SpeedPlexer Blog

Read Write Web reports, that “web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

“However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days.”

They go on to say what we’ve already told you in our headline, that “the retail site that got the lion’s share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites.”

“Interestingly,” they tell us, “Apple’s website saw the largest increase - by a huge margin - between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Overnight, their traffic skyrocketed 110 percent. Traditionally, Apple’s online deals for this red-letter day in commerce were modest at best. However, this year, rumors of substantial discounts were leaked online and spread like wildfire.” Perhaps the lesson here is: “If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then “leak” good tidings of great joy just before the big day.”

Other sites reported to have a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples with 47 percent, Dell with 40 percent and Amazon with 9 percent.

“What’s more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year’s Black Friday traffic - as you’ll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers?”

Might the economy be picking up with internet speed?

Read Write Web reports on the dangers of posting when you think you’re doing so anonymously.  Only last month, courts ordered anonymous commenters to pay big fines to women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on an internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now, a nasty comment cost someone their job—and with internet speed.

In the comments section of an online newspaper article, one user posted a single word response—one that isn’t improper in itself, but in the context of the article, it’s slang usage was offensive. Of course, the site’s moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this person was intent on having their say.

The site’s director of social media, found that the commenter’s IP address was coming from a local school. Thinking that he’d teach some kid an important lesson in netiquette, he contacted the school, only to find out it was not a kid, but an adult who worked there. When confronted, the employee resigned.

The lesson here? There’s no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their “real” name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. “With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior,” he writes.

So, as Read Write Web summed it up in their article’s title, “Leaving a Vulgar Comment Online Might Cost You Your Job”.

The argument rages on despite the fact that the winner has been declared–The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week and the winner was from the world of technology and new media rather than topics like Economy, Politics and Current Affairs, Environment or Novelty. The tech terms considered were:

• hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

• intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

• netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

• paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

• sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

But the winner was…UNFRIEND.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year… “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

But if you read the comments section under the Oxford University Press blog posting, you’ll see plenty of debating, not only about unfriend versus defriend, but also about another controversial term. Check it out and join the discussion to help change the English language with internet speed!

L.A. Times reports that Google is facing court action in Switzerland because it isn’t meeting the country’s demands for tighter privacy protection with its Google Maps’ Street View service, according to a Swiss government official.

Street View is a feature that lets users pick a point on a map and see a panoramic street-level image of the surroundings. By adjusting the location of the point, a user can take a virtual walk down the street. Google constructs the images from panoramic photos taken by cars it has equipped with cameras…and that travel with internet speed, apparently.

Faces had not been sufficiently blurred, and people were concerned about being shown near “sensitive locations, for example outside hospitals, prisons or schools,” Swiss government official Hanspeter Thuer said.

Google argues that it provides measures to protect privacy by making it possible for people to contact Google and ask to have pictures of their property removed from Street View. The company also said it spoke with privacy regulators and gave them an opportunity to raise questions.

“We’re proud of the blurring technology we’ve developed for Street View, and are confident the product is completely legal, but we wanted to go the extra mile to address Herr Thuer’s concerns,” the company said in a blog post.

Google ran into a similar problem in the U.S. this year when a Pennsylvania couple took the company to court, saying the feature was an invasion of privacy. A judge threw out the case, saying “complete privacy does not exist” and arguing that photos and building plans of people’s home were already available to the public.

In the blog post, Google indicated it planned to fight the Swiss case as well: “We will vigorously defend Street View in court and we’re committed to continue bringing the benefits to Swiss users.”

Ars Technica reports that Rodney Bradford, a 19-year-old Brooklyn resident, was arrested for robbing a man at gunpoint, despite his insistence that he was at his father’s Harlem apartment at the time. His defense lawyer discovered that an update was made to Bradford’s Facebook profile at the time of the robbery. When the district attorney verified the claims with Bradford’s father and stepmother and the IP information with Facebook, the charges against Bradford were dropped.

However, the Facebook posting could have been made by someone else, and there would be no way to truly verify who was sitting in front of the computer at the time. Bradford’s attorney brushes this technicality off as a “level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this.”

Actually, as Ars Tecnhica’s Jacqui Cheng points out, “it doesn’t take much of a genius to leave yourself logged in on someone else’s machine (in fact, quite the opposite). A report circulated in September about a robber who decided to log into his own Facebook account at the victim’s house during the robbing and forgot to log out—given that level of stupidity, it’s not hard to imagine leaving yourself logged in at your own father’s apartment.”

Criminal Justice law instructor Joseph Pollini says, “Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time.”

Law enforcement is facing this issue much more frequently these days. It’s not just about blaming your cat for downloading child porn anymore—anyone who wants to do so can easily create alibis online with the help of friends or family, and it doesn’t take an experienced hacker to figure out how to use internet speed to their advantage.

TechCrunch’s Orli Yakuel did a big favor for anyone who likes their fonts with internet speed–she researched several sites that free-font-fans might like.  Here’s a brief overview of her review:

BetterFonts is an online font database where you can quickly preview and download thousands of fonts. You can instantly download most previewed fonts for free, but for certain quality ones you’ll need to pay. They do have a deal of a 500-font package for $2.77, but without previews.

FFonts has a huge font library and it allows you to navigate easily, and download any font for free. All the fonts on the site are listed on the left side menu for easy access, and clicking on a font gives you information plus a satisfying preview of the font. Overall, the site hosts more than 10,000 fonts!

Fawnt, one of the largest free font archives on the web today, has a pleasant design and an easy-to-use navigator. All the fonts have large and customizable previews, and character maps. Though all of the fonts in Fawnt are free, they might have some restrictions, so be sure to check.

Myfonts, with 62,000 fonts, has the world’s largest font database. Not only can you search and download the fonts to your computer, you can also find fonts based on a picture with their service WhatTheFont! Simply upload a file, or specify a URL, and myFonts will find the font used in the picture you uploaded (or at least, give you some close alternatives to this font).

Abstract Fonts has a very convenient interface, lets you type in text to view font examples, opens a summary of information you need to know about that font. Abstract also gives you the ability to see similar fonts–an absolutely brilliant addition.