Postitlive News

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s offer
2008-02-10 14:13:00
Looks like Yahoo decided to reject Microsoft’s offer of $44.6 billion. The deal came surprisingly 1 week ago, and is perceived as “hostile” by many Internet users. The primary reason why Microsoft’s offer was rejected was that its deal is not high enough. Yahoo also believes that Microsoft is attempting to make use of the recent slide in Yahoo’s share prices to “steal” the company. If compared to 6 months ago, Microsoft’s deal would not be even close to the market shares Yahoo was having. Yahoo is thus very unlikely to accept any offer below $40 a share, which is a lot more than the $31 a share Microsoft is offering. However, even if Yahoo were to reject the offer, Yahoo does not seem to be in a good position to compete Google. Having lesser funds and talent to compete against almighty Google (a position Yahoo once held until Google came along). Thus, Yahoo is considering other scenarios to keep its independence, such as coming up w...
More About: Yahoo! , Offer

Firefox 2.0.0.12
2008-02-10 03:48:00
Firefox had another update which fixes several security and stability problems. There were 3 critical security fixes in this version, making it an important update. There are no feature releases in this version, as it is mainly a security fix. The update is dished out as an automatic update, but if you didn’t get the update, you can download the update from the Firefox official site. © 2008 Tevine.
More About: Firefox , Firefox 2

Yahoo to decide if it accepts Microsoft’s offer
2008-02-09 14:17:00
  Looks like it’s Yahoo ’s turn to decide if it should accept the $44.6 billion deal. The outcome will determine what happens to the search engine community - users, developers, etc. While Yahoo and Google has been actively embracing openess (particularly technologies that are not yet completed), going as far as to making APIs available for free, Microsoft ain’t so active. Rather, Microsoft was seen as shunning openess, prefering to stick to strategies that will somewhat coerce people into using its propiertary technology. It’s been known that big mergers tend to fail more often, due to the difficulties that arise when merging them together. It’s not easy to get open Yahoo to go with closed Microsoft. However, if Microsoft didn’t buy Yahoo, Yahoo would be facing a lot of trouble from Google. Surely Yahoo won’t want to end up like AOL. The main point of Microsoft buying Yahoo is not its search capabilities, but rather the advertising. Yahoo...
More About: Yahoo! , Offer

Cable cut fears
2008-02-08 16:12:00
Looks like people are getting worried that their Internet connection may get cut off any time soon because of unprecedented damages to the undersea cables (does not affect US Internet users). While a severed cable may impact the speed of Internet access, Internet Service Providers will quickly re-route Internet traffic to healthier traffic. So, ideally there should be no worry about have your Internet connection cut just because some terrorist (fortunately, there aren’t) blew up some cables. Interestingly, cable cuts happen all the time (once every few days). However, it is usually the more performance damaging ones like the 2 cable cuts recently that disrupted Internet access in the Middle East, as well as the cable damage cause by an Earthquake last year which disrupted Internet access in Asia that are publicized. Given that the Internet was designed to re-route communications as soon as a break was found, why was it that those cable damages can impair the quality of the Int...
More About: Fears , Cable

Predicting Super Tuesday results using Google trends
2008-02-06 08:05:00
Google seems to have a nice tool that is pretty accurate at predicting future election results. Google trends, which collates the total number of searches for a specific term has a nice little ability to predict stuff, accurately too. Using Google trends, you can search for “clinton, obama, romney, mccain” (they are the top 4 candidates), and you get a nice chart showing you who’s more popular. Apparently, Obama is in the lead, while Clinton is second. Sure enough, BBC is reporting that Obama is currently in the lead. It’s worth noting that Google trends has been fairly accurate in predicting results for past elections (of course, it can be inaccurate at times). © 2008 Tevine.
More About: Google , Trends , Results , Super , Google Trends

Wordpress 2.3.3
2008-02-06 07:32:00
  Within 7 days from the last security update, Wordpress has issued yet another security update. This update fixes a problem that may allow other users to edit your posts. This problem can be fixed easily by replacing the xmlrpc.php file with a newer version. Alternatively, you could always upgrade your Wordpress install to the latest version. Aside from the major patching of the security problem, some other smaller bugs have been fixed such a registration email problem. There is also a fix for a function which fails to work properly on 64-bit servers. © 2008 Tevine.

