From a msg from StopBadWare.org:

Google – which is one of our partners – will now present people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware. These warnings currently link to a general page on StopBadware.org, but as we finish researching sites, we’ll replace the general page with one of our individual website reports.

Very interesting. This could prevent millions of people from loading up their machines with viruses and other types of malware when they think they’re just downloading a free font or signing up for a newsletter.

<[>But I feel just a tad ambivalent. I know and trust folks at StopBadWare. It’s in part a Berkman venture. And it makes 100% sense as a plug-in. But although Google is of course technically an edge app, in the geopolitics of the Net, it’s a sort of upper-stack center (if that made any sense), so it makes me just a tad anxious when it begins dis-recommending (dreckommending?) sites. On the other hand, if Google used StopBadWare’s data to lower the page rank of malefactors, I wouldn’t feel as anxious, so I think I’m just being irrational. Overall, giving users a tool — especially one as open as StopBadWare — for avoiding tricksters and traps is a positive step. [NOTE (added the next day): I should have noted that I'm an advisor to a company (SiteAdvisor) that has a plugin that does roughly what StopBadWare does. I like both organizations and have no financial reason to shill for SiteAdvisor.] [Tags: google stopbadware malware]

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Mario Sixtus of Handlesblatt has posted a video interview he did in which he asked me about Cluetrain, PR, ID, Web 2.0, etc. [Tags: mario_sixtus cluetrain marketing pr]

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Tim Bray has posted Measuring the Web, an award-winning talk he gave in 1996 when he was at Open Text (Tim was a founder and head tech strategist; I had joined as marketing vp), one of the early Web indexing companies. A snapshot in November 1995 found 11,366,121 unique URLs and 223,851 unique servers. Current estimates are omigod unique URLs and you-gotta-be-kidding unique servers.

Lots of other interesting stats in the paper, including size of the average page, average number of embedded images (“just over 50% of all pages contain at least one image reference”), and number o links. [Tags: tim_bray web]

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Microformats are quick-and-dirty standards for expressing common data types. The standard example is a microformat for reviews which lets a blogger encode the expected data — name of the reviewed thing, number of stars, commentary, etc. — in a standard way so another app can harvest it and, perhaps, aggregate all the reviews of restaurants in Watertown. Microformats are developed quickly, using what’s out there as a starting point, aiming at usable but probably incomplete standards, as opposed to setting up an industry committee to argue for 12 years about what Platonic ideal of the standard.

So, today Technorati [Disclosure: I'm on the board of advisors and I'm friends with a bunch of Technoratians] announced that Technorati is going to provide searching that understands the data in microformats. For example, if you search for “chinese” within reviews, you get back reviews of Chinese restaurants but not blogs that talk about Chinese Checkers. (I assume that at some point Technorati’s microformats search — currently a research beta — will let us do fielded searches within microformat domains, e.g., have a box where we can enter dates when searching for events.)

Technorati also announced Pingerati, a service that aggregates and distributes microformat pings to anyone who wants them. So, if you have a calendar app that supports microformats, you can set it to ping Pingerati whenever you update it. Anyone who wants to build an app that uses updated calendar information can subscribe to it. (Unlike existing ping services, Pingerati is designed to work for pages that aren’t blogs as well as for blogs.) Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, says that Pingerati is free both to pingers and to those who want to receive the pings.

This is all good news because we need more metadata. Metadata lets us surf the information tsunami. Microformats are highly useful, but they won’t be adopted unless there are apps that make use of them. Today’s announcements make it easier for others to make something out of microformat data.

Hats off to Tantek Çelik for the enormous amount of work he’s put into this, and to Technorati for enabling Tantek to do this. [Tags: microformats standards metadata technorati tantek_celik pingorati search]

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Two learned, serious friends sorting through the world:

The oft-unraveling RageBoy is raveling like mad. In Spiritual but not Jewish he’s on about the connection of New Age thinking and the history of racism. I love the title of his post, making concrete exactly what one who says “spiritual but not religious” is rejecting (where one substitutes the speaker’s religion for “Jewish,” as appropriate). Since I think “spiritual but not religious” exhibits the Fear of Being Historical that is the basis of so much of the West’s self-loathing, it works for me. (There’s nothing as pathetic as a culture that loathes itself for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, has a culture ever loathed itself for the right reasons?)

Meanwhile, Ethan recently had a fascinating and detailed post about the languages of the Web now and upcoming. Also not to be missed: Ethan on what the US can learn about Net neutrality from Africa.

[Tags: chris_locke rageboy ethan_zuckerman net_neutrality newage spirituality language web]

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In late 2005, the Internet got its one billionth customer. The rumor is that the lucky winner received a lifetime supply of pornographic spam and genuine Nigerian scams. Just like the rest of us.

According to a report from eMarketer, 845M use the Internet “regularly.” About 250M households (how many people per household, I wonder) will have broadband this year. Although the US has the most Internet users and broadband households, Asia-Pacific has almost 40% of the world’s broadband households. Latin America is growing fastest.

For more details – like why with, say, 2.5 people per household, the total broadband population number seems implausibly high – please send $700 to eMarketer. And then spill the beans about what you find out. [Tags: internet]

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I’m talking on Sunday morning at my brother and sister-in-law’s local Ethical Culture chapter in Maplewood, NJ. My topic is “Is the Internet moral?” My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, posted a notice on the local community bulletin board, immediately drawing a bunch of well-earned contemptuous comments. Lively, to say the least.

I gave a talk at DAMA on Wednesday where someone reminded me about a piece I wrote in 2000. It lays out what I plan on saying on Sunday (skipping the non-moral metaphysics parts). I also realized how much it lays out what became Small Pieces Loosely Joined. (I hate the beginning of the piece. Bad bad writing.) [Tags: internet morality meredith_sue_willis]

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The Museum of Modern Betas is a frequently-updated list of betas. You can see them listed in order of popularity as measured by the number of bookmarks at Delicious.com, or in a tag cloud, etc. The reliance on Delicious means that it’s not a scrubbed list on which you’ll only find beta-ish betas — for example, Flickr is a beta in name only, and the web2.0 list is not actually a beta at all — but if you want perfect precision, you’re probably not all that interested in ragtag betas anyway [Tags: betas museum_or_modern_betas software]

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That Susan is on the board of ICANN should give us hope. Read her post about the latest meeting… [Tags: susan_crawford icann]

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KiJiJi is like CraigsList with sites in various cities in the northern hemisphere (+ Australia and New Zealnad), but, conspicuously, none in the US. (“Kijiji means “village” in Swahili. Plus, it has five dotted letters in a row.)

Competition is almost always a good thing. But CraigsList is so good, and so good-hearted, that I’m not filled with joy at the thought of the fragmentation competition brings. My feelings, they are mixed. (One of the threads at the Toronto site asks if anyone has actually made a sale on it yet. Not a lot of yes responses yet. But give it time.)

[Tags: craigslist kijiji]

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