Blocking Websites with the Hosts File

The hosts file contains a shortcut list for assigning name addresses (such as geeklad.com) to number addresses (173.245.60.113). To block websites with using the hosts file, you simply create “invalid shortcuts” for the websites you want to block. The easiest way to do this is to assign the name address for these websites to your computer’s local number address (127.0.0.1).

Host File Location

The location of your hosts file depends on what operating system you’re using. Here’s a quick cheat sheet for Windows, OS X, and Linux:

• Windows: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (typically %SystemRoot% is C:\WINDOWS, but it can be different)
• Mac OS X: /private/etc/hosts
• Linux: /etc/hosts

Editing the Hosts File

You can use any editor to modify the hosts file. In Windows, you can Click Start, Run…, and then type notepad %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

To add a website you want to block, just add a new line with 127.0.0.1 followed by the name of the website. For example:

Lists of Websites to Block

Fortunately, there are already numerous existing lists of websites to block. These lists typically consist of websites that are known to be harmful or perform actions such as tracking your browsing activity. Here are a few you may want to check out:

• someonewhocares hosts file
• MVPS hosts file
• hostsfile.org

You can download these files and then copy and paste the contents into your hosts file. Another (easier) option is to download and use a host file manager tool called HostsMan. HostsMan provides an easy mechanism for importing website blocker host lists into your own hosts file.

How to Block Porn Sites

Another option is to use Proxy Autoconfiguration (PAC) files to block websites. Eric Phelps has put together some very nice tools for using PAC to block porn sites. He even has put together a VB script to install and configure his porn site blocking method. It will only work on Windows.

This method for blocking porn sites, essentially creates a local proxy that prevents you from being able to connect to porn sites. The disadvantage of using this method is that the browser must be configured to use the local proxy. It is easy to bypass by disabling the proxy option in the browser.

How to Block Websites with DNS Services

OpenDNS is a DNS service you can use to block websites. It is yet another method you can use as a website blocker, without having to install additional software on your computers. It works very much like the hosts file method, by resolving the addresses of undesirable sites to an invalid location. You can sign up for their basic service for free.

Use Privoxy to Block Websites

Privoxy is a superb and free and open source program you can use to block websites. It is already pre-configured to block advertisements and malicious sites. You just need to download it, install it, and configure your web browser to use it.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll see an icon for it in your system tray. If you right-click on it, you’ll see Privoxy is running.

To take advantage of Privoxy, you’ll need to configure your browser to use it. The exact sequence will vary, depending on what browser you’re using. For most Internet Explorer versions, just go to Tools > Options

Click the Connections tab in the Internet Options dialog and then click the LAN Settings button.

Click the checkbox that says Use a proxy server for your LAN and then click the Advanced button. Finally, in the Proxy Settings window, enter localhost for the HTTP proxy address and 8118 for the port.

Naka informed me of additional parameters for the Google Web History RSS feed of which I was unaware: yr, month, and day. I may have actually seen them earlier, but their significance and how I could use them did not dawn on me until I read Naka’s comment thoroughly. There was a major problem with the first revision of my script: it would only successfully obtain about 4k or so records of history.

No matter what I did with the parameters I was using (namely num and start), the script would only download a partial history. However, with some modifications to the code, I was able to take advantage of the date parameters, and update the script to download a Google History in its entirety.

Installation and Usage

The usage is the same, with the exception of some additional new features, which are fairly easy to use (you will need Flash for it to work). To use it, drag and drop this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar:

Download Google Web History

Then visit https://www.google.com/history, log into your Google History, and click the bookmarklet. Accept any warnings that may come up about insecure content being loaded (it loads some JavaScript and Flash movie from my server), and click the bookmarklet again to begin the download process. For more info about the security dialogs you may encounter, refer to the usage section of the original post.

Please note that no private information of yours is ever transmitted/received to/from any server other than Google’s. Read the privacy info on my Google History Download script to learn more. The new download dialog box looks like this:

Be prepared to wait quite a while for your full history to download, if you want to get it all. Just to give you an idea of what to expect: I have over 40k searches and it downloaded over 135k records and the CSV was about 28MB in size. If you get sick of waiting, click the Cancel button and get what has been downloaded so far.

Notice that a cancel button has been added, as well as a note at the bottom of the window indicating the oldest record that has been downloaded. When you cancel the download, you can download a CSV with the records completed thus far. You’ll also be given the option to resume your download:

If ever your Google prompts for a password on the RSS feed behind the scenes, a dialog will appear with instructions for logging back into your Google Web History and resuming the download:

You may see this dialog if you have your history up and are idle for a while. It does also appear sometimes when a lot of requests are made to the RSS feed (which the script does indeed do).

New features

I’ve included a number of improvements in the new version:

• Now obtains the entire Google Web History
• Given that it may take a long time to download one’s entire history, I’ve added a cancel button
• There is also a button to resume, if the download is cancelled
• History login timeout is more gracefully handled, resuming where it left off after the user logs back into history using another browser window
• As records are being downloaded, the oldest date loaded is displayed at the bottom of the window — this helps to know how much history has been gathered as it progresses

Google Web History RSS Parameters

Here’s the full list of RSS feed parameters of which I’m now aware, including additional ones Naka mentioned:

• num: Number of records to output (1000 is the most you can get a time)
• start: The record number starting point (starting from 1) — Note, using num=1000 and incrementing the start parameter by 1000 will only get you so far (to about 4k records or so)
• month: 2-digit month
• day: 2-digit day of the month
• yr: 4-digit year
• max: Some kind of modified UNIX timestamp or something — Not particularly useful without fully understanding what it is, and it appears to have some of the same limitations as start
• st=web: Limit to web search
• st=img: Limit to image search
• st=frg: Limit to product (formerly known as Froogle) search
• st=ad: Limit to sponsored ad links
• st=vid: Limit to video search
• st=maps: Limit to map search
• st=blogs: Limit to blog search
• st=books: Limit to book search
• st=news: Limit to news search

Additional Technical Information

The new version of my script starts off by downloading the first 1000 records as it did before. However, from that point on, it loads the next 1000 records by setting the yr, month, and day parameters to the date of the 1000th entry. I did run into some odd problems with consecutive days with a lot of history.

In a few instances on days with a lot of history, the script would obtain the date of the 1000th record to load the next 1000. However, instead of starting on that day, it would start on the prior day. Then the original day would be the 1000th record again, and the script would end up in an infinite loop.

For example, when the starting date for the feed was set to July 1, 2009, the date of the 1000th record for that request was June 30, 2009. However, when the RSS feed parameters yr=2009&month=06&day=30 were used to load records starting from June 30, the RSS feed once again started with July 1. This resulted in an infinite loop, because the date of the 1000th record was June 30, 2009 and the feed parameters were being set to yr=2009&month=06&day=30 over and over again.

