I am sure most of you are familiar with Bluetooth technology. Most of your devices do have this since it’s the fastest way to connect and transfer files from one device to the other. But have you ever thought of how “Bluetooth” got its name? Just a little tidbit of history, Bluetooth is the English name of Danish King Harald Blatand (King Harold Bluetooth in English). He is said to have united all the division in ancient Norway, Denmark and Sweden in the 10th century. Just like what the techie Bluetooth does, it integrates (unites or connect) a wide range of different devices for a faster, more stable connectivity. On May 22, 2008, Bluetooth (technology) will also celebrate its 100th year anniversary.

Photo taken from http://allblackberry.com

With the different economic crises happening all over the world, epitomized by the recent recession in the United States, who would ever thought that the market for company servers won’t get affected? It’s true that companies did a little cost cutting on the side, but they never dared to cut of their server costs—in fact, server sales grew in the first quarter! Companies saw the need of technological integration to further their business success, thus, investing more on web content and other web-based mobile devices. HP was the leader in server sales, making $4.01 billion (10.3% increase compared to last year).

Photo taken from http://www.oreilly.com

Since free web-based emails put some of my important emails in my bulk/spam folder, I regularly and faithfully check it to see if I have urgent mails redirected there (to think I receive hundreds in just 30 minutes).

I see all the time emails from “Google Business”, so, thinking that this might be something important, I opened the mail. However, upon hollering my cursor over the link, I saw in my status bar that the URL is way too far from “www.google.com”. In fact, it was from a social networking website called “Perfspot”. Yes, the hackers have done it again. They used Google to retain the “legitimacy” of their email and redirect the link to their desired website (that sometimes automatically installs malware and Trojans).

Photo taken from http://images.businessweek.com

“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.

MySpace recently now announced an exciting project: its own digital music portal competing with current market leaders iTunes and Amazon.com’s MP3 store. They are currently negotiating with major record companies such as Warner Music, Sony, and Universal. According to reports, the pricing is “going to be very competitive.” Also, many of the music downloads will come without any digital rights management technology, so that the users will be free to copy and use the music on any device.

This venture is almost certain to succeed since MySpace is the most popular social networking site among the huge and important demographic of North American teens, and has over 110 million registered users, 30 million of which regularly use the site’s built-in music features.

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.

Quality content is very important, especially content that people will link to and discuss on their blogs. The number of incoming links to your site is a big factor in bumping up your site to the top of the results page. Many people write controversial topics, or opinions on news articles, for the purpose of getting incoming links and making their site more visible not just for readers but also for the search bots.

The main content should also contain your keywords not just one time but several times, preferably formatted in special ways such as bold or italics. However, using the keywords too much will backfire because your site may be blacklisted as spam.

A business gets astounding results from reaching the top of the results pages of various search engines. Bloggers also get more advertisers and therefore more revenue through increasing their page rank. The art of configuring your site and content to achieve this goal is called Search Engine Optimization.

First of all, the content should be both understandable to human readers and to search bots (programs used by search engines to crawl the world wide web and index sites). To achieve this, each page on your site should have meta tags with keywords and descriptions, especially the title tag which should contain your most important keyword. Each page should preferably be optimized for one or two keywords or phrases only.

To be continued…

Medical staff in the Philippines who allegedly videoed a man having an operation to remove a perfume canister from his anus and then posted it on the Internet risk getting fired and having their licenses revoked, a Department of Health official said on Wednesday.

“We have to investigate first to determine the facts. If true, the staff concerned should of course be made answerable to (the) full extent for violating the patient’s right to privacy and confidentiality,” said Health Undersecretary Alexander Padilla.

The video, which was posted on YouTube but then removed, showed medical personnel from a hospital in the central Philippines holding their cell phones and pointing them at the patient’s anus to take pictures while a doctor removed the canister and the other staff in the room laughed and cheered.