I have blogged before how I don’t like Google’s growing monopoly on the web, and how they increasingly block non-Chrome browsers when you use their own web applications.

It looks like Google is now moving into more unsound web practices, using their web crawling power and abilities to unfair, unethical and illegal purposes.

Google pays bloggers for Chrome links

Earlier this month, news broke that Google paid bloggers to write about Chrome, their own browser. Embedding paid advertisements, and, in some cases, hiding it as genuine blog content, has always been something I found highly unethical.
OK, in some cases during Google’s campaign, the paid blogs were clearly marked as such, but the post embedded links to Chrome’s download site. “Paid” links is something Google themselves have always battled against, saying it cheats search engines. Now they are doing it themselves, to market their own products.

Verdict: unethical and unfair competition.

Google crawls for data for their own profit

Today, I read this interesting and in-depth story where Google crawled data from Mocality, a small Kenyan company publishing an online Kenya business directory.

In their article, the Mocality folks detail how Google crawls their business directory, with the sole purpose to contact the listed companies, convincing them to convert to a Google business directory. The article features recording of telephone calls from Google employees to the listed companies, which also reveals other unclear and illegal business practices.
Even worse, after the story broke out, Google willingly switched the crawler’s IP address, and continued their malpractice in crawling Mocality’s data. This shows a lack of ignorance, and clear mal-intent.

Verdict: unethical, unfair competition, commercial spying.

My own thing with Google

Web crawlers, scanning your web content, are to obey rules web admins set in “robots.txt”. This file defines what crawlers can scan, what they should not, and at what rate they can scan.
I always had a problem that for the Google crawler, some settings, like the Google’s crawler rate, can only be set in the Google Web Master tools, ignoring the settings in “robots.txt”. Even worse, every three months, Google resets their crawler rates. If you want to spare your server from excessive Google crawling, you have to manually reset the crawler rates for each of your site, again. Every three months.

Today, I discovered that Google’s crawlers also ignore other, more basic rules:

On “Humanitarian News“, one of my sites, the “robots.txt” explicitly disallows crawlers to access the search facility:

Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /opensearch/

The reason is that with the rate Google crawls, and the amount of search combinations possible, my server performance goes down each time Google spams my site with excessive crawls. Even worse, this “opensearch” string calls for SOLR search, which invokes a JAVA script offering advanced RSS features for “live” users. Needless to say this sucks up server resources, certainly if you shoot off opensearch requests at a rate Google’s crawler does. This is the reason why I block crawlers from accessing the search, in the first place.

This morning, while verifying my log, I found a string of searches which caught my attention:

search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
etc etc etc..

Looking into it further, the search strings were of the format:

http://humanitariannews.org/search/apachesolr_search/somalia?page=1442

And who generated those searches? They all come from IP 66.249.72.105
Which is (source)…:

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgId: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

So…

1. My robots.txt clearly blocks /search access.
2. Google ignores that rule, and as such ignores a basic rule to protect certain web content from crawling.
3. Going over my log, I find repetitive Google crawlers of the search
4. On top of that, there is not much relevant data to be found in the search which can not be found in a normal crawl of my site. And certainly not on (as in the example) on “page 1,442″ of a search (see above example).

The problem is that other than blocking their crawler’s IP address, you can’t do much about it. And if you block their crawler’s IP address, as a web manager, you can just as well throw yourself under a train: The Google search results for your site, would disappear. – do I smell a monopoly here?-

Verdict: monopoly, unethical business practice, bad example for anyone else on the web.

Is it time for an #OccupyGoogle ? I think it is.
PS: If anyone has bright ideas how to tweak the robots.txt to disallow crawler access, I’d like to hear about it.
Angry face picture courtesy SearchEnginePeople

Don’t you hate it when organisations are using social media merely as a “broadcast medium”? You know the types…, those who only tweet links to their own websites, only publish their own publications on Facebook,… Those who never reply when you send them a message on Twitter, and hardly monitor their social media channels.

No surprise none of these organisations are very successful in the social media scene.

Social media is first and foremost about being “social”: interacting with your audience, conversing with your peers. It is also – and certainly in the nonprofit sector – about helping others, with their causes.

Nonprofits regularly use social media to support campaigns, events, conferences,… But for each event, social media can only be as successful as the size of crowd you reach. And to reach a crowd, you need a social media “followership”, you need a “social media momentum”. This take time, and your crowd can never be large enough.

