(My Original Blog Post: http://www.u-g-h.com/2008/12/09/sell-your-wares-on-twitter/) Did you know that you can tap into the awesome power of Twitter to attract people to your products and services? There's a service called Magpie that taps into people on Twitter to send messages to people who follow them. The interesting thing about Magpie is that it analyses the message streams of Titterers it uses so that any sponsored messages are contextually relevant to the people who follows them. This enables your messages to be targeted to a group who would be interested in something you are offering.So, for example, if you are trying to sell a data center automation package you probably wouldn't want to bother teenagers or moms with your message (or pay for their reading it), but would prefer to bring it to the attention of technical support staff or operational managers. Magpie lets you do this effectively without spending too much on your advertising; particularly as it's a new network so you don't have to bid against many advertisers at the moment.Interesting concept, and one to watch as people try out different marketing techniques with new social networks.

(My Original Blog Post: http://www.u-g-h.com/2008/12/08/join-an-artisan-marketplace/)
Are you handy with craft but hopeless with websites? Do you wish you could sell your creations online? Well, here's a website that you might find interesting. ArtFire.com is a marketplace that lets artisans and craft aficionados display their artwork and sell them to other people all around the world. The focus is predominantly on handmade products so if you feel you have a talent in that area it's a site you should really check out.The site operates on the basis that artisans can list their items (basic sellers can see up to 10 items at a time with 4 pictures each without charge) allowing buyers to search through them and buy anything they fancy. there's even a facility for buyers to request items made specifically to their requirements. It's a great concept and a great way to make your way into creating a global brand for your products. Sellers get their own subdomain complete with stats and a way to attract loads of visitors to their products.I gave a search through the website and came across this gorgeous set of printed monkey heads that I'm pretty sure Arthur wouldn't mind getting for Christmas. Who knows, I might get my credit card out and do some shopping. Actually, that's another benefit of joining a market place like this. Payment facilities are provided for you out of the box (together with all the necessary conversion from other countries) so that's one less thing to worry about.If you're artisticly inclined, check it out

(My Original Blog Post: http://www.u-g-h.com/2008/12/07/one-mans-art-is-another-mans-pornography/)
There's an interesting debate happening in cyberspace at the moment. It concerns album cover of the 1976 album by Scorpions called Virgin Killers (shown alongside). Apparently six British ISPs (Virgin Media, Be/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon and Opal) are inadvertently filtering all access to Wikipedia after the site was added to an Internet Watch Foundation child-pornography blacklist.There are a number of updates on The Register outlining whats happening as the events unfold, with the latest step being a statement issued by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) saying:

A Wikipedia web page, was reported through the IWF’s online reporting mechanism in December 2008. As with all child sexual abuse reports received by our Hotline analysts, the image was assessed according to the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council (page 109). The content was considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18, but hosted outside the UK. The IWF does not issue takedown notices to ISPs or hosting companies outside the UK, but we did advise one of our partner Hotlines abroad and our law enforcement partner agency of our assessment. The specific URL (individual webpage) was then added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child.

Now, gettings yourself off a blacklist can be as difficult as getting industrial clamps off your car, but I'm sure Wikipedia will be able to swing it somehow. We'll just have to watch what happens, but there are also some interesting questions about the powers behind Wikipedia that keep popping up, particularly around their transparency.

(My Original Blog Post: http://www.u-g-h.com/2008/12/03/top-5-manx-tweeters/)
I was looking at Twitter Grader to see who the Twitter Elite in the Isle of Man are and these are the top 5 at the moment:..tr>..table>I must say, I'm pretty chuffed to be at the top of the list. I know all the others on the list except for Clarissa whose Tweets seem to be predominently posts on her wedding site. A number of people are using Twitter for SEO purposes, whether it's to sell term life insurance quote online or wedding services, so I guess there are always going to people Tweeting who I don't really know.Again .. pretty cool I'm first ;)

			Tweet Them	Grade	Bio	Location
1		OwenC	Tweet	96.7	Your friendly neighborhood geek	Isle of Man
2		sherrilynne	Tweet	95	PR and marcoms consultant.	Isle of Man
3		ManxStef	Tweet	82	Freelance slacker geek who should probably get a real job	Isle of Man
4		jamesq	Tweet	81	A happy kinda guy just wandering along with my beautiful fiancee for company.	Isle of Man
5		Clarissa789	Tweet	80	Wedding Planner Extraordinaire	Isle of Man

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I'm in Malta at the moment spending some time visiting and meeting some old friends. It's turned out to be great really; organised a birthday party and had some friends over and today went to Valleta to get some things done while Camille shopped for cool baby clothes.

We actually went swimming today even though the weather wasn't as warm as we hoped. Then in the evening it was off to one of the best rabbit restaurants on the Island. Much to our surprise Arthur seems to love eating snails and ate a whole plateful (didn't actually touch his rabbit though)

Well, it's my birthday next week and Camille is getting me a new compact camera to replace my old Minolta (which is now 5 years old). To tell you the truth, 3.2 megapixels is still great for online photos, but it's slow, doesn't give any control over exposure time and the battery really doesn't last long. So, I've been looking around for what to get and here are my choices:

• Samsung NV100HD - Specs look impressive, boasting a 14.7 megapixel sensor a a wide array of features. Some of the reviews suggest that the quality of the photos doesn't do the camera justice, so not sure about this one.
• Sony Cybershot DSCW120 - I really really like this camera. It has a whole bunch of features I love, but I'm not too fond of Memorysticks to store images on. I'm a bit of an SD man I guess.

