Charter

I again decided to update the Wikipedia article for my high school. Here is what I added: "Advanced Placement
The school offers many advanced placement classes which allow students to earn college credit while still attending high school. Advanced placement courses include computer scinece, Literature, Language, Latin, French Language, French Literature, Spanish Language, Calculus AB, Calculus BC, Statistics, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science, Government, and US History."

The Charter School of Wilmington Wikipedia article

Today I decided to update the Charter School of Wilmington article on Wikipedia. This article was written about my high school. this is what I posted: "Charter studends continually score high on the Delaware Standardized Test Program every year, leading the State statistics with the most students scoring a 5 (the highest grade on the test) in several subjects including Math and Science." Yay for Charter. Here is a link to the new and improved article on Charter.

Vanity search

So today I was reading through my team members' blogs and I stumbled upon a fun article on Lydia's page. She wrote an article about Vanity Searches on Google. Here is Lydia's article on Vanity Search. Since we are supposed to take one of our team mates' articles and continue the blog about it on our site, I thought this would be a fun article to do.
When I searched my name on Google here are the things that came up: The first thing was the UD sailing website, I am the fundraising chair for the sailing team and my name is on the officer's roster. The second thing on the list is my blog for Info tech class!! Yay for extra credit points! The Wikipedia article I created is next, I was a bit surprised that this showed up on the list. Followed by several pages that show sailing results from regattas i sailed in. My high school graduation as well as articles in the school newspaper in which I was quoted.
It is fun and interesting to do a vanity search on Google to see what exactly the world can find out about you at a push of a button. This is an important thing to keep in mind anytime you add content on the web because you don't know what the Google bot can find and how far the Bot will journey in cyberspace to find those incriminating photos of you that may cost you your next job. It is becoming a trend for people to use this tool to find information on others before going on a blind date, or hiring someone for a job opening. You never know who is looking.
Aside from being paranoid that people will find out all of your information, this may also be a useful tool. For example if you have a blog, like me for example, and want the world to see the work that you have done on making that blog oh so wonderful, it pays to have to Google bot find you. For more tips on how to get Google juice read my previous post. (Look at that! I even used one of the hints I mentioned in that article where I said link to your old posts to generate the juice! I'm on to you Google bot...mmwahaha)
In the mean time its alright to admit that all of us are a tad bit shallow, so hop on to Google and see what secrets the little bot dug up about you.

Google Juice

Toby Blair's Skype presentation in class inspired me to find out more about Google juice. Her blog Diva Marketing comes up very high on Google if you search the term "marketing blog" and I decided to look into this subject. The whole point of blogging for marketing purposes is to get your word out and get it out to a lot of people. The best way to do this is to make sure that your blog shows up high on a search engine's search results, so I decided to search how to get Google juice on Google. The heart of search is the Google bot that crawls the depths of cyberspace to find every single web page on the Internet by hopping from link to link to link. When this guy finds web pages it takes them back to Google to have them Indexed according to a very specific PageRank algorithm. This algorithm gives the site a weight depending on the amount of links on the site and the quality of those links. So for example if a high traffic site with a lot of links themselves is linked to your site you would get a higher rank on Google's page rank system as opposed to if you linked to a site with a few unimportant links. I also found a blog talking about this subject. This is Bernie Zimmermann's blog. He has a step by step article telling you how to provide your own blog with Google juice. The first step Bernie suggested was linking to other sites because like I mentioned above, the Google bot that ranks search results checks to see sites that are often linked to. The second thing Bernie suggests is to link to your own site every time you have the opportunity. So if for example you are on a relevant site and commented on someone else's blog you could leave the URL for your page. Or sign all of your e-mails with the URL of your blog and soon people will notice your blog. Also you can link to your older posts to let readers and the Google bot know that your older content is still relevant. In the third update about Google juice that Bernie did, he gave more tips on fueling your web site's Google juice. He has links to other sites talking about this subject, like buzzle.com where a second article about Google juice can be found. This article suggests that you should register your website for longer than one year because spam websites usually only register for a short period of time and therefore the Google bot generally assumes that these short subscriptions are all spam.
For more information about Google juice and how exactly the PageRank algorithm works you could read John Battelle's book Search which is about search sites, including Google, and how these sites are changing the Internet.

Gyongyos Article

This week I decided to update the wikipedia article for Gyongyos. I added to the section that describes the name of the town and what it means. This is what I wrote: "The 16-17th century historian Miklos Istvanffy wrote that the name of the town comes from the Hungarian word for mistletoe (literally "wood-pearl"), which is abundant in the local woods." I found this information in a book that I have about the town.

Click Fraud

So Friday we were talking about click fraud in class and Professor Brown was showing us an article about it on one of our assigned blogs. And of course I had to ask a stupid question about detecting click fraud and the Professor Brown quickly assigned me the task of reading the article and blogging about it. So here it is...
Click fraud is when people make programs whose only purpose is to click on advertisements over and over again, and thus these clicks do not represent authentic traffic to these advertisements. Advertisers are concerned about this problem because on many sites such as Google, advertisers are charged for their adds based on the number of clicks they receive. To appease these angry advertisers, Google devised a three step program to try to cut down on fraudulent clicking. The first two steps of the system are referred to as proactive click detection and the last step is reactive click detection. In the proactive steps Google devised a set of algorithms as well as other techniques to detect fraudulent clicks and catch them before the advertiser is ever charged for these fake clicks. Most of the fraudulent clicks are caught in these two steps. In the reactive step the advertiser complains to Google about a potential problem and Google goes back to investigate those clicks, this represents a small percentage of fraudulent clicks that Google catches.
The article goes on to say that the problem with click fraud is those clicks that actually effect the advertisers by making them have to pay more versus those clicks that just happen and are caught or otherwise do not cause any other harm for the advertiser. So click fraud is only a problem if it effects the advertiser, if it just happens and the click protections systems catch them there is no harm done and its irrelevant that the clicks happened in the first place. So the goal is not to stop click fraud necessarily, but to make the blockers more effective.
Out of all the clicks on ads, only a small percentage are actually fraudulent, but to be extra careful Google rules out a number of probably not fraudulent clicks as fraudulent with out ever charging the advertiser. This actually ends up costing Google hundreds of millions each year in forgone advertising revenue. For example as a rule Google rules out double clicks and deems these clicks invalid. This is the proactive part of the system. As for the reactive approach, when an advertiser believes there might have been fraudulent clicks on their advertisements they askGoogle to do an investigation. If Google does find these clicks to be fraudulent after their investigation, the advertiser is credited back for the invalid clicks.
Even though there may be fraudulent clickers out there Google is trying hard to curb this type of activity by catching as many as possible fraudulent clicks, as it is the pay per click payment structure is beneficial to advertisers because they are only charged when a customer clicks on their ad and also this is a way for the advertisers to gauge the performance of their ad campaign.
Read the article at: Invalid Clicks – Google’s Overall Numbers

Painful Picture

I decide to add a picture to the Wikipedia article I made for Hysplex last week. I myself made the image so I didn't have to worry about any copyright issues with the picture. Making the picture was the easy part, but uploading it on Wikipedia was such a pain. I had to read a whole bunch of instruction on how to legally upload pictures so I don't violate any copyright laws and what not. I didn't think the instructions explained how it all worked too well because I was a bit confused after reading them. They told me to upload it onto their commons, which is a site Wikipedia has entirelly dedicated to images. After I did that I assumed I could go ahead and upload it to my article, but then I ran into sharing violations because the picture was already present on the commons site...So it took me a few tries, but in the end I finally figured out the logistics of this whole picture uploading business and now my article has a wonderful picture of a Hysplex!