Content and news by Rob Williams

There’s little doubt… if you manage a web site, chances are good that you’ve taken a gander at your Alexa rankings at some point. It’s certainly an appealing method to compare one site to another, but as Michael Arrington explains, it’s completely useless and shouldn’t be trusted by anyone. As an example, the service claims that Youtube is now larger than Google, obviously untrue. Comscore results show Google as having over 100 billion pageviews per month, while Youtube sites at a more modest 16 billion. Alexa is in need of a true overhaul, and until that happens, there will be no <3 from me.

This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach. Comscore tells a much different (and more accurate) story – Google is nearing 100 billion monthly page views; YouTube sees around 16 billion. Even newcomer Compete, which measures traffic in a similar way as Alexa, seems to be getting it right. Alexa needs an overhaul. It’s long since become less than useful.

Source: Tech Crunch

The term “web 2.0” is definitely (so is definitely) overused these days, but with it comes many social networking sites that fit every flavor. As far as music goes, there are countless networking sites available, including my favorite, Last.fm. Apple, not being one to be left in the dust, released My iTunes, a set of widgets which deliver functionality similar to social music networking websites. Since so many people use iTunes already, this kind of thing just makes sense.

There are currently three embeddable widgets to choose from. One shows recent iTunes purchases. Another shows music you’ve reviewed on iTunes. The last shows a sort of tag cloud of artists you’ve purchased on the iTunes store. The widgets can be customized by size and color.

Source: TechCrunch

If you acquire some source code for a popular online application, what else would you do except start up a fresh blog and post it? That’s what the people behind Facebook Secrets did and now the entire net is in a frenzy. The value of the source code doesn’t seem that apparent, since it’s just for the index page and not the rest of the website, but it may give ideas to crackers on how to delve deeper into the Facebook systems. It also shows just how vulnerable Facebook is, but that’s not exactly a new revelation. You would imagine Facebook is annoyed, but the entire Facebook community at large simply super-pokes each other and forgets about it.

This leak is not good news for Facebook, as it raises the question of how secure a Facebook users private data really is. If the main source code for a site can be leaked, then it can be said that almost anything is possible. Facebook has become such a success and has such a high profile that it has become a magnet for attacks against its systems.

Source: TechCrunch

If you think HD-DVD is dead, you are only fooling yourself. In an effort to keep things moving smoothly, Amazon has announced a sweet deal that includes an Xbox 360 Elite, Xbox 360 HD-DVD player and seven free HD-DVD movies. The deal works like this: You purchase the console, it already includes King Kong, but Amazon’s deal also includes 300. On top of that, there is a voucher for five free HD-DVDs, which brings the total up to seven. It’s times like this when I wish I needed a new Xbox.

The $599 price is certainly interesting given that it’s identical to the 80GB PS3 model which includes the Blu-ray player and this package seems geared for the movie inclined. Then again, you can always get a clearance 60GB PS3 with Blu-ray for $100 less than this bundle. Of course, we don’t buy our systems for movies, we buy them for games, and in that department y’all can choose who’s ahead at this stage.

Source: Joystiq

Building a silent PC or on the look-out for a quality mid-range graphics card offering? Gigabyte’s 8600GTS includes the best of both worlds. In addition to including a passive cooler, a free copy of Supreme Commander can be found here also. Of course the important question is: Does the overall performance warrant your attention?

The good folks at Joystiq deliver news that 2K’s Bioshock demo is finally on Xbox Live for download… and that’s really all that needs to be said. I’ve watched a fair amount of gameplay videos and now the trailer, and have to say it looks to be quite an impressive game. I’ll download and try it out in the coming days… but you can jump on there now and give it a go. It’s hefty though, weighing in at 1.35GB.

Completing the sudden onslaught of Bioshock goodness is the latest episode of the Major Nelson podcast, appropriately titled, “The one about the Bioshock demo,” starring Ken Levine of Irrational Games. We wish you luck, dear readers, as both Xbox Live and Major Nelson’s site are being positively crushed by our collective downloading might.

Source: Joystiq

It’s Monday. News is slow. Ok, I lie. I look for virtually any excuse to post car news, so a slow Monday seems appropriate. Edmunds gives us a nice comparo including the new BMW M3 (featuring 4.0L V8!) which is compared to Audi’s RS4 and gorgeous R8, in addition to Porsche’s latest 911 GT3 and also a car that seems to stick out in this crowd… vee dub’s Golf GTI. Though not a true head-to-head comparison, their initial thoughts state the obvious: you get what you pay for.

The Golf is not merely half as good as the M3 (which the price would suggest), but the noise, character and extra performance of that V8, the drama of the M3’s silhouette in the windows of shops as you pass by, and the greater scope for naughtiness that rear-wheel drive affords on those days when you just fancy treating yourself, all mean we’d lay down the extra coin.

