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 By now, most WordPress.com bloggers will have found they now have the ability to flag a referrer link as spam.

WordPress.com, the free service that hosts WordPress blogs, quietly rolled out the new feature on Friday in response to a two-month deluge of referrer spam, all generated by one Website.

The Website, semalt.com, was raining spam disguised as post views down on thousands of blogs, not just those powered by the WordPress content management system (CMS).

It wasn't exactly a rain of terror but it still left bloggers curious, worried, and ultimately pissed off -- the spam hits were skewing everyone's traffic stats!

When Microsoft executive Stephen Elop took the reigns in 2011 as CEO at Finland's Nokia he wrote a company memo that compared Nokia's predicament -- surrounded on all sides by challenges -- to that of a man trapped on a burning oil rig. In such a circumstance, Elop said, a person -- or one of the world's premier cell phone makers -- had no choice but to jump.

The memo became famously known as the "burning platform" memo. And Elop, a Canadian, was widely praised for telling it like it was.

Elop succeeded in getting Nokia to jump... into the arms of Microsoft, and he pocketed a healthy $25 million profit for his trouble (after which his old employer rehired him).

The praise has taken a turn towards Greek tragedy as Elop is frequently compared to a Trojan horse.

Now that Elop is back at Microsoft he's even been suggested as a possible replacement for outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer. That's all the more reason to suggest that he jumped from one fire into another one.

Microsoft, in fact, has several burning issues on its plate. There's the matter of finding the next great leader and the matter of making the next great operating system.

A team at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, is already hard at work building the replacement for the badly under-performing Windows 8 operating system.

[caption id="attachment_9122" align="alignnone" width="497"] Maybe you can use your old "feature" phone as more than just an emergency paper clip.[/caption]

The most popular tablets are essentially scaled up smart phones that don't make phone calls. Critics who pointed this out back in 2010, asked why people with an iPhone would ever want an iPad. Today the question is reversed: people with iPads and Android tablets are actually beginning to wonder if they still need their smart phones. Maybe all they need are their smart tablets and a dumb phone.

Predictions of the death of old-school "feature phones" (that flip-phone you have in a box with your Palm organizer and VHS tapes) at the hands of iOS- and Android-based smart phones may have been premature. The same features that made smart phones look so good: touchscreens, applications, cameras and Internet connectivity, actually look and work much better on tablet computers.

[caption id="attachment_7738" align="alignnone" width="497"] How's it snowing at 12th and Hemlock if it's not snowing at Broadway and Granville?[/caption]

Pusher, a digital creative agency in Australia, created an online Christmas card back in 2011 which is still impressing people two years later. The revised Pusher Christmas 2012 uses your address to show a scene of it snowing where you live. Neat trick.

A friend of mine received a link to the card from a friend of hers; both of them were amazed. My friend showed it to me, and I was also suitably impressed, but I could see how they did it. It was a clever use of the Google Maps Street View API.

Pusher is using a Google API (Application Programming Interface) to pipe the search results from Google Maps Street View onto their own page result and overlaying it with a transparent looping animation made using Adobe Flash.

Started watching The Internship, a comedy released this summer about two over-the-hill sales guys landing internships with Google. After 20 minutes, I considered gnawing my leg off to escape, before realizing I wasn't chained down, and could just turn it off. I even had a bad dream about Google. Oh well, I know I should avoid cheese before going to bed.

[caption id="attachment_6552" align="alignnone" width="497"] What's it mean? Search me. It's in Russian.[/caption]

My post on Adblock Plus, got me wondering about Yandex, the most popular search engine in the Russian Federation, and one of the online services reported to be paying Adblock's developers Eyeo to be on the program's "whitelist" allowing Yadex's ads to get through the popular ad blocker.

Yandex has a 60% market share in the Russian Federation, but they're far from being just a big fish in a small Russian pond; they're a pretty big deal, period. They are the fourth largest search engine worldwide, with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012, and more than 50.5 million visitors (all company's services) daily as of February 2013, all according to the Wikipedia entry.

The Internet is old enough to fit like a comfy shoe, and have it's own tired clichés, like:

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

[caption id="attachment_6453" align="alignright" width="150"] An example of the T&A in TPB's ads.[/caption]

This, apparently three year old saying, is meant to refer to the free Internet services we all use, and how they make their money mining our personal data. Many people now see it as glibness masquerading as wisdom, a truism, verging on a platitude, but it continues to be true, all the same.

I use the open-source Adblock Plus Add-on for Firefox, along with, according to Wikipedia. about 16 million other Firefox users (ABP claims 30 million users). Sure it speeds up page loading, but I kind blame it's popularity on The Pirate Bay. Let's say I need to download, um, a Linux ISO file -- ya. right -- certainly nothing illegal. Anyway. I need to download this file in a public library, or a coffee shop. Have you seen the ads on TPB? I for one don't want to expose small, impressionable, children, and Presbyterians, to that sort of thing, so I use Adblock Plus, or that's how I thought it worked, except I never thought about it.

