It may not be a bad idea to watch your incoming Google search hits more closely then usual over the next week or two to see how you are affected by one of the biggest changes to their search system since its inception. The changes, going under the codename “the Bourbon Update” has mostly taken place already but final tinkering will no doubt be ongoing. There are a plethora of reasons for the update but most seem related to improving organic search quality and reducing fraudulent results which is ironic since Google in my opinion and based on our own search statistics, are already way ahead of the other search engines in these regards. However it would be fair to say that not everybody has been happy with the results of the update and there are many reports online of previously popular sites losing much of their Google traffic. Hence my suggestion that you watch your Google stats closely over the coming weeks to find out how the changes affect you.

Our incoming Google referrals have risen by 4% in the last few weeks, so right now I’m pretty happy with the changes, but our growth has been totally organic and we’ve not engaged in any potentially shady methods to increase our ranking having basically just followed our own SEO tutorial. Also the number of external sites linking to, or mentioning us has grown gradually but dramatically over the past year, so I wasn’t expecting us to be adversely affected. It seems that one of the worst things you can do nowadays to hurt your rankings is to have your number of incoming links increase dramatically in an unusually short period of time, (something that is often a strong indicator that you are engaging in questionable tactics to gain Pagerank). That is however not the only thing you can do to get yourself in Google’s bad books so watch your Google referrers in the coming weeks to see how your sites are affected, you may find you will have to take some action in order to restore your traffic to pre-Bourbon levels. A good review of the Bourbon update can be found at dotcomicide where they suggest that the changes are to better detect the following questionable practices:
– Non related Links. (Links from sites that have nothing to do with your content.)
– Duplicate Content. (Affiliate sites and sites which copy the content of others are likely to be adversely affected.)
– Fraternal Linking. (Cross linking sites on the same host or in some other way related.)
– Run of Site Links (Links to you from every page on another site.)
– Low Quality Reciprocal Links. (Links swaps with sites that in Google’s mind are SPAM or very low quality.)
The above factors are not new to the search engines, they are just receiving more attention from Google then previously. The best SEO advice I’ve ever seen is mentioned on that site and can be best worded as: “put yourself in Google’s head” which is something I’ve been suggesting to clients for some time now. Basically if you think about your site from the search engines perspective, you can get a good idea of those things that will adversely affect your ranking, as well as those things that can improve it.

Microsoft IE 6 is old and full of security holes. Not a week goes by that someone says, on one forum or other that I us, “I have to use IE 6 at work”. Well okay there are employers with great confidence or cavalier attitudes. However, people who can switch are doing so fairly quickly and Firefox is starting to get a decent percentage of the market.

Microsoft, as recently as November denied it would update Internet Explorer 6, and wait for IE 7, which was initially planned to be available only with the next release of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) but yesterday they released a tabbed browsing toolbar via MSN for their browser according to C-Net. Of course this is nothing new as Maxthon has offered this as an add on shell built over the IE browser for a long time now. What this doesn’t do is fix any of the underlying problems IE has.

The foolish among us will mistake this for a browser update. It isn’t. Don’t be fooled, go get Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 will not even be available for users of anything older then XP SP2, so users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000 will have to use Firefox or Opera to get a decent fully featured secure browser.

[Franki: Interesting to note that for the first time ever, Firefox is scoring above Internet Explorer on HTMLfixIT. See the usage stats to the right of what you are reading.]

Big Brother — in the form of your employer looking over your shoulder — is getting bigger and stronger, according to C-Net.

The percentage of large employers monitoring outbound email and phone call volume now appears to be over fifty percent, up from less than ten percent less than five years ago. Keystroke logging software can tell your boss what you thought about saying to him/her, even if you later changed your mind and deleted the comment.

Recently many companies with products that are, or could be classed as Adware/Spyware have been threatening legal action against any company that classes them as such. Symantec, apparently aiming to beat Hotbar to the punch has filed suit against Hotbar asking Hotbar to be declared as Adware and to enable Symantec to treat it as such.

This quote from the Symantec seems to sum it up best:

Symantec is not seeking damages as part of the suit. Symantec is petitioning for a declaratory judgement by the court affirming Symantec’s assertion that certain Hotbar program files are indeed adware and can be treated as computer security risks.

Until there are strict guidelines defining Spyware and Adware, we should get used to these sort of cases. In other news, it seems that Hotbar has also had it’s right to use the Truste seal of approval according to Eweek.

There had been discord between Apple and the Open Source community over their joint but forking efforts to advance the KHTML rending engine behind such browsers as Konqueror and Safari, but that’s all over now. Along with the recent announcement that Apple was going to Intel for chips, comes news that Apple has reformed their Open Source efforts and released the Webkit Open Source project aimed at improving collaboration and sharing on the browser technology.

This is more important to the web developers than it might seem. Right now there is a general perception that there are only two real browser technologies to develop for, Internet Explorer and Firefox/Netscape Mozilla GECKO. It is important to remember Opera and the KHTML browsers as well as several smaller players as well. Market share isn’t really a good reason to develop for only a limited number of browsers because as Firefox has proven recently, market share is unpredictable and can change at the drop of a hat. We as developers want to follow Sun’s Java mantra of “Write once run everywhere” where the use of open W3C standards means that all browsers can correctly render the page in question. For that to become reality developers need to start following the standards rather then coding for a particular browser and Internet Explorer needs all of it’s rendering bugs fixed. If Konqueror and Safari succeed in aligning their code base and standards support, they could together grow to encompass a significant part of the browser landscape and ensure that developers become aware that the only way to write web pages is by the standards rather then by the browser.