To avoid this infinite loop, I put in some checks for the prior date that was loaded and if it is the same as the 1000th entry, it decrements the date by a day. Unfortunately, this could potentially result in some records in the download being lost. However, this is a lot better than an infinite loop. Fortunately, the occurrence of this problem appears to be seldom. The code also checks for repeat history entries (by checking the date/time), to avoid duplicity in the results.

Fortunately, the Pandora website uses jQuery, which makes it stupid easy to re-enable the ability to select & copy the lyrics in a single statement. If you want to do the same, just drag this bookmarklet to your bookmark bar:

Copy Pandora Lyrics

Here’s the JavaScript code that makes this possible:

$("div[class^='lyricsText']").attr({
	class: "lyricsText",
	unselectable: "off",
	onmousedown: null,
	onclick: null,
	ondragstart: null,
	onselectstart: null,
	onmouseover: null
});

All it does is find the <div> tag in the HTML that contains the lyrics and disables all the things that disable the selection of the lyrics text. That’s a lot of disabling! Put another way, it re-enables the selection of they lyrics.

Update: I’ve updated the script and added some enhancements. Find out more in my updates to the Google History download script.

Privacy Info

First of all, let me put your mind at rest by informing you that my solution will not do anything malicious with your Google Account or your Google Web History:

This solution works all within your browser. None of your Google Account data or history is transmitted or received to any server, other than Google’s servers. This tool downloads your Google Distory directly from Google to your computer and your browser. The source code for my bookmarklet is freely available to download, review, and modify, under the GPL v3.

I do not want the liability nor the responsibility of handling anyone else’s private Google Account data, so priority number one for me in developing this tool was that it all had to work on the client-side, without having to pass the data through any servers. I know that if I were to use a third-party solution, I would only use a solution constructed in the manner I built mine, and I’m sure most other people feel the same way.

If you would prefer not to use this tool and manually download your Google Web History, scroll down to the Technical Details section for information on how to do this.

Usage

You’ll need flash in order to use this tool. It makes use of a library that uses a small Flash movie to convert the downloaded data into a file, within the browser (read the technical details for more info). To use it simply drag and drop this bookmarklet onto your web browser’s bookmark bar:

Download Google Web History

If you’re using Internet Exploder (I feel sorry for you), you may receive a warning about the bookmarklet loading insecure content. This is because it will download a JavaScript file from geeklad.com, and load it into the current webpage. Just click Yes to proceed with adding the bookmark.

Next, visit your Google Web History. Unless you’ve visited it during your current browser session or have previously set up your browser to remember your computer for accessing your history, you’ll be asked for your Google Account password.

After you log in, click on the Download Google Web History bookmark you just created. If you’re using Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, the browser will warn you that the page has insecure content. Load Anyway, which will refresh the page, and then you’ll have to click the bookmark again.

The second bookmarklet warning you might see in Internet Explorer

This is the security warning you'll see in Google Chrome

I do not believe Firefox has this security check, and I’m not sure about Safari. In either case, if you do see a security warning, allow the page to reload and then click the bookmark once again. Next, you should see the page darken, and a box appear informing you that your history is being downloaded.

Prepare yourself for a long wait if you have an extensive history. To give you an idea, my history has over 44k searches and my tool downloaded over 135k records and the CSV file was about 28MB! If you get sick of waiting, you can click the cancel button (you can see what it looks like in my update post, the screenshot below is out-of-date) and download what has been done so far.

Eventually, all of your history will be downloaded and you will be presented with some search statistics and a button to download to a CSV file.

Update: More info on usage is available in the usage section of the latest update on this script to download Google History.

Shared Computers

If you share your computer with others, there is something of which you should be made aware. If you configure the browser to keep you logged into your Google Account, you will see the history generated by anyone using the computer (unless they log you out). When you see a bunch of searches for knitting needles, quilting, and dentures, don’t be alarmed and suspect an octogenarian of having hacked your Google account. It’s only Grandma surfing on your computer while logged into your Google Account.

If you do not even want the temptation of seeing what websites the others around you are visiting and what they are searching (good for you), make sure to always log out of your Google account when you’re done using the computer. Alternatively, you could just make sure to never check the “remember me” checkbox when you log into your Gmail, Google+, Google Docs, Google Reader, or any other Google services. That’s generally good practice anyway, when using a shared computer.

If you do decide to use my tool for evil, such as spying on your significant other or siblings, shame on you! That is not the purpose for which I’ve intended this tool to be used. That being said, I’m sure this tool will see its fair share of abuse.

If you don’t want anyone else using my tool to spy on you, don’t ever give your Google Account password to anyone. In order to access your Google Web History, you will be prompted for your password even if you’re logged into your Google account. This is a good thing, because if anyone wants to see your Google History or use my tool, they would need your Google Account password.

Technical Details

Update: There are some additional technical details on the Google Web History RSS feed in my latest update.

When I was searching for this solution myself, I discovered that there is an RSS feed of your history that can be viewed at https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=1. The num parameters indicates how many records you want to view at once, and start parameter which record you want to start at.

You can download 1000 records at a time. If you wanted to manually download it, you could save the output of these links:

• https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=1
• https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=1001
• https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=2001
• https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=3001
• https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=4001
• https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000&start=5001
• … and so on … until you finally reach a page with no <item> tags in it.

Then you need to import all of the XML the files into a program to combine them into one. You can do this with the latest version of Microsoft Excel. I was initially going to go down this route. However, decided it would be worthwhile to build a tool to automatically do this since others may want the same convenience of downloading their entire Google Web History in a single CSV file.

Another technical detail I’d like to share is that this tool uses a very nice JavaScript library called Downloadify. Downloadify provides the magic that allows it to generate a CSV file without having to pass your data through a third-party server. It does this through a small Flash program that takes a string as an input, creates the download button, and then creates a dialog box to download the string into a file when you click the download button.

Although you could use Firefox to download videos from YouTube, in Google Chrome it is a snap, and it does not require any additional plugins. First, you’ll want to enable the JavaScript console, Chrome’s built-in debugger.

You can just do this by pressing Control+Shift+J or by clicking the options wrench, and going to Tools > JavaScript Console.

Next, go visit the webpage with the YouTube video you want to download and play the video. As the video starts playing, it will start downloading the video file. The Chrome Javascript file makes it very easy to identify the YouTube video file you will download.

Just click the Network tab, and then click the Size column header twice. This will cause the list to sort by size descending (you will see a down arrow next to where it says Size. You’ll notice that the largest file is listed at the top, and it is called videoplayback.

In this screenshot, you see there are two files called videoplayback. The second one was an advertisement I did not care to watch and skipped, which is why you see it in red with a status of (cancelled). To download the video, right-click on the file you want to save, and then click Open Link in New Tab. This will actually save the file to your downloads directory.

You may want to rename the file to something a bit more memorable than videoplayback, and even add the .flv extension to the end of the filename. You can play back the saved file with a great, free video player called VLC, which is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Consequently… This process of downloading flash videos will work with other sites as well as YouTube. Just look for the largest file on the page, save it, and play it back with VLC.

