This is the second part of a two-part article on the leaked Google document Google Guidelines for Quality Raters. In the first part we reviewed how Google raters are told to treat such things as relevance depending on the country of the query and the actual rating scale. The document also revealed what raters consider Useful Content and showed us what it s like Inside the Raters HUB. In this part we ll cover web spam guidelines….

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ShareThis reports that it is now.

How do website readers prefer to share tales they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most well loved method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are fascinating – but there are also some huge caveats to keep in mind.

The Numbers

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how well loved sharing by email is. It’s clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one but, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The huge surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely well loved ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively small time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites that have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal’s blog, which is always a fantastic place to learn new things about the web.

Why This is Vital

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It’s an vital detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most well loved can help make this choice. Here at RWW we don’t use ShareThis, we use another service called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn’t offer sharing by Facebook at all – something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, but, include the following:

• Your site’s audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren’t a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb tales on MySpace – but maybe we’re incorrect!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren’t for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Tasty users, for example, don’t necessarily reckon of what they are doing as sharing (it’s often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very well loved ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.

From a company called Blue Whale Systems Ltd., makers of a free mobile push application called BlueWhaleMail, there now comes a new push application: Facebook. Via the BlueWhaleMail app, you can be told of your friends’ status updates, wall posts, and news items. You also have the ability to send pokes, make wall posts, and email messages. The notifications you receive are showed on your phone as soon as they as show up on Facebook…and there’s no need for you to have to browse to the Facebook web site to either view them or respond.

What’s BlueWhaleMail?

Out of the 2.7 billion people with mobile phones, those not carrying a smartphone still represent the majority of handset owners. But these people deserve an simple way to access their email and social network notifications, too, even if they can’t afford or don’t want to pay for a sophisticated smartphone.

Says Michael Maguire, founder and CTO, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion, "My team and I reckon there are some fantastic dedicated mobile email devices out there – but we’re biased, because half of us helped build one of them. Unfortunately the rest of the world’s 1.1 billion email users have phones with unusable, hard to configure in-built email that few people can be bothered to set-up. With BlueWhaleMail, we’ve gone back to the drawing board so that people can keep the phone they like and still stay in touch on the go."

At the moment, the BlueWhaleMail app is only available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones, but that list will grow in time as BlueWhaleMail branches out to serve the needs of those who carry “ordinary” mobile phones.

Where To Download

BlueWhaleMail can be downloaded from http://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail/ or by browsing to m.bluewhale.net on your mobile phone. The application is ad-supported and features a small banner ad at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer.

To learn more about BlueWhaleMail, check out this video, where founder Michael Maguire discusses the application:

BlueWhaleMail Interview with Michael Maguire – video powered by Metacafe

Anyone who is not already familiar with design patterns may, after a brief survey of the field, come away with the impression that design patterns are a lot of marketing hype, are just some simple coding techniques, or are the playthings of computer scientists who really should get out more. While each of these impressions carries a grain of truth, design patterns are an essential component of the professional C++ programmer’s toolkit.

A “design pattern” is a recurring architectural theme that provides a solution to a common design problem within a particular context and describes the consequences of this solution. A design pattern is more than a simple description of a technique; it’s a named capsule of design wisdom gleaned from successful existing practice, written in such a way that it can be easily communicated and reused. Patterns are about programmer to programmer communication.

From a practical perspective, design patterns have two vital properties. First, they describe proven, successful design techniques that can be customized in a context-dependent way to new design situations. Second, and perhaps more vital, mentioning the application of a particular pattern serves to document not only the technique that is applied but also the reasons for its application and the effect of having applied it.

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Data Abstraction

A “type” is a set of operations, and an “abstract data type” is a set of operations with an implementation. When we identify objects in a problem domain, the first question we should question about them is, “What can I do with this object?” not “How is this object implemented?” Therefore, if a natural description of a problem involves employees, contracts, and payroll records, then the programming language used to solve the problem should contain Employee, Contract, and PayrollRecord types. This allows an efficient, two-way translation between the problem domain and the solution domain, and software written this way has less “translation noise” and is simpler and more right.

In a general-purpose programming language like C++, we don’t have application-specific types like Employee. Instead, we have something better: the language facilities to make sophisticated abstract data types. The purpose of an abstract data type is, essentially, to extend the programming language into a particular problem domain.

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Figure 3-8 shows a diagram of a typical e-business payment processing system. The three functional elements of the electronic storefront’s payment processing system are order confirmation, payment gateway interface, and transaction database interface, as illustrated in Figure 3-9.

Figure 3-8. Use of the Learn one-time credit card to pay for buys

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As shown in Figure 3-7, proper implementation of the shopping cart application requires integration of several different electronic business components. First, it is integrated with a session management component, which keeps track of a customer’s shopping session. Second, it is integrated with the product catalog application, which generates a show of products sold by the storefront and allows the customer to browse the products; the customer can select a product from the catalog and place it in the shopping cart. Third, it is integrated with—acts as an input to—the payment gateway, which comes into play at the end of the shopping session. Fourth, it is integrated with back-end databases such as product inventory for automatically verifying and updating stock quantities, customer information for tracking customers’ buying preferences, and so on.

Figure 3-7. Shopping cart implementation – technology perspective

Since the early days of electronic retail shopping, many types of shopping carts have been introduced. Some shopping carts were made publicly available along with the source code, whereas some were sold as commercial third-party applications. Of the plethora of shopping carts, many failed because of improper implementation, which eventually led to security vulnerabilities.

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Introduction

Retail shopping has evolved dramatically over the years. In the earlier days of shopping, a shopkeeper would sit behind a counter and respond to requests from a customer, selecting a product from the shelf and handing it to the customer for her consideration. The customer would then indicate whether she was interested in buying it. If so, the product would be set aside, the shopkeeper would respond to the customer’s next request, and after the customer was satisfied with all the items set aside, the shopkeeper would prepare the final bill and accept payment. If the customer didn’t like a product, the shopkeeper would naturally reshelve it.

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