Google bomb? Why not try a "sidewiki bomb" instead...

Josh,

I had to sign into Google twice after clicking on your link. Hardly a good user experience!

So everybody will need a gmail account just to find out what people are saying about them.

And then, Google can move gmail to a paid model.

Time to buy Google shares :rolleyes:

Martin

Josh,

You are not exagerating at all. I won't even mention in public what's happening to certain people.

This will be in the courts for a long time. I hope they stop it.

George Wright

Hey Josh,

That was a very well written comment and I voted it useful. I'm quite amazed at Google's assurances that spam will be filtered out and that only quality comments will remain. I've been to Youtube. I love the videos, but I remind myself to never read the comments. It can be a video about Margaret Thatcher and half the comments will be about having sex with her (though urban dictionary may be needed to translate them).

I doubt my own sites will have any sidewiki entries written on them, but I certainly don't want any siteowner to have to spend their time trying to clean up the mess.

Gave a thumbs up on your comment. I also reported as harmful one side wiki comment I've been watching. It will be interesting to see how fast they remove it, if they remove it.

George Wright P.S. I just read their TOU for side wiki. If they really enforce it side wiki will self destruct. It reminds me of the scene in Star Trek where Kirk (the creator) talks to veager (who thinks Kirk is God) and the little guy self destructs because he just can't live up to his TOU.

George Wright

Interesting ...

I just voted for your comment Josh, on netscape without signin ...

Went to Safari tried to vote again and it is a endless loop of google telling you to signin...

James

Josh... this is what happens when you loosen your tinfoil hat and actually start playing with something with an attitude of genuinely wanting to learn about it and its possibilities.

This is simply unacceptable here. :-D

Congratulations Josh,

Josh is number 3 on Google Sidewiki comments with only 30 votes. WARRIORS, he should have 1000+ votes from us alone.

By the way, when I voted I was signed to my gmail account but I hadn't installed sidewiki yet. Following Josh's link in his IP with IE it still let me vote. Later after I installed sidewiki in my fire fox and went back to vote as a sidewiki member it would not let me vote.

So anyone with a gmail account can vote even if you don't have sidewiki. Just be signed in to your gmail account and follow the link in the OP.

George Wright

My experiment has seemed to work.

I promoted my sidewiki comment via twitter to get a few more votes and since I have done that my comment has been among the top listed on the home page for google.

Sidewiki is much like other discussion venues that allow you to build a profile etc but my main beef with it is the unfair implimentation because its like putting blog comments on someone else's site and then not allowing them to control if comments are allowed and who is allowed to comment.

I think the concept and the application is cool but the implementation and lack of an opt-in/opt-out choice and moderation is unfair to the website owners themselves. Parents should also make sure to block it by not installing google toolbar if they don't want their children exposed.

Googles sidewiki TOS are weak as well... its obvious they don't really care about the content or whether its valid or not since they clearly state that disputes about content commented on a site should be worked out by the owner of the site with the aggressors but with no recourse to moderate or remove it.

I do hope that they decide to allow site owners to opt-in or opt-out at the least if they are not going to allow moderation.

The real bad thing about this service is it bleeds traffic away from legitimate blogs and sites, see the comments over at the Buzz Machine

Now the next thing will be some clever person writing a virus/trojan that infects the google toolbar so they can steal the traffic that google is stealing from everyone.

Something else to consider...

For anyone who is not using security or logins to hide their thank you pages for their products...

If anyone posts a sidewiki on those pages then the comment shows up in their sidewiki profile complete with a link back to that page and their sidewiki profile shows up in Google search results. Don't forget that sidewiki profiles can be anonymous.

Another good policy would be for google to block sidewiki comments from pages with "no index" code.

CONGRATULATIONS Josh,

You are now second only to a Google VP on Google.com 's own sidewiki. ONLY a few more votes and the VP will be second and you will be first.

George Wright

Go over to the thread free-tool-prevent-google-sidewiki-comments-being-seen where I posted a simple script to block sidewiki, or at my blog in my sig.

Either way, more sophisticated methods are going to have to be utilized eventually. This is the way of the web, we are going to have to face the fact that this sort of "web-over-web" or "page-on-page" stuff is going to be reality and we will have to deal with it at the cutting edge and force it to create new opportunities for us all.

My 2 cents anyway.

-DTM

Josh, from a website owner's standpoint, I agree with your SideWiki comments and therefore I voted you up.

One thing about these quick javascript re-directors that I noticed is that the favicon is missing sometimes - Not on Warrior forum which is using a more robust form.

I still think a php based script with some robust testing and features would be a better option, but for now the scripts work.

got my vote josh, lets try to keep it up there

Please note...

Now that we have all the anti sidewiki script people popping into threads here and there anyone considering using any of those free or paid solutions should do a little research into how they work before you install one on your site.

Don't just grab and implement them without doing your due diligence first.

1. Many are asking you to run .js files remotely that they host on your own site. Do you know this person? It would be easy for someone to to a bait and switch and run malicious script on your site this way.

2. Google may update and render many of those anti sidewiki solutions useless... is the person providing the solution going to monitor this and provide updates?

3. What is the script actually doing? Some solutions do nothing more than redirect google toolbar users. This is not a solution. Where are they redirecting them to? Pay attention to what the solution actually does.

I am glad that warriors are pitching in to solve a problem but I also hope that people use some common sense when applying solutions and do due diligence first before installing any script on your site.

Personally I purchased the same one Allen is using on this forum.

this may be worse than you think....

even if you can opt out of it on your site....

what happens to your twitter profile ?

your articles ?

your bookmarks ?

getting it off your site does not get it off your back !

this is getting out of hand....

completely

Guess I am bias also as I have the only php solution on the market that uses keywords and does not rely upon javascript to process the url.

James

It finally appears that Google has decided not to play fair with sidewiki...

My experiment up until recently had put my sidewiki comment on the main page google.com in the #2 position. It would have been #1 but that spot is reserved for the site owner (I guess). In fact my post would have had more votes than the google reps #1 post but google has mysteriously made my opinion vanish off the top of the charts:

Google Sidewiki entry about Google

Were they embarassed by my comments and how I was able to use the tools that Google provide to promote my comment to be the #2 comment on the google.com home page sidewiki and therefor took the action to manually move my comment from its righful position according to their own comment ranking system?

I don't know...

If they did then they should allow the same right to any site owner to moderate sidewiki comments in such a way.

However, one thing is clear... from the survey that Google recently ran there are a lot of people that agree that Sidewiki should be an optin only feature or at the very least Google should provide an opt out.

I think its sad that Google has shown its bias and that they themselves do not want to suffer the same sidewiki comment treatment that they are forcing on other site owners by moving my comment off the #2 position where it was and should still be...

I am sure its not newsworthy but it would be nice to see some publicity of this blatant google hypocricy.

P.S. I hope the next comment in this thread is not "yeah that sucks but my kill sidewiki script.... blah blah blah." :p

I made a post on their install sidewiki page, it is several paragraphs long and it is still there (for now).. Told them pretty much that the tool should be disband 100%.. The heck with the opt-out feature, it should be destroyed and never brought back up again.

The bad thing is the people that do not know about sidewiki and bad comments are being made on their pages. How can they opt-out of something they know nothing about...

James

Some sites are being opted out. Atleast they only show the owner entry and nothing else. Or only the site visitors comment. Dell.com, eBay & Yahoo are examples of this. Of course they may have created a blocker that works w/out refreshing the page/url with a # or be a problem on my system w/ these sites.

The # trick also doesn't work any more if it uses the same numbers. I suspect google will fix the random ones soon too. Which would be easy to do.