Some time ago, a friend got me into an online card game called Urban Rivals. It is similar to other card games such as Magic the Gathering, but played online either via iPhone/iPad app or in your browser. One aspect of the game that quickly got my attention (other than the game itself), was the card marketplace where you can buy and sell playing cards.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was an inefficient market. Profitable trades presented themselves quite regularly, and with a bit of automation it would be easy to take advantage of the market. I proceeded with developing a Google Chrome extension that would allow me to do so, and it worked quite well.

Over the course of a few days, I had it up and running, automating both buying and selling of cards. Essentially, it continually scans the marketplace until a profitable buy appears, buys the card (or cards), and immediately posts them for sale at one clintz (the in-game currency) below the lowest price. I told a friend of mine about it, and with some trepidation at first, he decided to try it out and helped me test and tweak it. Eventually, he realized it worked great and used it extensively as I did.

When it was all said and done, I had accumulated probably over 6 million worth of clintz and cards, having started with just a few thousand. My friend had probably accumulated on the order of about 5 million. Ultimately, my friend and I were both banned. I told him if ever I did get banned, I would likely release the extension into the wild to see what sort of havoc it might wreak on the marketplace. Well, I did get banned, so here we are. Even before I was banned, I had a morbid curiosity to learn what might happen if I were to give it to more than just one or two other players. Having been banned was just the excuse I was looking for, as I (and my friends) no longer have a vested interest in keeping it a secret.

Words of Wisdom in Using the Urban Rivals Market Bot

First and foremost, Use at Your Own Risk.
If the good folks of Urban Rivals find out you’re using a bot, they will ban you. If you use it in moderation, you may not get caught. Of course, I can make no guarantees. If you get banned for using this, don’t blame me as you’ve been warned!

Be very careful if you set up a separate account.
My friend set up an account for using the bot, in case if he got banned, so he would still have the original account. Unfortunately this plan backfired on him, as he was banned not for the bot but both accounts were banned for having duplicate accounts.

If you do use decide to set up an additional account, do not ever connect to them from the same internet connection. You could try using Tor to connect from an anonymous internet connection for the bot account, and use your regular internet connection for your regular account. I haven’t tried this, but this method of using multiple accounts would probably work without a problem. You just have to be very careful you never connect via the same method/connection.

It may not work for long, or at all at this point.
Since I no longer have a valid Urban Rivals account, I have no mechanism to see if it even still works. The last time I used it, it worked without issue so it’s likely it still works, but I make no guarantees. So that my “legacy” may still live on, I’ll include the source code as well.

If you’re good with JavaScript, you can probably figure out my mess of code and fix things if they’ve broken. If you do fix any bugs you see, feel free to send me the new code and I’ll post it here.

Be prepared for personal attacks.
Because the bot works by looking for good deals, occasionally it picks up deals that were posted in error. Sometimes people forget a 0, and end up posting a card worth thousands for hundreds, or even hundreds of thousands for tens of thousands. The bot will pick these up for a song and repost them for sale and make 10x profit. Of course, when this happens it sometimes solicits inflammatory language from those that posted the price in error.

I would gladly exchange the card back to players that asked politely and patiently. Either I would tell them to sell me a cheap card for slightly less than the value of the card so I could still make a profit, or sell the card back to them (if I still had it) for a profit. I would recommend you do the same, if you do not wish to draw the attention of the UR gods. If you want to remain even more transparent, you may even wish to throw the impolite requestors a bone as well.

I would also recommend disabling your online presence for your UR login. I think in many cases, the players I pissed off thought I was online, when in fact it was simply that my browser window was open conducting market transactions on my behalf. In some cases, I was receiving many messages from incensed players within minutes of each other, but I did not see the messages for many hours later and sometimes even days.

When I finally realized my online presence was the reason I was receiving so many messages so quickly from the same angry players, I disabled my online presence. This helped quite a bit to quell the angry messages coming in rapid succession, but they did still happen. Be nice to those who make mistakes in their market transactions and ask you to sell their card back to them.

Instructions

1. If you don’t have it, download Google Chrome, the best web browser known to man

2. Download and install the Urban Rivals Market Bot Extension for Google Chrome
3. Configure the bot however you like:
   • Enable Profitability Filter: This enables/disables the filtering of the market to only show profitable trades, according to the profitability settings.

   • Enable Stars Filter: You can filter the market to only show cards with a certain number of stars
   • Min and Max Price: The minimum and max price to filter on. Cards less than the minimum or more than the maximum will be removed from the market list.
   • Min Profit: The minimum amount of profit to make on the purchase and sale of a card, if sold for 1 clintz less than the lowest listed card. Any cards that do not meet this criteria will not be displayed in the market.
   • Min Percent Profit: The minimum percent profit to make on the purchase/sale. Cards must meet both the min profit and min percent profit criteria to be displayed.
   • Autobuy: Buy cards that meet the profit filter criteria. Without the profitability filter enabled, this does nothing.
   • Autosell: Sell cards that are autobought. Without autobuy enabled, this won’t do anything. If disabled while autobuy runs, cards will be accumulated in a profitable manner, but not sold.
   • Refresh Delay: How many seconds to wait before refreshing the market page to try autobuying again. You can set it to 0. If you set it too fast, you’ll probably get a captcha, at which point the bot will stop working until you manually clear the captcha.
   • Max # of Cards to Buy: Sometimes there are profitable trades where there is a big breakpoint in the price of cards. You can buy perhaps the two or three cheapest cards, and sell at the price of the remaining cheapest card. If you want to be conservative, just leave it at 1.
   • Max Premium on Sale: Sometimes players buy up a lot of cards to raise the lowest price so they can sell the cards they buy at a higher price. This is a safeguard to avoid buying/selling a card when this has happened, otherwise you could fall victim to this market manipulation tactic. This is how far you are willing to resell a card marked up above the lowest price of the day, week, and month. If you set it too high, you could end up paying too much for a card and you won’t be able to sell it profitably. I typically ran it at 10 percent, which served me well.
4. Visit the first page of the UR market. Be sure to sort the market by date, with the most recent listings first (this is the default, so you really shouldn’t have to change anything). The page will continually refresh according to the refresh delay setting, and as profitable listings are found it will attempt to buy them and resell them 1 clintz lower than the cheapest. Please note, that it will only deal with cards with maxed experience.

The Autosale of Doubles Feature
One last note on using the plugin. If your sales expire, you may end up with many doubles in your collection. I eventually grew tired of manually selling all of my doubles, so I also added functionality to autosell doubles when visiting my collection page. When you visit your collection page, if you have doubles you’ll be prompted if you want to sell them.

If you use this feature to sell a lot of doubles at once (perhaps 50 or more), it could result in a temporary ban from using the market. This is a bit more severe than being captchad, as you can’t do anything but wait on the order of about 7-8 hours to access the marketplace again. Don’t panic if it does happen, but you won’t be able to access ANY market pages (even your pending sales, sold cards, etc.) until enough time has passed. I ultimately wanted to make this a feature that could be enabled/disabled in the settings popup, but I never got around to implementing that.

