Creekside Chatter

The advent of the Internet has gradually made a lot of things free, as in beer or otherwise. And people love free stuff, so unsurprisingly many turn to search sites to scour the Web for free music, movies, software and other digital media.

Which in turn significantly increases the risk of landing on websites filled with malicious links, code, ads and video viewing tools, security software maker McAfee now reports.

In said report, company researchers outlined several threats, including the threat of looking for “free” software, MP3s and streaming videos. The research found that adding the word “free” to a search for music ringtones, for example, resulted in a 300 percent increase in the riskiness of sites returned by major search engines in English.

The word “free” in other languages yielded similar results.

McAfee also reports that it has found thousands of malicious websites associated with fan clubs or comments made on social media sites, such as YouTube and Twitter.

Malicious advertising or “malvertising,” where an ad is used to distribute malware or exploit the user’s browser, is a common means of infection and not limited to unknown websites, McAfee warns. The company says that it identified “malvertising” on perezhilton.com earlier this Summer, and lots of other legitimate websites have shared that pain in the past (us included).

In short: a lot of free content is available on the Web, but that doesn’t mean it always comes without cost. Browse vigilantly. Stop searching for pictures of Cameron Diaz.

But don’t forget to click our ads regardless – I’m told they’re perfectly safe.

CrunchBase Information

McAfee

Information provided by CrunchBase

It has certainly been a busy week for the WordPress.com team with the launch of Subscriptions and now Email Post Changes, a new feature designed to improve author collaboration by sending emails whenever a post is modified. Basically, it’s the Post Revisions feature, but with email notification for registered authors.

To enable Email Post Changes, go to Settings/Email Post Changes in your admin panel. You’ll be able to choose which registered authors receive notifications and add additional email addresses.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog with multiple authors, you can install the official Email Post Changes plugin to enjoy the same great features. You may also be interested in Audit Trail (“keep track of what is going on inside your blog”), Capability Manager (“to manage WordPress roles and capabilities”), Highlight Author Comments (to “display comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files”), Impostercide (to “prevent unauthenticated users from ‘signing’ a comment with a registered user’s email address, name or URL”), and WP Word Count (to “give you word count statistics for your blog’s posts and pages . . . as well as breakdowns for each of your blog’s authors”).

Do you run a blog with multiple authors? Which plugins do you use? Are you planning to use Email Post Changes?

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MICROSOFT’S RESPONSE TO THE RUSSIAN SCANDAL: “Clever and nimble aren’t the first words you think of in connection with Microsoft, but the company’s decision to grant blanket IP licenses to targeted Russian human rights groups strikes me as both. It took less than 24 hours, and it doesn’t mumble about reducing its cooperation with the authorities — it takes the Microsoft weapon out of authorities’ hands.”

Great job, Microsoft. If only other tech companies did as well.

Reading isn’t a particularly social activity, but talking about reading and sharing books, articles, and other documents is highly social. Book clubs are so popular because people identify with other people who share the same reading interests. Document-sharing site Scribd wants to become the place on the Web where a million reading clubs flourish . With a redesign rolling later today, it will now start calling itself a “Social Network For Reading.”

Scribd is already is seeing traffic to its site double every six weeks from social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and email. Documents are shared, liked, or commented on 10 million times a month now, and CEO Trip Adler expects that to multiply with the redesign. It has already embraced HTML5 and is continuing on a new design path it embarked upon six months ago.

The two main changes to the site are a cleaner home page with a reading feed and a personal book shelf with all your documents (screenshots below). Scribd had versions of these before, but the home page is now two columns instead of three. The reading feed takes up the main column, as before, but the document icons are larger and it is now easier to share directly from the feed. The algorithms behind the feed are also more targeted to make it a better reading recommendation engine, showing the documents your friends and people you “subscribe” to are reading, publishing, and commenting on.

I released a new revision to the Smashwords Style Guide that makes it easier to produce, publish and distribute a great-looking multi-format ebook with Smashwords.

In parallel, in the last 30 days we developed, tested and introduced new EPUB and MOBI Meatgrinder conversion blades that give authors and publishers more control than ever over the final look and feel of their ebooks.

The new Style Guide marks the 42nd and most significant update to the Style Guide since we first released it in November 2008. Our last major revision was in April, which is when we first introduced new guidelines for paragraph construction and linked Tables of Contents.

The new Guide draws upon our experience helping over 9,000 authors publish nearly 20,000 books at Smashwords. We analyzed the most common formatting problems and then enhanced the Style Guide’s instructions to make it easier for authors to use Microsoft Word to create higher quality source files.

