Over the last couple of weeks, some users of DoubleClick may noticed server outages and massive spikes in server connections.  The connections were apparently referrals from DoubleClick banner adds, but coming in such massive waves that they caused the target servers to overload and stop serving pages. The flood of connections peaked between 6000 and 10000 connections in a 15 second sample.   In terms of website security, we call this a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack and would only ever expect to see it from a malicious source, such as a hacker or botnet.

Google don’t seem to have publicised this amazing blunder, although they have issued this statement to marketing campaigners who reported the issue :

Recently Google was notified of a problem being experienced by a small number of advertisers who were seeing large volumes of server requests from activity on the Google platform.  Following an investigation Google identified the problem and resolved the cause of the issue.  The problem related to ads being delivered across the platform that triggered a server request at the same time as the ad impression was delivered.

This issue was unforeseen, Google is sorry that the select client sites experienced problems with the volume of server requests.

Such heart warming remorse from the company comes only weeks after Chinese hackers launched attacks against Google’s systems and penetrated their security.  In those attacks, servers and accounts were compromised resulting in trojan horses and viral code being uploaded to Google’s systems.

In Google’s brief explanation of DoubleClick’s recent strange behaviour, they have not confirmed if the events are in any way linked and if DoubleClick’s servers have also been compromised.

As no doubt many of you are aware, there have been some big changes in Google Analytics lately, especially with the ways you can track how people interact with your site as well as the way you can structure your goal sets without having to create ridiculous numbers of profiles for you to track your 200+ goals! And yes, all of us here at Bloom are HOOGELY excited about it!

Google Analytics now lets you track up to 20 goals, all in the same profile! Each Profile is allocated 4 goal sets, each of these goal sets contain a set of five goals which make it really easy for you to now group similar goal types into one goal set:

Example:

Goal Set 1 – Registrations

Goal 1 – Party Registration

Goal 2 – Meeting Registration

Goal 3 – Conference Registration

Goal 4 – Charity Registration

Goal 5 – Seminar Registration

Goal Set 2 – Downloads

Goal 1 – Yearly Summary PDF Download

Goal 2 – Chairmans Statement PDF Download

Goal 3 – Widget Download

Goal 4 – Flash content Download

Goal 5 – Press Release Download

..and so it goes on.

Of course, you are not limited to the different types of goals that you can track; you can track just about anything! From completed ecommerce transactions to how many clicks you’ve had on your site “Follow us on Twitter” button, time on site, pages per visit, bounce rates, the possibilities are endless!

Engagement Goals

This is the thing which we Bloomers are especially excited about! Google Analytics has listened to the community and responded with a new type of goal called “Engagement Goals” which allows you to track how people are interacting with your website, and is an absolute must have if you are planning a new site launch and wanting to test the overall “stickiness” of the website, or even tweaking the website to improve its usability. This type of goal allows you to set thresholds for Time on Site or Pages per Visit.

Time on Site Goal

Google Analytics now allows you to set a greater than or less than value of time spent on the site for one of your goals.

For example, you can set a specific goal to track how many people spent less than 10 seconds on your site, then another goal to track how many people have spent 10 to 20 seconds, then another for 20 to 30 seconds, and so it goes on. This is particularly useful for when you are launching a new website, wanting to test some linkbait or how well people engage with a form or other facility that you’ve provided.

Pages Per Visit Goal

Google Analytics lets you create a goal that you can set to greater, equal to or less than value to a pages per visit.

For example you can set a specific goal to track how many people made less than 5, 10, 15 (the list goes on!) page views per session. As before, this is particularly useful when you are launching a new site, and you can gauge the success of it by seeing if the number of page views has improved, or God forbid, gone down!

And in case you’re wondering how you’re going to save all that historical data from your old goals, Kaushik tells you how to keep your old goal history in your new goal!

Advanced Table Filtering

A new addition to the reporting power of Google Analytics is the ability to filter the elements on a table based on the different metric conditions.

Example

If you only want to see your top pages that have an average session time of over one minute and received less than 100 pageviews, you can do that by performing the following action:

• Click Advanced Filter at the bottom of the report window:

• Click on “Add new condition” and select the metrics you want to set:

• Set the values you want to monitor:

• Create a new filter using the same process for the number of PageViews
• et Voila! Your Custom Report:

A very useful and powerful addition to the way you can report on your campaigns, I’m sure you’ll agree!

Google Analytics Intelligence Reports

This really is THE most useful new addition to the way Google Analytics reports your data. Google Analytics now tells YOU what’s happening on your website, your campaigns and much more!

