Month: November 2011

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Search rankings update

Time again to do a snapshot. Since the last snapshot, I have submitted this blog to a number of blog indicies, as well as added some new content on other sites. Cross-linking between my own pages has also been updated. Finally, the negative content on the Skype discussion board has been retired, although still appears in search engines at the moment.

Same note as last time about Yahoo! and Bing. My Google ad is appearing periodically as they keep refunding small amounts of money based upon what they believe are bogus clicks. I’m really unclear on how this is assessed, and how they decide where to run the ads (apart from geographically – which is selectable).

www.google.com.au

Page 1: bad results at #5, #8 (out of 10)

Page 2: none

Page 3: #6

au.yahoo.com

Page 1: #8 (out of 10)

Page 2: #3, #6

Page 3: #2

www.bing.com

Page 1: #8 (out of 10)

Page 2: #3, #6

Page 3: #2

www.ask.com

Page 1: #1, #7 (exluding my ad which is running again!)

Page 2: #6

Page 3: none!

duckduckgo.com

One continuous page: result #3, 6, 9 out of a total of 32 results.

Ask is definitely on the improve, with the bad results sinking (apart from that abandoned blog at number 1). Google has gone in the right direction this time, but Yahoo!/Bing is definitely worse.

DuckDuckGo has also come out worse, but strangely now has a note about the results coming from Bing and being built by Yahoo!, but with no real explanation.

So is there much else I can do at this point without spending a lot of money? Having your online brand managed seems awfully expensive, and comes with little to no guarantees. As the Skype forum data disappears from primary searches, there will be some improvement but the other two sites are looking difficult to contain. There are no doubt other repositories of this data further down the search, and the Wayback Machine will no doubt have archived much of it, but I still would like to clean up the first 3 pages, and in particular, bump the retired blog from being the first hit on Ask.

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Getting my Android ringtones back

This is a little post sharing my experience with getting my ringtones back on my HTC Desire Z (running official Gingerbread release).
**UPDATE 02-Dec-2011 This did not seem to survive a reboot. Worked when I copied the files across, but now the extra ringtones are no longer there.

I transferred my ringtones (in .m4a format) from my BlackBerry to Android phone some time ago. They worked perfectly. Came up in the menu. Everything was working. Then I decided to clean up the SD card to make some more space. In the cleanup I moved the ringtones off the phone. Most disappointed as I had made these myself.

After finding the files back, I thought I’d put them in a nice directory called 

ringtones

under the 

/media

directory. That turned out to do nothing, so I looked up where to put these files. Everywhere seemed to suggest just creating the 

ringtones

directory (noting the lower case ‘r’) in the root of the SD card. That didn’t work either.

Then came the real clue – some advice to put them in a directory called 

/media/audio/ringtones

So I created that directory (there was already a /media/audio/notifications but not a ringtones counterpart). I used the File Manager app to create the directory and move one of the ringtones there. Strange thing – once that directory existed, the phone found all of the .m4a files I had put there, so the other ringtones appeared as well.

So it seems that to use .m4a format ringtones, all you need is the directory /media/autio/ringtones to exist, and it will find other ringtones directories. Would need further testing, but the origninal ringtones from the first import were in /BlackBerry/ringtones and they worked perfectly. Odd behaviour overall. Would need some work to completely flesh out, but at least I have better understanding of where those files should be.

The distinction about .m4a files is that you can add any .mp3 media file as a ringtone, located anywhere on your SD card. There is a separate built-in add ringtone function for this.

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Diaspora* update

After some server tweaking to make better use of resources, and some code updates, my Diaspora* pod is much more stable again. Although it is written in Ruby, the footprint isn’t too large – and I am yet to resort to low memory versions of Ruby.

I have now posted from Diaspora* to both Twitter and Facebook. The interface looks more polished with every update, and new little features and bugfixes are coming along nicely. It is still very much in the Alpha stage of development, but is improving every day. The link to Facebook seems to be much more stable now. This may have been a temporary developer Facebook issue, as it would not previously allow me to enter the correct details for security.

I would also like to take a moment to remember Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder and a developer of Diaspora*, who left us far too soon.

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Internet sense of humour

So a funny thing happened to me on the way to the internet. I’ve been monitoring where things are at, seeing if anything new comes up, and lo. A new search hit on ask.com. Apparently there’s enough data on me on the internet now to put me on hiprank.com. Naturally, I don’t rate very well, but it seems well enough to appear on hiprank.com. The thing I found most amusing was that the first thing that appeared (the ranks have changed again since a few hours ago) was:
russian hacker vs shawn sijnstra
which was surprising to say the least. I didn’t even know that my “hipness” was being measured, but there you go. And compared to an apparently mysterious russian hacker. While the issues happened on a Russian registrar, I don’t think I’ve ever identified the “hacker” as anyone in particular. I’m wondering whether it’s just an ad placed with an interesing piece of AI to generate the pages (there’s a lot of ads on that page), or if someone added this stuff manually? Perhaps the same kind of spammers that offer “comments” on this blog to link to their products.

Upon closer inspection, it appears that I’m compared to everything that has been related in this blog about my identity theft. Perhaps a semi-manual process has been used to generate pages, inflating the content on hiprank? Next question though, is how did hiprank suddenly appear on the first page of results on ask.com? They are scraping in to the bottom of page 3 on google.com.au, and top of page 5 on Bing. Oddly enough, duckduckgo doesn’t care. Props to them for working out ask’s ranking scheme.

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Search rankings update

Time to do another snapshot of where things are at. Same conditions as usual. Rankings do bounce around a lot, and I am only viewing them from my own searching perspective (affecting locality). I am not logged in to Google when searching, so hopefully it doesn’t tailor the answers by detecting who I am some other way.

Also of note is that I am still checking both Yahoo! and Bing results separately even though they are rapidly approaching 100% identical as their Search Alliance nears completion.

www.google.com.au

Page 1: bad results at #3,6 (out of 10)

Page 2: none

Page 3: #2

au.yahoo.com

Page 1: none (out of 10)

Page 2: #1, #8

Page 3: #3, #10

www.bing.com

Page 1: none (out of 10)

Page 2: #1, #8

Page 3: #3, #10

www.ask.com

Page 1: #1, #4 (my ad is low on credit so no ads this time.)

Page 2: #2

Page 3: none!

duckduckgo.com

One continuous page: result #8, 10, 13 out of a total of 28 results.

So what do I think of the results at the moment? Minor improvements on DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo!/Bing are much better.

The Google results are much more disappointing, although not all bad news. While the bad results on the first page have climbed somewhat, out of the top 30 results, the count is down by one and the other link is disappearing down the stack. On Ask, the search rankings have only gotten worse, and in particular I am disappointed that I am being outranked by a no longer maintained blog.

What to do next? There is more positive content up relating to me, and I’ve also done some more cross linking today. Hopefully that will assist. Also, I need to consider legal avenues on content removal – not sure what my options are in all cases. I’ve been assured that some of the content will come down shortly, but the two remaining blogs are my biggest issue and I need to see what my legal options are here. Questions are:

  1. Is this libel or something else? i.e. how do I legally define this issue.
  2. How do I get an international court order for take-down of the content?