News of the day: 12/2/2010

Two interesting articles in today’s New York Times:

F.T.C. Backs Plan to Honor Privacy of Online Users

The FTC has apparently recommended allowing users to opt out of having their browsing and online behavior tracked.  As you should know, compiling and selling behavior profiles of web visitors is the key to profitability of advertisers like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.  Curtailing their ability to track people’s online habits will shatter their existing business models.  To effect this sort of change will presumably require a lot of political muscle on a topic that most people seem to be completely unaware of and uninterested in.

Google Acts to Demote Distasteful Web Sellers

This is an odd one… an example of one site’s unusual SEO strategy and the implications of having a single company effectively morally policing the Internet.

Technically-speaking, the article also brings up, albeit implicitly, the concept of microformats.  For example, sites that provide consumer reviews can use the hReview microformat so that the reviews are transmitted in a meaningful way to microformat-aware search engines like Google.

For example, a Google search for “Kenny’s Trattoria” shows yelp.com’s rating of this establishment:

The Google listing includes rating information that is gathered through Yelp’s use of the hReview and hReview-aggregate microformats.  Go ahead, view the source for Yelp’s page about Kenny’s Trattoria, and search for hReview.

Related posts:

1. Class 6 – Pop Practical Quiz! – Fall 2010
2. Class 1 – Assignment – Toy Store Sitemap & Wireframes (Fall 2010)