Analytics Intelligence provides you with automatic alerts of significant changes that are happening to your website in terms of traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and a whole lot more!

Example:

Google Analytics will alert you if you’ve seen a big spike in traffic on a particular day from a referring website or search engine, like your blog, Google, or just about anything. It would also alert you if you saw a drop in Time on Site with visitors from London for instance. So instead of you having to monitor reports constantly, Google Analytics now does it all for you!

You can also set up Custom Alerts which makes it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what trends to look out for. You can set daily, weekly or monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics and be notified by email or on the interface when the changes actually occur. An extremely powerful addition to Google Analytics indeed!

Fin

And there you have it! It’s easy to see why Google Analytics is one of the top Analytics packages available! Keep the new features rolling!

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

The highlights :

Operating Systems

• At 60.55%, Windows XP is still three nearly 3 times more popular than Vista
• OSX sits at 7.11%
• Windows 7 is about to overtake Linux, and it’s not even out to retail yet
• iPhone OSX sits between the deceased Windows 98 and server based Windows Server 2003.  (I find it interesting that Server 2003 racks up a higher percentage than iPhone as by default it blocks trackers and cookies, also being a server OS, it typically isn’t used for web surfing)

Browsers

• IE 7 dominates, with Firefox 3 lagging 6% behind
• IE 8 is close on the heels of Firefox 3
• The aging IE 6 is still hanging in there with 14% of the share
• Buggy Firefox 3.5 is down in 5th place
• Slow on the uptake, Chrome is way down in 7th place with a measly 3.23% of the share

Screen Resolutions

• 1024×768 is still top dog
• VERY closely followed by 1280×800, which is a wide screen resolution, typically not found on new monitors having been superseded by :
• 1440×900 (as used by our office Dell desktops) which is in 4th with 8.68%, that’s a bigger share than the total OSX users – this will eventually overtake 1280×800 as the standard wide desktop resolution.

Summary
IE6 has double the market share of OSX as a whole.  So let’s stop banging on about ditching IE6 and get rid of OSX instead.

Being a ’silver surfer’, Chairman, CEO, NED, etc., gives me a privileged position of ‘outside-in’ insight into this industry which is still highly embryonic and quite naive in some ways; occasionally exhibiting the inconsistency of an early stage teenager! I am also ‘contemporary’ (some might say contentious) in my views on business management. I firmly believe that business sustainability is only enabled by developing real underlying value in the enterprise. Value that is founded upon market positioning, brand, image and stakeholder value with financial gain being the OUTCOME of leading, aligning and managing these essentially non-financial assets.

I am therefore always mystified by individuals and enterprises seeking short term gain by seemingly ‘following the money’. For example I recently read of an exclusively SEO ’start up’ seeking to invest big sums to ‘grab’ market share … WHY? Is it because they saw it as a quick turn investment? In my humble and biased(?) opinion, to REALLY make a success of SEO you need to know and have major influence on how websites work and vice-versa. Furthermore, social media is rapidly growing in terms of its influence on SEO/WEBSITE effectiveness. To  enter an already fairly mature yet dynamic and aggressive market in such an exposed manner seems at best, high risk.

DIGITAL now encompasses an ever expanding domain. With such rapidly growing technologies and techniques, the power of the collective (enterprise brand/image/credibility/etc.) needs to be harnessed TOGETHER with enabling the individual to express their flair and develop their own brand/image/credibility. Enterprise is then enhanced by the individual and the individual enhanced by the enterprise whereby such pro-active engagement enables each partners aspiration to be mutually enabled ….. engaging warp-drive if you will.

This takes enlightened leadership and staff engagement and is what true HOLISTIC benefit means.

2 + 2 = 6

Such an approach is also where stakeholder (enterprise, staff, client, partner) engagement is truly empowered. The focus for both enterprise and individual is therefore on mutually inclusive contribution and value add as opposed to I/me/my financial gain; albeit when WE get it right, mutually sustainable financial gain is a natural outcome.

About 9 or so years ago I attended a conference in the USA where BT ‘proudly and confidently’ announced from the platform that they were not going to invest in installing another single km of fibre optic cable into the ground because ADSL (copper) technology was the way forward. This was followed immediately by both France Telecom and AT&T who both ‘confidently and proudly’ announced that copper technology was limited (dead!) and that they were only going to install Fibre in the future! What a sad indictment for a company who allowed Balance Sheet bean-counters to dominate technological visionaries within its Martlesham research facility; one of whom (I believe) ‘invented’ the World Wide Web! Short sighted financially driven decision making that has now put a UK Blue-chip at risk (read on!)