Turns out, the makers of ABP are using me. This eye-opening online Guardian item details how Eyeo, the German company behind Adblock Plus, is leveraging their large user base to literally extort money out of online services who rely on ad views for some or all of their revenue, that includes Google, which The Guardian say gets 90% of its revenue from showing ads, along with, basically, all social media, such as Facebook, and Twitter.

When business models collide

Eyeo actively approaches Internet companies with an offer to "partner" with them, in order to "engineer acceptable, non-intrusive advertising," to quote ABP's own "open letter blogpost to Twitter.

In a nutshell Eyeo's Adblock Plus is designed to block, or blacklist, all ads on Web sites that are not listed in the program's internal whitelist. Companies can get on that whitelist by adhering to Eyeo's Acceptable Ads guidelines, and... by handing over a share of their advertising revenues.

Eyeo apparently lets small companies off the hook, but, according to the Guardian item, for those Internet companies which pay -- including Google, Amazon and Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine -- the fee is 30% of the revenue generated by showing ads.

It sure sounds like a shakedown tactic, but, the other side of this issue is that Internet ads, unlike ads in mainstream media, are generally so deplorably "lowest common denoiminator," that no one want to see them. Adblock Plus' developers argue that they're using their power to create responsible advertising, that won't embarrass people browsing the Web in, say, a public library.

[caption id="attachment_5887" align="alignleft" width="150"] 1995 U.S. postal stamp.[/caption]

Google -- celebrating it's 15th birthday today -- was not named after a comic strip character. The official history is that when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided, in 1997, to ditch the original name -- "BackRub" -- they chose "Google" as a play on “googol,” a number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. They did not name it after the famous cartoon character Barney Google. One blog wonders about this.

The above classic Jeep, seen in Kitsilano, on the other hand, probably was named after a comic strip character: Eugene the Jeep, a go-anywhere, do-anything, little critter, who debuted March 16, 1936, in Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre newspaper comic strip, now called Popeye, after it's star. The Willys MB U.S. Army utility vehicle was introduced five years later in 1941. The theory is that soldiers were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after the character in the Popeye strip which was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems." This isn't the only origin story for the name, but it's the one I heard growing up as a rabid comic fan!  Click the images to enlarge them.

Selection of great pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre comic strips ►
search on the phrase “Google in 1998” ►

[caption id="attachment_4382" align="alignnone" width="497"] Well... Halo runs on Xbox doesn't it?[/caption]

How sad. Microsoft could be competitive in less than a year. The Redmond-based software-and-hardware company announced today that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer would be stepping down within 12 months. Microsoft stock rose nine per cent on the news.

Steve Ballmer went to college with Microsoft founders Bill Gates, and Paul Allen, and started with Microsoft in 1980. He became CEO of Microsoft in 2000, after Bill Gates stepped down.

Ballmer is said to be smart as a whip, but he's always come off publicly as more than a bit of a clownish huckster. Elevation to Microsoft's CEO in 2000 only magnified his "bull in a china shop" optics. Steve Ballmer had the misfortune of becoming Microsoft CEO the same year Steve Jobs became Apple's self-proclaimed "iCEO" In the i-era, Jobs completely out-general-ed, out-coached, and outmaneuvered Ballmer at every turn. Ballmer probably couldn't have helped Apple more if he had worked for them. He blithely, and blindly laughed at, and ridiculed, each of the iProducts, as they pushed Apple back into profitability, and, in 2012, past Microsoft in market capitalization.

Ballmer seriously hated on opensource and Linux, infamously calling Linux, "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." ► Balmer repeatedly threatened to sue opensource developers for patent infringement. Even without merit backing up it's claims, the threats alone, given Microsoft's legal resources, were designed to have a chilling effect on the opensource movement.

Steve Ballmer  tenure as CEO has been a near-total disaster for Microsoft. Under his tenure, Apple came back from the dead to become a thriving innovative tech darling, and opensourse, with Google's help, has come out of nowhere to dominate cell phones. Microsoft has repeatedly been caught off-guard, and left playing catch-up against it's rivals. It's responses: Zune for the iPod, Vista for OS X, Windows 8 Phone for Android, and Surface for the iPad, have all failed.

Microsoft's board has reportedly begun the process to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. Ballmer himself is quoted in Microsoft's announcement as saying:

“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time.”

Wrong again Steve -- 13 year, and 7 months ago, would've been a perfect time. From all the Apple users, and Linux users you slagged, and tried to terrorize with your "fear-leading" tactics: Don't let the door hit you on the way out!

I swear, when I saw this item in the morning paper; saw the words "Google," "online," "globe," "balloon," and saw the photo, reproduced below, I definitely had a distinct first impression. I read how Google was using the balloons to bring Internet access to the poor, souls living in Christchurch, New Zealand -- How poor are they Johnny? They're so poor, their church is made of cardboard [snare drum roll] -- I still think it looks like a photo of some kind of life-size Google Earth location pin.

