According to Science Daily’s summary of the research done by the University of Oklahoma,

Wii bowling and beginner level DDR elicited a 2-fold increase in energy expenditure compared to television watching. Overall, the energy expenditure during active video game play was comparable to moderate-intensity walking. Thus, for children who spend considerable time playing electronic screen games for entertainment, OU researchers found that substituting that time with physically active games can be a safe, fun and valuable means of promoting energy expenditure.

Let me give you a little of my own research.

Test 1: Sit on my derriere for 10 minutes watching TV. Am I tired? Nope. Not even a little.

Test 2: Play a Wii game like bowling or boxing or even yoga for 10 minutes. Am I tired? Nope. I’m EXHAUSTED.

Still not convinced? Would pictures make a difference?

Research Test 1:

Research Test 2:

I’m not sure what kind of research our universities are conducting these days, but I’m pretty sure this is the kind that does NOT need to be undertaken.

Go get your kids a Wii, let them play some physically active games, and know in your inner soul that they are expending energy. Really, you don’t need any scientific research to tell you that. It’s a Duh moment.

Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.

Now, while Microsoft may be hoping that people will associate the name of their revamped search engine, Bing, with “the ringing of a bell that signals the ‘aha’ moment when a search leads to an answer”, I would venture to guess that CNN chose to use Bing as the search-engine-as-a-verb, instead of one of the other two major search engines, for entirely different reasons.

Let’s face it, Googling or Yahooing Miss Biel doesn’t exactly inspire any sexual connotations whatsoever, whereas I know there are plenty of people who wanted to “Bing Jessica Biel” long before Microsoft grabbed the name.

Subtle, CNN. Very subtle.

I decided to go through the affiliate operating agreement myself to see if I could understand why they were doing this. I realized after I read it that they were not in fact saying any such thing. I wrote them to see what was up, and what the specific issues were.

It took 4 emails to them, with the first 3 coming back with the same answer, that they were not allowed because you are not allowed to use redirects. The problem is that the language of the agreement only mentions redirects in conjunction with either ppc traffic (you cannot link a ppc ad directly to Amazon, or via a redirect, it requires a click from your site to be valid), and with hijacking someone else’s traffic (no redirecting or interfering with someone else participating in the program). Eventually, however, I got someone who understood what I was saying and they agreed that it is indeed acceptable to do so. Here is there final reply:

Dear Michael,

Thank you for writing back to us and I sincerely apologize for the delay in responding to your message. I have carefully reviewed your correspondence with us. As you mention, you would not be permitted to use a shortened URL to an Amazon.com page as the destination URL for paid search advertisements because Associates are not permitted to engage in keyword bidding or other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks, to send traffic to our site.

However, you can use shortened URLs on your Facebook or Twitter accounts. You may be asked to provide the specific sites on which the shortened URLs are posted, which would mean that your Facebook and Twitter profiles would need to be publicly accessible for review if you used the URLs on those sites.

I apologize for the misunderstanding regarding your inquiry and I hope this information is helpful to you. If you have further questions, please use the Contact Us form available on Associates Central or by following this link:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact

Thank you for your participation in the Associates Program.

Best regards,

Richard – Associates Account Specialist
http://www.amazon.com

Note that he did state that the specific sites where you intended to post the links needed to be provided, so if you are an Amazon affiliate and think you might possibly post a link on either Twitter or Facebook, you should probably submit those profiles to Amazon asap and go ahead and get them listed in your Amazon account. One of the other emails from them gave me these instructions for doing so:

If you would like to add another website or multiple websites to your existing Associates account, we first need to view and approve the sites content before it can be added.

Please send us the URLs for the sites, and we will review them and let you know our decision. Once approved, we will send you instructions on how to add the URLs to your account. You can contact us back by using the secure form at the following specialized link:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact/

Keep in mind that if your Facebook page is set on private we will be unable to approve its addition to your account because we need to be able to view your site at any given time to make sure you are in compliance with our guidelines.

I have gone ahead and provided the entire conversation thread with Amazon here. I hope this helps anyone who might have had issues with this.

I ran a search today. It was a real search. In other words, this search wasn’t something I was researching as a search professional. This wasn’t a search for one of the high keyword value phrases. This was just me … being an ordinary user … wanting to find some information. And what I discovered was that Google failed me, big time, with absolutely nothing in the first ten results that was of any relevance to my query.