Source: Inside Line

There are few companies I completely dislike, but Best Buy is one of them. They keep giving people reasons to continue hating them, but it doesn’t matter. The suckers are those who don’t know any better. What are they doing now? Charging $3 more per Xbox 360 item, because they can. You can go straight to the Xbox.com website and purchase the same items for less, if you were so inclined. Many people believe this to be due to the fact that Halo 3 is on the way, and people just want to purchase the product and be done with it.

Apparently, Best Buy is cheating money out of its customers. Big surprise there. Seems the electronics retailer is adding a $3 tax to any Xbox-related item due to the massive hype surrounding Halo 3. As you can see above, you can normally bag a 360 headset for $19.99. At Best Buy, it’ll set you back $22.99. Doesn’t make much sense does it?

Source: CrunchGear

You are online all day any way, so why not try to expand your horizons by using online-only applications instead of your desktop solutions? Of course there are pros and cons to each method, the biggest plus being the fact that online applications can be accessed even when you are not at home. Tzunami posts a staggering list of one hundred different online applications to help you get a start in the quest for an application-less operating system.

Over the past few years, webware has matured to the point that almost anything you can do with desktop software, can now be done with a free webware alternative. Webware allows you to access your programs at any time from anywhere in the world, without having to bring your computer along. In this article, we highlight 100 free webware apps which will help you cut the cord from your computer and its traditional desktop software and instead take your computing completely online.

Source: Tzunami

One way to help movies become blockbusters is by having superb marketing, which includes creative movie posters. How often have you looked at an outstanding movie poster, and wondered how it was designed? Well if you want to put your skills to the test, Photojojo has lined up eleven popular movie posters on their site, with tutorials on how to create the same effect on your own. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

In honor of some of our favorite summer blockbusters (Harry Potter and Transformers), we bring you our 10 11 most-favorite movie-effect tutorials. From Scarface to Sin City to Pirates of the Carribean to 300, we’ve got 11 great ways to go Hollywood on your photos. Read on!

Source: Photojojo

Yeah sure, I admit that I am a Vista-basher, so articles like this, I tend to be drawn to. But how can I help it? I have given Vista many chances, chances where I would give Vista a fresh start… ignoring all the previous problems I’ve had. Well, Vista has never, not once impressed me, with anything, therefore I continue to rant about it. Joe Wilcox of Microsoft-Watch shares pretty much the same wavelength I do when it comes to the reasons of why Vista has thus far failed, and why.

Windows XP is a successful product. Service Pack 2 made the operating system rock-solid reliable, and five years in the marketplace made for customer familiarity and a broad infrastructure of supporting applications, peripherals and PCs. For many people, Windows XP achieves what some analysts call the “good enough” threshold. When something is good enough, its successor or replacement has to be a whole lot better to succeed.

Source: Microsoft-Watch

Google offers great services for free, which is one reason why they have become so utterly popular. So how come they are screwing over their -paying- customers? Though I never paid attention to the service personally, Google Video offered ‘download-to-own’ videos, which users could download to their computer (I assume) and then play back later. Each video was DRM-infested however, so you had to connect to their service in order to verify that you owned the video. Well as it turns out, Google is ending the service, and effectively disabling all those purchased videos in the process.

Notice that Google called these videos “purchased” and “download to own” — as though by buying them, they became your property. Funny kind of property, that. Imagine if these were DVDs: one day, a man from Virgin Megastore shows up at your door and says, “We’re taking away all your videos. Sorry! But we’ll give you a credit to spend at a different store. Not a credit for videos, though. Also: it expires in 60 days.”

Source: Boing Boing

Apple likes big. Apple users like big. AT&T likes big. But this is a tad on the ridiculous side. Ben from Ars Technica recently received his first phone bill since purchasing the iPhone and was caught off guard when he noticed it was thirty-four pages long, riddled with needless entries of $0.00 sums. Another member of their staff received a fifty-two page phone bill. What a blatant waste of people’s time and a waste of paper! Ironic: The iPhone is a “simple” device that promises to make our lives “easier”.

The AT&T bill itemizes your data usage whenever you surf the Internet via EDGE, even if you’re signed up for the unlimited data plan. AT&T also goes into an incredible amount of detail to tell you—well, almost nothing. For instance, I know that on July 27 at 3:21 p.m. I had some data use that, under the To/From heading, AT&T has helpfully listed as “Data Transfer.” The Type of file? “Data.” My total charge? $0.00.

Source: Ars Technica

We posted on Friday that Universal Music had plans to release DRM-free tracks, which would include a massive portion of their catalogue. I guess this should come as no surprise, but Wired Blogs has brought it to our attention that these songs will be watermarked, embedded with your user information. While this means virtually nothing for legal users, it does mean that those who purchase music to spread on P2P networks could be caught quite easily.

