Categories
Business Travel

United decides to tell customers, “F*** your refund”

Traveling is an inherently stressful endeavor. During the holidays, more so. We just took a lovely trip to beautiful Denver, Colorado from our home airport of Philadelphia, PA. Outbound flight was on United, return was on a “partner airline”, US Airways. To our chagrin, two days before our return flight, my 3-year-old daughter came down […]

Categories
Business DNS Marketing Security System Administration Technical The Sky Is Falling

Google’s Public DNS snaps up more of your browsing habits

Google recently added a Public DNS service. For a good definition of DNS, check our new wiki. In short: DNS is how your computer figures out where a web server is located when you type in any web address by your computer, meaning:

Categories
Uncategorized

Google now tracks “Google Alert” links

As of August 25th, 2009, Google Alerts now tracks links from emails through the google.com domain. Previously, they didn’t.

Categories
Privacy The Sky Is Falling

Brin’s Foreshadowing of Google Books Privacy Policy

Ah. The Google Books fiasco. I’ve seen it in the news, have been quietly monitoring the situation, but I just read

Categories
Analytics Privacy Technical

Tutorial on Top-Level-Domain Names, Cookies, and Privacy

Ever notice that when you sign into, oh, say, Gmail, you sign in at www.google.com? What’s up with that? The reasons are technical, but it should be noted that when more and more traffic goes through the same domain name, you should wonder why. Before I go off the nerd deep-end, if you don’t know […]

Categories
Privacy

FeedBurner redirects through google.com

Not that it’s news, but I did some quick analysis of FeedBurner, since I figured out they were acquired by Google, like, two years ago. The links that Google sends visitors to go through

Categories
Privacy

Is anyone worried that Google keeps grabbing more traffic?

Google snapped up reCAPTCHA recently. I’m feeling worried. As well, I must have been in a news bubble there, but they also acquired FeedBurner, in, like, 2007. They just re-branded it recently, which is probably why I didn’t notice. Now, I don’t put on the tinfoil hat very often, but Google keeps snapping up large […]

Categories
Analytics Business Marketing Technical The Sky Is Falling

Yahoo Analytics Tracking Parameters: Whoops

A quick post regarding Yahoo! Analytics tracking parameters. Our conversion tracking software recently added support for Yahoo! Analytics tracking parameters, which, according to

Categories
Analytics Bugs Email Privacy Security The Sky Is Falling

Google sees 92% of “top” web traffic

I had to write after reading this article in the New York Times. In short, Google “sees” 92 percent of online traffic for the top 100 internet sites. Other big boys, Atlas (60%), Omniture, and Quantcast (54% – I assume combined) don’t even get

Categories
Development Marketing PHP Security Technical

Automatically determining PageRank, or, unsigned integers in PHP

Market Ruler, LLC develops software for web marketers – and as such, I’m always on the lookout for new technologies to make life easier on the PPC and SEO crowd. I recently took the SEOMoz toolset for a spin, and in one of their tests, I saw that they automatically checked the Google PageRank of […]