Today I decided to have a look at social networking type sites such as Reddit. Reddit allows users to submit links to interesting pages and vote them up or down. The idea sounds good; popular articles should rise to the top whilst unpopular/uninteresting ones will fade into obscurity. Despite the site simply looking like yet another news feed, I decided to take a closer look.

Hot on the heels of the last code injection attempt comes another one; this time the attempt to breach security appears to have a Russian connection. The new log entries are as follows:

EDIT (24/7/2008): Hot on the heels of this code injection attempt, comes another one (link).

Getting a car that is stuck in mud moving, requires considerable effort. Once the car is in motion, however, greater traction is gained, and the car can be accelerated more easily. Likewise, increasing traffic to a new website is rather difficult and requires effort; but, once a certain level of traffic has been achieved, increasing traffic further becomes much easier.

In true ironic form, a few days after posting a commentary about blogs copying blogs, that very commentary has been copied by another blog. On closer inspection, the blog in question appears to simply copy posts from blogs relating to cell-phones. Compare this post from PhoneDONE, with this one on Waiguoren, as an example. It is almost like the blog is run by a bot that collects blog entries from various sources. The commentary that I wrote linked to one of the sites that Vaiguoren (yes, the blog is titled, Waiguoren, but the poster is Vaiguoren) copies from.

It has been a week since this blog was added to Technorati, Blogged, and Zimbio. So far, my predictions have been slightly off-mark. As expected, not much extra traffic has been seen from any of these sources. However, it was originally thought that Blogged would provide the most traffic. Instead, most traffic (out of these sites) has come from Technorati.

When trying to increase traffic to ones blog, does the day/time on which a blog entry is posted matter? I tried an experiment in order to determine this, but the results so far are inconclusive. In the experiment, two blog posts contained links to the Huffington Post, and Gizmodo, two of the highest-ranked blogs on Technorati.  These links within the posts cause them to be listed as "blog reactions" on the Technorati listings for the Huffington Post and Gizmodo. The hypothesis was that more people would be likely to see these posts on weekdays, as opposed to weekends. This would be due to more people reading on weekdays relative to the number of people posting "blog reactions."

... because no-one is reading. Ok, so this is not entirely true. However, it would appear that the number of readers does drop off over the weekend. Why would this be an issue? After all, the posts could easily be read on the following Monday. Well, this relates to trying to increase traffic by linking to other blogs. It appears that posts written over the weekend are likely to quickly become buried under other posts, before others notice that they are there.

A screenshot of Amiga OS 4.1 (obtained from the official announcement).

Amiga OS users got a pleasant surprise last Friday with the announcement of Amiga OS 4.1. Scheduled for release in Q3, 2008 (i.e., within a month or two), this Amiga OS release builds upon Amiga OS 4.0. This new release includes new functionality such as 3D graphics hardware based compositing, facilitating various effects, such as transparency and zooming/scaling with no noticeable slowdown of the system. A new file-system promising faster and more robust disk access is also included, as is a smart virtual memory pager that only swaps memory to hard-disk when absolutely necessary. For more features, see the original announcement.

Yesterday, I commented on how a blog's visibility in Technorati could be increased simply by linking to other blogs. Well, looking at Technorati's number one ranked blog, the Huffington Post, it appears that this game is being played by many; maybe too many. Take a look at the Huffington Post's listing on Technorati, it's post reactions list is filled with links to Huffington Post (over 362,000, in fact) ranging from relevant, to weak. For example, what exactly does "Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Report" by Robert F Kennedy Jr and Brendan DeMelle have to do with a site that sells Male enhancement drugs? Nothing really. There is not even any original content there, just a direct link to the news article on Huffington Post. This is just a blatant attempt to increase incoming links and ratings.