Dr. LeRoy uses the web in a variety of ways to provide personalized, quality and enhanced care to his patients. He keeps them up to date with the latest advancements in plastic surgery and provides patients with easy access to information and education. By utilizing social platforms, his patients have the ability to easily contact him or other experienced experts and professionals for advice and dialogue.

When you hear NFL pundits say the season never ends, this is what they are referring to.

One of the more popular/important activities of the NFL Scouting Combine is the 40-yard dash. Entire careers are made (or broken) based on the amount of time it takes these prospects to travel 40 yards as quickly as they can. Not only have careers been made, but the NFL Scouting Combine also offers the opportunity to create a legend. Just ask Chris Johnson after his 40 time was posted.

There is, of course, video of Johnson’s monumental dash:

Does this mean Real Estate prices are on the rise? Not necessarily. What it does show is that when a seller includes social media in the process of marketing their home, the extra effort is proving to be very fiscally rewarding and well worth it. The Real Estate agent, Rob Elsom of Hocking Stuart Northcote, hired by this homeowner was blown away when 80 people (30% more than expected) showed up for the auction.

So what did Kurt do to get so much for his home? In tandem with his Real Estate firm and a website, he employed the use of free, easy to use online tools available to everyone. He set up a Twitter account and used it to promote his auction and feed traffic to his blog about the property. He created his blog in WordPress, posted his (Read more...)

State of Search’s Louis Venter has an extensive account of Kaushik’s speech. One interesting part is what he says about bounce rate. I’m not sure if these were Kaushik’s exact words, but Venter writes, “Bounce rate shows you how much you suck.”

One issue that’s been debated in the industry is how much of a signal bounce rate is in Google’s algorithm. If this is the message Kaushik is sending, however, it stands to reason that this is the message Google is sending. He is, after all, the digital marketing evangelist for the company, and the analytics guru.

Another highlight was the following list of “things you should measure for social contribution” as Venter conveys:

1) Conversation rate – if you talk does anyone care? The number of audience comments per social contribution will help measure this.

4) Economic Value – sum of your macro and micro conversions and how they contribute to your overall picture

Here’s some Twitter reaction to the event so far:

Attending the event? What has been the best part to you?

Haines shared the conversation at a Storify link, but here are the relevant tweets:

In a new study from Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University researchers had a team rate and review Facebook profiles of recently employed college students. The raters were given about ten minutes to review photos, posts, comments and interests on each profile and were then asked to answer a series of questions relating to personality. After six months, the ratings from the Facebook scores were compared to the graduates’ employee evaluations and a strong correlation was found between their scores and their actual job performance.

Desirable traits for employers such as conscientiousness, agreeability and intellectual curiosity were consistent with higher ratings and positives were also given to graduates with more friends, a wide range of hobbies, interests and that (Read more...)

Google indicates that these tips wil help publishers earn more, so they’re probably worth paying attention to.

“To generate these new types of notifications, we use our technology to simulate the ad auction for a specific ad unit using different ad type and/or ad format settings,” explains AdSense engineer Gregory Block. “If our simulation shows that any of these changed settings consistently result in higher revenue for that ad unit, we’ll show a recommendation in your account. Please note that these simulations will not affect your live traffic or earnings, and you’ll only see a recommendation if our simulated auction demonstrated increased revenue for your account.”

Publishers will see the recommendations on the “Home” tab in their accounts. The “Do this now” button can be clicked to quickly implement the suggestion.

“For ad format recommendations, clicking the ‘Create this unit’ button will create a new ad unit of the recommended ad format on the ‘My ads’ tab,” says Block. “To complete the implementation, replace the current ad unit code in your webpage(s) with the newly created ad unit code.”

The new tips will roll out over the next few weeks, Google says.

For more on all things AdSense, check out our AdSense coverage page.

State Senator John Wightman is the sponsor of a bill that would give the deceased’s representative power over their internet life – Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, email. The bill, LB783, comes as an amendment to state estate laws. Here’s the applicable part of the text:

A personal representative shall have the power, unless the personal representative’s authority has been restricted by will or by court order, to take control of, conduct, continue, or terminate any account of a deceased person on any social networking web site, microblogging or short message service web site, or email
service web site.

“The law must keep up with technology,” Wightmann said to New Scientist. “At this point, it has not.”

Apparently, the bill has run up against a bit of resistance. Some other legislators worry about privacy – whether an executor should just automatically take over the reigns to a deceased person’s content in its entirely. Other legislators feel that social networks themselves should be consulted in the drafting of such legislation.

As of right now, companies (Read more...)

Google released a statement shortly afterwards that claimed that the WSJ article was mischaracterizing the company’s intentions.

We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

…

Users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome were not affected. Nor were users of any browser (including Safari) who have opted out of our interest-based advertising program using Google’s Ads Preferences Manager.