Here’s a summary of some of the most significant enhancements:

• More screenshots – We added more images to make it easier than ever to understand how to control the look and feel of your ebook’s formatting

Samples of well-formatted books – The Style Guide now contains links to two examples of well-formatted books. Download their RTF files for free.

Faster formatting – Dozens of time-saving tips help you clear out hidden corruption and create the cleanest, highest-quality formatting in the least amount of time.

Paragraph construction – The bulk of the most important Style Guide enhancements fall under this category. New instructions show how to easily manage and modify paragraph styles to improve readability and formatting quality. Learn how to modify your line spacing, code for first line paragraph indents, control fonts and paragraph styles, or code for block paragraphs.

Hyperlinked Table of Contents – Updated instructions make it easier to create clickable ToCs, footnotes and endnotes using Word’s bookmark feature.

How to check your work – Learn how to use use Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle for PC (or Kindle for Mac/Linux) to troubleshoot your EPUB and MOBI files.

How to pass EPUBCHECK – If your EPUB file doesn’t pass EPUBCHECK validation, we can’t distribute your ebook to Apple. New tips show you how to repair problems in your source file so you produce EPUB-compliant files. I expect we’ll continue to update these tips as we learn more.

New fast-track tips – Learn how to reduce the time it takes for your book to earn inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog, and gain faster and more reliable distribution to our growing retail distribution network.

Keyboard shortcuts – A new section provides even seasoned Word experts a refresher course on how to use keyboard shortcuts and Word’s FIND AND REPLACE feature to dramatically reduce formatting time and errors.

Access the new Smashwords Style Guide here.

I’d like to thank the thousands of Smashwords authors and publishers who have entrusted Smashwords to produce and publish their ebooks. In the last 2 1/2 years, we’ve worked to continually improve our Meatgrinder file conversion technology based on your feedback. As a result of your feedback, the files we produce today are dramatically better than what we produced just a few months ago. With your support, we’ll work to improve it further in the months and years to come.

Via the Smashwords blog.

Engadget claims that Target will begin carrying Apple's iPad in the coming weeks. The evidence comes in the form of inventory screenshots from Target's PDAs. Apparently 6 unnamed items are due on October 3rd and they match up with the iPads unique pricing (Wi-Fi and 3G models).

It can take a note-taking app just to keep track of all the note-taking apps out there. Until someone makes it, here are three of our favorites.

It’s finally happened. Bloglines,the troubled RSS feed reader owned by IAC, will officially be shut down, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The site has had a tumultuous history, so it’s unsurprising that IAC has finally put the platform out of its misery. Bloglines, which is actually operated by IAC Q&A property Ask.com, will be informing users of the news today and will officially be shut down on October 1.

Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams. Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. While we’ve heard in the past that IAC was considering shutting down the site, the company held off on killing the site permanently and was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines.

Doug Leeds, President of Ask.com tells us that the reasoning behind closing Bloglines came down to the fact that the market for people who use Bloglines (and RSS readers, he adds) isn’t growing, and is actually shrinking as people shift to realtime news streams such as Twitter to consume content on the web. In IAC’s market research, according to Leeds, there has been a 20 percent decline in people who are consuming RSS feeds as a whole. He says that Ask.com will continue to focus on drive traffic to and enhance its question and answer site.

Bloglines isn’t the first RSS reader to throw in the towel; Newsgator closed its doors last year. Now, Google Reader is all we have left; though even that product is slowly being replaced. We’ve put Bloglines in the TechCrunch Deadpool.

via TechCrunch

[So much of the web is built around aggregation — gathering together interesting and useful things from around the Internet and presenting them in new ways to an audience. It's the foundation of blogging and social media. But it's also the subject of much legal debate, particularly among the news organizations whose material is often what's being gathered and presented. Kimberley Isbell of our friends the Citizen Media Law Project has assembled a terrific white paper on the current state of the law surrounding aggregation — what courts have approved, what they haven't, and where the (many) grey areas still remain. This should be required reading for anyone interested in where aggregation and linking are headed.

Recently, I was reviewing my blog’s statistics. I was really curious to find out what posts were the most popular. To my surprise, my About page was in the top ten most visited pages of all time.

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/Eoseye

Prior to that, I hadn’t really thought much about my About page. I viewed it as obligatory but not really as an opportunity. (Obviously, anything that is getting clicked on that must is an opportunity.)

Lots of good ideas here.