Tech Commentary
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review matching the category Tech Commentary.
Some of the recent press releases from various companies trying to flog SEO services to large companies would be comical if they weren’t so tragic. Real search engine optimisation involves a lot more than merely looking at what tags and metadata are present in a webpage. One new company trying to flog SEO to the Irish market even sent out its press release before it had its website operational. Another did a survey of what it claimed was the top 100 Irish company websites. Now how would it know? There are at least 200K Irish domains and many of them would get more traffic than some of what are supposed to be the top Irish companies.
WhoisIreland will publish a survey of identified Irish websites dealing their title / keyword / description and other metadata. Spidering the websites is the easy part. This is something that WhoisIreland does anyway to provide the stats on the front page. The hard part is developing an accurate parser because sometimes HTML is not written in a text book format.
A preliminary .ie section is already done. The interesting thing is that there are parked .ie domains but the number is dwarved by the number of active .ie websites. Some interesting patterns are emerging. Some sites use Google Adsense for monetisation but Yahoo’s Publisher Network hardly even registers. There are some 12 .ie domains that are parked on Sedo. Compared to .eu and many other ccTLDs, the .ie ccTLD is more utilised and healthier.
Tags: Irishblogs , IEDR , Domains , .ie , Internet Statistics , SEO, Search Engine Optimisation
Written by John McCormac on March 27th, 2007 with 5 comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines and Tech Commentary.
EURid relaunched its website on February 5th and screwed it up. The www.eurid.eu website was previously readable. Now it is just another entry in EURid’s catalogue of failures.
You’d think that a registry would employ proper web designers. But EURid is supporting the Open Source to such an extent that its web developers (who use black text on a dark blue background) didn’t even bother to change the meta data in the Joomla implementation:
In the Meta data the following lines are present:
meta name=“description” content=“Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system”
meta name=“keywords” content=“Joomla, joomla”
meta name=“Generator” content=“Joomla! - Copyright (C) 2005 - 2006 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.”
With all the millions of Euros they had extracted from Irish and UK companies for failed Sunrise 2 registrations, you’d think that EURid could employ web developers who were competent enough to change the default settings on the CMS used for the registry website.
As for the colour scheme - black text on a dark blue background? What are these guys using for a monitor? I suppose that the management of EURid know even less about web design than they do about legitimate registrars and the domain business. The sooner the European Commission strips EURid of the contract to run .eu ccTLD, the better it will be for the EU.
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu, Domains, Joomla, Web design, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on February 7th, 2007 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and News Bytes and Tech Commentary.
The Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007 published on Friday may potentially be a death warrant for the IEDR. It contains enough provisions to effectively remove the administration of .ie ccTLD from IEDR should the Communications Regulator (ComReg) so wish. It also allows Comreg to levy IEDR and if necessary, fine it for non-compliance.
The first interesting amendment is this:
32.—(1) The purpose of this Part is to facilitate easy comprehension, fairness, transparency, avoidance of deception, promotion of fair competition and public confidence with respect to the use of ‘.ie’ domain names.
While it looks harmless it is rather powerful. Domainwarehosing and cybersquatting operations are effectively covered by this. The main domain warehousing/cybersquatting operation in .ie ccTLD is EUBROWSER.COM. It has over 500 .ie domains registered and has registered a number of high profile trademarks such as ADIDAS, NIKE, BEBO, ONECARE, WINDOWS-ONECARE as .ie domains using Registered Business Name certificates. It has also registered IRISHINDEPENDENT.ie, the name of one of the largest daily Irish newspapers using an RBN. This certainly falls under the “avoidance of deception” aspect of the above.
32.—(3) The Commission may make regulations for
the purposes of this section, but only after consul-
tation with the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and
Employment and such other persons and public
bodies (if any) as the Commission thinks
appropriate.
That subsection is where IEDR is effectively stripped of deciding the registration policy for .ie domains. Under this subsection, it is now the province of Comreg though it has to consult with the Minister and others. This is a big win for the industry. The members of the board of IEDR are just there because of who they know rather than for their industry expertise. This contention that the board of IEDR was a dumping ground for UCD and former Telecom Eireann staff and their friends was a commonly held one during the IEDR’s Fagan years and it was a source of irritation for the Irish internet industry. None of the board of IEDR has any known operational experience of the domain name and hosting industry.
Subsection 4 effectively gives Comreg complete power over .ie ccTLD: designating the authority to register .ie domains; setting renewal periods and conditions; revoking registrations, registration conditions; pricing of .ie domains and appeals against revocation of registrations.
Timetravel, it appears has been discovered. According to subsection 5, this law is retroactive:
32.—(5) The regulations shall provide that persons who have registered ‘.ie’ domain names before the regulations came into operation are taken to have
registered those names under the regulations.
Breaking the rules will be expensive. The new legislation allows for a fine of up to 5000 Euro on summary conviction.