I have been frustrated over the past year, how organisations have to start from scratch for each event, rallying “social media activists” to help bring out their campaign’s message. A bit like I did for the Addis Sharefair, the CGIAR Horn of Africa event and the Water and Food forum. That takes time and efforts which are better allocated to other, more useful tasks.

After the Rome Sharefair last September, a couple of us, social media agitators, decided to make a change: we started a Google discussion forum (a “Google Group”), gathering social media coordinators from nonprofit organisations, social media activists and fanatics alike.

In short, our group “Social Media for NonProfit” or “SM4NP”, gathers people with “their fingers on larger social media accounts”. We assemble social media enthusiasts who can help each other in spreading news, events, appeals, queries,. for nonprofit causes. Assisting each other, we mutually benefit from plugging into each other’s networks.

In the past, we have helped in spreading single messages like

“We have a webcast on Monday on (subject) at (time), please spread the message”

or

“Check this announcement. Looking for a reblog in Spanish and Chinese (link)”

up to

“Organising onsite/offsite social reporting volunteers around #COP17 – If interested email and we’ll register you on the discussion forum”

We aim to gather people with a larger social media networks, often via the organisations they work for, people running popular 
blogs, etc.. but we just as well welcome newbies, and will be more than helpful in getting them on the right social media path. (Amen!)

If you are interested in joining our group:

• apply for a membership (yes, you will need a Google account), or
• send me an email  peter (at) blogtips (dot) org, or
• even easier, just leave your email address in a comment on this post.

Hope you help us putting the word “social” back into “Social Media” !

Update: Thanks to everyone who helped. I have now identified a developer!

One of my websites, Humanitarian News, runs on Drupal 6. I’d like to implement a mobile theme on it, to make browsing from a mobile device easier and faster.

I am looking for a Drupal developer who can implement a very simple and fast mobile theme. As an example, check out the mobile theme I used for AidNews.

The site should detect automatically when the visitor uses a mobile device, and switch to the mobile theme.

The development should not touch any of the currently used modules. The theme should be simple and fast, and if possible use caching (without conflicting with the “normal browsers’ cache”).

Interested in this short consultancy?
Contact me via peter (at) blogtips (dot) org

PS: and happy new year to all!

Picture courtesy GizModo

“AddThis” is one of the main social media sharing sites. Just like “ShareThis“, which I covered before on this blog, they provide browser plugins and social bookmarking icons for 11 million websites. In short, they facilitate ways to “pass on” links via different (social) media.

Knowing AddThis reached over 1 billion users, they can provide a representative view of the social media and web market. In this 2011 overview, some things really stand out:

• Facebook is the most popular social media tool used for sharing links (just over 50% of the market);
• … followed by Twitter (14%), whose “sharing”-market grows by over 500%.
• Tumblr and StumbleUpon still have a tremendous growth.
• Sharing via Google+, the new social media kid on the block in 2011, has already levelled. Bad news for Google who heavily promoted it. But was to be expected, as it seems also the Google+ users is already levelling.
• Digg and MySpace are on their way down (no surprise here).
• Sharing via a browser pluging (“Address Bar” sharing) grows by over 1,600%.
• Internet Explorer is on its way down, Firefox levels and Chrome is on its way up. Chrome has been heavily promoted in Google’s Internet dictatorship.
• The use of mobile devices for sharing is on its way up. Once again, no surprise, though many mobile browsers could still do with good sharing plugins, if you ask me.

Happy 2012 sharing!

Oh, PS: If you are still doubting to put bookmark sharing buttons on your blog, check out my experience.

Barely two months have passed since we published a post, asking for volunteers to cover the forum via social media. By now, we have gathered about 20 social reporters who will “report” live from the Forum itself. Another 80 (!) social media volunteers spread all over the world will be helping to “propagate” the content through their own social networks.

The volunteering group consists of people from all walks of life: we found volunteers amongst our own staff, development specialists, social media geeks and loads of people who are interested in our cause.

Interestingly enough, most of these people have never met, and might never meet, except through their common goal: help disseminate information about CPWF and the Forum, via social media.

Over the past eight weeks, the volunteers set up an email discussion forum to prepare and coordinate their efforts, and used a Google Sites wiki-like collaborative website to “register” some of the agreements they reached, the tools they were going to use, etc..

While “normally”, social reporters only kick in action at the start of an event—the Forum in our case—our enthusiasts went quite a step further; driven by our cause, they dug into our website, and generated several blog posts to introduce some of our research.
They set up our Facebook page and have been generating a lot of interest via Twitter. They monitored the Internet buzz about CPWF and IFWF, published some of our content into other languages and reached out to their own social media networks to get people interested in the work we do.