Now at first, I assumed *I* was the problem. After all, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if you don’t give us the answers we are looking for, then we must have asked the wrong question. And just as I was about to figure out how to rephrase my query, I decided to do something else first.

I decided to run the same query in both Yahoo and Bing.

And guess what happened?

I received relevant results!

Now, to be fair, the results weren’t perfect, and they didn’t fully answer my question, but both Yahoo and Bing proved that they at least had a basic understanding of what it was I was looking for! You, Google, on the other hand, seemed utterly clueless.

So what was this question of mine? Well, I was daydreaming about moving to some exotic locale in which one could live quite well for relatively little money. And I was wondering where such locales might be. So I entered in this long-tail query:

[countries where one can live well with little money]

Go ahead. Tell me it’s my fault and please educate me on how I could have worded that query in such a way as to help you understand what I want. In the meantime, I’ll take a second and third look at Yahoo and Bing more often. (If you want to compare, here is that same query in Yahoo and Bing.)

Oh, and just so you don’t feel too badly, Google. You should know that before I even tried this query on your search engine, I first tried to get the information from Wolfram|Alpha. I thought that since it involved currency, countries, and numbers, it would have great answers. Unfortunately, like everything else I’ve tried to get out of Wolfram|Alpha (which is a terrible name, btw, but that’s another topic for another day), I got nothing but the same old message, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” So, to your credit, Google, at least you guessed … even if your guesses were painfully wrong.

Sincerely,

A frustrated search user

WTF? A poop-free chicken waterer? What??? Wait, I don’t even want to know.

I mean, seriously… wtf??

Today I receive this email from someone by the name of Joel Drapper:

Hey,

I’ve got a little problem.

The other day, I had this great idea to make a single PHP file that downloads, and extracts WordPress to make installing it much easier, and faster. So after I coded it, I asked a few of my friends for suggestions on a name. Most of them said EasyWP which sounded pretty good so I went ahead with it.

That evening, I put together the website (http://easywp.9milesMedia.com), but wasn’t going to launch it till the next morning when I decided what I was going to licence it under, etc. and was tweeting through this process. Then @smashingmag asked me if I could send it to them. I DMed them a link to the website that I’d set up, telling them that I wasn’t launching it quite yet, but they could see it early.

Moments later, my friends told me that he just Googled EasyWP and someone else (you) had made a similar file. I decided that it was probably a good idea to go ahead with my version anyway as I wanted to do a lot more with it then I could see you had done (I wanted to do an ftp version, etc. too in future update), but was going to change the name to something else because you had already used it for your file.

Unfortunately before I could do this, @smashingmag had tweeted a link to my version, and that link has now been retweeted over 100 times. It also ended up getting over 100 delicious bookmarks, and multiple blogs writing about.

I have a method of informing users of updates to the script, and I can set up 301 redirects, etc. but it’s going to be really hard now as it’s so well branded as EasyWP. I was just wondering if maybe you would allow me to keep the name? As I said, I can change it if you really want me to, but I’d rather come to some kind of agreement on this.

I’m sorry for not checking that the name was free earlier.

Thanks for taking the time to read this email.

I look forward to hearing form you.

Have a great day!

The script this guy wrote, at least in it’s current version, is slightly inferior to mine, does the exact same thing, came out a year after mine, and he gave it the same name. The only difference is that he got lucky enough to have @smashingmag to tweet the link for him. As a result, his script is getting a ton of attention. Despite that fact that he discovered that his script, including the name, was basically a direct rippoff of mine, he decides to continue to promote the script:

Since he did state that the whole situation was an accident, I suggested to him what I felt would be the right thing for him to do at this point:

Joel,

Ok, for starters, please stop promoting/tweeting your product until we have hashed this out. Your claims of this being an honest mistake seem much less sincere the more you promote this using the EasyWP name. Honestly, the fact that you didn’t issue a public apology for not researching the concept and the name the moment you discovered that you were plagiarizing, even though you claim it was accidental, surprises me a little. 19 minutes after tweeting that you discovered that the script had already been done and the name used for that exact purpose, you start promoting your script using that name, and you never stopped.

