MediaFire Takedown Notice Threatens Mozilla Over SkipScreen
I’ve been thinking about writing up a review for Firefox plug-in SkipScreen for a while now. SkipScreen has quickly become an important time saver with file sharing sites getting more and more belligerent about making even one time users wait excessive amounts of time and jump through more and more hoops.
What is truly ironic is that 99% of Mediafire’s business is hosting copyright violating files which it takes down one at a time in an effort to “steal” the value of the copyrighted files. Then, it has the nerve to demand that an organization take down a file that does not violate any copyright laws.
You can read the MediaFire Takedown Notice Response here.
It seems as though the EFF lawyer may have missed the most important thing. Even if SkipScreen did do something illegal (which it does not), the same legal precedent that says you can’t sue an ISP for providing the connection that allows a user to do something illegal (like downloading copyrighted files from MediaFire) would apply to this situation.
Mozilla cannot be held liable for UNAFFILIATED USERS violating the terms of service of a website by using UNAFFILIATED SOFTWARE. If Mediafire has a legitimate complaint, it must pursue it against SkipScreen and its users directly. Of course, it isn’t doing that because it has no legitimate legal claim and would quickly lose any such action. Instead it is trying to scare Mozilla with the threat of having to pay legal expenses in hopes that they will cave in before Mediafire has to actually prove anything or cite a relevant violation of law.
It’s the oldest trick in the book, legal extortion. Make it so expensive for the party that is in the right to fend off the party that is wrong, that the good guys decide it isn’t worth fighting.
Shame on Mediafire for its outrageous hypocrisy and its shameful attempt at legal intimidation.
SEO When SEO Wasn’t Cool
Google has forced us to change a lot of what we do. In particular, writers and marketers were forced to dance to a different drummer, one who asked us to do things in a way that was inferior to what we used to do. Convoluted titles (plus title tags with the right keywords) and silly domain names are a couple of examples of things that Google hath wrought.
Another involves branding. Any company that hopes to be successful for the long term needs to think about branding. Branding means distinguishing yourself from others who do, or claim to do, similar things to your company. That is why it is Coke vs. Pepsi, not Great Cola Soda vs. Tasty Cola Soda. Both of the latter would be regarded as cheap generic knockoffs, not high-end brands.
Incidentally, this is one of the best ways to distinguish an ongoing concern with concern for the long-term future from one that just hopes to make a splash on the Internet. Trabach Motors (or whatever) is probably a lot more serious about their future in making cars while Best Top Motor Cars is probably a lot more serious about their website generating cash flow in any way possible.
However, in the last few days, I’ve noticed some things that are search optimized even though they were created before there was such a thing as a search engine, or at least before anyone cared what the search engines were looking for. This post, is dedicated to them.
Search Optimized Brands – Accidentally SEO Ready Brands
- Pur – The water purifier brand kills a handful of birds with one stone. First, it’s very name catches the most probably typo or spelling error. No need to register another domain for that. Also, "pur" is part of the word pure. No doubt, this counts at least a little bit when both pur and pure show up in the website text in a way that seems both natural, and like it exists thanks to "stemming." Finally, pur.com (somebody beat them to it) or even purwater.com would be great domain names, especially if they had been savvy enough to grab pure.com and purewater.com too.
Others Coming
Yes, I have others. I just have to find that notebook. It would help if I developed better organizational skills.
Logitech Setpoint Uberoptions – Advanced Mouse Settings
I have been using a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard for a couple of years now. Over that time, I have slowly taken advantage of all the features and functions built-in to both the keyboard and the mouse.
While the keyboard is your basic enhanced keyboard, it comes with several other buttons and input devices than a more standard keyboard does. Unfortunately, many of these additional buttons are not useful to me. For example, there are 3 search buttons on the left side of the keyboard, each signified by a magnifying glass. One is for web searching, one is for searching on my PC, and the last is for searching pictures.
This is all well and good, but those aren’t the kind of functions that I do often enough to require a specialized button, or even to remember that those buttons are there. In fact, I’m more likely to hit them accidentally with papers or something than to press them on purpose.
Then there are the three buttons in the lower right corner. These buttons are used to make Internet phone calls through your PC either with something like Skype, or Voice Over IP. Either way, I hardly ever do that, so for a long time, those buttons were just dead to me.
Reprogramming Default Logitech Buttons
The power of these buttons comes not necessarily in their default settings, but in the fact that they can be reprogrammed to do almost anything you want them to do instead.
For example, I do a fair amount of watching videos on my computer. A lot of them are training materials that I review and I don’t need to watch every second to get the idea. Using the KMPlayer allows me to skip ahead 5 seconds by using the forward arrow key and backward by using the back arrow key. I can also skip ahead 30 seconds by pressing CTRL+Right Arrow.
The thing is, that isn’t very convenient when you have leaned back and are moving forward and back one handed. I checked in the program options to see if I could set a different, single, keystroke to be the fast forward 30 seconds key. I didn’t come up with anything, but I found something better.
By going into Logitech Setpoint, I can reprogram most of the buttons on my keyboard and mouse to do what I want them to do instead. For example, the green phone button used to make a call has been reprogrammed to be, you guessed it, CTRL+Right Arrow. Now, the key to skip ahead a little is right next to the key to skip ahead a lot. (Anything more and I just mouse click on the slider.)