These watermarks are apparently inaudible, and shouldn’t interfere with playback on any devices, so they shouldn’t cause problems if people buy the MP3s purely for their own use. But if they share them online (or if, say, someone else copies the files from the buyer’s computer and shares it from elsewhere, or installs file sharing software on their computer without their knowledge) the watermark could be used to identify the person who originally purchased the file — but only if the identifier number is unique to a specific purchase.

Source: Wired Blogs

The Inquirer has once again sparked up some controversy, but for good reason. At last weeks Siggraph conference, Microsoft announced DirectX 10.1 and it’s various upgrades, alongside a mention that 10.0 video cards would not be compatible with the new updates. That’s the bad thing. The good thing is that the various are not likely to matter to anyone, including the game developers themselves. Still, what’s up with this Microsoft? We don’t even have good DX 10 games yet, and we need a newer version already? Hell, focus on fixing Vista first.

We suspect that the spec is likely to be ill-received. Not only does it require brand new hardware, immediately creating a miniscule sub-set of DX10 owners, but it also requires Vista SP1, and also requires developer implementation. With developers struggling to justify including DX10 features in their games (see the recent comments by John Carmack and Mark Rein), they’re going to be about as likely to further limit their product’s market as they are to start developing NES games again.

Source: The Inquirer

Buying a Ferrari might give you bragging rights, but let’s face it… there are tens of thousands of people who own Ferrari’s, so it’s not exactly an exclusive club. What -is- an exclusive club? Staying at a hotel of course… in space. If this intrigues you, then you might be in luck just five years from now. This hotel would orbit the Earth a total of once every eighty minutes, or eighteen times per day. One thing is for sure… this would be an incredible experience. It might be wise to begin saving up your $4 million now.

Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay. During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman. Company director Xavier Claramunt says the three-bedroom boutique hotel’s joined up pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space.

Source: PC World

It’s near impossible to find someone who doesn’t use a Google service, whether it be Gmail, their search engine, Google Reader or whatever else. The problem with using all of these services is that all tranmissions, minus the login process, are unencrypted and ready to be viewed by prying eyes. In a home situation this doesn’t matter too much unless you have a rebel family member, but in a workplace, -anyone- could easily be running a program like tcpdump to view your e-mails and the like. Daniel Miessler has a good idea for those looking to secure themselves… simply change the http:// to https:// to engage a secure connection.

The more we depend on Google (or any other monolithic service) the more we need to safeguard the information they have of ours. One way we can help is by demanding (via secure bookmarks) that they send our mail, news feeds, calendars, and other information over a secure connection.

Source: Daniel Miessler Blog

Although not much of a surprise, Lenovo has announced that none of their ‘important’ PCs sent to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games will be running Windows Vista, but instead they will be sticking to the tried and true Windows XP. Computers that will be used by the athletes in their downtime will be running Vista, however. Leon Xie of Lenovo stated the reason for choosing XP was because, “At the Olympics, we need the most reliable and stable system”. Stability is not an area where Vista has excelled, sadly.

Lenovo, the official computing sponsor of the games, has already delivered 12,000 desktop PCs and 2,000 printers to the organizers in Beijing, in addition to 800 laptops and 700 servers. Another 5,000 PCs were sent over for the athlete’s lounges and other hospitality and marketing purposes. The desktop systems include mainly Lenovo ThinkCentre M55s, while the laptops include both Thinkpad T60s and Zhaoyang 680s. The server systems include SureServer models T350, R630 and R520.

Source: Yahoo News

Straight from the Mozilla wiki comes an impressive fact: 75% of users to download Firefox do not continue to use it for very long. Many issues with these numbers can come into play, but it’s still a high figure regardless. 25% is still a great number, however, although Mozilla has implemented a twelve-point plan to help trigger an increase. I personally don’t care much for IE7 because I find it a little clunky, but the fact of the matter is, it’s the default browser with Vista and it’s leaps and bounds above IE6, which is likely one of the reasons why many decide against sticking with Firefox.

Frankly, the 12-point plan doesn’t seem to offer much of real value. Nor does spending big bundles of cash on TV advertising. If you have any other ideas, they need them over at the Mozilla wiki. Every Windows user has benefitted from Firefox — even the ones who didn’t download it — because it forced Microsoft to get off its rear end, improve the product and compete for users.

Source: Guardian Blog

Many people dislike EA because of their monopoly on the NFL franchise, which is now even more appropriate because they have a monopoly on Monopoly and other Hasbro games. Both companies will share properties. EA will create video games based off of Hasbro’s board-games, while Hasbro could potentially create toys modelled after EA’s games.

The partnership is part of the newly formed EA Casual Entertainment strategy. A whole division of EA fully focused on bringing high-end casual games to the mass market. This partnership may be a good thing for EA. Actually, they’re the perfect company to handle putting games that haven’t changed in a half-century on consoles, they’ve practically been doing the same thing with the Madden franchise for years.

Source: Joystiq