Now that we are on the verge of kicking off the IFWF3 forum itself, the team, like a group of athletes, is all trained and geared up. The group will conduct social media trainings on Saturday, for any Forum participant who wants to attend. On Sunday afternoon, they will hold the first social reporters coordination meeting at the Forum venue.

“This will be interesting,” says Ilse Pukinskis, who has been pivotal in organising the social media team. “Many of us have been working together for months now, but have never met. It will be nice to put faces to the different names. It is more than exciting to start some of the real reporting work…”

The social media team will be attending all sessions and will report on some of the key messages. Their offsite colleagues are standing by to spread the content into the social media world.

Here are the social media channels we will using:

• Our blog: http://waterandfood.org/ifwf3/?q=blog
• Our Twitter account: @waterandfood (we will use the tag #IFWF3)
• Our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/waterandfood
• Pictures are on our Flickr account: http://flickr.com/cpwf
• Videos on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/cpwftv
• …and presentations on our Slideshare account: http://www.slideshare.net/group/ifwf3

A few weeks ago, I complained that the new Google’s Blogger dashboard no longer supported Safari. Instead Google encouraged people to switch to Chrome, Google’s own browser.

I predicted that it would not stop there, knowing Google’s tendency to monopolize the web world.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are moving yet one step closer to Google’s web dominance: now Firefox users get an error message popping up when using Google Docs, urging users to switch to… Google Chrome once more.

What’s the next step? Mmm Google+ will follow soon. And Google Maps. And the biggie would of course be if Google web search would only be possible with Chrome.

Was there not a US anti-trust law invented once to stand against monopolies?

Maybe it is time to #OccupyGoogle to shake things up a bit.

This warning popped up today, while surfing the website of a large international nonprofit.

It was the first time I ran across a oblivious warning like that.

Apparently, this warning refers to an EC directive:

Third parties may wish to store information on the equipment of a user, or gain access to information already stored, for a number of purposes, ranging from the legitimate (such as certain types of cookies) to those involving unwarranted intrusion into the private sphere (such as spyware or viruses). It is therefore of paramount importance that users be provided with clear and comprehensive information when engaging in any activity which could result in such storage or gaining of access. The methods of providing information and offering the right to refuse should be as user-friendly as possible. Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user. Where it is technically possible and effective, in accordance with the relevant provisions of Directive 95/46/EC, the user’s consent to processing may be expressed by using the appropriate settings of a browser or other application. The enforcement of these requirements should be made more effective by way of enhanced powers granted to the relevant national authorities.

And no, they don’t use paragraph formatting. It come from a legal journal, not intended for the joy of its readers.

Seriously, are we looking at a series of pop-up warnings for every website we visit? I mean, by setting my browser to accept cookies, I should be consentual enough, no?

What’s next? Will I have to sign a disclaimer before I visit a website, because that website writes caching data onto my harddisk?

This website took that idea for a funny spin. Try it out

In the past days, Delicious, the widely popular bookmarking site, changed their ehmm, how should I call it: their “website”, their user interface?

If it were only the user-interface, I’d be happy, but some of the functionality changed too… Yet another example of “If you seriously engage in social media, you can’t keep it as a ‘hobby’..” There is always something that changes, needs maintenance, needs updating, debugging… For me that is half of the fun. But it also means “works never stops”.

Back to Delicious: I had not even noticed the changes, until last night when I got a Skype call in from Simone, one of my clients: “Help, the Delicious feeds on my blog no longer work.”

Simone is using Delicious extensively (and “cleverly”, I may say), to bookmark events, interesting literature, reference sites etc… All as properly tagged, and we were using Delicious feeds for each tag to display the bookmarks on her blog.

Unfortunately, since last night, the Delicious widget to display RSS feeds for tags no longer works. You can only get a widget for the RSS feed on ALL bookmarks from one user, but not per user tag.

I sent a mail to Delicious “Feedback” account, asking for clarification if this would no longer be supported.

This is the mail I got back:

Thanks for sending us your feedback. Due to the high volume of emails, this is an auto reply. However, as Delicious goes back to beta, please know that we’re reading all emails as your suggestions and report are incredibly important to the team and we’re working overtime to resolve your issues.

To keep you updated on our progress, please check our engineering system status page here: http://deliciousengineering.blogspot.com/

Thanks again for taking the time to share your feedback and know that we’re working hard to dial everything in.

