Adsense click fraud

There has been an article about Adsense click fraud in the Digit Magazine November 2007 edition. And I'm quoting the main contents if that article here. Manish Arora, a security analyst developed this script and the guys at digit got to test it.

It works like this. You set up an Adsense account and implement it in your blog,site etc. Since then, whenever visitor clicks link out to another site, an image or a video, these clicks are registered as a valid adsense click. Need I say more? Manish Arora had made thousands of dollars with this technique but still haven't took any of the money. The test team at Digit have successfully tested his script. Manish wrote to Google sating that he can provide them with the mechanism, but they haven't accepted it yet.

What if I get that code ?

Yahoo mash - a review

Hi.. folks, for sometime I've been checking out Yahoo mash, Yahoo's attempt to a soclial networking site. I got my invitation from a bud at Digital point forums. Checkout his blog at Nspeaks.com. Here I'm spending some time to write a small review of MASH.

One thing that made me wonder is the way we invite a friend to mash. When you send him an invitation, you have to make a profile for him, and let him claim it(he may choose the create new profile option also). It's a wonderful Idea. you can also import you contacts from Yahoo,Hotmail or Gmail.Your friends can edit your profile too (Wiki anyone ?).

The profile; we can edit it using css to our liking. Thanks(or is it?) to Yahoo, there HTML is not allowed. Otherwise, it would've been like those heavy Myspace profiles which takes long time to load, even in broadband connections.

There are a lot of modules to choose from. They add uniqueness to our profiles. As for now the number of modules are not much, but we can expect a lot of them in future,as Yahoo is going to open their development platform to 3rd party developers. If you think you can do a good job developing new and interesting modules, get to this page. There are some modules preinstalled, when we first get to our profile- like Blurt, Guest book, Flickr RSS etc..
On the top navigation bar, there's Pulse where you can track what were going on with your profile. In tags, we can add a tag. By clicking it we can get to the different users who have the same tag

After all Mash Looks cool, but there should be good changes in the nearby future. There might have been a theme system which allows users to spice up their profile. The outline of each modules looks a bit out of place. As for now I don't think it will make a lot of reaction from India

Note : My neighbour, regular Orkut user asked me about mash(Orkut is widely popular in India). he wanted an invite too. When I gave him a brief about mash and showed how a profile would look like in the early stages, he said he don't want a invite. The layout and looks are pathetic he says. Hi mash team... are you listening ?

yahoo mashweb 2.0social networking

Laszlo Webtop

It's referred as a 'web 2.0' desktop by the company. as far as i could see it looks pretty cool.

From Laszlo's website :
Laszlo Webtop: The Web 2.0 DesktopTM
Webtop delivers users a web-based workspace—or “webtop”—that consists of multiple modular components that integrate with each other, providing extensive visual styling and branding. For example, a company’s brand can be applied to a set of applications in Webtop or even individual applications within it, reflecting numerous options for branding and site consistency.

The following animation below illustrates how Webtop, shown below with Mail and Contacts with the default Silver skin, can be customized to look completely different.

From an end-user point of view, Laszlo Webtop provides the following capabilities:

• Users can take advantage of a one-time log-in option for access to all applications

• A seamlessly integrated on-line desktop-like experience with multiple windows without any page refreshes

• The state of a user's desktop is automatically remembered across sessions

• A user can easily drag and drop objects between windows and application modules by leveraging SmartObjects

Right now I'm going to download a evaluation copy of it.

Yahoo & Cisco into social networking...

With Yahoo and Cisco jumping into the social networking bandwagon, the scene is becoming hot.

Yahoo MASH is now a invitation only Beta service now.Check the yahoo MASH Blog for upadtes. Cisco haven't started it yet. Check it out at 5Across. Yahoo is also Going to shut down their yahoo 360 service as it haven't made much response from users.With a lot of facilities Yahoo is aiming to break in to the league of Myspace and facebook.With CSS editing (to give your profile a unique look) and widgets I think it's gonna be a success .I'm looking forward to 5Across also.

Currently I don't have a MASH account, but I'm gonna have one soon and write more about MASH.
"web 2.0", Social networking

Web feeds

Web Feeds

Feeds are a way for an end user to get the updated content on a website without visiting the site. Feed are standard option today in sites that get updated time by time, and blogs. To use a feed you need some feed reader programs technically known as aggregators.They can be online or offline also. Aggregators check for updated content periodically. Content delivered by feeds are typically in HTML format. Feeds have many advantages - Unlike email subscription, you don't have to disclose your email ID to a website. The biggest advantage is that they minimize the pain of going to each website to know whether they are updated or not.

Browsers like firefox and Opera, Internet Explorer 7.0 have inbuilt feed readers. But I haven't checked out IE 7.0 (It's been a while since I stopped using IE). There are some mobile feed readers also.You can also add a webfeed to your personalized homepage services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, My MSN etc. So you don't have to worry about feeds while you are browsing from an internet cafe.

A feed is usually in XML format. It can be vary according to the type of feed. The two types are RSS and ATOM. They might have also extension like .rss or .atom respectively. By the way, the feed on my blog is ATOM.

some good feed readers
Greatnews -
RssReader -
FeedReader -
RSS Bandit -
RSS Owl -

for smartphones
Smaato
Moby Pocket Reader



One of the reasons I stopped using IE was it didn't have any inbuilt feed reader.It's slow also.