Microsoft today describes a similar circumvention in the company’s Internet Explorer browser. IE blocks third party cookies by default, unless the site in question “presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site will use the cookie and that the site’s use does not include tracking the user”.

Google now has created a P3P policy that is causing the browser to accept Google cookies, even though the policy the company submits does not “state Google’s intent”.

P3P policies are included in a site’s HTTP headers which users only see if they use specialized tools. Instead of using a valid statement, Google is sending one that is not a P3P policy. The problem here is that browsers will interpret Google’s policy as an indication that the cookies that will be saved to the user’s system won’t be used for tracking purposes, when in fact they do not verify that at all.

Microsoft has created a tracking protection list that allows Internet Explorer 9 users to protect the browser from Google’s practice.

msFilterList
: Expires=1
# Blocks 3rd-party Google tracking
# Last Modified: 2/19/2012
#
-d news.google.com
-d youtube.com
-d blogger.com
- apis.google.com/*plusone*
-d plus.google.com
-d googleadservices.com
-d googletagservices.com
-d googlesyndication.com
-d googleadservices.com
-d google-analytics.com
-d doubleclick.net
-d doubleclick.com
- http://google.*/api/sclk?
- http://google.*/client_204?
- http://google.*/gen204?
- google.com*/lh/ajaxlog?
- google.com*/uds/stats?
- google.com*/bin/stats?
- google.com*/log?
- google.com*/buzz

Microsoft is now actively investigating options to change the browser’s interpretation of unrecognized tokens.

Given this real-world behavior, we are investigating what additional changes to make to our products. The P3P specification says that browsers should ignore unknown tokens. Privacy advocates involved in the original specification have recently suggested that IE ignore the specification and block cookies with unrecognized tokens. We are actively investigating that course of action.

Google being caught red-handed reaching into the cookie jar twice in a week’s time. What’s your take on this?

Update: Google has posted a statement

Statement: Attributable to Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice President of Communications and Policy, Google

Microsoft omitted important information from its blog post today.

Microsoft uses a “self-declaration” protocol (known as “P3P”) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well known – including by Microsoft – that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other websites.

Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational. A 2010 research report indicated that over 11,000 websites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft.

Here is some more information.

Issue has been around since 2002

For many years, Microsoft’s browser has requested every website to “self-declare” its cookies and privacy policies in machine readable form, using particular “P3P” three-letter policies.

Essentially, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser requests of websites, “Tell us what sort of functionality your cookies provide, and we’ll decide whether to allow them.” This didn’t have a huge impact in 2002 when P3P was introduced (in fact the Wall Street Journal today states that our DoubleClick ad cookies comply with Microsoft’s request), but newer cookie-based features are broken by the Microsoft implementation in IE. These include things like Facebook “Like” buttons, the ability to sign-in to websites using your Google account, and hundreds more modern web services. It is well known that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing this web functionality.

Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational.

In 2010 it was reported:

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari have simpler security settings. Instead of checking a site’s compact policy, these browsers simply let people choose to block all cookies, block only third-party cookies or allow all cookies…..

Thousands of sites don’t use valid P3P policies….

A firm that helps companies implement privacy standards, TRUSTe, confirmed in 2010 that most of the websites it certifies were not using valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft:

Despite having been around for over a decade, P3P adoption has not taken off. It’s worth noting again that less than 12 percent of the more than 3,000 websites TRUSTe certifies have a P3P compact policy. The reality is that consumers don’t, by and large, use the P3P framework to make decisions about personal information disclosure.

A 2010 research paper by Carnegie Mellon found that 11,176 of 33,139 websites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft.

In the research paper, among the websites that were most frequently providing different code to that requested by Microsoft: Microsoft’s own live.com and msn.com websites.

Microsoft support website

The 2010 research paper “discovered that Microsoft’s support website recommends the use of invalid CPs (codes) as a work-around for a problem in IE.” This recommendation was a major reason that many of the 11,176 websites provided different code to the one requested by Microsoft.

Google’s provided a link that explained our practice.

Microsoft could change this today

As others are noting today, this has been well known for years.

Privacy researcher Lauren Weinstein states: “In any case, Microsoft’s posting today, given what was already long known about IE and P3P deficiences in these regards, seems disingenuous at best, and certainly is not helping to move the ball usefully forward regarding these complex issues.”

Chris Soghoian, a privacy researcher, points out: “Instead of fixing P3P loophole in IE that FB & Amazon exploited ……MS did nothing. Now they complain after Google uses it.”

Even the Wall Street Journal says: “It involves a problem that has been known about for some time by Microsoft and privacy researchers….”

Some interesting stats it lays out:

- Word of mouth is the primary factor behind up to 50% of buying decisions
- Blogs on company sites result in 55% more visitors
- Companies with blogs get 97% more inbound links than others
- 37% of marketers say blogs are the most valuable content type for marketing

That’s just a few.