Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

The web is abuzz about the Tammy NYP Sex Tape. Searches for “Tammy,” “Tammy Download,” and “NYP” dominate the Technorati top searches right now:

It takes a lot of popular interest for a term to dominate the top searches for the last few days. This sex tape is quite old news, and it’s still popular. Who is Tammy? She is a student at Nan Yang Polytechnic in Singapore, whose cell phone was stolen by rival cheerleaders. The contents, containing sexually explicit images and movies, were uploaded onto the internet.

If you’re curious as to what they look like, here’s a photo of Tammy and her boyfriend, not engaging in any kind of sexual activity:

I don’t know when amateur porn became so exciting–perhaps it’s because it’s raw and uncut from Singapore, where sex is a crime punishable by hard jail time? Who knows. Hopefully the media will let this couple live in peace and forget about it soon enough.

MC Hammer’s got a brand-new blogspot blog:

Hammer throws down moves in Look, Look, Look

The blog links to Google Video pages for his new single Look, Look, Look, and posts pictures of his son. There is also some introspection about the history of rap. I think it’s cool he’s trying the viral thing for his new album. It’s the internet equivalent of keeping it hood real.

The Wordpress blogging platform is vulnerable to a critical kind of SEO mistake or bug: duplicate content. Because it offers multiple views of data–by author, category, rss, search, or a plugin-enabled view–it is easy to be penalized by Google’s new duplicate content filter. For example, check out page two of my Cornell blog’s SERPS right now:

They all point to a special stripped-down print page which offers an easy way to print:

See how clean the copy is? Clearly, Google believes that the print pages are the authority for these blogs, and not the blog permanent links themselves. This is a problem–how to solve it? First, I removed the wp-print.php script and references to it. This will now cause all the print pages to 404. I toyed with a 301 redirect, but that would require me knowing a little more information to find the proper URL, and I deemed it not worth it. Then, to prevent this in the future, I am using the robots meta tag:

<?php if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page()){
echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">’;
} else {
echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">’;
} ?>

This will allow robots to only index posts, pages, and the frontpage. The rest it can crawl for links and such.

I think you mean, “I wish it weren’t so cold out.”

It seems like the folder icons for bloglines have all been updated and blue’d:

I wonder if this is sign of more interface improvements to come…