They have a newsletter so you can get their latest test data delivered to your inbox, and as an added bonus they are doing a free webinar on website form registration designs/optimization. They’re going to show 7 tests that were designed at opitimizing leads on registration websites (if you have any kind of signup/newsletter/etc form on your website you should probably attend).

Here’s the link to the webinar signup, I’d highly recommend checking it out:

So my wife started playing a game called FarmVille on Facebook. It’s a very simple game that revolves around you running a farm. The point of it is to harvest crops/resources, which you sell for money to expand the farm. It’s a very silly, but amusing game that involved some strategic thinking and some creativity. If you ever played SimFarm, it’s the same basic idea but not as advanced.

I’m a huge fan of strategy/simulation games so I gave it a shot. Here’s a picture of my farm as I’m typing up this posting:

There’s 3 sources of resources in the game: Crops, Trees, and Animals. I haven’t worked out the stats for Trees/Animals yet because it takes more work. However when you first get started you have to do crops because a) they’re way cheaper, b) they harvest way faster, and c) they make your plot of land look pretty.

So being the analytical type guy I am, I pulled the stats on the different crops you can harvest:

Breaking the above numbers down so you know what they mean:

Base Cost - that’s how much it costs you to buy the seeds for 1 square of land of that crop.
Time - this is how many hours it takes for the crop to be harvestable.
XP - this is how many experience points you get for planting that seed. XP is used to advance in levels like most RPG’s.
Sell For - this is your gross revenue when the crop harvests.
Revenue - this is the difference between the Base Cost and the Sell For price.
Plowing - before you can plant a seed you need to plow the square, which costs 15 regardless of the crop.
Profit - this is the difference between Revenue and Plowing (you’re total net profit from a single square).

I Should Farm Artichokes!

At first glance it may appear that Artichokes are the most profitable, as you can see you’ll make a net profit of 119 per square. But that is a wrong assumption as you aren’t accounting for what economists calls the Time Value of Money (a big fancy phrase that you’ll have drilled into your brain if you ever take any business classes…as I’m doing my MBA right now you can imagine that I’m sick and tired of that phrase).

Time Value of Money simply means this - $1 today is worth more than $1 tomorrow. Why? Because you can re-invest that money and make a small profit. If you’re not into economics/business, don’t worry, I’ve broken down the numbers below.

Alrighty, so above are the total profits/XP you’ll gain over various periods of time if you farm the mentioned crops. Aren’t I such a geek?

Still think Artichokes are still the good investment? As a matter of fact, they are one of the worst crops you could possibly farm, bringing in the lowest amount of XP (not including Raspberries) and the 3rd worst money generator.

If you want to make money and don’t care about XP, then you want to farm Raspberries until your eyes bleed. As you can see from the above chart, Raspberries make almost twice the amount of money that the other crops do. However there are some drawbacks: they don’t generate any XP, they require you to be level 8 to grow, and they harvest every 2 hours. The biggest problem is that last one - unless you are able to check your computer every 2 hours to harvest/replant them, they are useless to you and you will lose money in the long run.

Strawberries are the next logical choice. Offering a nice haul of money and the highest XP gain. I like strawberries and I made it to level 7 with nothing but Strawberries. However they harvest every 4 hours, which means you have to login the game every 4 hours to get the full benefit of them, which may not work for most of you.

You’ll see I’ve highlighted 2 other crops that are the best all-rounders: Pumpkins and Rice. These two crops give you a very nice amount of money, and a good volume of XP. They provide you with the best overall results because a) you only have to login once or twice a day to keep them going, b) with the 8-12 hour harvest time it’s not vital you login as soon as they harvest like with Raspberries/Strawberries.

Therefor the best crops to harvest are Pumpkins and Rice. I personally recommend Pumpkins because the XP is way higher for only slightly less money earned.

But I Want to Farm Soybeans!

There’s nothing wrong with farming the other crops, they just won’t give you as big of a benefit as the ones I’ve mentioned will. It’s more important that you have fun with this game, but this information is mostly meant at the twinking munchkin players like me that like to push games to the limits and get the best possible results with the least amount of work (aka I’m a lazy ass).

Happy gaming!

A couple weeks later and I have to admit that I just haven’t had the chance to test their platform yet. But it looks very slick and has a very web 2.0 feeling to the interface. In my emails with Paras I suggested that I make a note of their platform here to see if anybody else wants to test it out.

In checking their website this morning, I’ve noticed that they’ve opened their website as a public beta and are allowing anybody to register an account to try out their platform.