A Small Request

If someone could do me a favor, please contact mrdisco and tell him about my bot. He went on a rant in the forums to tell everyone what an asshole I am (scroll to the bottom of this post to read it). Someone please send him the link to this post. At least he can recoup his clintz using my bot, and even make a good bit more.

I attempted to contact him via UR messaging to tell him I would have gladly refunded him, if he had given me a chance to respond. He sent me a barrage of messages in a span of maybe an hour, probably while I was sleeping or at work, so I never got to respond. By the time I was able to respond, he added me to is ignore list so I couldn’t message him on UR although I wanted to.

At the time, I decided it best I not even try to explain myself in the forum. He obviously had no interest in hearing what I had to say since he never even gave me the chance to explain. At this point, I think this post is sufficient explanation and perhaps he may even no longer feel ill will.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, I was banned from UR (I’m sure mrdisco will be happy about that) so I am not able to post this in the UR forums, so here it is on my blog. If any discussion does take place in the UR forums about it, please feel free to repost it here. I’m very curious to know what people might say about it, if anything at all.

Oh, I almost forgot the source code!

Download the Urban Rivals Market Bot Source Code

The code is ugly but it works (at least it did, when I last used it). It’s all screen scraping with regular expressions in JavaScript. If you know JavaScript, you can probably figure it out for the most part. If you know regular expressions as well, then you can easily bend it to your will. If you do, feel free to reach out to me if you keep the code working and up-to-date.

Enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions about the plugin. Unfortunately, without a UR account I really can’t do anything about fixing bugs if there are any, but perhaps there’s a JavaScript/regular expression guru out there that can take hold of the Urban Rivals Market Bot torch.

Being the analytical person I am, I just simply wanted the most bang for my buck, but I wanted to make sure the product I bought was tried and true. Eventually, I built gb4less to help others seeking to do the same (and of course, make a few bucks in the process). With gb4less, you can sort by price and filter on rating info at the same time and do much more!

Every hour, gb4less crawls Newegg for deals on internal hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, system memory, memory cards, and SSD. It then calculates the price per gigabyte (including shipping) for all the products it finds, and then takes the top product for each category and displays them on the front page. If you don’t like the particular brand of the product you see on the front page, you can view all products n the category and search for the best price per gigabyte for your favorite brand.

The good folks at MakeUseOf placed a feature on gb4less in the MakeUseOf directory. Shortly after, the good folks at LifeHacker and Gizmodo also posted their own feature on gb4less. It wasn’t long after that before HostGator shut down gb4less, because all the traffic had brought down the entire server!

I was planning to eventually build a file cache to help the site to better handle traffic, but the bombardment from LifeHacker and Gizmodo expedited that plan. Fortunately, Yii (an excellent PHP framework I used to build gb4less) had built-in cache support. After a bit of research to implement the cache and a some hacking to re-enable the site, gb4less was back up and running.

So the next time you’re looking for some new storage, be sure to check out gb4less!

Use an Easy to Remember Phrase

Most passwords are hacked using simple dictionary attacks. This is why many systems require you to use symbols, mix of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, etc. It helps to prevent your password from falling victim to a simple dictionary attack.

Another (and I think better) way to avoid using words, but maintaining the ease of remembering words, is to use the first letter of every word in a phrase. For example, jbnjbqjjotcs might make a good password. How could you possibly remember such a cryptic password? Easy: Jack Be Nimble Jack Be Quick Jack Jump Over The Candle Stick.

Create Unique Passwords

You also never want to use the same password for multiple systems. You should always try to create a (relatively) unique password for each site you log into. But doesn’t this go against making passwords easy to remember?

Well, you could try unique phrases for each website you log into, but that’s not much better than using different words for different sites and forgetting which ones you used where. Here’s a tip for creating unique passwords for different systems, but still being able to remember your passwords: Use the same phrase, but prepend or append it with the first letter or an abbreviation of the site you’re logging into.

Continuing with our nursery rhyme example, you could use jbnjbqjjotcsfb as your Facebook password, jbnjbqjjotcsgm as your Gmail password, and jbnjbqjjotcst as your Twitter password.

Use Capitals, Symbols and Numbers

You don’t have use capitals, punctuation, and numbers all at the same time, although it certainly doesn’t hurt to do so and some systems even require it. You just have to be sure that whatever combination you use, that you’ll remember it.

With our nursery rhyme password, for our Facebook account, we might try something like: Jbn,Jbq,JjotcsFb13

The end of each line in the nursery rhyme provides a logical place to put a comma. Being pronouns, Jack and Facebook are logical to capitalize. Finally, we added the 13 to the end, because that’s your lucky number. Use easy to remember symbols and punctuation in logical positions within your phrase, to make it easy to remember.

Without a doubt, Google revolutionized search engine technology and Apple did the same with smartphones. However, when it comes down to fundamentals, Google Caffeine is no more revolutionary than the iPhone 4. The new iPhone is slimmer, faster, prettier, but it’s not as groundbreaking as its predecessors. The same goes for Google Caffeine: faster more recent results, but again, not groundbreaking — it still provides relevant results and information being sought.

I’m more interested into probing into what Google Caffeine will mean for SEO. Initially, there will likely be some manipulation taking place. There will quickly emerge a new generation of “real-time SEO experts” that will know how to take advantage of the new technology, as they will poke and prod until they spring a leak and the waterfall of desired results comes pouring out. There will be a short window of opportunity where these “SEO experts” will charge a fortune for what will eventually turn into marginal results.

Fundamentally speaking however, Google Caffeine is not revolutionary. It does exactly what Google search has always done: providing the most relevant results; it’s just happening faster. It could eventually result in what has happened in mainstream media — who can provide the latest and greatest breaking news with the best delivery (hopefully minus the sensationalism).

No longer will it just be about bringing the most relevant content, but you will need to provide the most relevant content in the shortest amount of time. So not only will you need to provide the most pertinent information for those seeing it, you will need to do so as quickly as possible. For well-established topics and information it will not be as important, but if you are on the bleeding edge of technology it will be paramount.

For the big guys (TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Slashdot, etc.) it probably doesn’t mean a whole lot. They already have the infrastructure and resources to provide breaking news quickly and effectively. However, for the little guys, it may provide a window of opportunity to speak their minds and acquire the audiences they are seeking.

So if you’re interested in taking advantage of Google Caffeine, how might you go about it?

1. Keep your ear to the ground

Stay connected and read what folks are talking about. Write about what people are reading about. However, in order to be heard you need to…

2. Develop your own opinion

Probably the worst thing you can do is repeat what others are saying, as your voice will be lost in the noise. Do something crazy like compare Google Search to the new iPhone and perhaps piss off a few people in the process. Nothing drives more traffic to a website than anger and controversy.

3. Express your opinion

…express it quickly, and express it well. If you can gather your thoughts quickly and provide an intelligent editorial on breaking news, you’re likely to get noticed.

