How To Scare Customers With Your Website Trustseal?

I got an email from Borrell Associates to download their latest report "Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages", which seemed like an interesting topic to read. For the uninitiated, Borrell Associates is a leading research and consulting firm tracking local advertising and releases special reports in this segment.





Now Borrell website has a typical way to take everyone through a shopping cart to even download the free summary. While on this page I just noticed (see screenshot above) a new trustseal from Trustwave and clicked on it out of curiosity. What popped up surprised me - Trustwave says it "does not recognize this organization" - their organization and identity is "Unknown". Scary!





While it was OK with me for a free download, this would have no doubt scared most buyers who would be ready with their credit cards to pay for the (full) report. I wonder how many potetial customers Borrell would've lost.

The lesson to learn here is - Use the trust seal on your shopping site only if is valid and working. If for any reason (like expiry...) the trustseal doesn't recognize your company - just chuck it off from your site. It's always better NOT to show this scary message to paying customers.

Be Part of New Guiness Record-Download Firefox 3.0 Today

Yeah, that's right! YOU can be part of this new Guiness Record. All you need is download Firefox 3.0 today, on June 17th, 2008 to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Why Firefox 3.0?
Firefox 3.0 comes with exciting new features like, built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom. With more than 5,000 add-ons, you can customize your browsing like never-before. Firefox 3.0 goes one step further by including phishing and malware protection as well within the browser.

How many others are part of this event?
As on current time close to 1.48 million people worldwide have pledged to help create this record. Hundreds are celebrating the event with Firefox launch parties as well.

Where do I download Firefox 3.0?
Head to the official Firefox 3.0 promotion HQ site created for this record-breaking event. Download Firefox 3.0 today and be part of this Guiness Record event.

Interesting Research Papers on Social Networking

While I was busy going through the exhaustive research papers on 'search' from WWW2008, I missed out to mention some interesting papers on social networking. Here's a brief look at the topics I found on the site (use the link at the bottom to download the PDF) which you might find interesting:

Social Networks: Applications and Infrastructures for Web 2.0

* Why Web 2.0 is Good for Learning and for Research: Principles and Prototypes
* Exploring Social Annotations for Information Retrieval
* Lock-Free Consistency Control for Web 2.0 Applications

Social Networks: Discovery and Evolution of Communities

* Tag-based Social Interest Discovery
* FacetNet: A Framework for Analyzing Communities and Their Evolutions in Dynamic Networks
* Statistical Properties of Community Structure in Large Social and Information Networks

Social Networks: Analysis of Social Networks and Online Interaction Spaces

* Statistical analysis of the social network and discussion threads in Slashdot
* Yes, There is a Correlation - From Social Networks to Personal Behavior on the Web
* Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something

Internet Monetization: Recommendation and Security

* Optimal Marketing Strategies over Social Networks
* Trust-based recommendation systems: an axiomatic approach
* Secure or insure? A game-theoretic analysis of information security games

The above research paper PDFs can be found on this page of WWW2008 website. Let me know if you found it as interesting as I did...

The Deep End of Search & Web Research

Last week saw the 2008 edition of the World Wide Web Conference which brings together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies working to shape the Web.

The 2008 conference in Beijing focussed on - how the Web access is moving from the desktop to cell phones and TV screens, and how most users are moving from passive browsing experiences on the Internet to active participation in building Web communities.

What really grabbed my attention on their site is a virtual treasure house of search and web research papers. As someone involved in SEO & social media marketing, I loved the depth of these reports. Beware, this is strictly for the academic-oriented, but anyone with deep interest in web or search would understand the value.

Here are some gems from the site - use the link below if you wanna download the detailed PDFs :

Search: Query Analysis

* Modeling Anchor Text and Classifying Queries to Enhance Web Document Retrieval
* Unsupervised Query Segmentation using Generative Language Models and Wikipedia
* Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries

Data Mining: Log Analysis

* Query-Sets: Using Implicit Feedback and Query Patterns to Organize Web Documents
* Mining the Search Trails of Surfing Crowds: Identifying Relevant Websites From User Activity
* Using the Wisdom of the Crowds for Keyword Generation

Internet Monetization: Online advertising

* Externalities in Online Advertising
* A combinatorial allocation mechanism with penalties for banner advertising
* Dynamic Cost-Per-Action Mechanisms and Applications to Online Advertising

Search: Ranking and Retrieval Enhancement

* Ranking Refinement and Its Application to Information Retrieval
* Learning to Rank Relational Objects and Its Application to Web Search
* Contextual Advertising by Combining Relevance with Click Feedback

Rich Media

* Generating Diverse and Representative Image Search Results for Landmarks
* PageRank for Image Search
* Graph Theoretical Framework for Simultaneously Integrating Visual and Textual Features for Efficient Web Image Clustering
* Flickr Tag Recommendation based on Collective Knowledge

Search: Applications

* Automatic Online News Issue Construction in Web Environment
* Finding the Right Facts in the Crowd: Factoid Question Answering over Social Media
* Personalized Interactive Faceted Search

Each of the above topic has been covered in details reports on PDF which can be downloaded from this page on the www2008 website. Apart from the above, there are many more research papers which are more technical than I can handle ;-)

The Lonely Planet Expose: What a Shame!

I felt like kicking Thomas Kohnstamm after reading about him admitting on Guardian that he did not always visit the places he reviewed on Lonely Planet.

His book 'Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?' talks about writing his 'experiences' in Columbia without actually visiting the country. He admitted using tourism brochures, net and other local contacts for his 'research' and then put it all together "as best you can from there". What a shame!

One way it's good to see him admitting to this blunder, but then, one wonders why people (including me!) spent all that money on many of those 'authoritative' travel guides from the 'Lonely Planet'. Is that the way all those guides are written? Shouldn't I ask them for a refund?