I’m confused.

I was pretty sure that BT said their 21st Century Network was the roll out of a fibre network across the UK. According to an article on the BBC website it seems BT are claiming that ADSL2+ is this 21st Century Network. If they think squeezing an extra few Mbps from the antique copper wires is 21st Century Network I better create a time machine and take a trip to the 22nd Century!

There are already companies providing a ADSL2+ service so what BT is beginning to use isn’t even the first of its kind.

Just another example of the telecomms monster under-investing and under-providing for something that could seriously affect the UK ability to keep pace online.

There’s been reports in the news about half a million Microsoft websites being hacked. Everything is being blamed on IIS when in actual fact it poor programming by the developers of the websites.

It stems from a type of attack on the websites called SQL injection which is actually related to the database layer rather than web server as seems to be reported everywhere.

The automated attack takes advantage of the fact that databases aren’t locked down by default therefore allowing the SQL injection to perform tasks inside the database that really shouldn’t be allowed. Best practice for database development should include anticipating possible different types of attack including SQL injection therefore employing defensive programming technique. In addition the database user to be used by the web application should ideally be locked down to only allow the minimum access allowed.

SQL injection attacks aren’t just limited to Microsoft databases so it should really serve as a warning to all programmers.

There is a terrible affliction spreading slowly in some digerati circles and it’s called Twitter fatigue. It tends to creep up slowly on people but eventually means their previous enthusiasm for Twitter is leached away.

So why is this happening to some people, myself included? I think ironically some people’s over-enthusiasm can be the cause for others loss of interest or even annoyance at Twitter. Why people feel the need to Twitter every trivial piece of information is a little beyond me surely they have better things to do…surely?

I do think it does depend on your use of Twitter too. If you are just checking your Twitter feed regularly or using the numerous Twitter applications available to filter the incoming information maybe you stand a chance against the tsunami of useless Tweets. If you use Twitter’s built in filtering and have Tweets coming straight to your mobile I think you’ll get tired of your text tone very quickly.

Paul Bradshaw has an excellent post on the OJB giving a wide range of information about the best use of Twitter. It does have a slant for journalists however as I would expect Journalists to be following a great deal of sources, a guide for help them might help the rest of the Twitterverse.

After cutting off Tweets to my mobile a few weeks ago I think maybe it’s about time I reviewed the alternatives to make my Tweetlife more manageable.

So Google is following up on it’s mission to penalise high PageRank websites that sell links as they violate the Google guidelines.

It would seem the Economist has seen a significant PageRank drop which has been attributed to their practice of adding classified adverts at the bottom of their pages without the relevant robots.txt file or rel=”nofollow” attributes.

Firstly I think this is excellent work by Google I’m a strong believer in ethical SEO. In other words optimising what you have on a website not just conning Google into showing what are essentially erroronous results. This just isn’t good for the whole online community or Google in the long term.

By penalising such a high profile website I think it will make people sit up and listen that Google aren’t taking this lying down and also raises the profile of this guideline so that people that aren’t aware should perhaps check their code.

Whether the Economist knowingly did this is open to debate but as these links seem to be unrelated to a lot of the content on some pages the overall effectiveness of these incoming links has to have been lessened somewhat - Google is all about relevancy.

At the end of the day accurate results are what will keep Google going so I have no sympathy if you fall foul of the Google guidelines. In the long run it has to be said Google is managing to at least keep up with the more unscrupilous SEOs out there.