4. Apply all the same old rules such as…
• Relevant content
• Well-written content
• Original content (expressing your own unique opinion will take care of this)
• Inbound links (relevant, well-written, original content will eventually generate inbound links and take care of this as well)
5. Get involved

Whatever interests you online, get involved in some online forums. If you have an area of expertise, join forums in your field, hyperlink your signature file to your website, and start posting questions and answers. If you have relevant articles on your website to the topic at hand, hyperlink to them. The majority of forums allow you to create hyperlinks that provide coveted linkjuice back to your website.

Do not haphazardly begin joining any and every forum in your field and start posting garbage. You will quickly get banned and disrespected and will achieve the opposite of what you wish to accomplish. Go in with the genuine intention of providing useful information to those seeking it (the very same intention you should have with your website), and ask thoughtful and provoking questions that will solicit helpful answers. You will quickly garner the respect you deserve.

Ultimately, if you’re already providing relevant content on breaking news that others are interested to read about and you provide your readers with a unique perspective, you should be in pretty good shape to take advantage of Google Caffeine. It could mean a few late nights or early mornings to be the first one to break some big news, so you may wish to invest in a good coffee machine and a nice big mug. And with that… it’s time for bed. It’s past 1:30am here.

The Chromium OS source code is available for download (Chromium OS is the open-source version of Google Chrome OS), and you can compile and build it. It took some time, but I did manage to do this on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) machine. I also managed to put together a VirtualBox virtual appliance that is all ready to go. I built a torrent for it, so feel free to download it here:

Download the Chromium OS VirtualBox Appliance Torrent

Please continue to seed, as I’m sure there will be many people out there wanting to try it out.

To use it, just start up VirtualBox, click File and then Import. Navigate to the chromiumos.ovf file and select it. The virtual appliance will be imported into VirtualBox and you should be good to go.

I also included a txt file that more or less has the commands I used to build it. You may be able to run it as a script, although I haven’t confirmed that it will work. I guess you could say I more or less took “script-like notes” as I was building Chromium OS.

If you hit Ctrl+Alt+T when you first log in, you’ll get a shell prompt. You can run “sudo su” (no quotes) to log in as root, and I’ve set the password to “password” (no quotes). If you use this machine for anything serious (although I doubt you would), be sure to change the password.

You should be running VirtualBox 3.0.12, and when you import the virtual appliance everything should be configured properly. If you get an error that says “network not connected and offline login fail” when you try to log in, be sure that the virtual network adapter is set to Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM).

If the network adapter is already properly configured but you are still seeing the error, try logging in with the user “chronos” with the password “password” (no quotes). This should log you in and bring up the chrome browser window. If you don’t see a Google Accounts login screen, try hitting the refresh button. That should bring up the Google Accounts login screen.

It is absolutely astounding how fast it boots. It really is nearly instant-on and takes a mere few seconds to bring up the login screen.

Once you log in with your Gmail account, it launches and you’ll see the Chromium interface open up to your Gmail. There is also a Google Calendar tab and a New Tab tab. The little chrome sphere appears in the upper left corner, but when you click on it you don’t get a menu as you see in some of the Chrome OS videos. Instead, you get a Google.com account login page.

As you can see, it looks very much like the Chrome OS screenshots that had surfaced last month. Of course, being that this is running on a virtual machine without any decent video drivers on the operating system, the resolution is quite low (800×600). Your dear old granddad may be the only one that actually finds it visually appealing at this resolution.

Right now the most impressive thing is how fast this operating system loads. Of course, it should load fast because there really is hardly anything there. In any case, it is rather neat to see an early release in action. The fact that it actually works on a virtual machine is quite promising. Eventually as drivers for more hardware are incorporated into it, it should be possible to run it your own real hardware.

I also found a VMWare virtual disk image on a Google Wave about the Chrome OS. You can download it here:

Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image

As of now, the link to the VMWare disk image is valid and the download works.

Update: I just went into the Chrome OS Wave I found with the link to the VMWare disk image, and apparently the poor guy that posted that file to Amazon Web Services ran up a $380 bill so he took the file down. Here’s the torrent of the same file posted up on Pirate Bay:

Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image Torrent

However, I haven’t tried using it, so I can’t confirm that it will run on VMWare without issue. Enjoy your Google Chrome OS virtual machines!

Nerd Vittles has put together another great hack for making free calls with Google Voice and Asterisk: Orgasmatron V, Google Voice Edition. It makes use of an Asterisk Linux distribution called PBX in a Flash. After installing PBX in a Flash, you download and run the Orgasmatron V script, and you have a fully-functional Asterisk system ready to make free calls with Google Voice.

In his instructions, NerdUno recommends using IPkall or SIPgate for a ringback number that is necessary for Orgasmatron V to work. It is actually possible and relatively easy to also use Gizmo as the ringback number, which I will explain in this post. His directions for setting up Orgasmatron V are very detailed and relatively easy to follow, so I won’t repost them here. Just follow his directions up until the part for configuring Google Voice.

Setting Up Gizmo

First, you will want to create a Gizmo account. Once you create your Gizmo account, go to https://my.gizmo5.com and log in. Bring up the Call Forwarding tab in your account settings. Click on the Forwarding All Calls radio button under Status and click on the SIP radio button under Forward to. Set it up to forward to gv-incoming@x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is the IP address of your Asterisk server.

Setting Up Google Voice

The next step, is to log into your Google Voice account. Log in and go to the Settings screen and click on Add another phone. Call it whatever you want, and enter in the 10 digit number. Be sure to select Gizmo as the phone type.

When You click Save, you will be prompted to verify the phone.  Download and install the Gizmo client and log into your account with the Gizmo client.  Click the Connect button on Google Voice to verify the Gizmo phone. When the Gizmo phone rings, answer and dial the two digit code.

Setting Up Asterisk

Once you’ve installed PBX in a Flash, installed Orgasmatron V, set up Gizmo, set up Google Voice, you’re ready to download and run the Google Voice configuration script for Orgasmatron.  Just log into your Asterisk box as root, and run the following commands at the command line:

	cd /root
	wget http://pbxinaflash.net/orgasmatron/configure-gv
	chmod +x configure-gv
	./configure-gv

Just follow the prompts and enter your Google Voice number (without the 1), your Google Account login credentials, and use your Gizmo number as the ringback number (be sure to include the 1 at the beginning).

Making Free Phone Calls

Once everything is all set up with Google Voice, Gizmo, and Asterisk, you’re ready to log into an extension with a soft phone and make free calls. I highly recommend downloading X-Lite, it is probably one of the best free softphones out there. Ekiga is another pretty decent soft phone you can use, if you don’t like X-Lite.

To make and receive calls, log into extension 701 with your softphone. Use 701 as the account username and the proper password (this would be the secret for extension 701 you selected when securing Orgasmatron as suggested on Nerd Vittles). The SIP server is of course the Asterisk box. Try making an outbound phone call. You should hear a lady say she is connecting your call, then some catchy music, and eventually a ringtone.

