word

Google offers 'Insights for Search'

Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.

For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would've otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.

With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map&… Read more

Apple, Microsoft, PHP headline IBM's list of most vulnerable software

Proprietary vendors, including study author IBM, take a beating in a new report that catalogs software vulnerabilities.

Apple, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM each sprinted to finish in the top five for most reported security vulnerabilities in the IBM Internet Security Systems's X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report (PDF).

Not to be outdone, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, and Linux also fought bravely to make the top 10. This is an indication of their growing adoption. As Sam Dean notes: no one bothers to hack a lonely system that few use.

However, it may also have much to do with the … Read more

WordPress app hits the iPhone fashionably late

Just a week and a half ago WordPress for the iPhone was announced with a pretty killer screencast detailing what you could do with it. Tuesday morning it finally showed up on the app store (download it here), and I've had ample time to play with it. The good news is that it's very enjoyable to use and quite capable for creating posts on the go. The bad news? You've got to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to take advantage of it.

The key benefit to using this app is writing and publishing quick posts on … Read more

The 404 143: Where it's talking to you

Per usual, we push the envelope in the preshow today and it starts to leak into the beginning of today's episode, but we quickly (maybe not so quickly) seal it up and get into our story rundown. We criticize our sue-happy country and its propensity for stupid T-shirts, speak to the potential power of iPhone gaming, introduce a new S&M Barbie doll (therapy not included), and snap our way through this year's Emmy nominees. EPISODE 143 Download today's podcast

WordPress updates to 2.6, adds Gears support

Blogging platform WordPress updated to version 2.6 late last night. It's the latest major release since 2.5, which debuted back in late March and adds nearly as many new features as it does bug and security fixes.

The video above outlines some of the major new features. The most useful of the bunch is aimed at bloggers on the go who can now take advantage of the same Google Gears integration introduced to WordPress.com earlier this month. This "turbo" mode downloads some of the files and scripts from your blog to your Gears cache, … Read more

WordPress to release iPhone app

When the iPhone App Store was mentioned in Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote, one of the many applications announced was a TypePad blogging tool, courtesy of Six Apart (The company also makes two other blogging tools; Movable Type and Vox). Now that the App Store has launched, other blogging platforms like WordPress are coming forward with their own iPhone app plans.

Today, WordPress put out a video demonstrating its very own iPhone blogging tool, which supports WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress.org blogs (as long as it's version 2.5.1 or later). WordPress promises the iPhone app will … Read more

Microsoft Word vulnerability prompts advisory

Users of an older version of Microsoft Word could have their computers compromised after downloading and opening a specially crafted .doc file, according to an advisory issued late Tuesday.

Microsoft said only limited and targeted attacks have so far attempted to use this vulnerability against systems running Microsoft Word 2002 SP3.

To become infected, a vulnerable user would have to open a specially crafted .doc document. An attacker using this vulnerability would then have the same user rights as the victim. If a victim were running as administrator, the attacker would gain full access to the compromised PC.

Attacks such … Read more

Google advertisers get view into keyword search popularity

Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those terms.

"Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you'll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network," said Trevor Claiborne of Google's AdWords group in a blog posting Tuesday. (See an image of the tool in … Read more

Geeks get a word in with Merriam-Webster

Geek culture is once again showing its influence over the mainstream lexicon in the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which includes word additions such as webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting (thank you Hewlett-Packard), and fanboy (thank you Apple).

Webinar is "one more example of the significant ongoing trend for electronic technologies to add words to the language," Merriam-Webster publisher John Morse said in a Monday press release about the 100 or so new words in the 2008 edition of the influential reference guide.

That's in line with Merriam-Webster's choice of the term "wOOt"… Read more