[caption id="attachment_2200" align="alignnone" width="497"] Just a helium balloon? Au contraire!. Associated Press took the photo. I took the liberties.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1302" align="alignleft" width="491"] Click the image to see how they always get their search results.[/caption]

Well, I certainly didn't need an American search engine to tell me, a Canadian, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were celebrating their 140th anniversary. Actually, I had no idea whatsoever. I just didn't need an American search engine, pointing out my ignorance -- or maybe I did. That is, after all, the kind of the job Google does now, isn't it; keeping track of just how dumb I am, and making allowances.

How Google is my brain. Let's list the ways:

• understands and corrects my crappy spelling


• answers all my stupid questions to the best of the Internet's ability


• handles all my correspondence


• used to be able to handle all my RSS feeds


• Since 2009, has been tailoring my search results to make me happy

There's probably more ways, but, Google knows, I just can't remember.

I have joked that, thanks to the Internet, I don't need a brain anymore -- that the content from ten-million-or-so people equals about five smart people, and that's enough to take care of all my intelligence needs. Want proof? Just Google "how to tie yor shuz."If you're still remembering how to do stuff like that, then you're working to hard.

After reading (at least the cover of) Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, I could have become concerned by this so-called filter bubble -- how Google has been spoon-feeding me biased personalized search results based on my previous search history, to keep me happily Googling for more, but golly, what choice do I have?

My brain is in the cloud. Does that mean it's free?

The catchy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."  lies somewhere at the heart of what Internet privacy activists, such as Eli Pariser, are on about. Others, such as Derek Powazek, say the phrase just lies. I remember back in the latter 1990s when the free version of the dominant Macintosh email client Eudora began displaying advertising banners -- there was no revolution, and so it began.


One key to succeeding in the Internet Age seems to me to involve profitably identifying things people won't miss. This is a hard one for me to explain: Remember long-play records, and all that dynamic range they could hold in those wee grooves? Well, the MP3 format threw that stuff away to compress the file, and no one cared; they still preferred MP3s to LPs.

Facebook is a dumpster?

Google, Facebook, Wordpress.com -- all social media, are learning  to profit off of the kinds of personal information, which people don't care about, don't think is important -- their likes, their shares, their search patterns. People are just tossing this stuff out on the Internet, and social media is binning it, and selling it. I'd say it's like human derivatives, if  I had more than a clue how fiscal instruments like that worked.

But what am I saying,  I don't need to try and understand or remember that sort of stuff anymore. I may not know [fill in the Google search bar], but I know what I [like].

Great Powers are meeting in battle as we make phone calls, surf the Web and play games. The prize is intangible; we can't hold it in our hands, but we can hold it in our phones, and our computers.

It's been said generals prepare to win the previous war. Back in the 1990s Apple and Microsoft had to just sit and take it while any old kludgey third-party software could be installed, and make a mess all over their operating systems. They could only fight back through the mail with floppy disks, and later, CD-ROM.

The rise of the Internet coupled with the powerful generation of cell phones that came after the iPhone in 2007, finally offered Apple, Microsoft, and new-comer Google, the ability to control their destiny.

The iPhone, in my opinion, represents a kind of "before-and-after" moment. It settled the question of what was the "best" form-factor; it finally broke Microsoft's effective monopoly over the Internet browsing experience, and it turned the premium feature of WiFi into a ubiquitous feature, creating the conditions for constant Internet conectivity.

In a world where everyone is increasingly connected 24-7 to a network (the Internet), that world begins to look like a traditional computer network, with network administrators wielding control over the user's access. But in this case, who are the administrators? Are they the the phone carriers who sell people the phones on plans, or pay-as-you go? Technically, yes, but the company’s who control the operating system, hold the greatest power of all. Apple controls the iOS, Google, the Android operating system, and if any phones running the Window 8 phone OS are sold, then Microsoft will control those.

Faster iPhone! Kill! Kill!

Network administrators have to be able to reach into any or all parts of their network to quickly deal with a threat, such as a virus. All the big computer companies have admitted to having such a "kill switch" in their phone and desktop operating systems.

Steve Jobs admitted there was one in the iOS in 2008 (♦). Microsoft has included one in Windows 8 (♥). Google has already used theirs, in 2011,  to delete malware on 50,000 Android phones (♣). Even Amazon, way back in 2009 controversially used a kill switch on their Kindle (♠).

So this isn't the Wild West 1990s, when Apple had to stand by and fume, while Adobe's Flash plug-in caused so many Macs to crash so often. When Steve Jobs slammed the door on Adobe's mobile Flash, with Microsoft nodding in approval, in 2010, this was both a settling of accounts, and the start of setting things right.

Quality and quantity, together at last

Utter control of the user experience is part of ensuring customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Plus, Apple, for one, knows a bit about up-selling existing users.

The stakes and numbers involved, between Apple and Google are becoming positively planetary: Apple claims over 500,000,000 iOS devices sold -- that's half a billion. And, reportedly, cumulative shipments of Android devices top one billion. Of course, Mark Twain's observation concerning statistics applies.

So the legal see-sawing all over the planet between Apple and Samsung, isn't; it's always been Apple versus Google, for apparent control of the Earth. No idea who will win, but I Googled all these facts, and sources.