Some Additional Setup Tips

If you are unable to make or receive calls after you’ve set everything up, it may be that your server is sitting behind a router/firewall. For it to work properly, you will need to forward port 5060 to your Asterisk box. You may have to refer to the instructions for your particular router on how to do this.

You may also run into issues if your Asterisk box does not have a static IP address. If your IP address ever changes, you will need to update the new forwarding address within Gizmo. To avoid such problems, you may want to set up an account on DynDNS.

You can download a DynDNS update client that will automatically update your IP address with DynDNS. You could download inadyn for Linux and install it on your Asterisk box. Be sure to check out the inadyn instructions to set up. If you have a Windows or Mac box on the same network as your Asterisk machine, you could always download and install your client for that computer instead of the Asterisk box. Alternatively, you could just manually update your IP address on the DynDNS website.

Once you have DynDNS set up, go back to the Call Forwarding tab in your Gizmo settings and change the SIP call foward to gv-ringback@your_dyndns_account.dyndns.org (replacing your_dyndns_account.dyndns.org with the proper domain for your machine).

How Does it All Work?

Behind the scenes, the calls are made with a Python script for making Google Voice calls. Orgasmatron V does the magic of receiving the inbound call from Google voice into a call group and automatically connecting that call to your extension. This makes it all quite seamless to the end-user making the calls.

Stay Tuned

In an effort to further reduce the complexity of this solution, I’ve put together a VirtualBox appliance for Orgasmatron V. Although Orgasmatron V is by far the easiest solution for hooking up Google Voice to Asterisk, packaging it all together as a virtual appliance makes it a little bit easier and a lot quicker. I’ll be posting about that soon, so stay tuned!

Lack of Access Control

Google Wave does not have any sort of access control for managing waves and wave participants:

• Anyone can be added to a wave by a participant in the wave.
• Any wave participant can add a bot to the wave (because bots are simply treated as participants).
• It is not possible to remove participants (except for bots) from a wave.
• Anyone can modify any part of the wave.

Here is what I think Google Wave needs to implement to resolve the access control issues:

• Allow the wave creator do add/remove any participant from a wave.
• Allow the wave creator to assign/modify the following permissions that can be set at the wave and participant level:
  • Permission to add bots to the wave.
  • Permission to invite other participants to the wave.
  • Permission to remove participants from the wave.
  • Read-only or read/write access to the wave.
  • Permission to grant/modify each (or all) permissions for other participants and/or the entire wave.

Without access control, things can quickly get out of hand if you are trying to work on a collaborative project that is only intended for certain people. Even if you do manage to maintain control as to who has access to a wave, you may only want to allow certain people permission to perform certain functions.

Image Credit: Brandon Lowery

Poor Contact Management

When you click on the Manage contacts link in Google Wave, you are taken to Google Contacts. Unfortunately there is hardly any correlation between what you see in your Google Contacts and what you see in your Google Wave contact list. Although everyone in your Google Wave contacts list has a @googlewave.com “address” (it is not an email address although it looks like one), within Google Contacts you’ll see no addresses with googlewave.com.

If you want to remove someone from your Google Wave contacts, you have to remove them from your Google Contacts. This may not be something you want to do, as you may wish to keep them in your Google Contacts and remove them from your Google Wave contacts or vice versa. Either Google Wave needs its own contact management, or Google Contacts needs to incorporate functionality for managing Google Wave contacts.

Image Credit: Hannes Grobe

Lack of Groups

If you deal with multiple groups of people when you communicate via email, mailing lists are absolutely essential. Google Wave has no way to group your contacts together to build the equivalent of mailing lists. Without such a function, you have to manually add each and every participant you want on a wave. Not only is this a major inconvenience, but you may omit someone that needs to be a wave participant or add someone that should not be a participant.

Google Wave needs to implement groups. Perhaps it can be incorporated as part of the improved contact management I’ve suggested, or implemented as a separate feature. Regardless, it should also become a part of access control. That way access control can be set and modified at a wave, group, and participant level.

Image Credit: lumaxart

Lack of “Legacy Support”

You cannot expect someone to abandon a very well-established legacy technology (email) without providing reverse compatibility and legacy support. The world cannot and will not just drop email in favor of Google Wave without an interim solution that supports both technologies. The fact that Google Wave addresses do have the same appearance as email addresses does seem to indicate there may be plans to allow Google Wave accounts to receive email.

It is very inconvenient having to check communications from multiple sources rather than having it all in one place. This is the reason why I have all my email forwarded to one single Gmail account. I also take advantage of the Gmail feature that allows you to send email from other accounts.

Google Wave needs to incorporate features to allow users to send and receive email if it is to receive the kind of wide-scale adoption Google seems to believe it is capable of achieving. If I could just forward all of my email to my Google Wave account, receive all my communication in one place, and send emails from Google Wave as well, I would seriously consider using solely Google Wave.

Image Credit: ePublicist

Lack of Revision Control

Revision control is absolutely essential for working in a collaborative environment. The need eventually arises where it is necessary to revert to a previous version of a document. Wikis provide this capability as do a variety of software development source control solutions. Google Wave needs revision control.

Google Wave does have something resembling revision control with the Playback functionality. However, you can only see the progression of a wave from start to finish, and you cannot revert to any of the frames in between. It would appear that some of the plumbing is already there for revision control, it just needs to be implemented.

I’ve seen many situations in public waves where revision control was needed. Sometimes someone unwittingly adds a bot that overwrites the initial blip, wiping away hours of hard work in the blink of an eye. Someone may also intentionally sabotage a wave, removing a lot of valid and important information that must subsequently be manually recovered or rewritten.

It would be best to have revision control in Google Wave at a blip level, rather than at a wave level. One may wish to revert to a previous version of a blip within a wave, without losing the changes that have taken place within other blips and the rest of the wave.

Image Credit: VisualPharm

Final Thoughts

Google Wave is a good tool for communication and collaboration. It has many impressive features and capabilities. However, as you can see by the headings in this article, the problem is that it is lacking many key features for wide-scale adoption. Given that the current Google Wave is just a preview, it is likely that these missing features and others will eventually make it into the final product.

I’m not sure how Google could forget to include undo. I suppose it happened the same way that Apple forgot to include copy/paste on the iPhone. So what does the lack of undo functionality say about the product? It must really suck if there’s not even an undo button or keyboard shortcut, right?

Google Wave is More than Just Advanced Email

I’ve seen some reviews and previews of Google Wave that describe it as the next logical step for email, and some even call it Email 2.0. However, advanced email is not what came to mind when I first started playing with Google Wave. Certainly you can use it as an advanced email replacement, but I think it is much more than that. If had to choose two words to describe it, I’d say it is more like a real-time wiki. Okay, so if you exclude the hyphen it’s actually three words, but who’s counting?

