Yellowseed Web Design Services

Yahoo gets ad placements on eBay, while eBay auctions will appear on Yahoo, and PayPal becomes payment backend for Yahoo online payments.

The overtures of a merger? Read this story here.

In a split with other tech firms, Cisco, 3M, Qualcomm and others ask Congress not to enact any new laws mandating Net neutrality. Check out the story here.

This is an ominous development in what might become the defining piece of legislation for the Internet in the 21st Century - the fight over whether the Internet stays “free”.

The gap between the rich and poor is growing. Information is power. Up until now, these two things, wealth and access to information, have been relatively unhinged—the growing gap in wealth has not led to a proportional growth in the gap in power.

The relatively low cost of access to the Internet (and it’s inherently egalitarian structure) has democratized our ability to get information, organize collectively, and petition corporations and governments (look at the recent demonstrations of illegal workers in the US as evidence of the ability of the Internet to empower the poor and marginalized).

If Net Neutrality Laws are struck down, all this is in jeopardy. Power will be handed back to the wealthy, 1 toll fee at a time.

Wondering how much you can get for your domain? Linkfish.com performs an instant analysis of you domain and assigns it a market value based on a number of factors. This is a great tool if you're considering selling your business - your domain's value can boost your asking price. It can also be helpful in choosing a domain.

Skype makes a break for it. The company is now offering FREE phone calls to any phone in Canada or the US.

With the launch of it’s new calendar service, Google has shown once again that it is the world’s leading developer of web-based applications.

Google Calendar is an incredibly useful tool that uses the iCal protocol first developed by Apple to allow users to create and share their calendars. Because it can display and publish iCal and XML feeds, sharing and collaboration are easier than ever.

Google Calendar also integrates seamlessly with gmail which means that not only is Microsoft Outlook in trouble, but Google has served notice that desktop productivity and office applications will soon be obsolete.

Sign up for you own google calendar at http://www.google.com/calendar/

The Viral Garden has done a nice job of uncover the Internet's 25 most popular marketing blogs. Why should you care? Well, the latest trends and techniques in marketing are bound to turn up on one of these blogs long before you'll read about it in your local paper.

After profiles on digg.com and MSNBC, the Great News Network surpassed the 20,000 visitor per day mark. The site has received great reviews for its comprehensive summary of the day's positive news and its easy-to-use layout. The site also provides a great system of positive news RSS feeds based on topic and region.

If you're not using Mozilla Firefox, you should be (unless you're running a Mac). One of Firefox's best features is its ability to utilize "Extensions". Extensions are little programs that make the browser do extra little things. Visit mozilla to learn more and get some of your own.

Here's a term you should know: social bookmarking. What is it? Why should you care?

As you already know there are literally hundreds of websites in the world. Or is that hundreds-of-billions? Anyways, there are a lot of them and so of course, it follows that there are a lot of companies out there trying to come up with cool technologies that can better sort this mess so you get only what’s good and relevant? I won’t talk about any of the things that have failed (mostly because they disapeared before I learned about them) but I will tell you about one technology that has succeeded in making the Internet more relevant, and succeeded huge.

It’s called social bookmarking and it’s more of an idea than a technology. The idea is that if you can get thousands of people to share their favourite bookmarked sites which you you rank sites based on number of other people who have also bookmarked those sites, then you would get a pretty good idea of what’s good. If you throw in a nice search tool and a system for allowing users to track bookmarks of specific people with similar interest, you’ll get a pretty cool tool.

Two of the most popular social bookmarking tools out right now are del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia but you can also find specific bookmarking services dedicated to specific kinds of sites (Technorati.com focusses on blogs).  Take a look at the right column of this page, near the bottom and you’ll see some of the sites that we think our cool. We got all of these links from someone else. But of course, that’s the way information has always spread: we tell each other. I guess you could say that what’s really happened is that word-of-mouth has just got a lot more organized.

A meme is like a gene, but of culture. It is self-replicating and often infectious, a piece of information that passes from one person to another (and through the electronic media) like a virus. They can be folk wisdom, advertising jingles, trends, fashions, styles, and technology that make up today's cultural genome. Online, memes are everything. I'll post more about all of this soon.

After many months of planning and work, we've finally launched our new website. This is a major plank in the development of Yellowseed 2.0 - a faster, friendlier and better quality web design company. We redesigned our logo, motto, accounting, customer support and we've made a new committment to web standards like XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 (Painful irony: this site isn't completely compliant - dratted Internet Explorer has forced us to comprise). Anyways, hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions please email us or send a ticket through our Consulting and Support system.

Yesterday, I received a strange email from a friend. It was a petition demanding the end to "bonsai kitten" - a pasttime in which a person stuffs a live kitten into a small glass jar for a year with the hope of creating a shrunken and distorted "bonsia" cat. My friend had received the email about bonsai kitten from another friend, and because she has a good social conscience, immediately forwarded it to everybody she knew. Sound familiar?

Well it gets better. The email also had a link to a website (www.bonsaikittens.com) which shows photos of the distorted cats and information on how to bonsai your own cat.  The site then goes on to describe techniques for packing your kitten into a tiny container, how to feed your cat and techniques for removing waste.

If you haven’t guessed already, the site is a fake and the email my friend sent me was nothing more than a funny (although disturbing) example of a media virus. Like a computer virus, a media virus spreads from computer to computer, usually by email. But unlike a computer virus, a media virus doesn’t take advantage of a computer’s weakness to spread, instead it exploits a uniquely human weaknesses, gullability.

Lunarpages.com got nailed by a denial of service (a.k.a. DoS) attack today, resulting in a number of their servers being unavailable. A number of Yellowseed clients are hosted at Lunarpages but, thankfully, only 1 client was affected. Their site was unavailable for about 15 minutes at around 10:30am.

So, what is a Denial of Service attack?

According to the wikipedia,

DoS attacks are often initiated by a virus, which launches the attack from thousands of infected computers spread all over the world at the same moment. Since they come from so many different computers all at once, Denial of Service attacks are extremely diffult to guard against. Nevertheless, the best solution to surviving a DoS attack is prevention. This article has some good information about your web host is doing to prevent them.

Read more at Wikipedia Denial of Service Attack

You've already heard that businesses are using blogs as a way of talking to their customers, employees, and investors in a more personal way (Here's an example if you need more evidence than what you're reading right now). Blogging makes a company seem more human and community focussed despite a global medium that de-emphasizes face-to-face contact.

Not to overstate the point, but I think the blogosphere is the foundation of tomorrow's media.

Syndication/RSS.

Tomorrow,

Blogs will also become richer of course - with audio and video woven in - and more interlinked, but tools like technorati.com that synthesize blogs into custom information packages are already here and just getting more sophisticated every day.