Once your account is activated, it’s very easy to create a test and start it up. All they need you to do is insert some javascript code in the HEAD of your pages and you’re all set.

Another thing that has really stood out to me is their segmentation control. With some split testing platforms, you can do basic segmenting (i.e. organic traffic, type in traffic, etc). When I checked Wingify this morning they had over a dozen different ways to segment your traffic for a test including:

• IP
• Country/City
• Keyword
• Web Browser
• Operating System
• Time Spent on URL

Plus many other interesting ways to segment your traffic for testing purposes.

I am going to be running a test with their softare in the near future and will be posting the results here, but I thought I’d post this info and hopefully some of you folks will take advantage of their free beta offer and see how it works for you.

Image: Split Testing Process. Very cool process overview of how split testing works. Image courtesy of MindValleyLabs (link at the end of this posting).

By now you should have a basic understanding of what split testing is, if not check out some of my previous posts on the topic for some tests I’ve been running:

• Adventures with Google Website Optimizer Part 1 (aka Getting Ready to Launch)
• Adventures with Google Website Optimizer Part 2 (aka Test Launch)
• Adventures with Google Website Optimizer Part 3 (aka The Drama)
• Vertster Testing Platform

Onto the Metrics Already!

Enough with what is Split Testing, onto how to measure a split test. There are 9 key factors (at least in my opinion, the metrics vary from marketer to marketer). Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Conversions - The number of conversions (usually orders or signups) received on each variable.
2. Revenue (optional) - This revenue generated on each variable (not applicable on all tests as some sites are just trying to generate leads, not revenue.
3. Unique Visitors - You need to know exactly how many people saw each variable.
4. Revenue per Visitor (RPV) (optional) - How much money you made per-visitor (not applicable on all tests, see Revenue above for explanation).
5. Average Order Value (Avg $) (optional) - How much money you made per conversion (not applicable on all tests, see Revenue above for explanation).
6. Conversion Rate - A percentage showing the ratio of conversions to visitors.
7. Projected Conversions - This is a derived statistic in which you project your average traffic against the conversion rate to determine how many conversions you are likely to get over a future time period.
8. Projected Revenue - A derived statistic in which you project your expected revenue based on you average $ per conversion multiplied by your projected conversions.
9. Lift - The projected gain based on all other metrics.

Building a Split Test Summary Report

Using the above 9 metrics, I’m going to show you a sample report for a split test I recently ran. Here’s the report:

Sample Split Test Report

Yeah I know that’s really tiny image and hard to read, so I’m going to break it up into 3 parts and go over each part in detail.

Split Test Report Part 1

This first part is pretty straight forward. It shows the 3 variables in the test (1 control, and 2 test variables called v6 and v7). It also show the total orders, revenue, and visitors tracked on each version of the test.

At bare minimum, every split testing platform should automatically track this information in some form. If you can’t track these three simple metrics in your testing platform, then you’ve been ripped off and should find a replacement immediately. The remaining 6 metrics are derived from these 3 key metrics.

Split Testing Report

This next portion of the report shows the basic derivations you can make from the data that gets collected. It’s very simple to do the math here:

RPV (Revenue per Visitor) is simply the total revenue divided by the total unique visitors.

Avg $ (Average $ per Conversion) is simply the total revenue divided by the total conversions.

Conversion (Conversion Rate) is the number of conversions divided by the number of unique visitors.

Split Testing Report

The last portion of the report (shown above) are metrics that are projected based on the previous metrics.

For this website in particular, we know that it gets about 73,000 unique visitors every month, so we start with multiplying 73,000 by the conversion rate for each variable. This tell us that “assuming the website gets 73,000 visitors next month, if we switched over to this version we would generate this many conversions.”

For the next field (Revenue), we simply multiply the conversions (calculated in the previous paragraph), but the Avg $. This tell us that “assuming the website gets 73,000 visitors next month, if we switch over to this version we would generate this much revenue.”

The last field (Lift), is a simple statistic to show the difference in revenue as a percentage against the control. The math is as follows: (Revenue - Control Revenue) / Control Revenue. This tells us “if we switched to this version instead of the control, we would see an increase/decrease in revenue by X percent.

Deciding On a Winner Isn’t Easy

So let’s say you’ve run a test and generate the results shown above. How do you decide which variable wins the test? Most people would look at that data and say that since v7 showed a Lift of 23% overall it’s the best. And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s a logical conclusion based on available evidence. The Lift that I’ve shown you to calculate with this report is a variable based off all the other 8 metrics (if you reverse engineer it, it literally is derived from the original 3 metrics). So it’s a good general way to decide.

