Google has launched one of its first experiments aimed at fighting back against content farms, asking the public to help identify the worst offenders.

Chrome users can now download an extension from Google called Personal Blocklist that will allow users to block certain domains from appearing in a personalized list of search results. Google will also track the domains that users flag "and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results," wrote Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google and a prominent anti-spam spokesman for the company, in a blog post.

For several weeks Cutts and Google have been acknowledging frustration over the proliferation of content farms in Google's search results, or sites that write content for really no other reason than to appear within search results and draw traffic from Google. Most often that content is poorly written and sometimes nonsensical, as site editors try to understand what people are searching for on Google and commission low-cost posts with enough keywords to show up on the first page of results.

The product may not be pretty but it can be lucrative, as sites like Associated Content and Demand Media look attractive to content companies like Yahoo and investors. Last month Cutts vowed that Google planned to take action in 2011 against such sites, previewing the user-generated blocklist concept as a similar idea to a user-generated spam-labeling extension available for Chrome.

Google took great pains to label Personal Blocklist "an early test" and "experimental," but it's now available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. It can be found here. Cutts did not say in the post how long it might take Google to amass enough data to change how blocklisted sites appear in regular Google search results.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

Microsoft says a small new feature within Internet Explorer 9 is having a big impact on sites that have tweaked their code to make use of it.

"Site pinning," which is new to this latest major version of Internet Explorer, lets users add a shortcut to a site from any page of their own to sit on their Windows 7 task bar. On the surface this would just seem like any other shortcut, except that Microsoft has provided ways for sites to boost the interactivity, like putting site-specific notifications, navigation, and information in contextual menus that sit behind the icon.

Microsoft now says that sites that have gone this extra step are seeing anywhere from a 15 percent to 50 percent increase in site visits, behavior that can be tracked back to a pinned site's increased visibility compared to bookmarks, which are usually kept hidden within a menu inside of the browser.

"It shouldn't surprise that much," Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live business group, told CNET in an interview last week. "If you think about it there's a reason people have competed aggressively for default home paging for years and years and years. That default home page was the thing that you saw every time you started your browser," Hall said.

"What we enable is the ability to get out of having only one home page. And not go wonky to the level that you have to have multiple paths, which an average customer isn't going to do for their home page set," he continued.

So far more than 900 sites have taken advantage of the feature, meaning that they've added some code to their site to offer up the special features to IE9 users. That includes high-resolution icon and support for Jump Lists, which break out site-specific actions into a menu that can be accessed without hunting around for those same options on the site itself. The feature has long been available to native applications built for Windows 7, with Microsoft positioning IE9 as the first pathway for Web developers to include the functionality into their sites and Web applications.

"We have more and more sites that just continue to keep pushing it," Hall said. "For instance when you have Pandora pinned now you'll notice that when you're paused and the windows is not in the foreground, you'll see a notification that lets you know that you're in pause."

Others have also moved to take advantage of the feature by promoting it when users first visit using IE9. "Huffington Post is interesting. If you go to Huffington Post from IE9, it will actually prompt you to do the pinning because they know that if it's pinned you're going to go there more often," Hall said. Similar initiatives have been done by mobile Web application developers with the home screen shortcut feature that's built into Apple's Safari browser on its iOS devices.

Microsoft also sees site pinning as a way to change the way portal-style home pages typically drove traffic to internal properties. "Let's take a site like Yahoo, which today has obviously good home page share in the United States," Hall said. "We could encourage people to pin Yahoo, pin Yahoo Mail, pin Yahoo Finance, and all the sudden [Yahoo] doesn't need to try and program everything through that single piece of real estate that is the home page."

Hall said that system encourages users to group together similar sites, or clusters of links. "If you go to 20 different sites, if you just start pinning them you get logical groupings," he said. "So let's say I'm doing all my research on MSN, I can have 10 links that are logically grouped here, and they're not getting in the way of my de novo browsing section."

But does that principle scale as users begin to pin more and more sites? Based on user behavior during the beta, that hasn't proven to be an issue. "I think the majority of people aren't going to have more than 10 pins," Hall said. For those that do, Hall pointed toward simply expanding the size of the Windows task bar to double or even triple height (or width) to accommodate more pins.

"I think what you'll find is, the more sites that do pinning, the more people want to pin. You might see more people going into double height, but that's a problem we look forward to having," Hall said.

Microsoft put out the first, and likely only, release candidate for IE9 last week, though the company has not said when it plans to roll out a final version. The software continues to be offered only to users of the current, and previous iteration of Microsoft's Windows operating systems: Windows 7, and Windows Vista.

Originally posted at News - Microsoft

It's been a work in progress for years, but there are a few more years to go yet before the next version of Hypertext Markup Language is finalized.

Specifically, the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group is set to announce today that it expects to anoint HTML5 as an officially recommended standard in the second quarter of 2014. That drawn-out schedule contrasts with another effort to make HTML a more fluidly updated "living standard."

"We started working [on HTML5] in 2007," Philippe Le Hegaret, the HTML activity leader for the W3C, told CNET. "We're targeting seven years for completing HTML5."

HTML5 will become the first new revision since HTML 4.01 was released in 1999. Among the features in the next-generation Web page description language: built-in video and audio, a "canvas" element for two-dimensional graphics, new structural labels such as "article" to smooth programming, and a codified process to consistently interpret the hodgepodge styles of real-world Web pages, even when improperly coded.