I'm a bit torn between the two, but I think the Cybershot is the one that might win in the end.There's a new model out too that seems just perfect for me, but it's a touch more than I wanted to spend. It's the Sony Cybershot T700 and has some amazing features. It's ultra-slim, does everything all the other cameras seem to do, has a massive touch screen on the back and even have 4Gb of internal memory. Check out the review here.The question is .. which one would YOU go for? (continue reading &aquo;)

We haven't had a honeypot in some time, so here's a chance to catch up on some great links to keep you nice and distracted:

• How to network: Excellent advice on how to get out there, make friends and build business contacts
• Twittex: Here's how to resume your Twitter-SMS service in the UK
• AVS Video Converter: Free tool that lets you rotate and flip video
• A tale of love: Great gadgety video
• Save My Boys: Help Jenn and Carolyn get their boys back
• E: Is this the future of social networking?
• SuperPress: Get your mitts on the theme I'm using for this site
• Tater Titan: Some people just have too much time on their hands

Enjoy! (continue reading &aquo;)

I've posted before about Clickjacking and how scary this is for most Internet users, regardless of which browser you're using or whether you have Javascript turn on or off. There's more information about the threat on the Interweb today, including a demo of how the exploit works and some advice on how you can avoid it. First of all, what is clickjacking? There's a great writeup on Securoris that explains it quite succinctly:

Clickjacking allows someone to place an invisible link/button below your mouse as you browse a regular page. You think you’re clicking on a regular link, but really you are clicking someplace the attacker controls that’s hidden from you. Why is this important? Because it allows the attacker to force you to interact with something without your knowledge on a page other than the one you’ve been looking at. For example, they can hide a Flash application that follows your mouse around, and when you go to click a link it starts recording audio off your microphone. We have protections in browsers to prevent someone from automatically initiating certain actions. Also, many websites rely on you manually pressing buttons for actions like transferring large sums of money out of your bank account.

There are two sides to look at this exploitation- user and website owner. As a user, if you visit a malicious site (either a bad guy site, or a regular site that’s been hit with cross site scripting), the attacker can force you to take a very large range of actions. Anytime you click something, the attacker can redirect that click to the destination of their choice in the context of you as a user. That’s the important part here- it’s like cross site request forgery (really, an enhancement of it) that not only gets you to click, but to execute actions as yourself. That’s why they can get you to approve Flash applications you might not normally allow, or to perform actions on other sites in the background. As with CSRF, if you are logged in someplace the attacker can now do whatever the heck they want as long as they know the XY coordinates of what they want you to click.

As a website owner, clickjacking destroys yet more browser trust. When designing web applications (which used to be my job) we often rely on site elements that require manual mouse clicks to submit forms and such. As Robert (Rsnake) explains in his post, with clickjacking an attacker can circumvent nonces (a random code added to every form so the website knows you clicked submit from that page, and didn’t just try to submit the form without visiting the page, a common attack technique).

Clickjacking can be used to do a lot of different things- launching Flash or CSRF are only the tip of the iceberg.

It relies heavily on [iframe]s, which are so pervasive we can’t just rip them out. Sure, I turn them off in my browser, but the economics prevent us from doing that on a wide scale (especially since all the advertisers- e.g. Google/Yahoo/MS, will likely fight it).

Clickjacking is very difficult to eliminate, although we can reduce its risk under certain circumstances. Because it doesn’t even rely on Javascript and works with CSS/DHTML, it will take a lot of time, effort, and thought to eliminate.

If that sounded scary, have a look at a video showing one application of the exploit:If you want to study that further, you can actually run it through it's paces here.So, what can be done about this? First of all, it's worth realising that while it's a powerful threat, the risk of it happening isn't that high at the moment. Vendors have started recognising the threat and coming up with solutions for dealing with it. Adobe has come up with a workaround and NoScript has released ClearClick to help address it. It's only a matter of time before this is quashed too (won't be easy though) (continue reading &aquo;)

We're almost there! Hyder and I have been working on a massively exciting theme for WordPress which will be unveiled very very soon. I'm using it on this blog as well as on WordPress Guru and you can tell just how customisable it us but looking at the differences between the two sites.There's a superb feature set sitting behind the theme and it's a culmination of many hours of work from both of us. I've even managed to lose weight by skipping meals to work on the theme! It has tons and tons of options and some really exciting unique features (I love my media manager for example)I'm not going to talk any more about the Super WordPress theme, just want to mention that you can win a free copy of the theme by signing up at our contest hereKeep an eye on the blog, more news soon! (continue reading &aquo;)

It's always great what you can find on the Web. Tonight I came across a website where you can get eyeglasses from as low as $8.00. Ok, they're based in the United States, so there's probably shipping, tax and all the other stuff, but that price is so cheap it's just remarkable. They claim that their cheap prices are due to the fact that there are no middlemen and using the Internet as a sales medium allows them to offer the cheapest price available.I decided to do some further digging and found a mention of ZenniOptical on Clark Howard's Radio Show Blog. Unfortunately the comments aren't all good claiming that refunds are impossible to obtain and warning there's little or no customer support. I suppose that's the other great side of the Internet; just looking for some information can quickly give you all the data you can require about any particular subject. Don't get me wrong; there are some positive comments too claiming how the shoppers are delighted with their purchases (especially those who paid $8 for the specs and $5 for shipping) and how they had positive experiences with the company.I suppose it's all a matter of expectations and getting exactly what you're after. (continue reading &aquo;)