The Next Big Project

I thought I'd document the process you have to go through when coming up with the next killer website. Of course I can't detail everything about it just now...

This personal project was born as many are, from a eureka moment - while out cycling this time. But the seed was planted by my Mum quite some time ago.

But as I gave it some thought, I saw the possibilities. And so I got Serious.

First question - is the concept being done at the moment? A search for the keywords behind the concept is positive - no, it's not being done.

Step 2: find the domain name. All obvious ones are taken. 2a is think of less-obvious (like, facebook.com or youtube.com are not obvious names for what the sites do).

Setback 1: Step 2 found a site quite similar to my concept. So Step 3 is: examine that site to see if my idea can still run without being a rip-off. And yes it can (the site I found is just for the US).

So it's back to Step 2, and as such I need to go cycling for more inspiration ;)

Google still dominates....

A recent BBC article reported that Google 'users performed more than 37 billion searches via Google, more than all the other major search engines combined...'

Nothing new there - our recent e-marketing seminar emphasised Google's dominance and the importance of optimising for it.

What was interesting though was that "...the study revealed that most search activity happens in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes countries such as China, Japan and India.

More than 258 million unique users in the region carried out 20.3 billion searches in August, said comScore.

Europe had the second largest total of searchers (210 million), followed by North America (206 million)."

Indeed, that China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo suggested that we start thinking of those search engines... and of region-specific ones as well.

The top search engines are:

Google sites 37 billion searches

Yahoo sites - 8.5 billion

Baidu 3.2 billion

Microsoft sites 2.1 billion

NHN 2 billion

eBay 1.3 billion

Time Warner 1.2 billion

Ask 743 million

Fox 683 million

Lycos 441 million

Total worldwide searches: 61 billion

Wimax... down the line?

Digicel in Jamaica are rolling out Wimax - wireless broadband - which gives us hope here in Dominica for an end to the near-stranglehold C&W have on Internet.

Though they do improve the service - many people are now at 1Mb, it's when things go wrong that their monopoly rears its very ugly head. Try calling their 1-800 support line and you'll know what I mean.

Full press release...

Losing the adverts

As an e-marketer I feel slightly uncomfortable using an ad-blocking Firefox extension, but you know, I never click on the ads anyway so what's the problem? One could argue that my surfing experience on a particular site is better for losing the ads, so I'm a more loyal reader...

Anyway, check out Adblock Plus http://adblockplus.org

Fighting spam, part 2

Since spammers are always one step ahead of the people who fight spam, the solution is simple - make the company offering the services that the spam advertises liable. The spammers hide, the people behind the services can't (or else how would we buy the products).

Fighting spam, part 1

(Taken from a forthcoming article in the Domnitjen magazine)

These days, there are times when using e-mail seems far less of convenience it once was. The huge amount of spam, undeliverable mail (probalby as a result of spam), annoying Out of Office replies etc. Add to that the inherant dangers with e-mail (namely viruses) and there's no doubt we're well over our honeymoon period with e-mail.

E-mail hijacking - more correctly called spoofing - is another problem that is cropping up these days. Why? Because it's so easy to do. When you send an e-mail, the From part (and other properties such as Reply-to) is simply what you say it to be in the account identity settings of your e-mail client (by client we mean software like Eudora or Thunderbird).

So if had your 'From' setting as "George Bush", with a return address of the.president@thewhitehouse.us for example, it might appear that the e-mail was indeed from the Man Himself.

Of course, if you pretend to send an email as if you were someone else, when the recepient replied the plot would soon come unstuck.

Unless of course they had also hacked into your actual e-mail account. Then they would really have hijacked your e-mail. To avoid this, the number 1 rule is use a strong password. Use a combination of letters, numbers, and try to make it more than 8 characters.

Spoofing is most commonly used in spam e-mail in order to hide where it was sent from, rather than to maliciously impersonate someone. If you think you've received a spoof e-mail, do some checking. Using the 'View Headers' option reveals useful information such as where the e-mail came from.

And don't forget, if you're using a webmail service like Hotmail, always log-off when you finish checking your e-mail.

A good guiding principle with e-mail is: be suspicious - suspect any attachment, any request for detailed personal information, and of course suspect that $10 million inheritance from Nigeria!

Ndiyo: affordable networking

Worth a mention is the Ndiyo Project - recognising that networking is basically expensive because you're using an entire PC for each person on the network, the Ndiyo project is aiming to produce small hub-like devices that all connect to just one PC running Linux. Ndiyo.org