links for 2009-02-14

Corned beef hash, hash browns, there are many great types of hash out there (don't start, I get it). All too often overlooked by online marketers and webmasters, however, is the old school hash symbol (#), also known as the pound symbol. This little beauty can do some pretty cool things for you. It can control duplicate content problems, martial affiliate links, and even help you control the content shown to different visitors…not bad for the old shift+3. Watch the video to learn what hash can do for you.

My dog Ribsy is on Twitter. He’s far from being the only one. Take a look at this list. Or this one. Or that one. Just like many of their human counterparts, dogs spend their days tweeting about the mundane (are they home yet?), but they also take it further. They talk about current events (is President Obama’s dog going to be a Labradoodle or a Portugese Water Dog), health issues (what’s that in my poop), to lighter topics such as fashion (lovin’ my new collar) and personal hygiene techniques (licks before kisses?).

While microblogging and foremost Twitter is booming many people still oppose the service, that is, do not understand the use of it. Most of these people just don’t get it, others just want to get some attention for “thinking different”.

There are many ways to analyze the effect of blogging with Google Analytics ranking at the top for most due to the pricetag of free and robust features. As the social web continues to grow and become central to the internet experience, analytics and social monitoring software will HAVE to converge to measure on and off page interactions. We don’t have that quite yet, but here are a number of other blog analytics tools that offer rich visualization and real time reporting features that are worth a look.

Just as giving wasabi ice cream to children is a bad idea, the notion that Microsoft could actually duplicate the success of Apple’s retail stores might be equally unpalatable. But damn the torpedoes, it is going ahead and trying it anyway and has recruited a new executive to head the charge.

This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he'd tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: "The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: https://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted." After a bit of investigation, we discovered that our site had been blacklisted by Wikipedia in mid-2008 and labeled as 'spam'! There is no explanation on Wikipedia as to why this happened. We certainly don't think we've done anything that would justify being blacklisted. So after some emailing and twittering, we found out that the way to challenge this blacklisting was to make our case on this Wikipedia page.

When I was in elementary school my father took me to the most amazing display of creativity that had I ever seen. I was completely mesmerized by the lights, the acting and the way stories were made to come alive. As a young boy, what intrigued me the most was watching what I thought was impossible become possible with a few words or gestures. What I had experienced was my first magic show.

The folks behind Firefox have unveiled a new project today called Bespin, an extensible, web-based text editor that lives in the cloud.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, the graphic arts industry was populated by full-time illustrators, production assistants and compositors. With only composing sticks for laying out type, straight edges for defining grids, a human proofer to catch spelling mistakes and an arsenal of X-acto blades for making edits, these guys lived and breathed detail. Mistakes were costly. It was a trade position that required lengthy apprenticeship; job security depended on getting all of the little things right.

This is good!

The average person likely won't even notice, but Webmasters can rejoice that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.

As we strive to evolve the Open Web as a robust platform for application development, we believe in the potential for web-based code editors to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

Mozilla Labs on Thursday unveiled a new open-source project called Bespin, a Web-based programming environment its developers hope will combine the speed and power of desktop-based development with the collaborative benefits of cloud computing.

Twitter fended off a second clickjacking attack on Thursday night as the popular microblogging site plays cat-and-mouse with a prankster, the site confirmed on Friday.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo will be discontinuing MyWeb, a way to save search results or other Yahoo data to a single location. MyWeb launched in 2005, as part of Yahoo’s vision for a “very individual Web.”

For those who read productivity sites like 43 folders or Life Hacker this methodology is well known to you.

At the urging of Lenn Pryor back when I worked at Microsoft I read David’s book and later went to one of his seminars with Lenn. Found it useful to step up my game and keep up with an increasing flow of stuff in my life.

A ton of ideas on how I’ve seen people get creative again after a layoff. On Sunday Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, admonished me and told me it’s very important to get back after a layoff and be optimistic again. Otherwise your work will suffer and people around you will see you as having less value.