Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Easy PHP Blackhole Trap with WHOIS Lookup for Bad Bots

"One of my favorite security measures here at Perishable Press is the site’s virtual Blackhole trap for bad bots. The concept is simple: include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap, which then performs a WHOIS Lookup and records the event in the blackhole data file."
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The Future of Ad Agencies and Social Media

"To keep up with ever-changing advertising and marketing options, ad agencies are rapidly adopting new strategies and outlooks on how consumers interact with brands. While many ad agencies have been slow to adopt social media, others have been keeping up with the trends quite well."

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Saying Thank You for ReTweets, and Signal v Noise

"On Friday, @StevePlunkett and I started a small column on this blog called “Steve’s Shorts.” It grew out of my admiration for Steve’s view of the social web and an idea that small observations can be powerful and worth talking about.

That first post had an interesting result. Apparently a behavior on Twitter can go unnoticed, a statement said in 140 characters on Twitter can float by without response, but point out that behavior or that comment and put it on blog and suddenly it has a new importance. In this case, some of that response seems made without consideration to the bigger picture or the reputation and generosity of the person who offered the original comment."