Tom Doyle :: TALK

According to Market Share, the release of Firefox 3 has helped the much loved browser break over the 19% market share barrier. They reckon the release grew its worldwide use by as much as 4%, mostly at the expense of poor old Internet Explorer.

Apparently over the same period, Apple’s Safari browser has seen its market share rise to over 6%.

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Ever wondered how much your website is worth?

Whether it’s a personal blog or a corporate website, your online presence is bound to be worth something.. right?

Well according to websiteoutlook.com, this blog is worth $4,555. Not bad for a site that is purely hobby for me - huh?

But it pales in comparison to some of Ireland’s most prolific bloggers:

1. Damien Mulley - $22,491.30
2. Tom Raftery - $21,724.80
3. Michele Neylon - $19,841.40
4. Grandad - $16,695.10
5. Twenty Major - $13,972.20

So what’s your site worth? Find out now www.websiteoutlook.com

DISCLAIMER: Please don’t use this as a real guide to the value of your website - it’s just a bit of fun…

We’ve been working on a project for a couple of months now, it’s a pretty standard website with the only major piece of coding being the used car search.

The client was already a signed up member of CarZone and really had no need to ditch them because the system worked quite well for them. However, what they did want to do was integrate the search more into their website so that they make it easier to use and get more content on their website.

On approaching CarZone, they gave two ridiculous integration options that in my mind are beyond belief.

Option 1 was to template a hosted solution on CarZones server. This wasn’t a goer for us because the site also had a Content Management System. So if anything changed, like the navigation or special offer etc. we would have to provide them with a new template each time. Obviously this didn’t make sense at all for the client.

Option 2 was for the results to be provided in an iFrame. Of course in my opinion, the further away from iFrames the better. We all know about the compatibility issues surrounding them, never mind the the fact that they can be quite restrictive in terms of layout etc.

After much consultation with CarZone, I was left feeling quite disappointed and badly treated when I tried to find other integration options. They refused to take simple suggestions on board that could have made this an easy integration for both parties. Even waving money in their face didn’t make a difference!

I was told, even after insisting it wasn’t, that the iFrame was an adequate solution. I’m sorry, but from a professional developers point of view anything to do with iFrames is not a solution. Maybe it is for beginners - but certainly not for pro’s who can do other things in a similar timeframe, yet have a much better solution in the end.

What’s really sad is that in this day and age, with all the hype about Web 2.0, one of Ireland’s leading websites can’t make the simple transition to providing basic xml feeds for their clients.

Come on CarZone, be a bit more creative instead of just sitting back and taking your clients money! Start providing a value add!

MySpace are planning a redesign of their popular website. The idea is to improve usability and maximise its ad space. Here’s a sample of what it will look like:

ConsoleSource.com, the games console accessory online store have published all their affiliate members profiles online.

Today I was notified by email from a source calling themselves GamerGenesis.com, that all my information, including my home address(!) has been published on the ConsoleSource.com website.

In an obvious security breach, you can access their affiliate list at the following address : http://www.consolesource.com/affiliates/admin/print.affiliates_all.php

Adding to the breach, GamerGenesis.com questioned whether any affiliate had actually received payments from ConsoleSource.com.

So if you plan to buy anything from or sign up with ConsoleSource.com be very careful as to what information you provide.

EDIT: Apparently this has now been “remedied”.

Some of you may have noticed that Google are using a new Favicon for their website. Like me, I’m sure you were wondering why… well here’s why:

“The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.”

So there ye go… now you know!

If you were new to the web, you wouldn’t be forgiven for thinking the homepage of Google is un-inviting, un-interesting and downright boring. Why have such a large company with all their billions never updated their homepage to make it more exciting?

Well to put it simply, it’s been years of testing it’s users. At the Google I/O Conference a couple of weeks ago, Marissa Mayer explained why:

“When Google was a relatively unknown 80-person start-up, the company tested Stanford students on how well they could use Google to find which country won the most gold medals in the 1994 Olympics. The result: students would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…”

When Marissa intervened and asked why they were waiting so long to perform a search, most people said “I’m waiting for the rest of it”. The students were clearly waiting for busier more flashy website and it was never coming.

So what did Google do to counteract this issue? No, they didn’t make it flashier, nor did they add a lot of extra content. No, it was something so simple, most people probably wouldn’t have thought about…

They put a copyright notice at the bottom of the page! Yes, that simple!

It’s not there for legal reasons,” Mayer said. “It’s there as punctuation. That’s it. (It tells the searcher) ‘Nothing else is coming; please start searching now.’”

That’s debatably the most innovative idea to come out of Google to date!

• We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment

I came across a site today that is basically a filesharing application using Google as it’s technology for finding copyrighted files.

www.yamour.com uses some Google hacks (and the Google API) by the looks of things to seek out anything from MP3s to video files. So who should the MPAA hold responsible for this blatant infringement of copyrighted material?

Should it be the owners of Yamour for basically taking all the nice Google features and presenting it in a more user friendly way or should it chase Google to remove the offending material from its index?

For me, it should be neither. Google is my favourite tool on the web, without it, I would be seriously lost! But why should Google be brought to case over people uploading copyrighted files to the internet? In the same way, why is TorrentSpy being punished for doing something that isn’t very far from what Google is doing?

Due to its continued growth, 2bscene are currently seeking a PHP developer to work with us!

If you are interested in this position, please email your CV and examples of your work to info@2bscene.ie

TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay $110m the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) for failing to hand over logs on the activity of users of their website.

The landmark ruling will send shockwaves to the thousands of small torrent search websites and maybe even some of the larger ones that offer a similar service to the one TorrentSpy offered before it shutdown in March of this year.

TorrentSpy in effect, was nothing more than a torrent search engine. It never held or stored any copyrighted material on it’s server. However, it did allow users easily find copyrighted material.

So in effect, TorrentSpy has been sued because it “linked” to copyrighted material, something that Google, Yahoo! and MSN do all the time with their search engine.

A simple search on Google will give you “links” to millions of copyrighted material. Here’s a very simple example of this http://www.google.ie/search?q=intitle%3a%22index+of%22+eminem

Why don’t the MPAA doing anything about this? Is the muscle behind the larger corporates a bridge to far for them to fight in their war against copyright infringement??