That doesn't mean interested parties won't be able to employ the new technology until 2014, though. On the contrary, key phases of the coming years' development involve getting feedback from real-world use that's already well under way and ironing out wrinkles that may arise implementing the standard in Web browsers.

At the same time, work continues on a broad range of HTML standards--geolocation, offline data storage, background processing, a direct browser-server communication conduit, and more--that aren't strictly speaking part of HTML5. And after the W3C releases the first "last call" draft of the standard in May--the point at which the W3C thinks the standard's features are set--the W3C plans to begin tackling the early stages of what it's calling HTML.next for now.

Clearly, then, the W3C isn't idling while browser makers and Web developers aggressively push ahead. But the W3C's schedule contrasts sharply with the speed at which the Web is developing today, growing beyond its role as a medium for static documents into a foundation for sophisticated applications. But the schedule also is not a great surprise given the complexity of HTML, the technological and political wrangling among the 55 organizations in the group, and an interest in HTML that's broadening beyond browser makers and Web programmers.

"When you want interoperability at a global scale across a broader industry, it takes time [and] more investment than single-platform stability," said Ian Jacobs, head of W3C marketing. For example, although the Web began as a phenomenon on personal computers, it's becoming a reality on mobile devices and another domain, TV, is coming, as exemplified by a recent W3C workshop dedicated to the subject.

"The key thing here is that there are lots of stakeholders, some of whom may not move at the same speed. One of the pieces of feedback from the TV and Web workshop is that TV manufacturers expect a shelf life of 7 years," Jacobs said. "Because the W3C has as its mission to make the Web available to everybody, we always have to take into account the multiple needs of multiple audiences."

The WHATWG's living document
Even as the W3C proceeds methodically, though, another group involved in developing HTML is changing its philosophy to an even more fluid arrangement. The WHATWG--Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group--began work on what became HTML5 in 2004 when the W3C declared that the 1999 update to HTML4 was the final version and that the future lay with an incompatible standard called XHTML 2.0. That proved to be largely a dead end, however, and the W3C resumed HTML work in 2007 and now has phased out work on XHTML 2.0.

The WHATWG got its start as an open mailing list, but its founders and decision-makers all came from browser makers--Opera and Mozilla to start, with Apple joining later. HTML governance now essentially involves both the W3C and the WHATWG. One key figure is Ian Hickson, a former Opera and now Google employee who serves as an editor of the somewhat divergent versions of HTML maintained at both the W3C and the WHATWG.

In January, Hickson declared that at the WHATWG, HTML has now become a "living document," a specification that is constantly updated according to need. Abandoning version numbers that no longer are needed, Hickson ditched the term "HTML5" in favor of just "HTML." And he said he'd like to see the W3C follow suit.

Don't expect the standards group to do so, though.

The W3C has always revised its standards, Jacobs said. "That doesn't mean everybody wants the nightly build of a specification," he said, referring to the software development practice of building a new test version of software every night to include programmers' latest patches. "We also have stable versions of standards, because there are some communities who need those for the level of interoperability they require...We think both innovation and stability are valuable, and they are not mutually exclusive."

Another factor is intellectual-property rights--specifically, patents. Those who participate in creating the W3C's specifications agree not to sue those implementing the specification for infringement of any patents those participants own. It's a bit of legal reassurance in a technology world that has plenty of patent risks, but technically that assurance only comes with the final version of a specification.

The final schedule
What exactly will happen between now and mid-2014 with HTML5? Several steps, according to Le Hegaret and Jacobs:

In May 2011 comes the first "last call" draft of HTML5. This version is feature-complete, meaning no new features will be added, but that existing features will be refined. The W3C expects to deal with thousands of comments through this phase, some of them likely to lead to "substantial" changes.

Likely by the end of 2011, the W3C will issue a second last-call version and begin a second round of refinements.

In the second quarter of 2012, a new phase begins, in which "implementors" of the specification--browser makers, essentially--provide feedback. During this phase, the W3C concentrates on a suite of thousands of tests to see if implementations of HTML5 really do get the same results when interpreting a Web page's code.

The culmination of this phase is a "candidate recommendation" of the HTML5 spec and at least two "interoperable implementations"--in other words, two different browsers that produce the same results on the test cases. The implementors' feedback is scheduled for completion by the first quarter of 2014.

Last comes a final review period of about six weeks, then some time to get the promotional gears engaged.

Then, in the second quarter of 2014, HTML5 should be done.

"We're excited to be able to say we now have a time frame," Jacobs said.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

HyperDock is a System Preferences pane that lets you add some time-saving functionality to your Dock that is similar to the Aero Peek feature found in recent versions of Windows. With HyperDock installed, you can mouse over applications in the Dock and see thumbnail previews of all windows open in that app--which can make switching between different apps and windows faster and easier. This latest version adds improved graphics performance and fixes bugs.

Also this week, we have the latest version of PhotoStyler, a utility that lets you add cool-looking effects, frames, and more to your images. Our game this week is Vendetta Online, the expansive space combat MMO that challenges you make a name for yourself in a hostile universe.

Don't forget to check out our iPhone apps of the week!