Demand Media dismisses effects of Google algorithm update

Despite evidence that a recent Google update decimated traffic to eHow.com, the site's publisher, Demand Media, says it's just not true.
A recent update to Google’s search algorithm intended to knock down the visibility of “content farms” and other “low quality” websites in its results has reduced traffic to sites like Demand Media’s flagship site eHow.com. But according to Demand Media, the reduction in page view growth has been negligible — not the nearly two-thirds traffic drop determined by some estimates.
“Certain third parties that have published reports attempting to estimate the effect of recent search engine algorithm changes made by Google on traffic to the Company’s owned and operated websites have significantly overstated the negative impact of those changes on traffic to eHow.com, as compared to the Company’s directly measured internal data,” said Demand Media in a statement on its website.
Demand’s executive vice president Larry Fitzgibbon furthered shrugged-off studies of the effects on eHow’s traffic caused by the Google update, known as Panda, saying in a blog post that the estimates were “significantly overstate. He added that Demand Media’s “owned and operated Content & Media properties will generate year-over-year page view growth comparable to or greater than the year-over-year page view growth reported for Q2 2010.”
Fitzgibbon’s claims contradict a recent study by Sistrix — one of the “third parties” Demand Media aims to discredit — which show that traffic to eHow.com dropped by 66 percent because of the most recent Google search update.
Other sites Sistrix says were negatively affected include Life123.com, Spike.com and 10best.com.
Sites that saw a marked improvement in traffic include Daily Motion, whose traffic reportedly rose by 31 percent, the highest of any other site, according to Sistrix. Other sites that saw a jump in visitors are Yelp.com, Etsy.com Mashable, Reuters and PC Mag. The Huffington Post — considered by many to be guilty of the same reader-baiting tactics as many content farms — saw an 8 percent bump in traffic.
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‘Lame’ Color photo-sharing app to address user complaints with update next week

Color, a new mobile app that shares users' photos with any other nearby user, has been pounded by bad reviews in the first 24 hours after its release. But the company is listening, and says an update to address the complaints is on its way.

The newly launched public photo-sharing app Color, available for iOS and Android devices, took the tech world by storm Thursday after it received a massive $41 million pre-release cash injection from venture capitalists. Much of the enthusiasm surrounding the app also came from its radical functionality, which treats all photos taken in the app as public, and shares those photos with any other Color user within 150 feet, friend and stranger alike.
Because Color decides for you who gets to see your photos, and bases this entirely around being nearby other Color users, the first-day reviews aren’t good. Early adopters say that the app is not only worthless unless used within the vicinity of other Color users, but also makes them feel lonely because their pictures are the only ones that show up in the app when they use it alone.
The problem is so apparent that on iTunes the first thing in the app’s description is “WARNING: DON’T USE COLOR ALONE.” The app currently has only a two-star rating based on just over 200 reviews. (The majority gave the app one star.)
Users also complained that the app includes very little instruction for how to use it, and doesn’t explain what the app does.
Not surprisingly, the company is taking the criticisms extremely seriously, and is already working on an update to fix the “loneliness” problem, reports Mashable.
According to Color co-founder and CEO Bill Nguyen, the update will do two things: First, make it impossible to use the app unless other Color users are around; and second, increase the distance required for another user to be considered “nearby.”
Nguyen says the update will allow the app to determine the appropriate distance for creating the app’s “dynamic network” based upon the population density of a user’s location. So, in tightly populated cities like New York or Tokyo, the app’s current 150 radius could still work well. But for spread-out cities or in smaller communities, the app will increase the distance automatically to ensure that all users can access other’s photo streams.
The update should be available as soon as the middle of next week. Until then, we recommend anxious Color users simply get more friends.

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Despite update, new Apple MacBook Pros continue to crash

Even after an update to OS X 10.6, new 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros are reportedly freezing when running multiple programs.
Apple’s new 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro laptops are reportedly freezing when put under a heavy load, according to numerous reports, as well as user comments on the Apple Discussion board. The problem, which appears to be widespread, has persisted for at least some users even after an update from Apple.
The new 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros feature Intel’s speedy new Sandy Bridge Core i7 quad-core CPUs, available up to 2.3GHz, along with AMD Radeo HD graphics processors (GPU), with up to 1GB of dedicated video memory.
The first public report of the issue appeared on an Apple.com discussion thread entitled “MacBook Pro 2011 17? hard freeze,” started on March 1, less than a week after Apple unveiled their new MacBook Pro lineup on February 24.
User Rensoom, who started the thread, says that he “wasn’t doing anything unusual,” but admits that he “had 7 apps open and was amid an auto-backup to TimeMachine.” This resulted in a “hard freeze.”
Since then, the thread has ballooned to 65 pages (at the time of this writing) with users complaining that their pricey new notebooks crashed when performing any GPU-intensive tasks, like running video games or iMovie.
According to user ND381, the problem occurred when running CPU-heavy processes along with programs that caused graphics processing to shift from the new Sandy Bridge processor to the descrete AMD Radeon graphics processor. One user, Chullo, was able to duplicate the problem at his local Apple Store, and cause all 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro display models to freeze, “much to the surprise of the genius helping me,” he wrote.
After reports of the problem became more widely known, Apple released a Mac OS X 10.6.7 update, which included a number of updates and fixes, including improved “graphics stability.” Unfortunately for MacBook Pro users, the freezing issue has persisted for some users, even after the update.
In fact, some say the problem has actually gotten worse, as a similar issue now seems to occur simply when running iTunes. We have yet to hear whether Apple has additional plans to address the issue.


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