Consider now that Lord Carter has recently published his (Government inspired) report on the future for a ‘Digital Britain’. My problem with the ‘objective’ is that we have a comms infrastructure inherited from BT that is (and has been for some long while) 3rd world technology; so how are we (UK Ltd) going to compete on the world stage?

Put simply, how can we get beyond this ‘copper crap’ that delivers unbalanced bi-directional speeds with at best kB performance in one direction, to the point where we at least catch up with our peers in other countries?? ……
The exponential journey that the internet is currently driving business on, requires AT LEAST the 8MB bi-directional speeds ‘talked’ about and probably at least 20MB, but this requires a massive investment in fibre optic infrastructure. Virgin have inherited the NTL/Telewest fibre network but this is very limited in its user avialability. What is needed, for UK Ltd to compete on the world stage is for the last/first mile, exchange to every home and business premise, to have fibre cable delivering REAL Broadband. The applications, demand and technologies already exist. Furthermore, someone, somewhere has to carry out appropriate oversight to ensure that we (UK) do not end up with a 3 tier comms infrastucture; ie that service providors are not allowed to cherry pick the ’super-centres’ and allow rural areas to continue to rely on copper. OFCOM have not demonstrated to-date (to me at least) that they can apply such strategic insight to their role in regulatory oversight.

However, we are where we are and such a capability requires massive investment which must be applied within the next 10 years …. and time is running. Without such investment the risk to us all is that we will have to compete on the world stage with 3rd world technology and that probably implies that we would end up as a 3rd world country.

Unfortunately, Lord Carters report is full of rhetoric and new committee’s; discussing legislation and control, etc. …. very little if any focus on how we deliver and meet the demands of todays rapidly evolving business world.

Put this situation into the context that BT has just reported a £2.3B loss for the first quarter of 2009 AND are only forecasting to invest in providing fibre to a ‘massive’ 1M homes and it is easy to appreciate the size of the challenge and risk!

There are other local service providors who are investing, eg Hull, Bournemouth, Dundee, etc, some of them with local authority investment, but these are just small pockets of activity and will not deliver what is needed.  What is needed NOW is a consensus which builds a powerful lobby that has a voice loud enough to be listened to in the corridors of power such that CHANGE HAPPENS…….
Help!!

If you are interested in this topic you might want to check out the following

http://nga-uk.blogspot.com/

http://digitalbritainforum.org.uk/

According to aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page-views per month across more than 3 million websites, Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 7’s European browser market share.

For the first time ever, Firefox pulled ahead by just over half a point, registering 35.05% to IE7’s 34.54% with Internet Explorer 6 lagging way behind in third place at 11.92%.

While Internet Explorer as a browser on the whole (across all its versions) is still more popular than Firefox, these statistics show that the gap is narrowing quite dramatically. In Europe at least.

This can be compared to North America where IE7 still has roughly twice as many users as Firefox 3. (Let’s not talk about Asia, where IE6 still is king.)

“The move is partly explained by a small switch from IE 7.0 usage to IE 8.0 but also by growing market share overall by Firefox 3.0,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO and founder StatCounter. “The data shows that Firefox is closing the gap and is now just 10% behind all IE versions in Europe.”

This could mean that European web consumers are becoming more web savvy, care more about security and speed and have simply opted to use a superior web browser. The knock on effect of this is much better support for web standards on the whole, making our lives as web developers much easier. It also means less pressure to support hideously out-dated browsers such as Internet Explorer 6.

Since the introduction of Flash video (flv) in 2002, Flash Player has become the most widely installed Internet video client, running on over 96% of all Internet-connected PCs. The ubiquity of Flash Player ensures that most visitors can view Flash video without downloading additional plug-ins, so you can reach more people with lower development, testing, and support costs.

Flash video can be delivered either via a streaming server, which allows for on-demand/live video, or via the more commonly used progressive download method. Progressively downloaded videos do not start until a proportion of the video has downloaded to the client, ensuring a smooth un-interupted video experience.

While this is fine and dandy, what happens when you want the entire video to download before it begins to play, or if you have several bandwidth intensive videos as is the case of our own “Meet the Team” page. In either case, preloading flv’s is not a documented feature, and it must therefore be simulated.

What follows is one method you can use to simulate preloading Flash video files, including a progress bar and percentage label.

