Archive for December, 2005

Men want facts, women seek relations on Web – Yahoo! News

A new internet usage poll from pew is due out today, many of the internet browsing habits that we have been assuming are apparently backed up by those surveyed in the poll.

In an article via yahoo / reuters by Eric Auchard, we can establish that men are more likely to buy online, download files, surf for porn and engage in action activities online. Women tend to enagage in more communication that establishes community and relationships, and men are usually right to the point, especially in emails.

One of the suprising results was that women under 29 are just about as apt at internet verbage and usage, and the next generation of adults may see women blogging and otherwise using the web community more than men.

Some of the findings from the interview with Deborah Fallows are quoted here:

Internet users share many common interests, but men are heavier consumers of news, stocks, sports and pornography while more women look for health and religious guidance, a broad survey of U.S. Web usage has found.
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“Once you get past the commonalities, men tend to be attracted to online activities that are far more action-oriented, while women tend to value things involving relationships or human connections,” said Deborah Fallows, a research fellow at Pew and author of the report.

A larger number of men surf the Internet for pleasure, with 70 percent acknowledging they go online to pass time, compared with 63 percent of women. Men are more likely than women to listen to music, view Webcams and pay for digital content.
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Men want facts, women seek relations on Web – Yahoo! News
WEB RISKS, JARGON PUT WOMEN OFF

Over the past decade, men have proved more willing to engage in riskier encounters or transactions, such as joining chat rooms, bidding in online auctions or trading stocks. Auctions attract 30 percent of men versus 18 percent of women.

In addition, 21 percent of males confess to looking at porn online compared with just 5 percent of females, the Pew survey has found. This area is notoriously difficult to measure and may be underreported by survey respondents, Fallows said.

Meanwhile, 74 percent of women seek health or medical information online, far more than the 58 percent of men who do so. Thirty-four percent of women seek religious information from the Web versus 25 percent of men. Such differences mirror gender differences in the offline world, Fallows noted.

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In addition, the survey found men feel more in control of their computers. Far more men fix their own computers, for instance. Men also are more likely to be aware of the latest technology jargon — terms like spam, firewall, spyware, adware, phishing and RSS.

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Eighty-six percent of women ages 18-29 are Web users, compared with 80 percent of men. But 34 percent of men 65 and older use the Internet, compared with 21 percent of elderly women.

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“Teenage girls may do more or less than boys of certain activities, like downloading, but the important message is that the technology is not standing in their way,” the report states. As younger women grow up, women are likely to overtake men in terms of the overall audience, Fallows predicts.

The report cites data from surveys performed by Pew from 2000 through 2005. Some 6,403 respondents took part in 2005.

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New Site Offers Free Audio Books as MP3s / Podcasts

Free audiobooks via mp3 and podcasts; we’ll be volunteering for this one…
Podcasting News: New Site Offers Free Audio Books as MP3s
According to the site, “Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. ”

How it works:

1. LibriVox volunteers suggest books from the public domain, and we’ll choose some to record.
2. Volunteers “claim” chapters, and record them to mp3.
3. Volunteers submit files to LibriVox
4. The files are hosted on the Internet Archive
5. LibriVox maintains a catalog of complete and incomplete books, and podcasts selected books

LibriVox was founded by Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer interested in the “free movement” in its many guises.

Check it out at ww.librivox.org

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IEBlog : The prolog, strict mode, and XHTML in IE

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 will not support web standards XHTL MIME Types.. but apparently for a good reason, with the current code IE7 would skip over errors in it’s translation, thus thwarting the reasons behind standards and could end up causing future versions to accept erros for backwards compatability… An excerpt from the IE
Blog…

IEBlog : The xml prolog, strict mode, and XHTML in IE
(which is focused on compatibility) and hacking in XML constructs. It is highly unlikely we could support XHTML well in this way; in particular, we would certainly not detect a few error cases here or there, and we would silently support invalid cases. This would, of course, cause compatibility problems based on parser error handling in the future, which XML is explicitly trying to avoid; we don’t want to cause another mess like the one with current HTML error handling (rooted in compatibility with earlier browsers –

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Operational Security for the Home

From two very interesting, very blunt blog articles written by E L Frederick, and Information Security Professional, about online saftey and internet common sense.. Then some info about online issues myspace and similar social networking site horror stories.. Drama, not reality drama, real drama.

E L Frederick – General: Operational Security for the Home (PART I)
posting to their blogs on sites such as MySpace and Xanga. However, all too often we are taking to banning them from using the sites instead of educating them on the importance of Operation Security (OPSEC).

Banning the usage of the sites is not going to fix the problem. It is going to make the problem worse. It will give the sites a stigma of being “cool” and “rebellious”. We need to empower our children thru education, not leave them to fend for themselves in a hostile world foundering in ignorance.

As parents we begin to teach OPSEC to our children at a young age when they begin to answer the phone. We teach them not to say “My parents aren’t home”, but to use, “They aren’t available right now” instead. The difference is slight, but one could mean that my parents are asleep or outside, or in an argument, as apposed to not home.

For instance, I just did a Google search for “Mike Borden PA”. Mike Borden was one of Kara Beth Borden’s parents. He was killed by David Ludwig a few weeks before the writing of this article.

he places another message on Xanga that says that he and the family are going to be going to Disney World and aren’t going to be home for a week.

Your son, unwittingly, just provided someone with an opportunity to break into your house while you’re away. They have both the address and the window of opportunity sitting in front of them on your son’s Xanga blog.

