Sean Walther's Blog

Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”

As web developers, we should do our best to stay up on the ethics of the code we write.

I’ve said before, I believe this “filtering” is best for the end user. Your experience is much better customized for you, but there is a narrow margin between customized for you, and customized according to someone else’s agenda.

As users, we should all know when results are customized for us, and have an option to see a non customized version. Perhaps we will appreciate these filters more, but we should always know when we are seeing something as raw data, or presented to us in a way we might “want” it.

Tags: Eli Pariser, Ethics, filtering, Google, Yahoo

Help: How do I announce a new website?

We launch websites every month or two for clients, and make many website updates.  What are the best ways to tell the “internet” that your site is up, and ready to be checked out?  I’m going to focus on the free options, as I find anything that costs money sketchy (especially with regard to listing a site).

We can divide this into a few categories:

• Search Engines
• Social Networking
• Peer Sites
• News Aggregators

› Continue reading

Tags: Bing, delicious, Facebook, Google, Google Webmaster, LinkedIn, News Aggregators, Open Directory Project, SEO, Social Networking, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Yahoo