Bwana added me to a few public waves with tips and FAQs on using Google Wave. I made a few contributions to some of them, most notably my realization that there is no undo. Rather than explain how to undo something without undo functionality, here is a screenshot of the section I added to the Wave FAQ wave (sounds kinda funny when you say it that way):

Google Wave and Wiki Comparison

Here are the similarities between Google Wave and wikis:

• The content is editable by all members
• Discussions about the content take place
• The history of the wave can be reviewed
• Anyone can modify the wave
• Anyone can view the wave (if it is public)

Some of the differences:

• Wave discussions take place on the same page as the content. Wikis have a separate page for the discussion.
• You can see updates being made in real-time.
• You can see who is making those updates in real-time.
• When you close a wave or log out of wave, upon your return, you can see what updates have been made to the wave.
• You can add others to a wave. (I suppose you could email someone a wiki page, then they could view/modify it, but it much more seamless w/ Google Wave.)
• Discussions (i.e. blips) can appear anywhere within the wave.
• With Google Wave extensions, the sky is the limit as to what you can put in a wave. For example, there is a Google Wave gadget that allows you to embed HTML, which means you can embed streaming videos, entire webpages, web-applications, etc…

How Google Wave Works

Heres a quick and simple rundown on how it works:

• When a wave is created, the first “blip” is also created. The entire wave is nothing more than a collection of blips.
• Typically this first blip becomes the main part of the wave. It can and will become quite long and full of information.
• The discussion proceeds down below the first blip as more blips are added. You might consider this to be the discussion page behind a wiki page. It takes on the form of a threaded discussion, much like any other message board.
• You can also embed blips within other blips. So you can have discussions taking place at any point within the first blip, or any other blip for that matter.

What I’ve described here is what I’ve seen happen on a typical, well-organized public wave. I’m sure there are plenty of other waves out there that don’t fit this mold, and have all sorts of craziness happening. There’s nothing that says a wave must have a main blip at the top with discussion blips below it. Fundamentally speaking, a wave is just simply a collection of blips.

The ability to embed blips within blips and modify anything and everything is where the magic happens. Functionally speaking, theres no distinction between content and discussion, but somehow it does all manage to remain organized. It is organized chaos at its finest. It’s all pretty cool, and when you see it in action you really get a good feel for how it works and what it’s all about.

Why Didn’t Google Call it LiveWiki?

The irony I see with Google Wave is they did not put the word “wiki” in the name of the product. Google already has two products with the word wiki in them, SearchWiki and SideWiki. Neither of them is hardly like a wiki if you ask me (you can’t modify public content, only add it and modify your own), especially when you compare them to Google Wave. If any Google product ever deserved the word wiki attached to it, it is Google Wave. Perhaps they should have dubbed it LiveWiki.

toiletscribble: Someone…anyone…invite me to google wave and I will have your baby



paulgodfrey: I’ve got an extra kidney sitting around and one of you has an extra Google Wave invite, you can see where this is going… DM me.



trickjarrett: Dear Google Wave invite fairy, please come by and drop one off for me. I’ve been a very good boy this year.



Spinchange: I call bullshit on the google wave ‘rollout.’ If I request an invite in the spring and still don’t have one by the fall, that’s a crawl out



wawoodworth: If anyone has a Google Wave invite, I will bake you cookies and mail them to you. Wherever you are in the world. =D



Nycteris: Now it’s 2009 and I still don’t have a flying car… nor do I have a Google Wave invite!



DStuart: I already hate Google Wave and I haven’t even got an invite yet



SPoftheFakulty: Really needs a Google Wave invite! Kind people and A**holes alike, please bless me w/ one lol.



karlhodge: @danoliver If it helped me get a Google Wave invite, I’d buy @aho a wheelbarrow full of cookies. And when I say “buy” I mean “steal”.



rmtiwari: And just in case, if you got *my* google wave invite in *your* inbox, please re-direct.

Update: Be sure to check out my new article on how to download video from YouTube with Google Chrome.

There are lots of programs and browser plugins that help you to download flash videos from websites. The problem is that they all seem to only allow you to do it from select sites. I found a relatively simple way to do it with Firefox and Firebug.

Firebug is a great Firefox plugin for website development and debugging. I don’t know how I would ever get along without it. Don’t bother looking for the “flash video download” feature in Firebug, because it does not exist. You’ll have to do a little bit of manual work to do it, but using Firebug to download flash video from any website is relatively easy.

If you don’t have Firefox, download it. Then download Firebug. Next, open up Firefox and browse to the page with the flash video you want to download. Click on the little Firebug icon in the browser status bar at the bottom of the Firefox window.

Click on the Net tab in Firebug and then select Enabled.

If the video fully loaded into the page when you last opened it, it is likely the entire movie is in your browser’s cache.  That means that when we monitor the net connection, we won’t see it load the video.  You will need to go and clear you’re browser’s cache.  If you’re using Firefox 3.5 on Windows, click Tools > Clear Recent History.  Click the Details button and make sure the Cache checkbox is selected.  Then press Clear Now.

Now you’re ready to find the location of the flash file.  Click the refresh button in Firefox and allow the page to reload.  The Firebug Net panel will display all of the HTTP requests being made along with statistics for each request as the page loads.  There are a few things you can look for to identify the video file:

• .FLV file extension on the file being loaded
• Very large file size
• Very long gray bar on the load time

Here is an example of what the Net panel looks like for a video page on The Onion:

Once you’ve identified which one of the requests is for the video file, right-click on it and then left click on Open in New Tab.

There’s another nifty trick you can you can use if the video has not fully loaded in the player. First, click the clear button in the Firebug panel to remove all the requests. Then click on the player video navigation bar (if there is one) to fast forward to somewhere else within the video.

This will generate a new request for the video file, which in turn adds just a single line for the video file in the Firebug panel. This makes it very easy to find the video file. You’ll then want to click back at the start of the video file, to make sure you get the link to download the entire file. Select the last file request, otherwise, you will end up downloading it from the point to which you fast forwarded.

When the new tab opens, Firefox will ask you what to do with it. Just save the file somewhere where you will remember you put it.  That’s all there is to downloading flash video with Firefox and Firebug!

Of course this begs the question, “What do I do with the movie now that I’ve downloaded it?” Well, if you want to watch it, you’ll need a player that can read it. I suggest you download the VLC player. VLC is a great open-source multi-platform video player (available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).

I really like it because it includes all the codecs you will probably ever need for playing videos, so there’s no having to constantly add codecs to it all the time. You can even use it to convert videos for your iPod, although I tried this some time ago with limited success (it may work better with the latest version).

With Reruncheck, you can find out a few different ways whether or not your favorite TV show is airing a new episode.  First of all, you can visit the website and search for your shows.  You’ll be taken to a page that will let you know with a big green Yes if there is a new episode airing within the next 7 days.

If you are interested in receiving continuous notifications for new episodes, you can either subscribe to the feed for the show (in the upper right corner), or you can subscribe to receive notifications via email.  If you decide to subscribe via email, please be sure to read the RerunCheck privacy policy.  If you see anything in there you don’t like, then I suggest you use the RSS feed rather than email.