You said that you planned to go further with your script that I did mine, but as it stands currently not only is your script not really any kind of improvement over mine, but additionally it is lacking a couple of features that mine already has built in (such as checking permissions or allowing the user to upload their own version of wp, should they not want to go with the current one). Seeing as that is the case, and seeing as I released mine almost a year ago, this is what I think should happen from here:

1) I think that you should write an apology post for not doing any research before releasing your product, explain how the name was already being used for a near identical script, and how the original script actually has features yours does not. I think you should include in your apology your reasoning, whatever it was, for not letting people know right away and why you instead continued to promote your product without even mentioning mine.

2) Since my script does in fact offer things that yours doesn’t, I think you should simply 301 your current download page to mine.

3) You should ask Smashing Magazine help you get the word out about the original script, seeing as if you actuality did tell them that it was a sneak preview for their eyes only then they should not have tweeted it.

4) In the future if you do write a script with more/better features than mine then yes, I do hope that you use a different name.

Now Joel, obviously I cannot make you do anything, and you will of course do whatever you want. Only your own personal set of ethics will dictate what happens hereon out with this. It’s up to you.

Peace.

-Michael

Joel, however, is unwilling to give up the attention that comes with getting a mention from someone with the prestige of Smashing Magazine’s Twitter account, and all of the subsequent blogging that results from that. He claims he will give it another name, and come clean about what happened, in a few days after he updates the script. I asked him why he wouldn’t fess up now, but he really couldn’t give a good answer for that one, so he just replied that they were “taking this seriously and are actively coding updates, and sorting out the hosting”.

Do I know for a fact that Joel didn’t find my script and decide that passing off a similar one as his own was a good idea? Nope. No way to know those kinds of things. I do know that it took him almost 24 hours to contact me, and that he only did so after the script started to get tons of attention on Twitter. I also know that he refuses to make it right while there is still a large amount of buzz about it. I think that most responsible adults with any concept of business ethics would immediately own up to what happened, drop the script, and find some other idea to develop.

The problem is, Joel Drapper isn’t a responsible adult… he’s a 16 year old kid that is part of a group of 9 other kids aged 13 – 16:

9miles Media is a small, unique graphic & web design group comprised of nine creative teenage entrepreneurs (age 13-16) from all over the world. We adore what we do, and you’ll adore what we can do for you.

So, what do you do in a situation like this? Give them a pass because of their age? Trust their word that it really was an accident, despite their refusal to make it right? Having a hard time figuring this one out myself.

Although a change to AJAX technology would only make searches milliseconds faster, those milliseconds add up, allowing people to do more searches, faster. And that would let Google grow even more, eating up percentage points along the way. – Sarah Perez

However, what was missed by many in all of this is that when Google implemented this “fix” to retain the referrer, it wasn’t actually fixed in the way that they described in their blog post. What Brett Crosby highlighted in his post was the referring url itself that webmasters might start seeing in their traffic logs, and how it would be retaining the q= parameter for analytics packages to make use of, and nothing at all about how they were actually accomplishing this. He omitted these details even though he qualified the post in the opening by saying that they were writing it “for the most geeky among us”, and real geeks would want to know the nuts and bolts of what was happening. What neither he nor Google spokesperson Eitan Bencuya mentioned when discussing this is that the magic of retaining the referrer was not accomplished by simply coming up with a new url structure… due to the way that all major browsers function, just changing the url won’t fix the issue. Google engineers, to the best of my knowledge and generally speaking, are smart people. They know this. It simply cannot be done. Therefore what they did is to create a second, interim landing page that users are funneled though when they click on a link in the serps. This page then loads some Javascript that is processed, which when complete fires either a Javascript driven redirect or a meta refresh in the users browser, eventually bringing them to their final destination page.

If you happen to be getting served these new urls, you can see what the Javascript code on these new pages looks like by right clicking on the url and choosing to save the target. If you then view the file in a text editor, you will see code similar to this (there are a couple of variations on what code they are testing, apparently):

<script>if(parent!=window&&parent.google){parent.location.href='http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/';location.replace('about:blank')}else{location.replace('http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/')}</script><noscript><META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/"></noscript>

which was generated by saving this url:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bad-neighborhood.com%2F&ei=YVbnSYraM5CNtgevkpzLBQ&rct=j&q=bad+neighborhood&usg=AFQjCNH7sp5nWWhaVsJafdeL1Rw8-TTXxA

Why does this matter? Well, remember, the gain that Google is getting from doing this switchover to AJAX is, on a per-search basis, minimal at best. It is in the area of milliseconds. Now to correct something that it breaks they are adding in two additional slowdowns to the navigation process… the delivery of more html, which although tiny does involve time itself to connect to the server and deliver the actual code, and the processing time of each browser to either interpret the Javascript or trigger the meta refresh. This not only nullifies any benefit that would be gained by switching to AJAX in the first place, in many, many cases it will actually cause the searches to be slower than if Google had just left things alone.

