Google Safe Browsing API
Further to my previous post about Google flagging some Wordpress blogs as badware, the Google Operating System blog points to a Google API that allows webmasters to monitor their URLs for blacklist status with up to 10,000 ‘regular user’ requests (though it doesn’t say over what time period this takes place over).
Kudos to Google for assisting webmasters in this issue.
UK mortgage market slowdown
As the UK seemingly enters a period of uncertain economic growth, and and an almost certain fall in house prices (the IMF believes that the UK mortgage market is overvalued by around 25%), it’s interesting to look at a Google Trends report for searches on the words ‘mortgage’ and ‘recession’:
It’s interesting to see that at almost the exact same time that people started searching for the word ‘recession’, the volume of searches for the word ‘mortgage’ started to drop, and the third quarter dip seen in previous years around Christmas was slightly sharper and more pronounced.
What’s also interesting to see is the sharp rise in searches for ‘mortgage’ at the end of the first quarter of 2008; however perhaps at this time the intent of the search has switched from looking to buy a mortgage, to being informational searches on the condition of the mortgage market. It will be interesting to watch these trends in future months…
Great online regex tool
Just found a fantastic online regular expression tool which includes real-time regex evaluation for PHP (PCRE & POSIX), JavaScript, Perl and Python syntaxes.
Much credit to Lars Olav Torvik for writing and sharing it 
Gibson to sue Activision over “Guitar Hero”
As a real guitarist who enjoys playing real guitars, I have to say, rock on.
Best search marketing tool of 2008 so far
Via searchengineland, some fantastic person has created a tool which aggregates data for page views on Wikipedia; you can search for any page that exists on Wikipedia and see daily traffic stats for that page in a number of given months.
The awesomeness of this should not be underestimated; what we’re basically seeing here is a vague estimation of the kind of traffic you can expect for a number of keywords if you reach the top ~5 in Google and Yahoo. Obviously being Wikipedia this is slanted towards information-style queries (which we see had 53k views in February), so its commercial value could be debated, but with a bit of lateral thinking this kind of info could probably be applied to anything - especially looking into the potential of niche markets.
With Overture’s keyword tool dead for over a year now, this is a very welcome addition to a search marketer’s array of research tools, and with talk of an API for this info in progress, I think this is an almost unprecedented gateway for the average search marketer/webmaster into overall traffic volumes on the web (barring AOL’s search info leak).
Upgrade Wordpress or risk getting flagged as badware by Google
From its launch, StopBadware.org has raised questions of what happens when a legitimate site gets flagged as ‘badware’. When this happens, affected websites get a warning that “This site may harm your computer”, beneath the listing in Google’s search results pages. When users click a result, they are not taken to the website, but instead a strongly worded warning page - a traffic killer if there ever was one.
It seems that this month has seen a potentially large (but as yet unreported) number of hacked Wordpress blogs getting this exact problem.
This is due to a vulnerability in Wordpress versions earlier than 2.3.3 that allows hackers to inject code into your posts. Rather than going down the unsubtle route of sticking tons of affiliate viagra links into your posts, it seems that the latest hack is an <iframe> tag claiming to be stats code; invisible unless you view the page’s source code. According to the stopbadware blog, this code proceeds to attack blog visitors’ computers with the ‘JS_PSYME.XP’ virus.
If you’re affected by this, the fix is to upgrade Wordpress, and when the upgrade is complete, search for ‘iframe’ in the ‘Manage’ tab of your WP admin console. If you find any of the following code, delete it:
‘Make3D’ does what Fotowoosh promised a year ago
Via Techcrunch, Make3D is an awesome service that can create 3D images from standard 2D photos. Still very much in beta mode, and currently hosted on Stanford University’s servers, the service does what a Flash file on Fotowoosh has been tantalising beta testers with for a year.
It works best on pictures of landscapes, and with the Cortona browser plugin, you can fly around your images in an almost freaky Blade Runner style, noticing things you didn’t realise were there before. My attempt with a photo I took whilst on the Inca Trail is below: