You just finished a hard bit of work so you fancy some down time.  You saw a film last week, who was that actress in it? Oh yeah, it was Jessica Biel. You want to find a bit more about her. Since you’re sitting at your computer, you open up a Google and search for ‘Jessica Biel’.

You get a whole page full of results – nothing unusual about that, she’s a big celebrity. You scan past the first one (who clicks just the top link? – not you, you’re an Internet pro!) until you find a link that seems to offer what you’re looking for.

You click the link. And your PC falls into a hackers hands.

How did that happen?

Well according to some research published by McAfee last week, Hackers will build a website with the purpose of infecting your PC with a virus. They will then optimise that website around popular search terms, to try and boost it high in the rankings for that search term. Celebrity names are very popular to do this with, since they have a very high search volume and they are also used by less discerning searchers. And the celebrity that this year tops the list of most exploited search terms is Jessica Biel.

Apparently there is a 20% chance that a search for Jessica Biel will result in you landing on a website that has been set up by a hacker for this very purpose.

The hacker will charge the website up with every kind of virus, including spyware, trojans, spam and phishing tools, in the hope of infecting your PC.

Each year, the celebrity most exploited changes. Last year it was Brad Pitt. Other celebrities in the list this year include Beyonce, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Brady, Jessica Simpson, Gisele Bundchen, Miley Cyrus, Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie, and Ashley Tisdale.

Still interested in those celebrities? Leave us a comment below.

We’ve spoken a bit before about click fraud. This occurs when someone clicks on a Pay-Per-Click advert for any purpose other than to visit the website of the advertiser, with a genuine desire to look at their products and services.

‘Pay per click’ is one of the main sorts of advertising on the web. Perhaps obviously, the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their advert.  Every advert that appears in the Search Engine Results Page on Google is a pay per click advert.

There are three main types of click fraud. The first is called ‘innocuous’, where users click on adverts accidentally, or habitually click on a particular advert. They weren’t deliberately intending to visit the website of the advertiser, but do so by accident.

The second two types are both ‘malicious’. The first are clicks carried out by competitors to an advertiser, to drive up costs for that advertiser. The 2nd are carried out by website owners, who click on adverts on their own website, since they make money every time an advert on their site is clicked on.

Google claim to detect and filter out these malicious clicks so that advertisers are not charged for them. Google don’t reveal how they work out what is a malicious click since, they say, that would prompt the perpetrators of the click fraud to develop more complex click fraud techniques.

As reported over on Techcrunch, a company called Anchor intelligence has released a report that outlines the amount of click fraud that exists. The report covers January to June 2009.

The report shows that click fraud appears to be on the rise with 22.9% of all clicks being click fraud of one sort of another.

The report also breaks down the click fraud rates by country. In the UK, click fraud is around 17.7%, relatively low in the click fraud league. By contrast, in Vietnam has a click fraud rate of nearly 50%. No other country comes close to that.

And it’s not like Vietnam is an anomaly due to its low click volume. It is, apparently, the sixth biggest market in the world for pay per click advertising.

Here’s some good visuals reproduced from TechCrunch:

What does this mean if you’re building a website with WebEden? Well if you use pay per click advertising to drive traffic to your site, be assured that you’ve got – on a world scale – a low risk of paying for fraudulent clicks. There’s not going to be a lot you can do about avoiding these fraudulent clicks, but just trust that Google and others are not charging you for them.

If you run AdSense adverts on your website, the overall message has got to be: don’t click on your ads! The chances are the Google can already detect from your IP address that it’s you who is clicking, and will therefore not credit you with any cash. The risk you take if you do click on adverts on your own site is that Google will terminate your AdSense contract, since you’re breaking their Ts & Cs.

Have you been the victim of click fraud? Or have you maliciously clicked on a competitors’ adverts? Leave us a comment below.

A couple of weeks ago, something unfortunate happened to Twitter. A person calling himself / herself ‘Hacker Croll’ hacked into Twitter’s network and then copied 310 private company files, including emails, memos, partner agreements and meeting notes. He / she then packaged up all these secret files and sent them over to newsbreaking site TechCrunch.

And TechCrunch decided to publish those ’secrets’.

