Mini battles occur online day after day. These range from petty misunderstandings between lovers or friends that end up in angry emails, to major quarrels between competitors that end up on their websites’ home pages.

Even young bloggers are not spared from the anger as spammers and flamers bombard comment boxes. The same sort of anger carries over to discussion threads, forums, and chat rooms. When you think about it, the web has become yet another outlet for many people to dispense their pent up emotions. In fact, some blog entries specifically fall under the rant category.

Where are all the angst coming from? Is the web turning to a whole new battlefield for many people all over the world?

Photo credits: Steve Woods

This is one kind of ailment that the computer age has brought to us. One of them is known as the Computer vision syndrome, or CVS, is a relatively new medically defined ailment and it’s growing. among the heavy computer users. Opthamologists say that 90 percent of the people who just stare at a computer all day long will have some part of it. Focusing continually on a computer screen triggers a whole host of complaints, including double and blurry vision and headaches. People with dry eyes are more vulnerable to CVS. People can lubricate the eyes with artificial tears to combat CVS.

So how was the George W. Bush “miserable failure” bomb finally removed from Google search results?

There are two reasons: first, in 2007, Google changed their algorithm so that it could no longer be abused by pranksters, and ensured that the “miserable failure” search term would not point to the Google bomb, but rather to discussions, news articles, and commentary about the Google bomb project. The first result is now an article about the “miserable failure” Google bomb itself. Google’s official statement on this change was:

Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Also, the White House web team got smart and redirected the link that used to point to George W. Bush’s biography; it now points to the page of the current president, which means that after Bush’s successor is elected, those old links would now point to that person’s page. On second thought, I’m not sure that was a completely smart thing to do.

From 2004 to 2006, if you typed in “miserable failure” on google.com, the first result you get would be George W. Bush’s official page on the White House website. This is the most popular example of a Google bomb, which manipulates search results based on the fact that Google’s page ranking algorithm places a high premium on incoming links.

According to Google, they didn’t manually edit search results for Google bombs such as these because:

We’re reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Image source: www.brickfilms.com
Smile. You’re about to encounter the Kensington VideoCAM family – high quality, competitively priced Digital PC Cameras that make it trouble-free to take and send snapshots and video clips online. When you use Kensington Digital PC Camera, you’ll see why the Kensington VideoCAM’s state-of-the-art technology is going to transform the way people communicate. Whether e-mailing still photos and video clips or videoconferencing online, you’ll be looking good – at a great price. Live video conferencing saves money on phone bills and creates more intimate and effective communication. Imagine explaining directly to your client the status of an important project. Imagine singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a face, not a phone receiver. Just plug the VideoCam into your USB port, load the drivers, and you are ready to go. No interface card required. This tiny device fits on or near your computer. Lean forward or backwards; the person on the other end will still see you. And why wait to show your newly decorated home to your friend – send snapshots over the Internet right now! The tethered cord gives you six feet of range to position and move around with the camera.

“In only three years, 20 average households in the US will generate more online traffic than the entire Internet today.”

This was a quote from an AT&T spokesperson about the future of the internet. Due to increasing bandwidth speeds, internet users enjoy video streaming and quick transfer of huge files. However, AT&T claims that the internet’s structure will reach full capacity by 2010 unless large investments are made for its expansion. They project that the cost of this expansion will be 55 billion USD for the US network and 130 billion USD worldwide.

This seems like a huge exaggeration, but there is no doubt that there will come a point in the future when network expansion has to be done if current trends continue. Right now, most analysts concur that this will occur sometime between 2016 and 2018.

The New Websense® ThreatSeeker™ Network, which features the world’s first “Internet HoneyGrid™” melds both honeypots and advanced grid computing systems to parse through more than one billion pieces of content daily searching for security threats.  The new system uses more than 50 million real-time data collecting systems worldwide to monitor and to classify Web, messaging and data content – giving  Websense unparalleled visibility into the state of content on the Internet. With this unique Internet intelligence.  Websense security products can adapt to the rapidly-changing Internet at speeds not possible by traditional security solutions from Symantec, McAfee and TrendMicro, and basic Web filtering solutions offered by Secure Computing, BlueCoat and others.

A new version of Mozilla’s popular Firefox Web browser is ready for download with improved security and memory use as the tiny company takes a stab at Microsoft Corp’s dominant Internet Explorer. It’s the privately-held company’s trial version of Firefox 3 browser that will soon be ready for the masses to use after months of development. On the other hand,  Internet Explorer ready for easier Web sharing. Many people now create and share content on the Internet or blend services from various sites in their daily tasks, reflecting the medium’s clear evolution from a place for simply consuming websites.  The upcoming version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer, version 8, embraces those trends by adding an ‘Activities’ feature that makes all that easier for PC users.  . 

As with most things in life, the Internet has its positive and negative aspects. The web is one of the most promising phenomena ever, but that does not make it fool-proof. In fact, the same positive aspects that make it a wonder are often the very same things that have been abused.

For starters, there’s the issue between connectivity and privacy. The web is all about getting you connected and publishing your thoughts and ideas to the world. But this cannot happen without sacrificing your privacy and possibly foregoing your anonymity. Then there’s the debate about freedom of speech and censorship. Who dictates what one should and should not say online?

The list goes on and on. What do you think about the web? What are its pros and cons?

Photo credits: Marius Largu