I have long been a fan of RFID. I think the technology is really cool and can help streamline businesses and help raise the profit margins for well-organized companies. I like RFID’s potential but know that it’s nowhere near ready to be used for sensitive information such as passports, certificates, or credit cards. While the technology behind RFID is ultra cool (RFID embedded in fingertips to open doors, unlock PC’s, etc…) and the technology could lead to a “commerce 2.0″ type revolution/evolution (faster checkouts at grocery stores, faster pay at the pump…), the lack of thought given to securing these cards by their manufacturers brings to the forefront a very big security risk for anyone carrying RFID cards with sensitive data.

This blog post was inspired by yesterday’s Boing.tv post where they demonstrate how easy it really is to hack in to an RFID card. For as little as $8 in parts easily obtained at eBay, Pablos Holman proves how quickly and easily one can obtain the data stored on these chips.

RFID is a scary technology that I believe is being used prematurely in some respects. If you have a credit card or a passport with RFID chips embedded, I would exercise caution and do my best to disable the readibility of those chips. For example, one could easily disable the RFID chips by microwaving the chips for a few seconds. Your card should still work but the RFID functionality would obviously be disabled.

Watch the video below and use your wise judgment when considering an RFID card.

Got some time to spare?  Head on over to Google’s official easter egg game and relax for a bit!

The question for the ages. How does one place well for certain keywords on Google? I get asked that more often than I would have thought. I’m not Matt Cutts nor am I an SEO expert, but I have done OK for a few of my sites in the recent past. There is no one magic trick to placing well in the engines and Google surely won’t give away any tips or tricks. However, they do give you a set of very vague guidelines to help you get an understanding of how to build your websites.

Firstly, keyword search results, or your search engine ranking position (SERP) determine how well you place when a user searches for a given keyword that is relevant to your site/page. Google advises you to make your page for the humans that are reading it, and if it’s relevant to humans then Google’s Googlebot will read it and index it. In addition to content, Google recommends that you have other links going to your site and that you also create a sitemap. You should also make it accessible and avoid keyword pollution, page cloaking, and other malicious things.

From the paragraph above, you can see that there are at least 4 recommendations. From these recommendations, honest developers and spammers alike will be indexed by Google. Google then aims to remove the spam and keep the ham. The honest content creator and the Evil Marketing Spammers (the Ems, as I like to call them) both have the same set of guidelines, but somehow, it seems like the Ems are getting ahead of the game. While the honest content creators strive to provide good content, the Ems will work their evil magic to beat Google’s rules and algorithms in order to rise above other more qualified and relevant websites.

Learn From the Ems

Then question then becomes simple. As content developers and non-spammers, what can we do in order to make our websites better than that of the Ems? How can Google find favor in our sites, given that we don’t have all the time, money, or other resources that the Ems have?

Lucky for us, Google has given us some starting points and the Ems have given us plenty of knowledge and insight into doing well for ourselves.

1. Human Readable Pages: Google recommends that your page should be human readable. Well, aren’t all pages readable to humans? I would say “sort of, yes”. However, what Google really means is this: “Make your content so that our bot can read it”. In other words, don’t create one huge .jpg with text on it. Googlebot will think it’s only an image. Don’t make your site in Flash if you’re not using any text that can be parsed. If possible, use only valid HTML code. That’s kind of what they’re saying. Googblebot is impressive, but it is not able to interpret things other than text so it goes through your source code and looks at what’s inside. It then makes sense of your content and indexes and ranks it accordingly.
   It also seems like Google cares about how much content you have. If there are two sites of similar quality, content, and ranking, I think that the one with more content will be ranked above the one with a lesser rank.
2. Incoming Links: In the Google Webmaster tools, there’s a way for you to check incoming links to your site. I’m not sure how the big G finds and categorizes the incoming links, nor do I know what they count as a valid incoming link, but that does seem to play a big role into placing well in the search results. We can learn from the Ems here and use some strategies if we really want our content to be found. We (as individuals) can create accounts on sites like Squidoo, Blogger, and Wordpress. We can then create content on each of these sites that link to our site. This is kind of an odd strategy because you are then creating SPAM to promote your quality site. I’m not too fond of this approach but I have used it in the past with a small degree of success. Likewise, you can create accounts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon and hope that your users will like your content. These two strategies combined can help your site to place higher in search engines.
3. Accessibility: Lastly, Google says your site should be accessible. This does not mean making it only so users can GET to your sites, but it means making the content “accessible” to people with disabilities. You do this simply by adding “alt” tags to your images and by adding titles to links. Make sure to validate your site using the W3 HTML validator.

Getting indexed by Google is the easy part. People will find you and people will get to your site eventually. If you employ the above strategies and work on building solid content, people will find your sites more frequently and you’ll start getting more and more hits organically. Keep your eyes peeled and examine the sites made by Ems. They’re good and you can learn a lot from them!

Have you ever noticed that a lot of bloggers seem to be doing a lot of brainless things on their website? I mean, I’ve surfed a lot and seen many different sites, but only a few of them stand out and hit me as blogs that try to do something different. I’d say that a vast majority of the blogs I read are cookie cutter blogs; they have some generic blog template serving up some affiliate ads on the right. They’re clogged with widgets, gadgets, and 3rd party bells and whistles that detract from the content of the blog.

The first thing I wanted to do when I started blogging was to develop my own Wordpress blog template. I knew nothing about doing this kind of thing before November and today I would like to think that given a bit more artistic talent, I could start a Wordpress theme design company. I can take any template and break it up into a Wordpress theme. Not only does a self-made Wordpress template help you to stand out from the crowd but it also adds a nice level of individuality to your blog. I also get the satisfaction of knowing the my blog template is unique and nobody else has this template. I’m not bragging about my template…I know I am no artistic genius, but I like what I see and am satisfied with my work. When people come to this blog, I hope they recognize that this is not a run of the mill, flight by night kind of blog.

Another thing that instantly turns me off to a blog while browsing the Internet is the use of 3rd party plugins. I currently use 3 of them on my site; one of which I think will be gone soon. Some websites that I see, however, take what seems like 5 minutes to load. When all I want to do is read a certain article, I often end up closing the blog before it even loads because these gadgets take so long to load. There are blogs that probably only get 10 hits per day and they load up all kinds of widgets in the hopes of making money online. For those blogs out there, hear me: get the traffic first, then add the monetizing widgets. You can’t make money if people close your blog before it even loads.

As a rule of thumb, I think of my users before setting out a new design for the blog or before adding anything to the site. Is your blog ready for new things? Do you want people to remember your blog as a good one? Then don’t do what everyone else is doing! Think outside of the box and do something different. Don’t bog down your blog with useless widgets. Make your user’s experience memorable. Want your own Wordpress template? Stay tuned to this site and learn! In the coming posts I will show you, step by step, how to create your own Wordpress template from scratch.

Yesterday, an AP story started out like this:

“WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.”

I don’t know about you, but I like my privacy…or at least the perception of privacy. I don’t have anything to hide but I still would like to feel like nobody is looking into my business. With so many privacy breaches occurring these last few years, it is as though our privacy has been thrown out the window. Most of the times, the claim is that our privacy has been violated to help win “the war on terror” (think: unlawful wiretaps, etc…), but to me it feels more like it’s been breached because the policies that do exist were created for a different time and are very outdated. Policies need to change from the ground up, and this means stepping on some toes and laying down a well defined line of what things are acceptable and what things aren’t acceptable.

Do you like your privacy being invaded like this? Read this article and tell me what you think.