So WTF does that mean? Is this a civilized way of saying “Thank you, but what-ever?” This is a good way to lose the support from your user basis, Delicious! #Fail.

So what will we do? Hmm… I saw the bookmark tags are actually in the user feed, so probably I can filter them out with Yahoo Pipes, and generate an RSS feed per tag, through Pipes…

But that will require some work. Again.

Update 1 :
I don’t seem to be alone in my frustration of the Delicious web revamp? Check this article (and the comments!). People seem to have lost tags in the transition, and are reporting multiple bugs on the website, the widgets, RSS feeds, etc…
A good example how a migration to a new website should NOT be done.

Update 2 :
I am contemplating to move all my bookmarks to Diigo (which seems to include all the -old- Delicious functionality and is more stable). Diigo allows you to import bookmarks from Delicious but beware: the new Delicious has a bug which screws up the dates of your bookmarks.
In a test I did, I ended up with my oldest bookmarks as the most recent. Beh! Only work-around is to manually edit the Delicious export file. Have fun!

Update 3 :
It seems all tags from the old Delicious which contained spaces, disappeared. I also noticed that there is an inherent problem with bookmark dates, and the widgets they used to support for blogs, now contain junk characters. Widgets which displayed tag-based feeds no longer work.

Water scarcity is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity today.

Today, more than 20 percent of the world’s rivers run dry before reaching the sea. This is an upcoming disaster for the world’s agriculture, specifically in developing countries where 70-90% of the available water is used to grow food.

More than 1.4 billion people currently live in water-scarce rivers basins. By 2025 the number is expected to reach 3.5 billion. As the world’s population grows and global food demands will roughly double in the next 50 years,  competition for scarce water resources is projected to intensify between the use of water for agriculture, and the use for urban or domestic uses.

If future generations are to be fed, agriculture must produce more food with less water.

This is the core work of the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food (or CPWF), make the use of water-for-food:

• …more productive (produces more food per unit of water and land),
• …more resilient in the face of economic and environmental shocks, and
• …more diverse in food production and nutrition.

The third International Forum on Water and Food (IFWF) will be held in South Africa on November 14-17 this year. It will focus on assessing the progress of the research so far, and how to best capitalize on the results. It will gather lead scientists, policy makers and NGOs working in this field.

This is where we come in, and where I need your help!

Calling on social media volunteers

The forum organisers recognize the power and reach of social media, and want to actively use  it to advocate for their cause. They asked me to coordinate the social media team.

Our team will:

• Use social media to spread the message and key content before, during and after the forum;
• Do the social reporting from the forum itself, using different social media outlets to distribute the updates;
• Coordinate the spreading of “the messages”, using a worldwide social media network.

The team will consist of volunteers. Some of them will be CPWF staff, others will be people interested in the cause of “water and food”. Some will attend the forum itself, but many will not physically be there, but rather use their social media networks to spread the messages.

More than just “advocacy”

But it is not just advocacy, we’re looking for. We want to use the opportunity to gather a group of volunteers, just as we did for the AgKnowledge Africa event in Addis last year: We will use the forum as a project, teaching people how to put together a social media strategy, how to select and use the tools, and train the newbies on the different social media techniques.

So, in short, we will use social media at its best and finest: Train people, define the approach, and execute a social media campaign for a good cause.

This will be an excellent learning opportunity, and a way to share experiences with like-minded people.

Are you interested to join in? You got nothing to lose!

Again, you don’t need to be related to the CPWF, nor even work for a non-profit organisation. You don’t even have to attend the forum. We do need people with a genuine interest in using social media for a non-profit cause, willing to learn from each other, and work with the others. We are looking for people willing to help spread the message through social media for a good cause.

If you are interested, drop me an email via peter (at) blogtips (dot) org or simply leave a comment with your email address in this post.

I will then put you on our Google Groups Email discussion forum. As our social media team is just starting, you can participate in the discussions from the beginning, and time-permitting, volunteer for one of the tasks.

And there are plenty of tasks: e.g. manage our Google Sites repository, search for new social media tools and help setting them up, make blogposts, and help to train others.

All of this is on a volunteering basis: you can invest as much or as little time you want.

Interested? Join now! This is a unique opportunity to be part of a greater good: using social media for a good cause.

 
From time to time, those of us working in social media, still have to convince people on the reach and use of it all. So, here is another infographics/infomercial video. Always good at the beginning of a presentation.

Video is based on the book “Socialnomics” by Erik Qualman
(Discovered via @gaurisalokhe and @rsamii)