Google stocks fall below $500
2008-02-05 14:55:00
It looks like bad news for Google as Google stocks hit to a new low. The value of Google stocks has fallen steadily for the past month, appearing as the top 10 losers in Nasdaq several times in a row. Microsoft’s purchasal of Yahoo came at a time most punishing for Google. Of course, it goes without saying that Microsoft does have a few problems trying to buy Yahoo - it may need to borrow a little cash. Just last month Google stocks are valued at about $700 a share, and has steadily declined in January. Yahoo on the other hand faced a similar decline. It would have kept declining, if not for Microsoft’s offer. Thanks to big Microsoft, Yahoo stocks not only recovered, but actually shot up to become much higher compared to that of the last quarter in 2007. Though, it will take more than falling stocks to beat Google. © 2008 Tevine.
More About: Stocks , Fall

Google criticises Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Yahoo
2008-02-04 11:13:00
In response to an (not so) unexpected offer by Microsoft, Google has decided to counter Microsoft’s attempt at becoming a dominant presence on the Internet. Earlier a few days ago, Microsoft offered Yahoo an interesting $44.6 billion to acquire it. Google was playing along silently until 2 days later. What Google says “The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible.” - Basically it’s trying to say that Google and Yahoo are very “open” in their approach towards users unlike Microsoft, and has acknowledged that controlling the net is not possible given the freedom of the net. “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” - Google fears that Microsoft’s takeover will mean that Microsoft will exert monopoly strength and controversy on the Internet as what it has done to computers. “Could the acquisitio...
More About: Acquisition

Microsoft considers buying Yahoo for $45 billion
2008-02-03 14:04:00
Seems like Google will be facing a whole lot more competition this time round. While this idea is not new, it is was just speculation amongst webmasters on discussing whether Google will still stay king of the net. Some jokingly said that the only way Microsoft ever get close enough to Google, is to buy Yahoo . This joke has become a reality. What this means If this deal is successful, Microsoft will soon find itself into the pages of numerous web surfers around the world. Well, no one can really complain. It’s not like Microsoft is all that bad right? (*Braces self for Windows-related sarcarsm*) Even more importantly, this deal may determine who shall dominate the Internet. Don’t forget that Microsoft had always have an influence over the Internet from the beginning, starting with its Internet browser, Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s acquisition over Yahoo means that Microsoft will have a permanent stake in the Internet. Advertising, search, media will soon have Mic...
More About: Buying , Yahoo! , Billion

The problem with the phishing filter
2008-02-03 10:54:00
It seems like even security experts make mistakes at times. Trendmicro is one of them. Aside from spreading the mentality that cookies do much harm to your computer (which is incredibly impossible), they decided to “help” you further by giving you that extra phishing site detector. The problem is, it doesn’t work sometimes. What do you mean, “it didn’t work”? It didn’t work in that it didn’t deliver the goods. When it comes to phishing filters, it means that the user will be severely discouraged from visiting the blacklisted site. So, what if a site gets into the list? One sad thing with the case of TrendMicro, is that once you are stuck on that list, you cannot come off it, unless TrendMicro discovers its mistake. Just recently, TrendMicro blacklisted a few IP addresses, one of which is a Google datacenter. Pretty bad move, since not only has they shown that they didn’t actually check that it belongs to Google, this will mean th...
More About: Phishing , Problem , Filter

Temporary Announcement: Server Downtime
2008-02-03 10:28:00
Due to an unforeseen problem, Tevine’s server was temporarily shuttered. So, this left Tevine server-less for a while. Because this came quickly and unexpectedly, a 3 day downtime cannot be prevented. Well, at least the good news is that the hosting is back online, and better too. Since this is a temporary announcement, expect it to be gone in a few days time. © 2008 Tevine.
More About: Announcement , Server

Webmasters tools - crawl stats update
2008-01-30 10:23:00
Google has updated the crawl stats for PageRank allocated in each site, viewable via Webmasters tools. Well, that’s about all the news, nothing much really. Though, an interesting point of note is that Google hadn’t done the January update in the way it used to. It might be a tiny update, probably separate from the major ones, but it is still an update, nonetheless one that is done incompletely. Despite all that temporary rush about the latest PageRank 2 weeks ago, it does seem that the PageRank of most sites will not change until the next update. Though, Google seem to do hit-and-miss, as apparently it didn’t update the PageRank of a large pool of sites. Some sites like Technorati got it by the hit-and-miss bug, causing it to be not ranked at all (it should be PR7-8 depending on the Google directory). Seems like the only place where you can get an updated score is via the Google directory, which is more transparent at showing PageRank results (i.e. no penalties...
More About: Tools , Update , Stats , Crawl