Section 33 allows Comreg to impose a levy on IEDR for funding its activities. Maybe the management of IEDR might have to take a pay cut if this is ever used. Section 34 allows Comreg to access all .ie data including, apparently, the accounts of IEDR.
Section 35 gives Comreg the power to designate an interim registration authority and defines the term of such an appointment as being 12 months. This appointment can be renewed subsequently with the consent of the Minister. That’s basically the power to strip IEDR completely of the administration of .ie ccTLD.
Had this legislation been in force when IEDR was spun off from UCD and during the Fagan years, there is no doubt that the current IEDR would not be administering .ie ccTLD. However IEDR has changed considerably since 2000. The board of IEDR is still a bunch of talking heads who are there because of who they know rather than because of their industry expertise. They are even more irrelevant now.
The most important part of this legislation is that it strips IEDR of the policy making function for .ie ccTLD. This could be a mixed blessing for the industry. The provisions to revoke IEDR’s control of .ie ccTLD are there. If this is indeed IEDR’s death warrant, then it just hasn’t been signed and dated yet. It might have the effect of making IEDR somewhat more responsive to industry concerns. But changing policy and perhaps the introduction of personal .ie domains might become a bit more complex.
Tags: Irishblogs , IEDR , Domains , .ie , Internet Statistics , Comreg , Cyberwarehousing , domainnames
Written by John McCormac on February 3rd, 2007 with 10 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and Irish Tech News and Tech Commentary.
The Irish Times has had a bumpy relationship with the web. Its coverage of technology during the dot.bomb era ran the gamut from utterly clueless to to downright wrong with the odd detour to accurate reporting. The web really does not know what goes on in that walled garden of a site that is the Irish Times. Apparently it now has an embryonic blogs listings. Though it refers to them as “weblogs” rather than the more common term “blogs”. The range of blogs is limited and is more like a short list of the blogs that the Irish Times people read rather than a comprehensive list of blogs - Irish or otherwise. The Irish Times blog directory was mentioned here by Dave O’Neill on his blog.
The Irish Times’ technology section is Pay Per View. Most people on the Irish web don’t pay to read the IT’s technology section’s OpEds, blatent product pimping and unfortunately few news items. Like the technology sections in most newspapers since the dot.bomb era, the IT’s technology section has shrunk too. Since web events and business are now day-to-day news topics, the idea of a dedicated technology section is perhaps harder to defend.
Though if the Irish Times did add a weekly blog listing to its Friday “Technology In Business” [1] section, it would, in a strange way, be returning to its roots. The IT’s Computimes section, a computer/net/comms section that preceded the “Technology In Business” section, used to have a listing of websites, bulletin board systems (BBSes) and interesting links. The Computimes section was respected and considered clueful.
So could the Irish Times be starting its own blog listings? Stranger things have happened - the Sunday Tribune has its own little column on the Irish blogosphere. Though Irishblogs.ie and planetoftheblogs.com are far more useful and comprehensive listings of Irish blogs.
[1]: Apparently I confused the title of the Irish Times “Technology In Business” section with the Sunday Business Post’s “Computers In Business” supplement. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between them but ironically the error was pointed out by John Collins, former editor of consumer PC publication PCLive who is now an Ireland.com employee and freelance contributor to the Irish Times technology section.
Tags: Irishblogs - IrishTimes - Blogs - Irish Times - Blog Directories
Written by John McCormac on August 23rd, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
A number of online news sources including Reuters are reporting that the proposed European Software Patents legislation may be in trouble. This is good news for the anti-Software Patents lobby but the vote has to be taken on July 6th. The EuObserver also reports that the legislation may be in trouble.
Lobbying has been rife and the pro-patent lobby has been planting stories all over the Irish media. PR operations claiming to represent the Irish software industry have been trying to get MEPs to vote for software patents. The reality is that these people only represent their backers, typically large multinationals with armies of lawyers ready to corrupt the European patents system so that it becomes a mirror of the failed US patents system. The Irish software industry is very much against software patents.
Tags: Irishblogs - Software Patents - EU
Written by John McCormac on July 5th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
An article in the Sunday Business Post carried some interesting angles on the web hosting. The quality of the article was a bit beyond the usual clueless rubbish that passes for technology journalism in the mainstream Irish media. The last time that the Sunday Business Post’s advertising supplement (Computers In Business) ventured into the realm of hosting, the clueless comments of its editor Adrian Weckler managed to unite the Irish hosting business. It seems that Weckler learned from his mistake and got Charlie Taylor to write this article. Four notable players in the Irish hosting business were interviewed. Stephen McCarron of Hosting365, Eoin Costello of Novara, Richard Tarr of HostIreland and Michele Neylon of Blacknight Solutions each gave their views and they showed a surprising commonality of purpose.