/**
* Preloading FLVs with progressbar
*
* Actionscript developed by Bloom Media Ltd. | www.bloommedia.co.uk
* Contributors: Dominic Kelly
*/
 
// open a net connection
var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
// null connection for progressive download
nc.connect(null);
 
// create a stream
myNetStream = new NetStream(nc);
myVideo.attachVideo(myNetStream);
// load video
myNetStream.play("dom-kelly.flv");
// pause video to hide it from the stage
myNetStream.pause();
 
// hide load progress
percentage._visible = false;
percentage._visible = false;
 
// resize video onload, based on meta data
myNetStream.onMetaData = function(obj)
{
	myVideo._height = obj.height;
	myVideo._width = obj.width;
	// show load progress
	percentage._visible = true;
	percentage._visible = true;
};
 
// listen for the 'Stop' status event, and restart the video to loop it
myNetStream.onStatus = function(info)
{
	if (info.code == "NetStream.Play.Stop")
	{
		this.seek(0);
	}
};
 
// create a preload interval to check load progress every 1 millisecond
myInterval = setInterval(checkBytesLoaded, 1, myNetStream);
 
// preload loop progress
function checkBytesLoaded(mns)
{
	// calculate percentage of video that has downloaded
	pctLoaded = Math.round(mns.bytesLoaded / mns.bytesTotal * 100);
 
	// update textfield on the stage
	percentage.text = pctLoaded + "%";
 
	// update progress bar on the stage
	progressBar._xscale = pctLoaded;
 
	if (pctLoaded >= 100)	{
		// the video has fully downloaded
		_root.percentage.text = "loaded";
		// play video from the beginning
		mns.seek(0);
		mns.play("dom-kelly.flv");
		// clear interval
		clearInterval(myInterval);
	}
}

And there you have it, a simple and effective flv preloader.

View the demo or download the source code.

E-mail harvesting and website hacks are the main ways for spammers to get to you. For example, a plain text e-mail address on a webpage can be harvested by e-mail “bots” then added to mailing lists and sold to the highest bidder.

To stop this, developers quickly adopted the use of graphical representations of the letters, displayed using a static JPEG or GIF image. But the bot programmers began to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read that address just like the human eye.

In response, developers got smart and started to use contact forms. That was a good idea, only humans can fill in a web form, right? Wrong! It didn’t take long for the bots to get smarter. E-mail bots can now fill in those contact forms themselves.

Give us this day our daily spam.

So, what’s wrong with that? If you get spammed with your website form, you just delete when the spam hits your mailbox? That will work for maybe 1 or 2 spams a day, but what about 20? 200? Once your contact form is found by the bots, then you will start getting hit with more offers for fake Rolex watches and Viagra than you can deal with.

What is worse, this will impact on your e-mail server. If your e-mail server is a shared server from your ISP, you could find yourself in breach of their terms of service, and have your site shut down. Worse still, often those forms will be filled in using already harvested addresses, meaning any automated replies could be sent to innocent victims using YOUR mail server, from YOUR e-mail address. This could result in you and even your ISP being blacklisted which may again find you in breach of contact. In the worst case, compensation may be sought by your ISP or third parties as a result of system downtime, loss of revenue and time for remedial work.

So what can be done? How can you tell the bots from real people?

It’s actually relatively easy to spot a robot. The Turing Test has been around for a while, and so far no one has made a computer which can fool a human into thinking they’re real. What is needed then is a reverse Turing Test which challenges anyone using the form, with a question only a human could possibly answer. You will be glad to know that there are many different kinds of test which have been developed and are collectively referred to as CAPTCHA: “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”

You may already have used a CAPTCHA, they typically take the form of a graphical rendering of a word. The user must type the word in response thus passing the test. Early versions were easily broken using the same OCR methods as with e-mail harvesting, but the test have quickly been made harder by deforming the words, and adding extra graphics to make the words hard for the OCR to decode.

CAPTCHA done the right way. Care of reCAPTCHA

As a result, some CAPTCHA systems are very hard to read and have serious usability and accessibility issues, but systems such as re-CAPTCHA give very useable results and have audio versions of the code for increased accessibility.

Many ISPs are now making it mandatory for CAPTCHA systems to be installed on any web form they host, and with the risks discussed above, it’s clear why this is the case. No ISP wants to be blacklisted, accused of spamming and they certainly don’t want the performance of their servers compromised either.

This is why CAPTCHA systems are here to stay and anyone not taking on the new technology will be left behind … Still clearing their inbox probably.