It seems that somehow Google likes to visit and index this site. I have been monitoring this phenomenon for sometime now and I realize for the past few weeks, Google seemed to visit this site nearly everyday. And sometimes it even visits this site more than twice per day. Well, let’s say in the morning, I add a blog post and after a few hours, I do a search for my site and it appears in the index. And then I add another blog post, let’s say in the afternoon and I again do a search for my site, and it appears in the index as well! The question is why?

I mean, I have other sites, mainly directories which I have added a lot of incoming links from other directories and websites but they don’t get the same attention as this blog. Which by the way, has far fewer links and is much much younger as well. I have this blog up and running for around 4 months only. Unlike some of the directories I have which have been online for over a year now. Looks like it is constantly changing content that is attracting Googlebot to this blog. And if constantly changing content is important, then why don’t I rank well in Search Engines? My traffic from Google to this blog is barely 10 or so unqiue visitors per day. Keywords wise, don’t bother. The only keyphrase I rank well is for Authority Sites Directory Blog and Authority Sites Blog. That’s it. Of course I do get some little long tail from my posts, but those are really far and few between.

And what is this I hear that Google gives priority to Blogs? Is it true? I doubt so, as there is no way (in the algothrim sense) for Google to know whether a site is just a normal website or a blog. Well, at least this is what I think. You will never know Google and what they do with the vast information they have gathered.

Anyway, is it good that Googlebot index this blog frequently. Hopefully, it will result in more visitors from Google. I may need to bribe Google more in the future so please send in your donations.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It’s sort of like figuring out from an image the wordings in the image. You know, if you have an image and it has words, the PC doesn’t know what the words are. So you need a software - OCR, to figure out what the wordings in the image are. They can usually used to create text editable content from images.

I guess you will realize by now that a lot of spammers are using images in their spam emails. ISPs and email hosts have been using words in the email to identity spam from ham. So if you have those “health” supplemental drugs in your email content, they may tag it as Spam (according to their set rules). Well, to counter this technique, they use different “spellings” of the word, like “V-1-a-g-r-a” instead of the actual word. And now, they use images. They convert their text into an image so that ISP’s spam filtering system cannot figure what the words are but human readers can still view it.

Now, we are fighting back! Although OCR has long been used by people trying to scan documents, Spam “fighters” now start to use OCR based analysis to identity spammy words from images. It is also been used to identity certain adult images. I have certainly seen a lot of such email image spam being filtered off from by email host’s spam system, which is very encouraging.

Being an email administrator myself, it would be good news. However, I wonder what kind of load will be have on the servers to implement this technique? I am sure that OCR takes up a lot of resources, because figuring out words from images is no easy task. And I wonder, would it be a simple thing to fight this spam filtering method by using those captcha things? You know, they distort the words with some lines or little images but it is still readable by humans? OCR may fail to figure out the words if there is captcha involved. I wonder how long will it take for most spammers to start using this trick to bypass the spam filter.

As you guys know, I am being retrenched from my company, which I had worked for around 6 years or so. Due to some financial problems, they decided to ditch me and get younger and more capable guys to replace me. Not really, but it is true that my company is facing a lot of fiancial problems so a lot of people were cut. Some of the staff had worked for over 10 years. I really pity those. I mean, a lot of them had sacrificed a lot for the company, but in the end, the result was retrenchment by those greedy nutjobs at the top. Bastards! They didn’t even give any kind of retrenchement benefits at all, claiming that their own big and expensive cars needed more chrome in order to shine.

Well, so I was officially let go a few days ago. I decided then to leave my company with a big bang. I wanted to make a name for myself as a rebel and as someone who isn’t afraid of anything. I wanted to make a huge fuss and create a big scene at my company reception area just before leaving at 6pm. I bought a trumpet and a loudspeaker into the company as well. But I guess they (being some sort of evil genius) knew what I was planning and they told everyone (who was to be retrenched) to gather at the reception area at around 4pm. They ordered everyone to queue and in turn gave each of us our cheque (the last payment) and each of us was then escorted out by their heavily armed paramilitary guards. It spolit my grand plan. Most people will be too anxious(and afraid) to collect their cheque to worry about me. And those who would have supported my scheme (actually those who have already collected their cheque) would have been escorted out already. Damn it! My little Boston tea party has failed.

Well, anyway, I did managed to spit on my company’s entrance door. It’s kind of yellowish. So that’s one for justice. One for the common man being oppressed by greedy corporate types you can find everywhere in Singapore. No one is willing to stand up and fight, so I guess it is left to me. Hoora! Hoora!

Now I am starting to look for a job. If you can help, please leave your contact here. I am looking for an IT job, especially in the networking (Windows) and desktop support arena. And the best thing about us, I won’t cost you a leg or an arm, just feed me some scraps you have left over on your table now and then will be fine.