Current news has it that Laptop computers for the first time outsold their desktop cousins, but just exactly what do you get for your money? All the test sites on the net and in PC magazines get the laptops, run them though lots of benchmarks give opinions on quality and appearance, and once they are done they usually get shipped off to the next group of testers and that’s the end of it. None of them can give you any idea of how long it’s going to last longer then it’s warranty period. I’ve got desktop machines running here that were built in 1997, but I don’t have any laptops that are still running after reaching their second year.

Recently laptop manufacturers have been getting much bad press due to recalls and possible design flaws in their products. All of which begs the question, are today’s laptops designed to outlast their warranty period of 1 year by any significant margin? For example, my third last laptop was a Compaq M700 and it fell to pieces before it was 14 months old. Next was a Toshiba TE2000/Satellite Pro 6000 which ended up suffering from a flaw in the motherboard/power supply connection that resulted in it being unable to boot and requiring a new mainboard. This happened at around 18 months and rendered the laptop unusable.

My current laptop is a 16 month old Dell Inspiron 5150 and I now have the same flaw reported by many other users. The board has flexed too many times, and so touching the palmrest restarts the machine. So many users have complained about this, that one thread on Dell forums (one of many on the subject) had 57 pages of complaining users. Repairers even devote pages specifically to a known problem of particular laptops like the i5150, This laptop spent the vast majority of it’s life being used on a desk with an external mouse so it certainly hasn’t been mistreated. You know something is seriously wrong with a laptops design when users get together and put up web pages about how to fix the design flaws themselves as can be seen here for the 5150 and here for the Satellite Pro 6000 but you are unlikely to hear the manufacturer admit to anything.

No brand is particularly safe, there have been issues with IBM, HP, Sony and even Apple has had to recall faulty power adaptors. Yet it is practically unheard of for a manufacture to say “Yeah, we blew that design, sorry about that” unless there is potential legal liability. So are we to assume that Laptops are not supposed to last longer much than their warranty period nowadays? The M700 needed so many replacement parts that the only thing I had that still worked properly was the screen. The Toshiba TE-2000 needed a new mainboard and the Dell 5150 also needed a new mainboard. The M700 I gave up on as a lost cause, the Toshiba mainboard replacement was going to cost me 800 dollars and the i5150 motherboard was about $600 AUD and none of these laptops were more then 2 years old. My clients have just as many laptop horror stories to tell proving that although laptop sales are outnumbering desktops now, they don’t really deserve to. I’m typing this on my 16 month old $3500 AUD inspiron 5150, I’ve already had to start the story again because I slipped while typing and touched the palmrest and it restarted the machine.

My point in mentioning all of this is that we need some regulation and standardization on laptops, the manufacturers know that you can only get a new mainboard from them, so they can charge ridiculous prices for replacements. If they can keep the laptop running for just the year of the warranty period, then they don’t seem to care if they die immediately afterwards. It’s fair enough that laptops put tight space and heat constraints on the hardware, but if people knew they were not going to get 2 years of use from a laptop, would they fork out the thousands of dollars buying them? Should the manufactures of laptops with known design problems be forced to rectify the issue rather then sweeping it under the carpet as sometimes appears to be the case? Perhaps I’ve just been really unlucky to strike out 3 times in a row, but doing some research shows that there are many thousands of users out there who are not happy with their laptop experience so I’m apparently not alone. I most certainly would not have paid $3500 AUD for my Inspiron 5150 if I’d known it would fail before it was two years old and would require an expensive replacement mainboard. Perhaps it’s time for the laptop industry to standardize the same way that desktop hardware has. At least then we’d have more uniform and tested designs and implementations. Most manufactures seem more concerned with rushing new designs though to market then they are with the quality of what they are selling.

Microsoft is in negotiations with the European Commission about their efforts to remedy their anti-competitive practises. One of those remedies is to provide server protocols that allow non-Microsoft entities to create interoperable software. Microsoft has agreed with this in theory, however the question of dollars and licenses have proven to be arguing points. In short, Microsoft doesn’t want any of the protocols they disclose to be used by their biggest competitor, Samba on Linux (Open Source).

They are on the one hand asking to meet with Open Source community leaders, and showing up at Linux events talking about how they want to work together on issues such as interoperability, while on the EU stage they are trying to deny interoperability information from the developers of the only server Operating System that offers them any significant opposition (Linux and Samba again).

This quote from Europa sums it up quite nicely.

Microsoft considers that the software source code developed by recipients of the interoperability information that implements the Microsoft protocols should not be published under a so-called “open source licence”. The Commission nevertheless considers that, if the Court of First Instance rules in favour of the Commission in the pending application for annulment filed by Microsoft (case T-201/04), this should be possible for the protocols that do not embody innovations.

Microsoft are going to get few chances for trust from the Open Source community. If they blow it at this early stage, they are not likely to get the chance again. Yes they compete against Open Source and want to keep their cards close to their chest, but trying to avoid competition by denying interoperability doesn’t hurt anyone except their own users and that is eventually going to effect their public image even more then calling Linux a cancer did. They must know that OSS isn’t going away by now, otherwise they wouldn’t deem it worthwhile to engage in dialogue with the leaders of OSS. So why make it obvious that they have no desire to interoperate with Open Source by raising the issue again in the EU anti-trust discussions? It’s enough to make me hope that OSX on Intel is for real and coming to a computer near you soon. If Microsoft lose a significant portion of their desktop monopoly then the issue will become mote because Microsoft will have to interoperate with everyone else to ensure continued sales. Don’t think it can’t happen. Not that long ago people didn’t think it was possible for Internet Explorer to lose market share to an Open Source browser that isn’t included in Windows and now Firefox has anywhere from 6 to 15% (update: 30% now) of the world wide browser market, and that happened in less then a year. It would take years longer for Apple to grow market share on x86 PC’s but it is certainly possible considering Apple’s flair for style and marketing.