Tag: google

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Crikey: China isn’t our biggest hacker threat

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Despite all the news about Google being, it is alleged, hacked by attackers in China, from an Australian perspective China probably isn’t our main problem.

I made this point in Crikey‘s lead story yesterday, quoting a security consultant at a leading outsourcing firm.

Australian attacks targeting the private sector have come from other so-called ‘friendly countries’. Which country is a problem closely correlates with business competition in the particular sector…

You could pick any one of our major trading partners and I could tell you a story about a sophisticated and well-executed attack sourced from that country. Examples at the top of my mind include Japan, Canada, US, India and France.

The story is free to read. Do click through.

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Patch Monday: Contactless EFTPOS and Google privacy

ZDNet Australia logo: click for Patch Monday episode 26

Privacy issues on the Patch Monday podcast this week.

Contactless EFTPOS and credit cards that allow you to make payments without a signature or entering a PIN, and the vast honey pot of personal data that is Google. It’s not just Gmail, but everything else.

My guest is the Chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation, Professor Roger Clarke.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please, let me know what you think. We now accept audio comments too. Either Skype to “stilgherrian” or phone Sydney 02 8011 3733.

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Has Google Trends data made me look a goose?

Yesterday I wrote an article for Crikey plus a post here based on Google Trends data which, it now appears, is dodgy.

Google Trends shows a steady decline in traffic to various websites since about September 2008, based on the metric “unique daily browsers”. But I was howled down. Everyone else’s metrics were not showing such a decline.

Indeed many, such as this chart of Nielsen NetRatings’ unique dailies, provided by Andrew Hunter (@Huntzie), Head of News, Sport and Finance at ninemsn, showed the exact opposite.

Nielsen NetRatings unique daily browser chart, showing steady rise in audiences: click to embiggen

For example, news.com.au grew from 250,829 average daily unique browsers (UBs) in July 2008 to 346,367 in October 2009, a 38% increase. Not the roughly 50% drop shown by Google Trends.

Google says:

Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users, powered by computer algorithms…

In other words, it’s some Google Secret Sauce. But has the sauce gone off?

Photograph of an angry goose

The Google Trends forum is rather quiet. There were only three questions or comments posted for the whole of September, none of which received a reply, and nothing since. I can’t see that anyone from Google has responded to anything for months and months — I gave up looking back any further. Others have noted that Google Trends data differs wildly from Google’s own Analytics product — usually complaining that it shows significantly less traffic.

Google Trends is a Google Labs product, i.e. an experiment, I’m starting to think that it’s been abandoned and we’re just seeing a slow degradation due to lack of maintenance.

Meanwhile, I have changed my Twitter avatar to a goose for the rest of today.

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Is social media killing the web (as we’ve known it)?

Google Trends graph showing traffic drop to major Australian news sites

If Google Trends’ statistics are to be trusted, it looks like there’s been a significant decline in traffic to websites over the last year — not just news, but everywhere. Except social network sites.

Following a blog post by Nicholas Moerman, a planning intern with Proximity in London, I checked out the figures for Australia sites. It does indeed look like there’s been a significant drop in daily unique visitors — which is what Google Trends measures, rather than the more common monthly uniques.

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I’ve written more, and provided more graphs, in a piece for Crikey today, Is social media killing the web as we know it?

Oh, and I was also in Crikey yesterday, Baffled by Murdersoft? Making sense of Murdoch and Microsoft, where I look at some of the numbers behind the rumoured deal between News Corporation and Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

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Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009:

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

Continue reading “Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009”

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Murdoch’s wrong about Google

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I reckon Rupert Murdoch’s plan to block Google from indexing News Corporation stories is daft, and I said so in Crikey yesterday with a piece they headlined Dear Rupert, this is how the internet works. Google it.

In brief, my commentary is that people don’t really get their news in a monolith any more, neither the daily newspaper or the nightly TV bulletin. Instead, they gather it from all over in little pieces. If you want people to find your stories, those stories need to be in the indexes.

Crikey editor Jonathan Green has also pointed out the stark difference between News Corporation and Google. I reckon News needs Google more than Google needs News.

Jason Calacanis has a different theory, that News will do an exclusive deal with Microsoft’s Bing.

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazines?

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”

Which might work if News Corporation were the only supplier of general news. Which it isn’t. And which point I make in my Crikey piece.