But not all tests are decided this way. Some tests get so close that measuring the Lift isn’t enough. Sometimes you could get a Lift of only 1%, which isn’t very impressive. Therefor you need to decide what priority each of the metrics plays in making your decision on the winner. So take all 9 metrics, and organize them from most important factor to least important factor.

For the company I do this for, we generally go by this decision priority list:

Lift
Revenue per Visitor
Average $/Conversion
Conversion Rate
Projected Orders/Revenue
Orders/Revenue/Visitors

However some people prefer to have a higher conversion rate rather than flat out Lift or RPV. So they might assign that as the highest priority. Always establish your decision hierarchy BEFORE you start testing, otherwise your hierarchy will be skewed because you are already seeing data and it will influence your decision process - THIS IS VERY BAD - don’t let your stats control your decision factors, they must remain independent.

Related Articles

• The Art of Split Testing - MindValley Labs
• Getting the Right Message Out - Inside Campaigner
• Split Test Case Studies - Visiolo

Well simply put, I’ve been super busy. I’m working full time, putting in time on my MBA, working on my MBA project, family time, and playing the occasional World of Warcraft (yeah…that’s a stupid thing to do with my 5 minutes of free time but it’s cheap entertainment).

Anyways, since this is my first 2009 post, I figured I’d give you a nice list of useful tips for marketing your websites in the new year:

