.
So well done Will – damn fine job sir!
I just got back from 3 days at FOWA. Excellent conference, excellent speakers.
I picked up so much to write about, so much to read and so much to do…