Content vs speed
2008-01-25 13:43:00
Speedily updating a site is a nice way of getting visitors to stay on your site, however don’t let that be a priority. Updating a site often is not a feasible thing to do if you are working alone. Rather, you should “invest” or venture into other areas that are able to get you a sustained amount of visitors. Speed alone (i.e. news) While updating a site steadily will net you a steady stream of visitors more easily than any other method, it’s the updating that takes the most out of you. Blogs are a popular example - update it frequently, and people are bound to find it, somehow or rather. However, it takes a significant amount of updating to get people to return to the site. Content alone Having quality content is an important ingredient for any site. However, quality content is hard to come by, and takes a lot of work, simply because you can’t make “quality content” in just a day - it takes accumulation of all that hard work. Did Wikipedia w...
More About: Speed

Audio ads? Not such a good idea
2008-01-21 11:43:00
  Thanks to web 2.0, we have much more innovative ideas than what we have a few years ago. Now comes a new ad which sounds promising (literally), which utilises a lesser used medium, known as the ear. Instead of having banner ads that are already annoying already, why not pop in an audio ad instead? Certain to capture the daily surfer who hasn’t got their speakers muted off, these ads hope to enhance the way advertisements get delivered to you. Unwanted “noise” To be frank, how many seconds could you last on a page blasting music at you from god-knows-where? Now with those ads, you do not just have to tolerate sites who have some sort of personalized music, you have to deal with those ads blabbering about how good a product is. 5 seconds while pretty short, turns up the annoyance level by a whole lot. While this sort of advertisement is normally targetted at radios, which is perfectly fine, it’s a pretty bad idea for sites non-audio related. Fancy visit...
More About: Audio , Idea , Good

Sloppy PageRank update?
2008-01-17 15:17:00
  Seems like Google had it all half done, probably one of the very few times you get to see Google make a few mistakes here and there. The last known change in PageRank was in 10th January 2008. I was hoping this update to continue, but it stopped right there - exactly half-way through. Then again, this whole “update” may not be the real update yet; it might be a prelude to the major one. Hit-and-miss The update is like a barrel of machine gun rounds. Not all your pages get hit by it. If you are lucky, your main page gets updated, if not, then you’ll see newer PageRank on your least expected pages. It’s all totally random. So, it’s not too surprising to see higher PageRanks in internal pages compared to the main page, as much as a difference of 4. About 10% of pages get hit, so you have a few pages with a new PageRank, while most of your other ones keep the same PageRank (or have none). As the new PageRank takes values from links, Google only update...
More About: Pagerank , Update

Do site-wide links help?
2008-01-16 12:21:00
When it comes to links, it is known that the more links there are, the merrier. What about site-wide links? All it takes is to add a link to every page, and you’ll get plenty of links. Site -wide links comes in all flavors: External ones, internal ones. Internal site-wide links are easy: put a link to your main page on every other page, and presto, a site-wide link. Depending on the size of the site, you can get several links, to hundreds. Do they really help? They may help. PageRank is one visible proof. But, each of those links appear to weigh lesser than several links scattered about. Sure, you have hundreds of links that can compensate for that, but it’s worth noting that even internal pages with the most exposure to site-wide links (e.g. archives in blogs) get a much lower PageRank than other pages that are linked less often (e.g. tag pages). Strange behavior? On the other hand, site-wide links do add on to PageRank, but at the same time reduce PageRank (for the pa...
More About: Links , Wide

Q1 2008 PageRank review
2008-01-13 13:16:00
  The entire update for the first quarter of the year is not yet over at the time of this post, considering that a random selection of pages had their PageRank updated. Of course, since it is not yet over, things can pretty much change over the next few days. It is quite nice to know that the PageRank update this time appears more balanced - there are about the same amount of pages which had a reduction in PageRank as the ones with an increase in PageRank. Comfirmation of update There are reports of several sites having an update in PageRank. True enough, there are sufficient amounts of sites that have a change in PageRank in their main pages (both increases and decreases). Some new sites (those with no PageRank in pages except for the main page) also have internal pages assigned a PageRank of more than 0. The update There are not as many sites being penalized by Google at one shot compared to the last update in the last quarter (September), probably meaning that there are mor...
More About: Pagerank , Review , 2008