Uberoptions to the Rescue
There is one other thing that I do all day long. As a freelance writer, I am constantly taking screenshots. Alt+Printscreen plus a screen capturing utility makes this very easy. The only catch is that the PrintScreen button is in the upper right hand corner of my keyboard in the no man’s land between the main keyboard and the numeric keypad.
Finding that key when the keyboard has been pushed back under the monitor stand to allow for a book or other papers to rest in front of my typing fingers is a pain. More than once I have thought I took a screenshot only to realize that I must have hit INSERT or PAUSE/BREAK instead. Sometimes that makes more work for me; sometimes it means that I have lost an important screenshot that I cannot recreate.
I’ve tried a thousand times to program another key, but no dice.
The problem is that pressing the PRINT SCREEN key causes the computer to execute the command. It does NOT cause Setpoint to record that keystroke as my intention.
I posted in the Logitech help forum where someone pointed me to not only the solution to this tiny problem, but a utility that makes my programmable keyboard and mouse EVEN BETTER.
The utility is called Uberoptions and it installs alongside the regular Logitech Setpoint utility. What it does after that is nothing short of brilliant.
Uberoptions adds hundreds of keystrokes and functions that are not available in the basic Setpoint utility to the list of things you can program your keyboard or mouse to do. Normally, certain keys cannot be re-assigned (it varies by model apparently) but many of those keys are easily programmable once Uberoptions is installed.
This alone would make Uberoptions a great recommendation. But, it goes one step further. For some settings, Uberoptions actually allows you to assign functions based upon what program you are using.
For example, the two arrow buttons on the side of my mouse can be set to be Next Email and Previous Email in Outlook while being set to be Page Up and Page Down in my PDF reader and then be set to be Cruise Up and Cruise Down (scroll fast) in Firefox. This, my friends, is gold.
If you have a programmable Logitech keyboard or mouse, I highly recommend you check out Uberoptions Logitech Setpoint Enhancement Utility. It is a free utility that you can download and install as easily as the Setpoint utility itself, and the world of functionality it opens will be well worth it.
Update: Uberoptions now supports not only Print-Screen as a programmable option, but Alt-Print-Screen as well. Now you can set a keyboard or mouse button to capture the active window (which is usually what you want anyway.) Couple this with a utility called Screenshot Captor (set it to not pop up with each screenshot) and you can capture multiple screenshots in a row, quickly and easily.
Bing Webmaster Tools Down
Update: The Bing Community has an update. Apparently there was a "glitch" that wasn’t site-wide or global. I guess that means it wasn’t a big deal. Whatever. Maybe someone should monitor their own forums so they know when there is a problem.
Maybe Microsoft isn’t really ready to take on Google yet after all.
After making a big splash with the new search engine Bing, Microsoft has added a few new features, such as the much hyped visual search. Many writers and news stories have declared that Bing’s search results are good. Some have stated that Bing’s results are as good as Google’s search results, though I have yet to find anyone who has said that they are better.
However, there is more to running a search engine than headlines and splashy result. The algorithm that ranks and displays search engine results, often called SERPs, is complicated and in need of constant refinement. The tweaks to the algorithm are necessary both to stay ahead of the so-called black hat SEOs, users who use "tricks" to rank higher than their page deserves, as well as to keep up with the fast every changing state of the Internet. Content displayed on webpages is seldom static and with each new innovation comes newer and often tougher things to index and rank.
The only help a search engine can get in this area comes from the willing participation of the community of webpage developers and website managers in the form of what is often termed white hat SEO. The so-called white hat SEOs cater to the search engine companies by ensuring that certain elements that are useful for indexing and cataloging the web are present on the websites that they run.
Microsoft acknowledged as much when it published a multi-part article on its Bing Community website outlining what elements the company would be looking for in its search algorithm. Much of what is written on this Bing SEO article series is old news because it is very similar to much of what Google already has already stated that it looks for in its SERP rankings. These elements are things like keywords in the title tags, and proper use of semantic web design and coding, like putting other important keyphrases in header tags, preferably in descending order of importance.
But, in the end, doing the right things to help out the search engines can be tricky business. Many helpful elements, such as a website’s sitemap, are technical files that can be ruined by even the smallest of typographical errors. For this reason, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have long provided a set of "webmaster tools" that allows the developers of websites to track various elements of how the search index robots, the search algorithms, and even the search results are affected by the actions they take on their sites.
Microsoft wisely rolled out it’s new Bing Webmaster Tools right away. Unfortunately, they are broken.
That’s right. The most basic of tools provided to webmasters are not functioning on Bing’s search engine. A thread posted in the Bing forum is piling up with webmasters who can’t add their websites to Bing webmaster tools, not because of access issues, or security issues, or anything of the sort, but rather because clicking on the "Add Site" button brings up an error saying the file cannot be found.
In other words, the Bing Webmaster Tools need to use the Bing Webmaster Tools to find out they have a broken link on the Bing Webmaster Tools.
It would be irony, if it wasn’t so stupid.
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