Google is aware of this too. Matt Cutts mentioned again the other day how he wished there was a better solution:

The problem is, of course, the better solution is to not make the changes. Unless all mainstream browsers recode the way that they handle url fragments after the hash mark (#), and Google waits until everybody in the world upgrades to those versions, it’s just not going to happen.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that Google is actually cloaking these new urls that they are delivering to people? If you happen to have your status bar turned on, and you mouse over a url in the serps, it shows you the final destination page instead of the actual one:

However, if you click on the url (even a right click), the true target suddenly appears:

Not that big of a deal, I know, and nothing that they haven’t done before, but still. Between that and the “don’t bother reading this post, it’s just for geeks” intro on the Google Analytics blog post it almost seems like Google is making an effort to not have these new changes noticed. If this change is such a great idea, I would have to wonder why that would be.

Shortly thereafter, the tests appeared to have stopped. People stopped thinking that Google was linking to them from their homepage, and in very short time the buzz died down about it.

Yesterday afternoon, someone pointed out to me that the subject came up again during Matt Cutt’s keynote address at PubCon South. According to Lisa Barone’s live blogging efforts the conversation went something like this:

Brett: How about the JavaScript test.

Matt: That was really funny. The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible. JavaScript makes the search results a lot faster. Suppose you do a search for flowers, as you’re typing flowers, they can do a query from the back end and fold search results right into the page. You’re still in Google.com and they can pull in the results automatically. It doesn’t give you the referrer. He says the team didn’t think about the referrer aspect. So they stopped. They’ve paused it until they can find out how to keep the referrers.

Ok, fine. So they didn’t know about the referrer issue (and didn’t give me credit for pointing it out to them before it was more than just a test, *cough* *cough*), so they stopped until they can figure out a way to fix it.

Less than 1 hour after reading that, I happened to notice an over-abundance of url’s in the serps that were getting redirected though Google’s url redirection service. For those who are unaware of what I mean by that, it is a tool that Google uses to enhance their own behind-the-scenes tracking of user behavior. You can see it most consistently when Google displays sitelinks. They redirect the clicks through their own tracking mechanism first, so that they can determine how many people are actually using those extra links. Instead of going directly to the page in question, it goes through a link like this:

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm&ei=in…

If you view one of those links using a header detector, you can see that after doing whatever tracking they do on their backend, they then redirect the user via a 302 Redirect onwards to the final destination page:

User-Agent used to fetch header:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051206 Firefox/3.0

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:44:42 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Length: 247

Occasionally you will see these Google redirects in the normal serps as well, although usually not. The thing is, I was seeing them on every search I performed. It struck me as odd, until I suddenly realized that every search was being done via AJAX:

Here’s the problem, Google. That will not fix the referrer issue, which is what the issue is with every non-Google analytics package that exists. Without that, then the traffic coming from Google cannot be accurately analyzed (unless, of course, the analytics program has access to whatever it is that Google’s redirect script is recording). For one, a 302 redirect passes on the referrer of the original page, not the one of the tracking script, and for another there are no unencrypted keywords included in your tracking urls. It doesn’t take pushing the test to the live servers to figure this out, either. The engineers had to have known this beforehand. This means that if Matt was correct, and Google did indeed stop the testing until they could make it work with analytics, then the only analytics package they were worried about AJAX serps working with is Google Analytics.

Lisa Barone wrote a piece talking about personal brands and false idols on the web. In it she wrote the following paragraph:

Don’t support personal brands built on smoke and mirrors. Make people work for the brands they’re trying to create. Don’t let them scoble their way in. Don’t accept that someone is important just because they act like they are or someone told you they were.

Apparently Robert is the ultra sensitive type, and didn’t take too kindly to her choice of wordage. Here is his reply:

Wow, Bob. Way to identify with the lowly masses out there.