Privacy Browsing Extensions in Google Chrome

Using two Chrome Extensions, Disconnect and AdBlock you can be sure of having a vary very clean browsing experience-it is recommended especially if you dont like the auto sharing of your personal preferences and cannot be bothered by the Byzantine maze of social media privacy fineprint.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jeoacafpbcihiomhlakheieifhpjdfeo

Disconnect by Brian Kennish

(184) – 44,284 users – Weekly installs: 24,086

Stop major third parties and search engines from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do.

Install

* Search depersonalization is now optional and off by default. Click the “d” button then the “Depersonalize searches” checkbox to turn this feature on (or back off in case you have trouble getting to Google or Yahoo services). For help with anything else, see the known issues below and ask questions at http://j.mp/dnewgroup.

§

If you’re a typical web user, you’re unintentionally sending your browsing and search history with your name and other personal information to third parties and search engines whenever you’re online.

Take control of the data you share with Disconnect!

From the developer of the top-10-rated Facebook Disconnect extension, Disconnect lets you:

• Disable tracking by third parties like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, without requiring any setup or significantly degrading the usability of the web.

• Truly depersonalize searches on search engines like Google and Yahoo (by blocking identifying cookies not just changing the appearance of results pages), while staying logged into other services — e.g., so you can search anonymously on Google and access iGoogle at once.

• See how many resource and cookie requests are blocked, in real time

and

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom

Extensions > AdBlock




AdBlock
 (6937) - 1,615,373 users - Weekly installs: 153,032



The most popular Chrome extension, with over 1.5 million users! Blocks ads all over the web.


Verified author: chromeadblock.com





Install

=================

New in version 2.1: Translated into dozens of languages!
New in version 2.0: Ads are blocked from downloading, instead of just being removed after the fact!

=======================

The official AdBlock For Chrome!  Block all advertisements on all web pages.  Your browser is automatically updated with additions to the filter: just click Install, then visit your favorite website and see the ads disappear!

FAQs:1. This is the official AdBlock extension: the original ad blocker written from the ground up to be optimized in Chrome.  There's an unrelated, older Firefox project called Adblock Plus, and they're working on making a Chrome version out of the old AdThwart codebase.  At the moment AdBlock blocks some ads that AdThwart only hides, but they're working to improve it.  It's available at bit.ly/id2Gqx; if you have trouble with AdBlock, they're good guys and a fine alternative!

Most Popular Firefox Extensions and Posts of 2010 [Video] (lifehacker.com)
Ex-Googler Helps Users Disconnect From the Social Web (readwriteweb.com)
10 Google Chrome Extensions for a Faster Browser (friedbeef.com)
IE9 Gets Built-In Ad Blocking (informationweek.com)
Click&Clean, Browser Add-On To Delete Temporary Data, Improve Privacy (ghacks.net)

Deleting Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn- Accepting Life

This Thanksgiving as I prayed to God for my family– I prayed to him to give me more time with my loving family. An insight or revelation struck me-

I was spending more time with my computer than with my loved ones.

Is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn essential to living? No

I have 1700 followers on Twitter

1100 “Friends” on Facebook, and 9429 “Connections” on Linkedin

Deleting Facebook was an emotionally wrenching decision- see this screenshot- I tried to download all my account- family photos (320 mb) but connection kept breaking-

so I had just deactivate and not delete the account. You win, Zuckenberg

How to-

Right Hand Top Corner —-Account Settings- Deactivate Account

After Facebook de activates your account- it mocks you by saying this this in YELLOW “

Your Facebook account has been deactivated.

To reactivate your account, log in using your old login email and password. You will be able to use the site like you used to.

We hope you come back soon.”

I go back to Facebook to download all my family photos before final deletion (and not just de activation)- I get this message

It may take a little while for us to gather all of your photos, wall posts, messages, and other information. We will then ask you to verify your identity in order to help protect the security of your account.

Yeah Yeah Mark.

One Down Two to Go

Deleting Twitter

Twitter was disappointingly easy-

Go to http://twitter.com/settings/account

At bottom left you see Deactivate my account.

Twitter tries to scare me now-

Is this goodbye?

This action is permanent.

Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider? Was it something we said? Tell us.