Who’s celebrating Christmas?
2007-12-25 04:48:00
It’s nice to see that Yahoo and Google are putting on the Christmas spirit. As usual, Google has plans to create nice doodles for the days before Chirstmas. This is the 4th of the 5 for this year: While Yahoo decided to go animated with some nice flash effects. A screenshot is shown below: You can find the 3 here, here and here. Expect one more to come after though. Even Ask has something to say about Christmas, with a nice template dedicated to Christmas. There are many other sites celebrating Christmas as well, maybe at least mentioning it. Glad to see Christmas being celebrated online. Sadly, Microsoft (Live and MSN) didn’t really mention much about Christmas, aside from the ads. © 2007 Tevine.

Technorati is flawed
2007-12-24 04:59:00
  Technorati has one of the most accurate blog rankings on the Internet. The idea that links between blogs are a sign of popularity is great, but there is a problem of so called “unintended” links appearing on Technorati. Unintended links are links not expected to be appearing as reactions on Technorati. What links do Technorati count Technorati count links appearing in posts. After all, that’s probably the most relevant part of the site for Technorati to find links to other blogs (exclusive of those in comments). However, it also counts links that appear near the post. Having widgets with some nice link near a post will leak out some technorati juice. Hence comes the “nofollow” sub-standard that is now popularized by Google. Nofollow you say? Like Google, Technorati doesn’t credit nofollow links. However, it credits “external nofollow” links. Weird? It’s an unfortunate side-effect that stems from some crawlers being unable to i...

Why searching is free
2007-12-23 13:26:00
  We never need to pay for finding stuff online. Searching is an invaluable tool - the most trafficked sites are search engines. Have they ever placed a price tag on search? No. They can’t place a price on it, so the best possible price would have to be - FREE! However, Google and Yahoo still earns billions from search, even though the main service itself is provided at no cost. Though, search itself does grant those who provide it with unmeasureable power - enough to actually counter the fact that searching is free. Sources of cash without cashing in on search Making search free completely eliminates the searching part of search engines from the profit list. However, providing other services will make up for it - by a lot. In the end, search engines still profit, though indirectly. However, if Google does charge a fee of $0.01 per search, it will net billions per month (given that there are millions of searches a day). 1. Imagine, the information collected Information ind...
More About: Free

Google’s Christmas present - 6GB email space
2007-12-21 21:48:00
  Sounds like the GMail space meter is going extra fast these few days. By Christmas , expect to have 6GB worth of storage for your account, because that’s how fast the space is increasing. Not too bad, considering that Google is now an email service that provides the second largest mail space that is constantly growing (currently topped by Yahoo with its wonderful limitless space). Though, don’t forget that the space is shared in your Google account, so Google documents and bookmarks take up that space as well. 6GB marks yet another milestone for GMail. It is not too long ago that GMail was 3GB, which was in early 2007. Another thing worth of note is that Google is doing up some doodles for everyone’s pleasure (while Yahoo is doing flash animations). © 2007 Tevine.
More About: Space , Email , Present , Resent

Why Microsoft *could* have taken over the Internet
2007-12-21 14:09:00
  Microsoft ’s monopoly of the PC market can be depicted by this phrase: “All your computers are belong to us”. Microsoft has the ability to take over a market at its discretion - talk about the endless potential of money. Well it has the ability, but so far used a fraction of it on a few of it’s strengths. Microsoft? Take over the Internet ? If Microsoft managed to nearly take over the browser market (in the process completely eradicating some of its rivals), why not the Internet? Taking over the browsers market is one step for Microsoft’s empire manipulation of the Internet - after all, to even use the net, you need an Internet browser right? Quality is not a choice, Internet Explorer was and is “bad” but people had to use it, maybe until the advent of Firefox. So, if step one was the browser market, what is step 2? Right, the Internet. Currently, the Internet is governed by the top 10, the most prominent ones are Yahoo and Google. W...
More About: The Internet

Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads
2007-12-20 14:54:00
  Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms. The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)...
More About: Windows , Windows Live , Search

Google removes supplemental index
2007-12-20 13:59:00
  Google has recently annouced the discontinuation of the supplemental index. Ok, maybe not a total removal, but more of a improvement to the results. This index is, as it’s name implies, is a supplement to the main index (also known as the primary index). The supplemental index is sort of like a second index, except that pages in the index is treated on a lower priority compared to those on the main index - i.e. they are indexed less and won’t appear in most search results (unless there are very few results), so this is one index you will not want to have too many of your pages appearing in it (the supplementary index also has an alternate name). Since Google has announced the termination of it, all pages in the supplemental index has been “promoted” to the same level of priority as the other documents, increasing the amount of relevant results (and unfortunately irrelevant ones as well). Might be a great thing don’t you think? The removal of...
More About: Index