So often creating the news, Twitter has become a news topic. Their ’secrets’ are all over the Internet. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

1. Twitter: how big are they going to be? According to their internal figure, Twitter reckon they will have 25million users by the end of 2009; up to 100m by the end of 2010; and a truly staggering 350 million by the end of 2011. Facebook is currently the largest social networking site with 200m users: Twitter think they will be twice as big as that by the end of 2011. But it doesn’t stop there: by the end of 2013 they hope to have 1billion users – 1 in every 7 who walks the planet!

2. Although Twitter is yet to sell anything to anybody at all, they expect to make revenues of $140m in 2010, of which $46m will be profit. Nice eh? That’s nothing – by 2013 they hope to be pulling in $1.54billion, and be employing 5,200 people. I would love to sit in a board meeting when someone is presenting these figures: “And here you see the graph go up… and up… and up…”

3. They’re currently sitting on a cash pile of $45m. Since they are yet to sell anything, this is all money raised from investors. Whilst $45m is just a fraction of the revenues they hope to make, no wonder they aren’t in a hurry to start selling stuff – the wolf is a long way from the door. Co-founder Biz Stone confirmed this in a recent interview with Revolution Magazine: We’re not under any pressure to hit a home run. We want to take our time and get this right”.

4. Twitter estimates that the cost of providing their service freely to each user is about $1 per user per year. And that’s despite the fact that some users post hundreds of Tweets every single day.

5. Twitter has recently kicked around the idea of a themed reality-TV show dubbed the ‘Final Tweet’. The idea, pitched to them by a US production company, involves a clash between teams of entrepreneurs who compete for a $100,000 cash prize.

The fact that all this private stuff has been moved to the public domain might be a bit embarrassing for Twitter. Whilst not denying their veracity, Biz Stone is saying that these files are very much out of date. “Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they’re certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world,” he said.

What do you think about Techcrunch deciding to make it all public? Does WebEden fit into the same boat since we’re republishing them here? Does this change your view of Twitter? Leave us a comment below

Unless you have spent the last week trekking deep in the Amazon, or crossing the Atlantic in a rowing boat, the media event of the last week has been the death of Michael Jackson.

Almost a week later It still makes every news broadcast, even though there’s no ‘new’ developments, just a desire to rake over the details.

Whatever your view of the man himself, there’s no doubt we’ve lost an awesome singer and performer.

But if you’re a website builder then his death has affected you more than most. Because as news of his death spread across the web, several trusted websites started to crack under the pressure. And when those are the same sites that send traffic to your website, then you start to notice.

As documented by the event chronology over on SEOmoz.org, this was the first story that can truly be said to have been broken online.

The highly niche x17online.com first posted news of Jackson’s collapse at 20.10pm, along with some exclusive photos. It took another 20 minutes for TMZ.com – the site largely credited with breaking the story – to start reporting on the matter. TMZ.com is read by thousands, and has RSS feeds with breaking news to many other sites.

So by 21.22pm the story was being read by many people on TMZ.com and picked up by other websites such as Wikipedia too.

Ever the trusted source of information, it was now that people turned to Google to confirm the story. Such was the volume of people searching for news related to the death of Jackson that Google’s systems assumed it was under attack. This would be exactly the sort of an issue thrown up by an automated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

As a safety measure, Google users were asked to enter a ‘captcha’ code that proved they were real people

And Google News – the service that scours breaking news so that search queries return up-to-the-minute results, broke down entirely. It was a full hour and a half before Google was able to confirm the story with its news feeds.

Google Search results for Michael Jackson from SEOmoz.org

By this time of course TMZ.com itself was offline, as it struggled to deal with the volume of traffic. And even the websites of massive news organisations such as CNN.com and MSNBC.com were slowed under the weight of visitors.

Google told Web User that it had seen “volcanic levels” of activity between 2030-2315BST.

They added that searches for ‘Michael Jackson’ made up more than 50 of the top 100 searches.

OK, it’s unlikely you noticed any change in the traffic that Google was sending your website. But this may go down in history as another GoogleFail – that when people turned to Google when they needed it most, it didn’t work.