Before you deactivate your account, know this:

This action is permanent: account restoration is currently disabled.
You do not need to deactivate your account to change your username. (You can change it on the settings page. All @replies and followers will remain unchanged.)
Your account may be viewable on twitter.com for a few days after deactivation.
We have no control over content indexed by search engines like Google.
If you’re creating a new account and want to use the same user name, phone number and/or email address associated with this account, you must first change them on this account before you deactivate it. If you don’t, the information will be tied to this account and unavailable for use.
Okay, fine, deactivate my account (thats the button)

I clicked the Okay fine Button.

One more pop up-

Re-enter your Twitter password to deactivate @DecisionStats.

Ok Done-

Twitter tries to scare me again —-

You deactivated your account.

Account restoration is currently unavailable. Here is the message you agreed to before deactivating your account:

his action is permanent.

Before you deactivate your account, know this:

This action is permanent: account restoration is currently disabled.
You do not need to deactivate your account to change your username. (You can change it on the settings page. All @replies and followers will remain unchanged.)
Your account may be viewable on twitter.com for a few days after deactivation.
We have no control over content indexed by search engines like Google.
If you’re creating a new account and want to use the same user name, phone number and/or email address associated with this account, you must first change them on this account before you deactivate it. If you don’t, the information will be tied to this account and unavailable for use.

So Long Twitter, I gotta spend more time with my offline family okay.

And probably anyone trying to do sentiment analysis on my twitter feed for social media analytics now has an incomplete data point (hehe)

Last One- Linkedin 9349 connections are valuable- I was thinking of auctioning this on E Bay but they kicked me out.

So I just go for deletion.

I spend 10 minuted looking for the delete account button-this is getting a bit annoying now.

I finally go to

http://help.linkedin.com/

Item 4- Closing my Account-

Linkedin neither scares me nor emotionally coddles me – This is what is says-

Closing Your Account

How do I close my account?

Log into the account you wish to close.
Hover your cursor over your name in the top right of your home page and then click “Settings”.
Click on “Close Your Account” under Personal Information.
Select a reason for closing your account.
Click on “Continue”.

Members should only have one LinkedIn account. Multiple accounts can prevent the ability to accept an Invitation. Closing additional accounts should resolve this dilemma. Prior to closing any secondary accounts:

Inventory all connections and identify any that may be missing from the primary account you wish to keep.
Send Invitations to those connections missing from the primary account.
Update any profile information that maybe on other account profiles.

So I try exporting all 9300 + connections using http://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport

I dont think I will send that many invites again- but some of these people have been good to me ( 18 of them even wrote recommendations- which are non exportable it seems)

I check my downloaded csv file- yup all 9379 email addresses are there.

Final round-

Update- Linkedin does NOT get deleted. I get this-

Your close account request must be processed by customer support for the following reason:

You have more than 250 connections.

You will receive a confirmation email from customer support indicating that they received your request to close your account.

The account that customer support will process for closure is below:

Ajay Ohri
9,429 Connections
16 Recommendations
ohri2007@gmail.com (primary address)

and the email says

Member Comment: ajay ohri

11/24/2010 23:10

Member ID: 6691344
Member Name: Ajay Ohri

The member has attempted to self close this account and was unable because:

The member has a large network of connections to close. Please close during non peak hours.

Please confirm with the member when his or her account has been successfully closed.

So long people- you know where to find me- on this blog (and some on skype).

And if you dont’ know how to find me on my blog-

Happy Thanksgiving-and kill that Turkey 🙂

Demi Lovato Deactivates Her Twitter Account (shoppingblog.com)
John Mayer Deactivates His Twitter Account (shoppingblog.com)
New Facebook privacy tip: ‘Super-logoff’ (cnn.com)
LinkedIn CEO: We’re adding a new user every second (money.cnn.com)
Stephen Fry says ‘bye-bye’ to Twitter … again (cbc.ca)
Making Friends: LinkedIn vs. Facebook vs. Twitter (e1evation.com)

Tale of Two Analytical Interfaces

Occam’s razor (or Ockham’s razor^[1]) is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae(translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). The principle is popularly summarized as “the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one.

Using a simple screenshot- you can see Facebook Analytics for a Facebook page is simpler at explaining who is coming to visit rather than Google Analytics Dashboard (which has not seen the attention of a Visual UI or Graphic Redesign)

And if Facebook is going to take over the internet, well it is definitely giving better analytics in the process. What do you think?

