Allfacebook.com recently published a handy list of 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.
Included in the list are instructions for creating custom friend lists, removing yourself from search results, preventing tagged photos of you from being visible to all, and restricting access to stories and contact information. It’s a very handy guide with some seriously good tips on how to protect yourself in the big bad world of friendface. 🙂
For those of you interested in seeing what South Africans search for, here’s the Google Zeitgeist 2008 for South Africa. It’s actually quite boring in some places. I mean who googles for yahoo? Or googling for facebook? Or the worst – googling for google? An indication perhaps of immaturity in South African search usage? I thought so, until I looked at some of the US and UK trends, and we’re not that far away from them…
Some of the most popular searches included Load Shedding and of course the FIFA 2010 World Cup. This year’s Zeitgeist also reflects important South African concerns like Xenophobia, along with rising interest in new developments like the Gautrain. South Africans were keen to stay up to date on politics, with high volumes of searches around Thabo Mbeki’s resignation, and around international events like the elections in the USA and Zimbabwe. Take a look below to get sense of the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, in South Africa for 2008.
political party)
These two blue tits above give us a great reminder of what you get yourself into when you start looking for a social media specialist. Everyone’s on the bandwagon, so you’re better off approaching the straight-talking technical rockstar, someone with a proven skill, experience, ability and great in-depth knowledge of computing, the internet and all things web 2.0, instead of getting a marketer-turned-so-called-“internet guru” to waste your money for you.
The single most irritating thing about South Africans, the interwebs, and web 2.0 is that nobody can dream up a single original idea and build it. (Except for, I’m hoping, this guy). We copy muti from digg, amatomu and afrigator from technorati, Synthasite from [choose-your-lame-site-builder], Blueworld “social network” (ahem!) from myspace, AmaGama/iBlog from WordPress.com/Blogger, Zoopy/YouTube, the list goes on, and then we slap some really stupid justification like “we are localising it for a South African audience“.
Yeah, localising it for what South African audience? The one that uses the *other* internet that we have in SA, not the *real* Internet? Come on.
Yes, you all suck on originality, copycats, and that pisses me off.
But there’s a new one. And oh, how the mighty have fallen!
After bitching and whining and moaning and circle-jerking in a great hoohaa about how Regator kinda sorta maybe looks a bit like Afrigator, yes I’m looking at you Mike, and Stii, and Justin, and co, you have the nerve to launch Adgator on the site design of Text Link Ads. That’s pretty low. And Lame. You couldn’t even change all the text…
Did you honestly think nobody would notice? Or was I surfing on that *real* Internet that doesn’t have an audience in SA and this is a better more “localized” version?
Sorry to be so blunt guys, but you just fucked yourselves. How do we take you seriously now, when you’re being hypocrites and copycats? Even worse, I don’t want to be angry – I like you guys!
Go on! Click the image below: See for yourself.
(BTW, I’m not against a South African ad network – that idea does make sense. Yes I do want to use Adgator to sell ads on my site, I think its a great thing, but it’s risking being horribly spoiled by some designer laziness.)
Of course I’m looking forward to the entertaining comments and excuses… 😉
[I’ve just seen that Chris M spotted this a couple days back…]
Over the past few days I’ve been messing around with Google Webmaster Tools in an effort to make sure that all the little bugs and issues from my major blog upgrade, from b2evolution to wordpress, a few months back are ironed out.
As always, there tend to be silly little things that are the real pest – misspelled words, poor grammar, obscure comment links and the odd stray feed needing a redirect, all of which were quickly sorted out. After first digging into a few Apache mod_rewrite rules, of course.
I was reading through some tips on the Google Webmasters Help pages when I stumbled on this gem: “We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.” Say what? I looked through my archives, and discovered to my dread that all my old content used underscores in the titles. “Eish. Oh well, this is Google, they can probably figure it out anyway – it’s a simple character substitution in their algorithm. It probably doesn’t matter that much.” I thought. But then I picked up in a guest blog entry by Vanessa Fox on Matt Cutts site that there is a distinct difference in the way Google handles underscores and dashes:
‘”african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.’ This statement alone indicates a huge difference in exposure because of this one trivial character.
That made up my mind to try the big change, but it would require jumping through a few hoops:
1) Changing all the old urls to new urls with dashes instead of underscores. That’s a lot of editing.
2) Redirecting any existing requests for underscore-urls to the new dash-url. That’s a lot of redirecting.
3) Hoping like hell that it worked.
Fortunately problem 1 could be solved by a simple mysql command:
mysql> update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name,'_','-');
And problem 2 was easily resolved with the Dash Redirect WordPress Plugin.
I suspect the Dash Redirect Plugin can actually fix both issues at once, but I only discovered this after I’d already changed my urls.
Today I’m feeling good karma from the synchronicity of my blog.