A report from Havard Business out last week has found that of those people who have signed up to Twitter, only a small number are actually tweeting.

Whilst the use of any website is skewed towards a small number of highly active users, this number is even more highly concentrated in the case of Twitter.

A mere 10% of Twitterers account for 90% of all Tweets. By contrast, in the case of Facebook, the top 10% of users produce just 30% of all content added to Facebook pages. Twitter use is even more concentrated than that of Wikipedia, which has been criticised in the past for being produced and edited by too few people. For Wikipedia 15% of people edit 90% of all pages.

In addition to this concentration of users, at the other end of the scale, a typical user tweets just once in their Twitter lifetime. This backs up a study that questions whether Twitter is here to stay: people tend to use Twitter for just one month.

The report commented that this user concentration implied that Twitter “resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network”

This confirms comments we’ve made here before: that it seems like there’s a lot of tweeting going on, but how many of those tweets are actually getting read and responded to?

It also feeds into the idea that people and companies are using Twitter to market themselves, now that there are a few ideas of how use Twitter to do this. Marketing has always tended to be a one-way conversation – for example television advertisements are broadcast into your home. Twitter was hailed as an opportunity to make that conversation two-way, by having customers respond to the messages they were receiving.

But maybe Twitter is becoming just another way for marketers to reach new and existing customers?

One thing is clear: that these highly active users – often now referred to as the Twitterati - have been very good at telling the rest of us how important Twitter is.

Can you see the future of using Twitter? Leave us a comment below, Oh, I forgot the shameless plug:  you can always follow WebEden on Twitter.

Research from Hitwise UK this week showed the impact of world events on Internet traffic. The outbreak of Swine Flu in April boosted traffic to the World Health Organisation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by more than 200% each in just 4 days.

Here’s a graph from Hitwise that shows their traffic.

And of course it also has a huge impact on what people are searching for. UK searches for ’swine flu’ increased 58-fold for the week ending 2nd May. Of the 10.9 million different search terms that Hitwise monitored over this period, ’swine flu’ was the 20th most popular.

And as we’ve discussed before, this booming interest in swine flu has meant the cyber squatters have moved in. This is good news of course if your website is all about flu symptoms. But for the rest of us, we can only watch (with our facemasks poised). Time to use the WebEden Website Maker to write about Swine flu?

Anyone with an eye on the technology news can’t have failed to notice the launch of Google Latitude a couple of months ago. The system allows you to show your current location on a web based map. It works by receiving data from your Smartphone and then publishing it on Google Maps. (If you haven’t got a Smartphone – such as a gphone, iphone, or other – then don’t worry, your location remains a secret!).

Since the launch there has been lots of criticism from people who see this as a threat to privacy. The press has been full of comments like ‘big brother’ and ’stalking’. Even Google, who are trying to sell us into this idea, say that it lets you “see where your friends are in real time”.

As it stands right now, Latitude could be a gift to stalkers, prying employers, jealous partners and obsessive friends” said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International.

Google for its part has responded by pointing out that the system is an ‘opt-in’ service with simple privacy controls – you only publish your location if you want to.

As an update to the service, Gmail recently added a labs feature that can publish your location in your email signature, when you use gmail.

You can see where Google is headed with this application. A significant proportion of search queries are location specific, EG ‘florist London’, ‘taxi in Manchester’. Google can already deliver relevant results to these queries but it relies on the search query using the most appropriate search criteria. For example, if you do want a shoe shop in Sheffield and you’re searching for ’shoe shop south Yorkshire’, it won’t automatically know that you’re interested in results from Sheffield too.

So in Google’s eyes, the more it can automate the process of location specific searches – by knowing exactly where you are – the more relevant the results will be.

Have you tried using Google Latitude? Is it a bit stalk-y or just a bit of fun? Or can you see more practical applications to this technology? Leave us a comment below.

Over the bank holiday 13m of us were stuck to our TV screens for the Bank holiday’s biggest treat – the two semi finals of Britain’s Got Talent. And then last weekend ITV took an even bigger chunk of the viewing audience, and our collective consciousness, for the grand final. But whilst that was going on, some enterprising cyber squatting individuals were snapping up the domain names of all but a handful of the performers involved.