Which Interface is simpler- and gives you better targeting. Ignore the numbers and just see the metrics measured and the way they are presented. Coincidently R is used at Facebook a lot (which has given the jjplot package)- and Google has NOT INVESTED MAJOR MONEY in creating Premium R Packages or Big Data Packages. I am talking investment at the scale Google is known for- not measly meetups.

(the summer of code dont count- it is for students mostly)

(but thanks for the Pizza G Men- and maybe revise that GA interface by putting a razor to some metrics)

GA vs Facebook Analytics

The Deal with the Devil (politics.ie)
Google Analytics: Goodbye Site Overlay, Hello In-Page Analytics (searchengineland.com)
Google Instant Page Previews Wreaking Havoc On Web Analytics (seroundtable.com)
Designing Your Blog with User Interface in Mind (gabrielcatalano.com)

Who searches for this Blog?

Using WP- Stats I set about answering this question-

What search keywords lead here-

Clearly Michael Jackson is down this year

And R GUI, Data Mining is up.

How does that affect my writing- given I get almost 250 visitors by search engines alone daily- assume I write nothing on this blog from now on.

It doesnt- I still write what ever code or poem that comes to my mind. So it is hurtful people misunderstimate the effort in writing and jump to conclusions (esp if I write about a company- I am not on payroll of that company- just like if I write about a poem- I am not a full time poet)

Over to xkcd

All Time (for Decisionstats.Wordpress.com)

Search	Views
libre office	818
facebook analytics	806
michael jackson history	240
wps sas lawsuit	180
r gui	168
wps sas	154
wordle.net	118
sas wps	116
decision stats	110
sas wps lawsuit	100
google maps jet ski	94
data mining	88
doug savage	72
hive tutorial	63
spss certification	63
hadley wickham	63
google maps jetski	62
sas sues wps	60
decisionstats	58
donald farmer microsoft	45
libreoffice	44
wps statistics	44
best statistics software	42
r gui ubuntu	41
rstat	37
tamilnadu advanced technical training institute tatti	37

YTD

2009-11-24 to Today

Search	Views
libre office	818
facebook analytics	781
wps sas lawsuit	170
r gui	164
wps sas	125
wordle.net	118
sas wps	101
sas wps lawsuit	95
google maps jet ski	94
data mining	86
decision stats	82
doug savage	63
hadley wickham	63
google maps jetski	62
hive tutorial	56
donald farmer microsoft	45

Ways of Optimizing Blog in Search Engines (cash-bandit.com)
SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 23, 2010 (searchengineland.com)
Do You Want Increased Income? Chango Could Be The Answer (wassupblog.com)
Domain.com Announces Industry’s First Natively Integrated Browser Domain Search (prweb.com)
Why Keyword Research Matters and Link Building Doesn’t (danlew.com)
Six rules for producing optimised web content (econsultancy.com)
Consumer Watch Dog Group Files Complaint with the FTC Regarding Data Mining, Profiling Algorithms – Privacy With Health Information At Risk With Insurer and Employer Usage (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
Find the Question to your Yahoo Answers! (seomoz.org)

Zen and the art of applying T tests to Spam Data

Decisionstats traffic seemed up mmm but Spam is way way up

Whos spamming my dear bloggie

hmm

is it the russians doing a link spam. unlikely they dont bot against Akismet that much (as they fail)

And Captcha can be failed by python (apparently. sigh)

Is there a co relation of certain tags of posts, and count of spam- hoping to distort say blogs’s search engine rankings for SAS WPS Lawsuit in Google or jet ski across pacific in Google.

Sigh- an old retired outlaw black hat is never kept in peace. Try doing a blog search for R in Google- Revo is now down to number 7 (which is hmm given Google Instant)

Of course I think too much about SEO, but I dont run CPC ads- I made much more money when traffic is low – say 5-10 small businesses needing to forecast their sales .

and enjoy your Thanksgiving. Remember the Indians bring the Turkeys.