Something as innocent as a post saying “Hey, DogBoy005, my folks aren’t going to be home tonight, why don’t we get together and rent a movie.” Suddenly take on a whole new meaning when viewed thru the eyes of a predator.

E L’s posts are worth reading and sharing..
Read Operational Security for the Home (PART I) here

and Operational Security for the Home (PART II) here

We also stumbled across some very sobering information via DJ Steve’s Blog… (NSFW; Adult Content)

And…in case you didn’t know…

Mommies and Daddies!
1. your little 14 year old daughter is posting semi-nude pictures of herself, her address, phone number, and where she’s gonna be Friday night. Oh…is that a beer and/or a joint that I see in those pictures she posted? Smart…(see Why the internet can be a bad place to meet people. A murder in Virginia. The Taylor Behl story. )
2. your little Tommy has been posting about how he’s gonna kill himself or somebody else because he feels all alone. (see Teens Both Kept Weblogs)
3. If you still don’t know what the hell is going on, check out…Internet Safety: Internet 101 – Blog and Diary Web sites

read the whole post from this guy that swears myspace has ruined his life, and others’.. kind of funny, and in some ways scary…

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10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

With the official release of WordPress 2.0 we came across a great article by Aaron Brazell (or is it Darren Rowse?), which listed 10 important things to know about WordPress 2.0, and the 10 point we’d like to point out to anyone else out there that has been kicking the idea around of using wordpress as a content management system, or CMS….

10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
WordPress as a Content Management System – Suppose you like WordPress as a blogging tool and you wish to use it to run non-blog sites. This is a distinct possibility, and not necessarily WordPress 2.0 specific. In fact, I’ve been doing this for the past few years in one form or another.

Let me give you an example of one such site. My father is a pastor at New Covenant Community Church in Audubon, New Jersey. (Feel free to visit. I’m sure he won’t mind!) This site is completely WordPress 2.0 driven and it doesn’t even resemble a blog! The question is, how did I accomplish this?

Well, there’s a couple of things I did and I’ll bullet point them for quick reference.

1. Because we wanted the front page to have a different layout than the rest of the site, we created a special template file called NCCC_Main_Page.php. To make it usable for our front page, we needed to add this block of code near the top (after the opening ‘< ?php')
/*
Template Name: NCCC_Main_Page
*/
2. We created a "page" with our home page content and selected the NCCC_Main_Page template from the Page Template drop down.
3. We then downloaded the Static Front Page plugin and followed the instructions to install it.
4. We created the content for our home page and assigned it a page slug of "home" (Note: this is most easily done by assigning the page title of home and then changing it to something more useful after publishing)
5. Because most non-blog sites, including NCCC’s, have a manageable number of pages, we were able to create Entries in WordPress and create a static menu using the entry permalinks. There are built-in functions and plugins to make larger amounts of content more manageable and automatic.
6. As a bonus, we did create a non-blog blog of “Upcoming Events” by posting under a specific category. The permalink to this page was a mere category archive permalink with the specific category used in the archive call. This provides added benefit of enabling an RSS feed of upcoming events.

Related: WordPress 2.0, Open Source Content Management

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WordPress 2.0 Release Candidate 3

Perusing the web today, I came across an exciting development, it looks like wordpress 2.0 is very close to a final release. We are loving the wordpress 1.5, and have yet to finish testing out every feature, theme and plugin that we can get our hands on. If 2.0 is better than 1.5 I can’t see any other blogging software very catching up to wordpress – it’s just awesome.
boren.nu » WordPress 2.0 Release Candidate 3

Then, we click over to Andy’s blog, and find that a new feature in wordpress 2.0 will basically allow you set an application to run with specific files when you upload files such as mp3s and images, that’s right wordpress will be set to take images and audio files (I am assuming video too), auto add to the database and create a post for it, so that you can call the image or audio file into a post, and there is a thumbnail option which will allow you set up an image to go along with your audio file – so this is going to be a big plus for podcasters, or blog broadcasters indeed!

After clicking over to the example Andy used I see the photo handling is really quite brilliant, get ready for an even more powerful wordpress soon!

Can’t wait for the final version!
(and now to see if the plug ins and themes will have any compatability issues?!)

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Technorati adds charts, other features – The RSS Weblog – rss.weblogsinc.com

Technorati is gaining momentum the past severl months, and as to whre they have had some problems, and there has been much debate about issues with blogs not being indexed or indexed regularly (some more than others it appears), Technorati is rolling out some new services, and perhaps these new features will increase the use of technorati for marketing research and public opinion, so revenues should go up, and hopefully thier techology will be upgraded to handle every blog in the world…

Technorati adds charts, other features – The RSS Weblog – rss.weblogsinc.com
Technorati has rolled out a number of new features, including live, updated charts that display the number of mentions of a certain topic. It has also improved extracts so that you can see more about a post before clicking on it.technorgraph
technorgraph

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Adrants Top Ten Thirty Adrants 2005 Sex-In-Advertising Stories

Sometimes it’s a taboo subject, but advertising in every medium seems to do well when incorporated with sexual themes or imagery. Adrants has done a swell job of reporting on some of the largest ad campaigns that blend sex with an ad message, and today they posted the top 30 sex – ad stories of the year…

Adrants » Top Ten Thirty Adrants 2005 Sex-In-Advertising Stories

So here, in no particular order, are the top sex-related advertising stories of 2005 for your multiple pleasures.

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