California is not known for making the best decisions, but this one I think takes the cake. (A number of news sites have covered this story. This quote comes from Digital Trends)
Joel Anderson, a San Diego Republican who’s a member of the California assembly, is a man with a mission. He wants to keep America safe by forcing companies to blur satellite images of schools, places of worship, government or medical buildings, as well as banning street images.
I can just hear the conversations now:
Evil Terrorist 1: “What is our next strike target in California?”
Evil Terrorist 2: “Haven’t you heard, they blurred all of the images of schools, churches, and governement buildings. They’ve even blocked street-view!”
Evil Terrorist 1: “Certainly NOT!”
Evil Terrorist 2: “Yes. Our plans have been foiled. Damn you California!!!”
Next thing you know California will be demanding fake images be put into Google Earth to throw terrorists off track.
Stop California! Stop hindering progress. Learn to use technology, not hate it.
I’m addicted to Google Analytics. I check the statistics for the three websites I manage daily. I’m constantly watching to see what kind of traffic the sites are generating, what pages people are viewing most, how long they are spending on the site, and many more statistics. So if you are still trying to decide what web statistics service to use, I highly recommend Google Analytics (GA).
Set up for GA is pretty simple. Simply go to the GA home page and follow the steps. You will be required to embed a small amount of Javascript code on each of your web pages that will make the connection between your site and GA allowing it to track youru site’s activity. So obviously root access to your sites content and a template file that places the code on all of your pages is necessary. Or for those sites built on the major content management systems (Drupal, WordPress, etc.) modules/plugins are available to do all of the work for you. This blog is built on the WordPress CMS and I use the Google Analyticator plugin. In the Drupal websites I have done I always add the Google Analytics module. Configuration of these modules/plugins is very straightforward and I have not seen an increase in page load time.
I think my favorite part of GA is the main dashboard. Not only is it completely customizeable, but it allows you to quickly view all of the key analytics information you want. I find myself going in once a day and glancing at the dashboard for each of my three sites, instantly getting all of the information I care about, and then leaving. If I want more in-depth information I can dig deeper but 90% of the time I am simply appeasing my curiousity with a visit to GA.
So far I haven’t found any real downsides. If you manage a site that is full of static pages and does not use templates then I guess you could be in for some very boring code adding. However, modern web design best practices use some form of template or CMS which makes tapping into the functionality of GA simple.
Check out these links I’ve found!
While on the topic of online aggregation services I thought I should give a rundown of BackType. BackType’s goal is to bring together all of the blog comments posted on the Internet and allow users to track them. This service effectively provides two functionalities – it makes tracking comments by specific people very easy and it allows BackType users to ensure that they are not be impersonated on the web. I’m not very interested at following other people’s comments, I’m much more interested in good blog postings and news. However, I am very interested in making sure that my comments are attributed to me and that my identity is not being used by someone else to post spam or fake comments. For much more popular people (Barack Obama, Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, etc), I’m sure BackType is a very powerful service. I’m sure they are constantly being impersonated and fake/spam comments are being posted using their identity. BackType allows anyone to quickly and easily make sure that their commenting identity is not being abused.
So far my test of BackType’s service has been fairly limited, however it has pulled in all of the comments I have posted on blogs. Unfortunately, BackType has not recognized my comments on Lifehacker. BackType did extend its service a few months back to include Reddit and Digg, but they obviously haven’t gotten all of the major sites that aren’t strictly blogs. I’m curious to see how the service will develop over the next few months and I’m really hoping for better support on sites like Lifehacker. If you do a lot of commenting on different blogs, I encourage you to visit BackType and sign up for an account.
Social networking is all the rave right now – Facebook, Myspace, FriendFeed, Flickr, Twitter and the list goes on. Even content providers like YouTube and Hulu have a social networking aspect to their site. Keeping all of your profiles updated throughout the Internet can be a real chore, but there is some relief. DandyID Services is an aggregator that allows you to enter all of your online identities and then allows you to easily display them (via a Javascript widget) anywhere you can post (and run) code on the web. DandyID is still in beta (much of it closed) and I have not gotten to test any other functionality besides the Javascript widget seen in the right-hand column of my blog. It has made my life somewhat easier when changing contact info on my networks. I pull up DandyID and just cruise through the list changing information.
While I do value the service that is being provided by DandyID, I think there is huge potential if they are able to go the extra step and make it possible to change information on DandyID and have those changes cascade down to a users different social networks. I’m a big proponent of the OpenID initiative, but have yet to see it made truly functional with the major social networks like Facebook. I’m sure there are lots of kinks to be worked out before we will see a true web-wide ID system.
Tim Seymour lives in Washington, DC. He works as a Systems Administrator for 
