In my first post on this blog I wrote (critically) about ACAP – a thoroughly wrong-headed attempt by some publishers to enforce stringent limitations on the way search engines index the content that publishers make public on their websites. Today ACAP is completely dead in the water. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (see those links for [...]

For those of you who haven’t come into contact with it before, OpenID is an open-source single-login that works on many websites. In their own words “OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.”. And it does. Some time ago, I set up the main domain of this website [...]

There’s already been a lot of comment about Microsoft’s recent hostile takeover bid for Yahoo (not least from Google itself). Google’s objections are based around arguments against Microsoft’s monopoly (hardly a threat when Google’s share of the search market is bigger than Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s combined). David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President, asked: Could Microsoft [...]

OK, well I’ve spent some time reviewing this new specification. It’s a mixture of a couple of useful new qualifiers to the old robots.txt standard and a lot of anally-retentive control-freakery written by people who still don’t get “the internet”. The good points: Extends robots.txt to allow site owners to define sets of folders/files by [...]