Tags: IrishBlogs,Hosting
Written by John McCormac on May 1st, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
An interesting post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog about the rising number of blogs covered Dave Sifry’s (Technorati) post on the state of the blogosphere. The flurries of activities in the graph confirm the event driven nature of blogs that makes them different from ordinary websites.
In building the Irish blog search engine one very important fact has become apparent: Blogs are updated aperiodically whereas websites are updated periodically. This makes tracking blog updates difficult and necessitates the use of blog pings. The problem for search engines is that blog pings are open to abuse. Some blog aggregators have time limits on the number of times per hour that a ping can be submitted. The system is not perfect because spam blogs have appeared. As with traditional search engine spam, these spam blogs are set up with keywords to attract readers to adverts rather than to provide the reader with information. Some blog search engines have not resolved the spam problem yet.
Blogs have caused a shift in website patterns. Traditionally, the personal website has been some free webspace on an ISP. But with the advent of blogs, many personal websites have become blogs because of the ease of update. Previously, running a personal website meant having some web development software on the PC. The free blog services remove the necessity to have web development software and makes the publishing on the web accessible to a wider audience.
With a website, it is easy for a search engine operator to see that some sites update on a monthly or weekly basis and others have a yearly update frequency. Most websites are brochureware and are only updated once or twice a year.
Blogs, by comparison, are a very bursty form of communications. They need a trigger event (something about which the blogger feels strongly enough to write about it) to see updates. When particular blogs update, a cascade effect occurs on many other blogs. The blog posting link growth pattern is totally different to that between ordinary websites. It is the difference between the pattern of a shattering pane of glass and the growing branches of an oak tree.
With an aperiodic system, six months between updates means as much as six hours.The old periodic model of website updates does not work with blogs. The simple reason: blogs have a human factor whereas websites generally have a business factor.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Blogs , Internet Statistics , Search Engines , Technorati
Written by John McCormac on March 19th, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
Some time ago, Technorati.com introduced tagging and over the past few weeks, I’ve used it on some posts here. The idea is that bloggers would add a tag to their posts to allow Technorati to group the posts in with other similarly themed posts from other blogs. Simple idea? Yes but there is a catch - the bloggers have to include a tag on their post that links back to technorati’s server. (Eg: http://technorati.com/tag/IrishBlogs).
Tagging is to blogging what meta data is to web pages. Back in the mid 1990s, meta data made web pages easier to categorise. Each page would, theoretically, have a description and keywords. Technology was expensive then and meta data offered search engine operators a cheaper and more effective method. Web pages and web sites could simply be categorised by stripping out the page title, the description and the keywords. But like any simplistic system, it was easily gamed for commercial purposes. Some keywords guaranteed hits. As the price of technology fell, full text indexing of webpages by search engines became viable. Even then there were people stuffing keywords into the text of webpages. These keywords where in the background colour so that only the search engines would see them - the user would not.
Meta Data is a nice academic concept but like its tagging offspring, it relies on one critical aspect - the website developer has to include it in the webpage source code. Even years after they were introduced, at least 70% of webpages do not have proper meta data. A recent check on Irish websites showed that out of 33239 .ie websites, only 9710 sites have title, description and keywords. Like meta data, tagging is self-categorisation. But often bloggers will already have specific categories listed on their sites.
The problem with tagging is that it is an “early days” solution to a complex problem. With ordinary websites, the link model is one that describes the links between what are often static business sites. The link model with blogs is different. Blogs are often a stream of consciousness. Bloggers link to each other rather than to websites. Simply grouping blog posts rather than discovering their interconnectivity is an easy way for Technorati to develop what is in effect a dynamic web directory of blogger posts. But like any automated system, it has weaknesses. The IrishBlogs tag has essentially been taken over by Richard Delevan (a freelance journalist in Dublin). Because he posts early and often, Technorati’s date based grouping bumps his blog to the top of the list. This is not gaming the system. Technorati is best thought of as a group of tags with each tag having a small set of associated blogs. The effect of sorting using the time that the page or post was last updated means that the most recent post will appear at the top. This problem of updated content is an old one for search engines. The solution that search engines adopted was to effectively remove the update or ping aspect from the user side and to periodically spider websites.
Irish bloggers do not typically incude Technorati tags in their posts. As blogging becomes a mass-market phenomena, including tags has to be made easy. It has to be made part of the blogging software so that bloggers can include a tag as simply as clicking on an icon. But by the time that tagging hits the mass market, the big search engines such as Google will have deeply integrated blogs into their existing search indices. Google could even be planning their own blog specific search in the same way that they have a news, usenet and image search option. Given the size of the world blogosphere and the frequency at which it updates, it would be trivial for a large search engine to create its own blog search index. But by including blogs in their main search indices, the larger search engines regard blogs as part of the mainstream web.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Technorati , Tags , Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on March 11th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
« Older articles
No newer articles