The 10 point case against CAPTCHA use (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)
Google Has Internal Debate About Content Farms as Spam, Cracks Down on Link Spam (webpronews.com)
Silicon Valley Blog: New search engine slashes spam (dock-of-bay.blogspot.com)
Some Missing Google Maps Reviews Return (seroundtable.com)
Blog – Why Google is Choked With Spam (technologyreview.com)

Playing with Playwith- R Package for Interactive Data Visualizations

While just browsing through Google Code repositories for R Packages-

https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:R

I came across Playwith- which is basically a toolkit for creating interactive data visualizations. I then played with ClusterApp and it really seems promising (hierarchical) – Since I am using R 2.12 on Win 7 (x64) platform somthing broke but overall this seemed like a promising interactive tool making widget.

playwith is an R package, providing a GTK+ graphical user interface for editing and interacting with R plots.

The playwith package is maintained by Felix Andrews <felix@nfrac.org>

Here is the Data Visualization called Cluster App that impressed me There is an obvious synergy between Rattle and Playwith (though some bugs with new R 2.12 on an X64 do come into play)

https://code.google.com/p/playwith/wiki/ClusterApp

RPostgreSQL 0.1-7 (dirk.eddelbuettel.com)
Creating GUIs in R with gWidgets (r-bloggers.com)
R Project and Google Summer of Code: Wrapping up (r-bloggers.com)

The SEO mess on joining blog aggregators

Mug shot of Paris Hilton. — Image via Wikipedia

If you are an analytics blogger who writes, and is aggregated on an analytical community- read on- Here’s how blog aggregation communities can help you lose 30% of all future traffic long term, while giving you a short term.

The problem is not created by Blogging Communities (like R-Bloggers, or PlanteR, or Smart Data Collective or AnalyticBridge or even BeyeBlogs )

It is created by the way Google Page Rank is structured- you see given exactly the same content on two different we pages- Google Page Rank will place the higher Page Rank results higher. This is counter intutive and quite simple to rectify- The Google Spider can just use the Time Stamp for choosing which article was published where first (Obviously on your blog, AND then later to the aggregator).

How bad is the mess? Well joining ANY blog aggregation will lead to an instant lift of upto 10-50 % of your current traffic as similar bloggers try and read about you. However you can lose the long term 30% proportion which is a benchmark of search engine created traffic for you.

So do you opt out of blog aggregation? No. It’s a SEO mess and it’s unfair to punish your blog aggregator, most of whom are running on ad-supported sponsors or their own funds on dry fumes to publish your content. Most of the fore mentioned communities are created by excellent people I interacted with heavily- and they are genuinely motivated to give readers an easy way to keep up with blogs. Especially Smart Data Collective, Analyticbridge and R-bloggers whose founders I have known personally.

You can do one thing- create manual summaries in the excerpt feature of your blog posts- it’s just below the WordPress page. And switch your RSS feed to summary rather than full. It avoids losing keyword rank to other websites, it prevents the Blog Aggregation from gaining too much influence in key word related searches, and it keeps your whole eco system happy, Best of All it helps readers of Blog Aggregators- since most of them use a summary on the front page anyways.

An additional thought on Google Page Rank- something I have sulked over but not spoken for a long long time. It ignores the value of reader- If Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and 500 ceos from Fortune 500 companies read my blog but do not link to it- it will count daily traffic as 500. Probably it will give more weightage to Paris Hilton fans.

A suggestion-humbly- you can use IP Address lookup of visitors to see if traffic is coming from corporate sources or retail sources -Clicky from GetClicky does this. Use it as feedback in Google Analytics as well as Google Trends.

And maybe PageRank needs to add quantity and quality of visitors as additional variables . Do a A/B test guys some Chi Square juice- its not quite Mad Men Adverting but its still good fun.

Google Page Rank 3 for a Website with no Content: Case Study (shoutmeloud.com)
What Would Happen If Google Removed The Nominal PageRank? (tjantunen.com)
SEO Myths, Mistakes & The Madness of Crowds (outspokenmedia.com)
Gasp! You Still Need to Care about PageRank (searchenginejournal.com)

and the world is one big community as per xkcd

Gasp! You Still Need to Care about PageRank (searchenginejournal.com)

Disconnect by Brian Kennish

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Is this goodbye?

This action is permanent.

Before you deactivate your account, know this:

You deactivated your account.

his action is permanent.

Before you deactivate your account, know this:

Closing Your Account

How do I close my account?

Ajay Ohri

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All Time (for Decisionstats.Wordpress.com)

2009-11-24 to Today

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