1. Eliminate Bugs - a lot of webmasters do not take the time to ensure their websites function properly, they just make assumptions that everything is working as intended. Don’t be foolish and do this, every month or two test every function and feature of your website. Yes that can be a lot of work, but you might find something broke and it’s really upsetting your visitors and turning them away.
2. Don’t Jump on the Next Bandwagon - there is always ‘the next big thing’ on the horizon. Don’t be a sheep and follow what hundreds of other webmasters are telling you to do. Chances are, there the hype over it is bigger than the actual product/method/technique. And chances are better still that all these webmasters telling you how much money they are making with it are just telling you that so you’ll click their referral link. Just because somebody says “this is awesome”, doesn’t mean that it’s true.
3. Don’t Forget About the Recession - yeah it’s hard to forget about it since it’s always on the news right now. But never forget that it is happening, hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost every month (CNN reported that the US is losing 250,000 jobs/month right now). You have to consider that the average customer right now is very strapped for cash (especially right after Christmas). You also have to bear in mind that advertising campaigns that use the recession as a selling point won’t work, maybe they did 6 months ago when this mess started, but now people are desensitized and won’t fall for it.
4. Keep It Manageable - I’m a but of a hypocrit when it comes to this, but simply put - don’t take on more projects than you can realistically handle. Downsize if you need to. I for one have gotten rid of over 100 domain names in the past 12 months simply because I knew I would never get the time to use them. Don’t be afraid to get rid of things, if you have a good domain name but don’t have time to do something with it, try auctioning it (I recommend TDNAM.com, it’s run by Godaddy and very well done, otherwise use Moniker if your domain isn’t with Godaddy). At the end of this year I’m expecting to have no more than 5 active domains running. Why? Because I would rather spend the time bulding 5 really successful websites instead of 50 that don’t do anything.
5. Live Your Life - don’t let working on the web take over your life. Too many good webmasters get burnt out and drop of the radar. Spending 100+ hours online every week is only going to hurt you. I try to stay offline over weekends (doesn’t always happen), but when I do go online on the weekends it’s either to do homework or play World of Warcraft - I don’t touch my websites or lurk on the webmasters forums.
6. Fight Procrastination - the #1 enemy of the webmaster is procrastination. I’m guilty of this, as are all of you. Rather than say “I’m going to do this next week”, get off your ass and do it right now. Don’t push things back, just do it. A week will turn into two weeks, two weeks will turn into a month, and before you know it a project you wanted to do last year still hasn’t even been started.
7. Schedule and Prioritize - set a schedule and stick to it. It doesn’t have to be rigid and strict, but at least give yourself some idea of what you’ll be doing on any given day.
8. Learn Something New - try to learn 1 or 2 new technologies or methods every few months. You don’t need to become an expert, just expand your knowledge. For example, last year I taught myself how to install and manage Linux on my laptop (including learning how to dual-boot it with Windows XP). I also spent some time learning Ruby on Rails (and learned that I hate it, but at least I tried). I also learned that JavaScript is the bane of my existence, especially when it is used in tracking codes, but I took the time to learn how to deal with it and get around common JS errors when it comes to tracking codes.
9. Don’t Write an eBook - ebook writing is DEAD. Stop it. Don’t write another word. For the love of all that is holy and just, if I see another ebook on internet marketing I swear I’ll pull my hair out. Most ebooks are written by somebody in China or India or the Phillipines (and they got paid about $0.50/page for it), and they have no knowledge of the actual topic. Want proof? Logon to any freelance site (i.e. RentACoder.com, Scriptlance.com, etc), and take a look. You’ll see dozens of contracts posted for people wanting ebooks written for $5 (which they then proceed to sell via Clickbank for $99). Don’t be a moron, ebooks are dead. Help the ebook resistance, stop buying them, stop talking about them, just ignore all talk of ebooks. They are dead, there are no ebooks.
10. Stick to What You Know - everybody will tell you this, but very few of them actually follow their own advice. If you want to blog, then blog about something you are familiar with or passionate about (i.e. I only blog about internet marketing as that’s what I do for a living, it would be stupid of me to blog about cooking as I’m a dunce when it comes to such things). In the past year I’ve seen a lot of threads on Digital Point about people asking for blogging ideas for their new ‘make money online’ blogs…that’s a really bad way to get started when you are asking people who are your potential readers.
11. Spend Time on Forums - I recommend finding a few forums that are related to your website and becoming a member. Don’t flog your crap, just be a member and post useful information. From time to time drop information about your website when it’s appropriate, but the main purpose here is to get involved with the community that your website is based in and try to get some interaction. Build up a good reputation with your readers/customers, even if it is on a different website. If you want helping finding forums related to your website, check out www.big-boards.com, they keep lists of the biggest forums in the world, sorted by subject. It’s one of the more useful websites I discovered in 2008. With that in mind, don’t spend more than an hour every day on forums, you’ll suddenly find all your time is gone. I, for example, only go back to Digital Point every 3-5 days now (whereas last year I was on it every day).
12. Don’t Spam - This should go without saying. Spamming laws are getting more and more severe, and you’re only going to hurt yourself. Sure, you could send out 10 million emails and probably get $100,000 in sales from the penis pills you tried to sell, but now you’ve got a multi-million dollar lawsuit filled against you, you’re facing jail time, and your domain/IP has been blacklisted. Besides, you look like an ass.
13. Don’t Go For the Quick Buck - there is no such thing as easy money. I can’t say this enough times to aspriing webmasters. If somebody tells you otherwise, it’s preamble for their sales pitch on their ebook they are trying to sell you. You’ll always see people saying “I made $XXXX with this method, find out how by clicking here!” the link then sends you to a POS clickbank product.
14. Break Into New Markets - earlier I said to stick to what you know, but if you have the time, try to get into some new market that you haven’t established yourself - but make sure you have an interest in the market or you’ll get bored. For example - my MBA project is focused around particle physics, but I love science and I’ve never run a science site before. There’s no harm in stretching out to new markets, but keep it to something you know at least a little about.
15. Stick to It - If you run a blog, don’t abandon it. Keep posting to it, take breaks if you have to (i.e. I havent posted here for a month). Don’t just abandon a website. If you are finding you can’t keep up with it, then sell it and make a small profit. Never just give up and let a site die, that’s a waste of all the time and effort you’ve already put into it.
16. Think Logically - don’t just decide to do something and jump at it. Spend some time thinking about what exactly you want to do, and what you’ll get out of it. Deciding to build a website on cats and putting it up 5 minutes later is stupid, spend a few days planning out the content, where you’ll place advertisements, how you’re going to market it, who your target market is, etc. “Point Shoot Aim” marketing does not work.
17. Understand Your Target Market - who is your target market? What do they like? How old are they? Male or Female? What country? What language? Do you actually know all of these types of statistics about the people who come to your website? Is your website appealing to them? Why are you advertising male vitamins when 90% of your traffic are female? Review your visitor profile and make sure you are sending the right message to them.
18. Have Fun - if you are not enjoying what you are doing, then stop. For myself, I hate working with graphics and images (mostly because I suck at design), but I love putting together websites and marketing campaigns, and occasionally programming - you’ll never find me trying to do web design. Yet I build websites for clients - they know from the very beginning that I’m not a designer and I expect them to have a design ready.
19. Set Expectations - Related to the previous point, make sure everybody involved in anything you do has a realistic expectation. As stated above, I don’t do graphic design so when I take a contract to buld a website I make sure my client understands that. I never offer to do it, because I know it will suck and they won’t be happy. I would rather help them find a competent designer and take longer to get the project done, rather than risk the entire project falling apart. Same goes for websites, for example - this website doesn’t update frequently, and everybody knows that (join my Feedburner list if you just want to get emailed whenever I post so you save the time of returning here to find nothing new). My readers expect that I post infrequently, what do yours expect of you?

