Furth and Fortune blog by Will Murray

Paul Walsh, an Irish entrepreneur, wants more visibility. He’s creating buzz by giving away a Mac Air to people who follow his wubud account on Twitter. Will he climb to the pinnacles of online greatness like his IT blogging rivals Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis?

It seems the WordPress 2.5 upgrade was more hype than substance, or else a lot of the benefits are under the hood where I can’t see it.

The most blogged about “must-have” feature is the upgraded administration area. It’s supposed to be so much better organized, so much prettier, so much easier on the eyes, so much better than before. Well, that’s “their” opinion. Here’s mine.

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A close relative of the deceased Star Trek Enterprise actress, Kellie Waymire, called me for insight on how to remove the actress’ name from several porn sites. There are no nude photos, but the sex sites use her name to lure people in to sell things. The call really touched me; it also made me mad.

Note: I discussed this blog entry with the relative, who would prefer I not disclose his or her name or relationship to Kellie. Therefore, I will refer to the relative as “Vee”.

The Internet is, like any technology, neither good nor bad. How people use the technology is what matters.

Kellie Waymire was a very likable and charming young woman entering the prime of her acting career. In addition to Star Trek, she was in 36 other TV shows and movies according to IMDb, and a regular or semi-regular in several of the TV series. Vee also tells me that Kellie was nearly always involved in some sort of community theater product or other stage work since from her middle school years through college. Kellie made friends easily, and there was hardly a place in the country where she did not have a nearby friend who would have willingly let her stay while she visited.

The week after she passed away, Kellie’s name hit the Lycos Top 50 at number 19. (The Lycos Top 50 is a list of the most searched for words or phrases on the Internet, and it is updated weekly.) At her memorial, over 500 people attended, including directors, producers, and co-stars. Kellie was admired and respected by her peers and fans. She was loved by her family and friends who were very proud of her. She continues to be missed by all who knew her or have come to know her through reruns.

After Kellie’s passing, Vee’s grief kept her away from the Internet for over a year. She did not want to know what people were saying about Kellie. She probably did not want to even think about it more than the dozens of times each day the loss probably passed through her mind. Other relatives continue to avoid Internet sites concerning Kellie, because the pain is still too much. During that time, several websites filled up with pages and pages of condolences from fans, friends, former college roommates, people who saw her on stage, people who worked with her. It’s all very overwhelming, even for someone like me who never knew Kellie.

Vee did eventually venture out into the Internet to see what, if anything, was out there about Kellie. It turns out there is a LOT of information. There is a Wikipedia entry for Kellie Waymire, and naturally, she is listed on IMDb (as most everyone in the move and TV industry are). She has entire message areas dedicated to her on several Star Trek fan sites. Kellie even has an “unofficial” fan club site that does a wonderful job capturing the beauty of Kellie’s life. Vee is deeply touched by these sentiments. Knowing Star Trek fans as I do (being somewhat of a fan myself, though not a rabid one), it’s fair to say that Kellie Waymire will live on in the Star Trek universe, and in the hearts of her fans, forever.

As one might expect, anytime you enter a celebrity’s name in a search engine, you will find links to nude pictures of the celebrity. It doesn’t matter that Kellie never was in any nude photos, but there are still plenty of links to sites claiming to have these sexy photos and porn clips. When Vee followed these links, invariably she found one or two pictures of Kellie (usually from some scene in a TV show or movie—hardly pornography), as well as links to sexy centerfold type models, many of which were overtly sexual and disgusting to Vee.

Somehow, these pariahs of the Internet (the sex site owners) had picked up on Kellie Waymire’s name as being a popular search term, and they were using it (and any slightly sexy photo they could find) as bait to draw people into their sites. Why? Money, of course. Once Kellie’s good name had lured the visitor to the site, it’s easy to assume that people likely to click on “nude photos” in the first place, are likely to pay for a subscription to the porn site. Or maybe they will buy a DVD instead. Maybe both. All an Internet marketer is hoping for is that once they pull some visitor into their site, the visitor will stay and spend money.

Imagine for a moment that you are Vee. Your relative was such a sweet, humble, and unpretentious girl. Then you see these sites linking her with porn and disgusting sex acts. It would be almost too much to bear. At first, you probably try to ignore it. Then you start to get mad. Then you decide it’s time to take action. You look in the yellow pages. You call me. (Well, that’s what Vee did. I’m still not sure why she picked my company.)

Unfortunately, there is little I can do for Vee. I listened to her story, of course. I visited some of the websites she had visited. I helped her to download some of the touching memorial videos that had been made. I also tried to help Vee feel a little better about the situation.

