Jianjun’s Blog

After some research and secret testing, I decided to launch a Chinese teaching podcast blog at a separate domain. The podcast will mainly focus on people who never learned any Chinese. The service teaches everyday conversations and will be absolutely free of charge.

The whole course will start with simple greetings and then extend into longer and more challenging situational modules. I plan to give a 5-10 minute class each week with accompanying text materials such as new word list, additional vocabulary and other relevant information.

Since the course will be a one-man show - at least in the beginning - to prevent listeners getting bored quickly, I will try to make each class as short, useful and interesting as possible. While I’m preparing (finding sound clips, writing syllabus, etc.) for the formal launch of the podcast, as always I appreciate any suggestions from you. Although this service is of an amateur nature, I’d like to ensure its quality.

Stay tuned!

OoVoo (what’s ooVoo? Read this post.) recently sent a survey request to users asking for feedback on its functions and possible improvements. Most of the survey questions compared ooVoo to Skype, which gave me a feeling that they were committed (and in the end ready) to grab some market share from that big brother.

However, a few days later when a new version of ooVoo came into being, it only let me down. Instead of offering more useful features, it takes away some of the coolest and charges a fee if you want them back.

The standard (free) ooVoo option now only has these:

Like Facebook, one of the charming features of Twitter is its extendability. Although standard Twitter functions are kind of limited, third-party applications make up for this perfectly. Here are some of the services I used and liked:

1. If you think text tweets are too boring and would like to share your snapshots on-site occasionally, give brightkite a try. Brightkite allows you to post your current location, notes or pictures via web, SMS (if in the US) or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) - as an email.You may choose to link your brightkite and Twitter accounts so each time your update on brightkite, a new tweet appears on Twitter. Brightkite has a privacy option so you can always control how detailed your location should be shown to whom. Brightkite is currently in Beta and you need to wait for an invitation to participate. If you can’t get one from their website, leave me a message here. I’ll send one to your email on an availability basis.
2. Ever wondered who’s been following when you didn’t get follower notification? Or are you feeling frustrated when someone unfollows you after you followed them back? With Twitter Karma, in just a few clicks you will find all those information plus a couple of other functions.
3. If you are one of those twitterbuds who can’t stop tweeting even during sleep, here’s a good one for you. Tweetlater sends out pre-scheduled tweets at your own local time. You may also use it as a reminder service tweeting to yourself. But this only works when you use, again, a third-party service notifying you of such tweets. Another use of Tweetlater is auto-follow your new followers. However, since Twitter spammers are on the rise, take the risk when you use this.
4. Did you know many of the most active Twitter users don’t visit Twitter website to interact with other friends? There are many Twitter ‘enhancement’ applications, one of which is Thwirl. Thwirl is an Abode Air application that sits in your system tray. Besides all standard Twitter functions, it also gives you a sound alert when @yourusername appears in the middle of someone’s tweet body. This is a great addition. Twitter by default doesn’t send the message to your ‘reply’ tab unless @yourusername comes first in a tweet. Some other nice functions:
   • re-tweeting a useful message, spreading it far and wide;
   • keyword-searching twitterland messages;
   • shortening long URLs with snurl;
   • picture-sharing via TwitPic.

There are many other great Twitter extensions. But since I didn’t have a chance to try them out, I won’t be able to cover them until I update this post later.

Nice tweeting…

Gladder is a free FireFox plugin that works as a proxy server pool picker. (To learn more about it, read this article.) However, recently I found each time I use Gladder to visit my friend’s blog, the browser is redirected to www.sheetr.com (see below):

As this persists, it has led me to think about Gladder’s security strength and the possibility of its being hacked by such web sites.

Besides, as Gladder proxies are unencrypted, data transmitted through these servers are transparent. In other words, your data can still be filtered by the Firewall and you are denied access to many web sites. Furthermore, Gladder can’t deal with scripts, flash and a number of other multimedia features, meaning you can’t watch Youtube movies, Google movies and so on.

If it has so many limitations and annoying redirections, I don’t see any reason to continue using it. Anonymouse provides all Gladder functionalities without installing anything onto your disk.

Most SEO experts tell us that identical (duplicate) content will negatively affect our website’s search engine ranking and may even result in our websites being penalized. Well, to some extent, this may be true, as we do hear people say their websites are being banned or even dropped from search index. But according to my recent observation, those are probably just some very rare cases.

Some of the most notorious copycat websites almost don’t have any original content. They simply search on the Internet and found those keyword-rich articles and heap them together to make a gigantic website. They do things that Google ‘threatens’ to punish but they do get very good SEO results!

Their tactic is very simple. The site owner sets up a large number of blogs on free platforms with the same duplicate content linking to one another with most links back to the main site, while the main site doesn’t link back to these satellites. At the same time, they submit all those blogs to search engines and services such as Technorati to get better exposure and higher authority.

Let’s look at a live example: ‘translation183.bloglipi.com‘. The blog not only uses duplicate contents from other websites, but also has unknown number of embedded keyword-rich links to its main site - sytra.cn.

On Technorati, there are 19 blog reactions to it (see http://www.technorati.com/search/translation183.bloglipi.com) and one of those reacted back has an authority of 58 (see http://www.technorati.com/blogs/jonramos.com/wpmu/translation182). Needless to say, all those ‘reactions’ are created by the same guy and those blog names mostly have a ‘translaiton183′, ‘translation182′ or something similar.

I guess no SEO experts will actually recommend such a strategy to generate traffic, but it works. In just a few months time, Sytra.cn generated a very good traffic of more than 6,000 unique visits per month and a Google pagerank of 3.

Please don’t take me wrong. I’m with you in condemning such copycats + spammers and I believe what they are building right now will in the end be their tombs (something a Semantic Web will do well).

The purpose of this article is to show you search engine algorithms of today are far from perfect in dealing with such abusive acts and, at the same time, some unintentional duplicate content or a little too many links probably won’t do us much harm in regard to SEO.