Social bookmark generator - Drag and drop
2007-12-20 03:34:00
Here’s a nice social bookmark generator that no one else has made (yet). This bookmark generator, as its name implies, generates social bookmarks for use in your site. Currently, it supports wordpress only. In order to customize your bookmarks, simply drag and drop. You can rearrange the bookmarks or remove them. The bookmarks can also be organised into rows. Afterwards, click on the “Generate Bookmark s Buttons” in order to generate the bookmarks. © 2007 Tevine.
More About: Social , Generator , Drag , Drop

Top 5 underutilized web 2.0 features
2007-12-18 15:23:00
  I’m sure you have heard of web 2.0. Even Wikipedia knows about it. Though, not all pretty web 2.0 effects that you see around you are used commonly - even if it is great at enhancing user interaction. Here are some pretty web effects that are under-utilized (in that not many sites are implementing it) even today. *Note: Most of them are JavaScript based. After all, isn’t web 2.0 suppose to accomodate more JavaScript into it’s mix? 1. Drag and Drop   Drag and drop is a nice feature. You see it in your file browser, so why not on the Internet browser? It is nice, because you get to be more interactive with your users - they can customize stuff to their liking. However, it is a nightmare to implement. No, you don’t want just stuff that you can drag around anywhere. Drag and drop should be used for something useful - not just for eye-candy, hence it cannot find its place in most web 2.0 sites. For example, Google and Netvibes use it for rearranging stuff, b...
More About: Features

PS3 firmware 2.10
2007-12-18 14:31:00
  Sony UK has recently annouced that they will release firmware 2.10 today. The update is available here. The update adds a few enhancements: -Ability to choose “Type 3″ as an option under Bitmapping settings. -DivX (which is the main feature of the update) and VC-1 support -Some refinements to Blu-ray features © 2007 Tevine.
More About: Firmware

Google dishes out new AdSense format
2007-12-17 11:53:00
  Sounds like Google is experimenting with a new format which is able to show more ad units using the same amount of space. Expect the new 336X280 pixel and 180X150 pixel units to be coming soon. This format is similar to the original ads, except that it shows 4 ads at once instead of the usual 3 or 2. It might look a little jumbled up, but at least it does show more ads. The format is not listed in the official Ad formats page, but it is being tested. There is still a low probability of it appearing amonst your ads, so it’s a perfect opportunity to have a screenshot when you do see one. © 2007 Tevine.
More About: Adsense , Format , Dishes

Google changes name of Product search, again! Sort of…
2007-12-16 12:24:00
  Google has just renamed its product search from “Product s” to “Shopping“, giving Google’s product search 3 names to work with (with the first one being “Froogle”). That change is only on the main page of Google.  I guess Google might be trying to reach out to some nice would-be shoppers to use it’s product search feature, seeing that Christmas is not too far away. After all, why did it promote Product Search to the front page in exchange of Google video (though not too much of a problem now that Google has Youtube)? Well, at least it makes Product Search the second beta Google service to appear in the Google top bar. A few others notice it, but it’s just a change in a word on the main page of Google; no big of a deal is it? But if almost no one noticed it, Google should try to make it more visible… © 2007 Tevine.
More About: Sort

Getting links as a commentator
2007-12-16 08:06:00
  Commenting on blogs has never been more easier: Type in your name, email, website, and your opinion. All that should take only 5 minutes. However, not all blogs will give you a link worthy as a backlink - in fact most blogs will give you nothing much other than a platform to express your opinion. Despite this, there are some blogs that do give link favor in return for your activity, a fair trade ain’t it. What blogs can be used? Not all blogs will give links to their commentators; most blogs will not return link favor now that Google is encouraging the nofollow movement. There are some that do though, which brings us to Dofollow blogs. Dofollow blogs Unlike nofollow blogs, dofollow blogs do not implement the nofollow portion of links. Most blogs prior to 2001 were dofollow - because nofollow was not invented. Today’s a little different, nofollow is now everywhere. Fortunately, there are some who decided to remove nofollow from the comments - so, every comment with ...
More About: Links