So here is a recap of my life for 2008:

• 4,000 blog comment spam
• 4.5 deaths (4 humans, 1 dog):
  • Colin Main - a good friend for over 15 years
  • Bill Morenz - my sister’s father and close family friend
  • Julius Nicklom - my grandfather
  • Karen McCrae - a close friend I’ve known for almost 20 years
  • Footlong - my parents dashound that we’ve had since I was a kid
• 2 different jobs, the second I’m very happy with and will probably spend the next few years here
• 10lbs lost (about 60 more to go! lol)
• 1 minor surgery to remove a small lump from my arm
• Getting my debt under control with the help of our bank before the recession really hit Canada
• I sold off my of my unused domains finally! At the start of the year I had around 400, today I’m down to about 40 (most of them are in use). That saved a lot of money.
• 1 car accident (I backed into somebody that was riding my bumper at an intersection the other day)
• 30,000 unique visitors to this blog
• 1 World of Warcraft account reactived. I managed to resist for a while, but unfortunately I’m back in that stupid game….grrr….
• Discovering that my dog is epileptic (yes, she has seizures!).

Biggest regret of 2008: Not spending nearly enough time with my family

Plans for 2009:

• Finish my MBA (Dec 2009)
• Get my physics journal/publication (my thesis project) to generate $2500/month in revenue
• Spend more time with the family
• Get one World of Warcraft character to level 70 (probably my Warlock since they are stupidily OP right now)
• Buy my wife something shiny, it’s been a while since I’ve done that
• Play with my Wii Lightsaber that I got for Xmas

I hope you all have a very Happy New Year! This blog will be back to it’s usual posting of 2-3x per week starting in January. Until then, have a very Happy Holidays!

‘ vs “

This is probably the most common problem we see. There is a massive difference between using either of this parsers in your code. Simply put, anything between a set of ” will get parsed, anything put between a set of ‘ will not. What does that mean exactly?

Observe this code:

$foo = 69;
echo “First: $foo “;
echo ‘Second: $foo’;

Now if I actually execute the code, I get the following:

First: 69 Second: $foo

See what happened? The second time I echo’d the $foo variable it just outputted the variable name, not the value.

If you are running into this problem, it won’t even throw an error. PHP thinks you’ve done it on purpose, so it just goes along it’s merry way. But if you are outputting text to the screen, you should be able to see if this is happening and change it.

If you want to save yourself the headache and avoid this type of problem, just never use single quotes when echoing anything to the browser. Problem solved.

Using \”

Ok, so you’re not using single quotes anymore for any echo statements, good job! But what happens if you want to put quotes around something in a string you are outputting? Simple, but escaping the double quote surrounding the text it will appear in the output:

$quote = “I like chicken”;
echo “When asked, the minister replied \”$quote\”.”;

This will output the following:

When asked, the minister replied “I like chicken”.

The most common reason for escaping quotes is if your code is outputting html code to the browser, such as this:

echo “<img src=\”someimage.gif\” />”;

Using .

Sometimes you need to join multiple items together in a single echo statement, as some variables (i.e. system variables) don’t like to be executed inside a “. Things like $_POST, $_GET, $_SESSION, $_SERVER will throw big hissy fits at you if you try to use them in an echo statement surrounded by quotes.

The solution is to join multiple components together in an echo statement using . as a connector:

echo “Your IP address is: ” . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . “. Any questions?”;

When executed, the above code will output this:

Your IP address is: 74.125.44.136. Any questions?

If you try to do that by referencing the $_SERVER within the text and quotes, you’ll get a bunch of errors from PHP and your code will not execute (and chances are the entire script will crash until you do this properly).

The Dreaded T_STRING Error

Alright, so you’ve taken when I’ve shown you so far and everything is working great. You add more code and then test your script, and instead of displaying what you want, you get this really nasty error message instead:

So you’re sitting there wondering what the hell does that mean?