If you love to watch just about any show on TV, you can also subscribe to the main RerunCheck feed.  It is updated every day with all the television shows that are airing new episodes.  You can also see what programs are showing new episodes today by visiting the main RerunCheck page.  There is also a page that will let you know the television programs that are airing new episodes this week.

You can also create a new RerunCheck account, to manage all of your favorite programs in one place.  An account offers you the same email subscriptions you can receive without an account, but in addition to receiving email notifications you will also have your own custom feed.

Your custom feed will contain new episode notification for all of your favorite shows. You can share your custom feed with your friends, put it on your website, add it to FriendFeed or other social networks, or just subscribe to it yourself.  The choice is yours!

Try RerunCheck and let me know what you think. Feel free to send me any suggestions you might have for the service to help me make it better.

Play the Portal Theme… Still Alive..

Of course, that prompted me to search YouTube for the song. I listened to it and I enjoyed it. I also checked out a few others including a live version of Still Alive performed by the writer, Johnathan Coulton.

After listening to the live version, I searched for Johnathan’s blog and started browsing around on it. I came across a post of Still Alive being played on the carillon. Check out the video. The carillon isn’t terribly impressive to watch, but it’s a cool video to listen to.

Perhaps the three most important factors to consider in deciding what to put on your website are the size of your market, the competition you will face, and the quality of your content or service. In this article, I share some of my observations on size of market, including examples on how I’ve failed and succeeded in properly assessing it.

Without a doubt, size of market is the most important factor for making money online. There are millions of people using the Internet each and every day, which is why it has attracted so many as an opportunity to earn income. However, it is likely that only a very small fraction of them will be in the market you will be targeting.

My Failure in Assessing Size of Market

For the most part, I’ve not had a lot of organic traffic so far on my blog. I’ve come to realize that my eclectic mix of content does not really appeal to a wide range of individuals. Although there are a lot of other geeks out there in the world, most of them are not particularly interested in many of the things I write about and the tools I develop.

Improving My Assessment of Size of Market

Part of the reason I’ve decided to develop this series on making money online was to try to appeal to a wider audience. There is no doubt in my mind there are more people interested in making money online than there are people interested in things like a Greasemonkey script for Google Webmaster Tools.

I also decided to write about making money online because I recently had my first real big hit with organic results on this blog. Earlier this month I wrote an article on how to remove Antivirus 2009, Spyware Guard 2008 and other malware, and it definitely seemed to appeal to a wider audience than any of my other posts on GeekLad. I decided that sharing my success could provide some good information on how to make money online.

My Success in Assessing Size of Market

There are a lot of people that encounter problems with Antivirus 2009 and Spyware Guard 2008. I used Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to remove those programs from my parents’ computer, and decided it would make a great blog post that would appeal to a wide audience. It is apparent by the amount of traffic I’ve received that I was right.

I also signed up for an affiliate account with Malwarebytes.  If anyone decides they would like to purchase the full version as a result of reading my article, I receive a commission for it. Signing up for the affiliate account and including an affiliate link within the article has allowed me to make some money with the article.

Selecting Your Audience

When deciding on a topic to blog about or the type of service you are going to provide, you need to take your audience into consideration. You need to figure out how many people that will be interested in your website.You can use the Google Keyword Tool to determine the amount of search volume there is in the areas you are considering for your blog or service. Keywords with higher search volume will provide you with a larger market.

If your content or service is very specialized, you can expect to have a small audience. If you decide to blog about a very popular topic or develop a service that would appeal to many individuals, you can expect to have a large audience. Having a small audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you can convert visits into cash and each conversion is worth a lot of money.

What’s Next?

The size of your market should not be taken into consideration alone. It is also very important to consider existing competition. Although there may be millions of potential visitors in your audience, there may already be many competitors servicing that market. If the competition is fierce, you may find it difficult to make money.

In the next post in the series, I’ll be taking a more detailed look at sizing up the competition.

Photo Credit: Apreche

Much like Edison inventing the light bulb, I’ve found more ways how not to achieve the desired outcome. However, I’m glad to say that I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I recently decided to share my experience in my quest with a multi-part post on how to make money online.

About a month ago, I reached out to Jesse Stay for help in my quest. Jesse is a successful entrepreneur, published technology author, and guest author for Louis Gray. He is the creative mind behind SocialToo, a web service that provides some handy tools for some popular social networks. I asked Jesse for advice on how to turn my hobbies (programming and blogging) into a career. He provided some great info and there was a series of questions he asked that really got me thinking:

What would you like to do? Are you looking to become a developer? Do you want to become a blogger? Do you want to be an Entrepreneur?

Very good questions indeed. I think that ultimately I would like to be an entrepreneur and offer web services that are high in demand but low in supply. If I ever get to the point where I’m creating demand, I’ll know I’ve made it. I think answering these questions led me to the first step in making money online: do you develop content or develop a service?

Content Development

Behind door number one, we have content development. This has become one of the most popular methods for earning a living online. There are countless individuals online providing eager readers with relevant and useful information. The majority of them in the form of blogs.

Blogs are a great way for enthusiasts and self-proclaimed experts on any topic to provide information to the masses. It has become quite apparent that blogs are probably the best and easiest way to provide information online. It has been observed by many that search engines have an affinity for blogs. If you are a decent writer and have a lot of great information to share that others are seeking, blogging is definitely the way to go.

Providing Services

The second choice you have for making money online is to provide services online. Just as there are millions of people seeking information online, there are many others seeking services as well. Of course, the majority of them prefer free services but there are plenty that are willing to pay too.

Providing services online does not necessarily mean you need to be a programmer or web developer. If you already have a business or are interested in starting one, providing services online can easily become an extension of your business. This is especially true if your business is not limited by your geographic location.

It is relatively easy to build a website to promote and even sell the services online. Even if you don’t know how to do it, there are plenty of people out there who provide such services. Alternatively, you could find the information online on how to build a website and do it yourself. I find the latter to be the most enjoyable as well as rewarding.

What’s Next?

Once you’ve decided whether you wish to provide content or services, you need to decide the topic of your content or the type of service to provide. There are three very important factors to consider when making this decision:

• Size of Market
• Competition
• Quality of Service

These will be the focus of my next post in this series.

Photo Credit: Tracy O

Well, to match their breakneck speed out of beta, they’ve now released a 2.0 version in the Google Chrome dev channel. There are a few new features, the most notable being the ability to do full-page zoom.

Prior to the 2.0 release, if you zoom on a page (Ctrl+ and Ctrl-, or using your scroll wheel on your mouse while pressing the control button) only the text zooms and the images remain the same. The 2.0 release now properly zooms text and images together. Here are a few other blog posts around the web describing some of the other new features in Google Chrome 2.0:

• Chrome gets Mac deadline, extensions foundation
• Google Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta
• Google Chrome Update With Form Auto-Completion And More
• Google Releases First Pre-Beta of Chrome 2.0
• Release Notes 2.0.156.1