As we’ve spoken about before, cyber squatting is when someone registers a domain name which is the same or similar to that of another individual, brand or company, in the hope of profiting from traffic that a website on that domain might generate.

We’ve recently seen this happen in the case of Swine Flu and domain names.

Both the .com and .co.uk variations of the contestant’s names have been registered as domain names. Those contestants with foresight – all 5 of them – registered web addresses in their name before entering the talent contest.

The owners of these new domains will generate traffic to any website they put on those domain names in the following two ways.

The first is called direct traffic or type in traffic. This is where people type in the name of the person or company they are looking for directly into the address bar, and just add .co.uk or .com onto the end.

The second is when people search for that celebrity on Google. Its much easier to boost up your position in the Search Engine Results page (SERPs) if the keyword that people are using to search with is within your domain name.

And people will end up clicking on those websites that are exact match of the contestant’s domain name when they see it appear in the SERPs.

What is the point in getting traffic onto these sites? The short answer: money. If the cyber squatters fill these pages with relevant adverts, then those adverts are going to get a lot of eye balls, and lots of people clicking on them as a consequence.

In a further development, many acts have also had Twitter accounts opened in their names. This is a hint at the power of Twitter. Maybe Twitter account names will in the future be as valuable as domain names, since users will search for those people in Twitter and then ‘follow’ them, even though they may have nothing to do with the actual celebrity.

What’s the moral of this one? Well if you haven’t done so already, maybe its time to register your own name as a domain name. And whilst you’re at it then why not do the same with Twitter. You never know - Simon Cowell might be waiting just around the corner…

Imagine this. You’re on holiday, you’ve been out walking, and you need to get back to the other side of town to your hotel.

You come across a bus stop, and you decide to wait for a bus. Whilst standing there, you decide to take a photo of your friends waiting with you.

You take the photo and then show the photo to your fiends. Hang on, what’s that on the photo? The bit of the bus stop in the shot has got a URL on it, inviting you to click on it. You click, and are presented with a bus timetable for this stop. Highlighted is the next bus going to your destination, and the length of time you’ve got to wait!

Amazed, you click back to the photo, and notice that in the background you’ve managed to capture part of a window of a local restaurant. Again, this part of the image has a URL, which you click on. Hey presto, you’re on the restaurant’s website, where you can check the menu and also get a money off voucher.

A bizarre view of a convenient future? This is one envisaged by MOBVIS, the Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios project, which is currently mapping out streets in both Austria and Germany.

The service claims to be able to recognise pictures of surroundings and add URLs to anything in that image it can find information about.

It is a so-called ‘pre-emptive’ technology, designed to anticipate your need to search for information.

The MOBVIS project is funded by EC.

Scary picture of the future? Fantasy comic book idea? Or exciting project that could change searching and surfing habits? Please leave a comment below.

We covered the UK launch of Google Street View last month. The database of street level images from 26 UK towns and cities has been one of Google’s more controversial projects. There have been lots of objections that Google Street View is an invasion of privacy, since it takes photos without any individual’s permission, and in most cases without their knowledge. It has also been described as a helpful aid to burglars.

Despite this, its proved a huge boost for traffic to Google Maps.

The photos are taken from a panoramic camera mounted 12 foot high on the top of a moving car.

The residents of one village near Milton Keynes have turned their objections into direct action. Protesters from Broughton surrounded a Google Street View car to prevent it taking photos of their homes.

A local councilor said the camera was ‘intrusive’ and that people should have been consulted.

The protest was significant enough for the police to be called: “A squad car was sent to Broughton at 1020 BST after reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor”, said Thames Valley police.

This isn’t the first time objections have been raised. Before the project even launched, Google had to satisfy all privacy concerns with the Information commissioner’s office.

For my part, there’s no way I’d get in the way of the Google Street View car. Aside from being a really innovative development in real world mapping, it’s been really exciting to travel along known streets and roads pointing out the homes of friends and family.

And of course anyone can remove images of their house from the database once it goes live, if they still feel like their privacy has been invaded

What do you think? Great innovation or invasion of privacy? Leave us a comment below.