The error means you’ve screwed up your code syntax and are missing something that needs to be there. Usually this is a missing ; or } or { or ( or )

For example:

echo “I like to eat fish on tuesdays”;
$mycounter = 994;
if($mycounter > 1) {
    echo “Last year I caught $mycounter fish”
} else {
    echo “Last year I didn’t catch any fish”;

If you execute that code, you’ll get the annoying T_STRING error and it will reference Line 4. So you look at line 4 and realize there is a ; missing at the end of the line.

echo “I like to eat fish on tuesdays”;
$mycounter = 994;
if($mycounter > 1) {
    echo “Last year I caught $mycounter fish”;
} else {
    echo “Last year I didn’t catch any fish”;

You execute the code again and it throws the same error, but it references Line 6 this time. Any idea on what you left out?

You forgot to put a } to close the else statement.

echo “I like to eat fish on tuesdays”;
$mycounter = 994;
if($mycounter > 1) {
    echo “Last year I caught $mycounter fish”;
} else {
    echo “Last year I didn’t catch any fish”;
}

Now that code will work and you’ve debugged your first script without having to wait for another coder to look at your code.

Happy Wednesday everybody!

But in light of my recent spam bulleyes that appears to be painted on this blog, I started looking at other options, take a look at this:

That chart is a report that the Akisment anti-spam plugin can generate for your website. And since Akismet comes with Wordpress by default now, everybody already has some very impressive comment spam reporting tools available to them.

If you look at that chart, you’ll see that since Nov 14th I’ve been getting hammered with spam (I’m now up to about 100/day).

So here’s today’s tip - learn all the features/functions of the software you have already before looking at adding more software to the mix and making things even more complex.

To all of my actual readers I’d like to thank you for coming back again and again. While this site isn’t anywhere near the level of several webmaster blogs, looking back on the past two months I feel that I’ve contributed a lot to the webmaster community and hope to continue offering tips and tricks to other web monkeys.

In light of this achievement, I spent some time today looking through some of the comments that have been flagged by Akismet as spam and found one interesting one:

That comment really threw me off. I’m looking at it, and notice that it appeared in a huge stack of comments that were submitted within about 30 minutes of each other. I went digging further and found 5 other comments that were virtually identical to this.

So are some comment spammers actually offering an opt-out of their hit lists?

Let’s take a few things into consideration:

1. Most comment spam software uses dynamic IP’s (aka Proxy Servers), multiple email addresses, random names, and other methods to make every comment they post appear from a completely different computer/person.
2. Most comment spammers live outside of North America, which protects them from the anti-spam laws that we have in the US and Canada
3. Most comment spammers will ignore you if you contact them to stop spamming you.

Now here’s a thought I had about this opt-out link - if I enter my URL into their form to get off their list, chances are the spam will just go up as they know the site is actively monitored. In fact, I’m betting that my spam volume will shoot through the roof because I filled out the form.

So as an experiment I filled out the form from one of the spammers and will be monitoring my spam activity. But I would be willing to be that by doing it they’ve identified a site that actually checks their spam and will flood it even more.

Have any of you experimented with this?

Related Blogs

I tried to find other blogs talking about this, but suffice to say the pickings are slim. Nobody seems to be addressing this.

• All Spammers are Morons - you gotta admire the response he sent to the spammer
• Another blog that got hit by it

I’m sure that wasn’t the intention of what they’ve done, but I can’t really think of any other application for their latest research into cyber communication. The research was released yesterday through the Chronicle Online, Cornell University’s online publication that outlines their research projects and activities.

I actually came upon the research entirely by accident, as I’m on their list to get all of their research news. (I get their news because I use part of it for a science news portal that I run). Essentially the Chronicle is a daily digest of all their press releases and research papers that they’ve done, which is very useful as they do a ton of research and you can get it directly from the source instead of waiting a few days for Google News and other major networks to pick it up and start syndicating it.

Now again I want to make it clear that I doubt this was their intention, but when you read the story this is the headline:

The research story outlines how you can use social networks like Facebook and instant messaging software to basically force your way into somebody’s life. It talks about various methods they used to try and get a complete stranger into somebody’s life and the success rate of each method.

So here’s the question - aside from cyberstalking, why would you want to research this? I guess there is some application for police and cyber crime units to consider, but for the most part it seems like all they’re doing is educated cyberstalkers in ways to be more successful.

All I can say about this is WTF.

Related Websites:

• Cyber Communication Research - research by Cornell University
• School Opens Cyber Stalking Communication
• Hacker Gets 2 Years for Cyberstalking on MySpace