I pointed out that the only reason these site owners are using Kellie’s name is because she was so popular. The fact that so many fans loved her, so many of them still search for her, so many fans still care for her, makes her name a very popular search term. The porn sites simply look at search terms for celebrities, and the more popular the celebrities’ names, the more likely their names will appear on unsavory Internet pages.

I mentioned that I… [Continue reading]

I’m sure most of you have heard of Net Neutrality for some time by now. Please do not forget to stay current with your representatives’ view on this important issue. Your ability to connect to sites like MySpace.com, Care2.com, ACLU.org, or Eff.org could be at risk. Even if you’ve acted before, following up is important.

If you have not already done so (or if it has been a while), please do the following:

• Visit http://www.savetheinternet.com/ for background information on this issue.
• If you are in the USA, find out where your representatives in Congress stand.
• If you are in the USA, also sign this petition.
• If you are on MySpace, add SaveTheInternet as your friend.
• If you blog, sign up to join the corps of bloggers
  helping to save the Internet.

Nothing beats directly communicating with your government representatives. While the Net Neutrality laws being discussed are focused on the USA, this problem has worldwide impact. If you live in or work in another country, request your country’s government to apply pressure on the USA to insist on Net Neutrality — REAL Net Neutrality — so that your country’s access to Internet services is not harmed. Whether it’s a good thing or not (probably not), much of the world’s Internet is hosted and/or operated within the United States, so its laws are very far-reaching. Big companies like AT&T and Verizon with a global presence are pushing for relaxing or eliminating Net Neutrality. Contact them and tell them how much you are opposed to their efforts.

Below is the letter I wrote to my representatives in Congress:

I am a business owner and your constituent writing to urge you to vote NO on Senator Stevens’ telecommunications bill (H.R. 5252 / S. 2686) unless real Net Neutrality language is added.

I have been using the Internet since 1990, back before the World Wide Web was graphical. Years ago I helped bring the first community-based Internet service provider (ISP) to San Luis Obispo, California, and I have seen firsthand the incredible growth, promise, and potential of the Internet. I have seen the world shrink from an unimaginably big place to a place where I now have friends in probably over 50 different countries. I have seen small businesses compete, and often outperform, bigger companies that were slow to adopt.

Companies like Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, and Google.com have become part of nearly every person’s life on this planet. How did that happen? Because the Internet is the only place on this planet that is not fragmented and sectionalized into fiefdoms and regulated by profits.

Net Neutrality is vitally important to the ongoing success of the Internet. Without it, there will no longer be an Internet as we know it. There will be subnets where your ISP becomes your programming director. It won’t be blatant at first, but over time, you will get only what you pay for. To get more of the Internet, you will have to pay more ISPs for access to their preferred content. Sure, the companies are arguing that now, but without laws in place to enforce net neutrality, these companies’ guarantees are meaningless.

Do what is right for the world and the future. Please vote NO on Senator Stevens’ telecommunications bill (H.R. 5252 / S. 2686) unless real Net Neutrality language is added that prohibits network operators from discriminating against content and creating a tiered Internet. I will be following your actions related to this matter. Thank you for your time.

Tags: Congress, Internet, ISP, net neutrality, politics, SaveTheInternet.com, telecommunications, web design

Sitemapping is both an art and a science (isn’t most of good website design?). It’s a bit quirky, because it’s designing not for a human, but for a piece of software to easily comprehend instead.

Google has an XML-based sitemap specification that has been picked up by most of the other search engines. If you generate the site map in this format, Google can more quickly and accurately traverse our site and return more relevant results. It also gives the googlebot an idea of how frequently to re-index pages (do specific pages change often or rarely?).

To encourage Google and other engines to fully index your website, the “sitemap.php” (or “sitemap.html”, etc.) file, and especially the “sitemap.xml” file need to be at the root level of the site, and a link to the human-readable one needs to be included near the top of every page (above the top 20% of the page in code view, not just in display view) to be sure the sitemap is easily located and indexed. All 404 error pages and other error documents should include a link to the sitemap to help both people and bots locate an alternate choice if they followed a stale link.

Tags: Google, search engines, SEO, sitemap, tips, web design, website, XML

Isn’t it funny how you can just accidentally stumble across a piece of history in the making? I visited Apple’s home page and noticed a counter listing how many songs had been downloaded, and it was counting up to 500 million. The counter was at 499,996,000 give or take, but was climbing very rapidly.

Tags: Apple Computers, design, historic events, history, Internet culture, iTunes, music, news, songs, thanks, work