Welcome to Smuggle Me

I use to live in chat rooms. Now I pretty much live in social networking. No I haven’t gotten into myspace or facebook, but social networking in the blogosphere has been quite entertaining for me.

Also, since I’m a tech addict I’ve loved to see the various social networking technologies develop.

Today I came across and simple, but nice innovation on chat rooms and social networking called Pictari.com They take a chatroom and make it so the chat users can create social networks. I think it’s a great idea. People love being able to chat and by tieing it to social networking it adds a new level to the relationship between those people chatting.

I will warn you that chat rooms can be completely addicting. They are great if you need to pass the time. Add in social networking to the chat room and you might as well just set aside time to participate everyday.

Most stat packages have a slew of stats. I’ve looked over everything, but here are a few of my favorite stats.

Referring Pages
I love to see what pages have links to my websites. More importantly, I like to see how many people other blogs and websites have sent to my page. This is checked daily and often hourly. Yes, I’m an admitted stat addict.

Search Engine Referrals
This is almost the same as the first, but I love to see what people are searching in order to find my site. It’s also interesting to see which search engines like me. I’ve found that Google is definitely the most popular, but MSN gives words more credit and links aren’t as essential for MSN as they are for Google. Also, for some reason Canadian Google loves my blog.

Visitors
I love to see how many people actually visited my website. I can’t look at pageviews because Googlebot looks at my pages so much that it skews pageviews. However, I do a search of unique O/S and it gives me a pretty good number of visitors to my site.

Most Visited Page
I do like to take a look at which pages on my website people are visiting. It’s a perfect way to know which topics visitors (and search engines) like. Remember that much of this could be influenced by being Dugg, Reddit or other link pimping.

Visit Duration
Awstats has a really interesting statistic that shows how long visitors to your site remain on your site. Google Analytics has something similar. I’ve been amazed how long some people stay on my website. It also doesn’t surprise me that many of my websites have people who leave quickly. That’s how I visit most webpages.

Bandwidth
This is just important to make sure that I don’t have to pay for extra bandwidth from my host.

Google Adsense Channels
I don’t know if this quite fits into this post, but I look at them as much as anything else. Other affiliate or advertising packages could be listed here also. I love to see which of my blogs are performing. I tried the Google email of my stats, but it just wasn’t enough. I like to check regularly how much my blogs are making and more importantly, which ads are making me the most money. These stats might be the most important stats you could check.

Of course each one of these needs to have the ability to change the time frame. Being able to change the time frame is very important to be able to see the trends over time. In fact, Wordpress.com has a great built in stats package with a graph of your pageviews. It gives you a really nice visual of how quickly your blog is growing.

Any other stats that I missed and should be looking at?

A group of Maryland Ford Dealers have created a really simple site to help find a Ford in Maryland. I haven’t seen a site this fantastically simple in a while. It has gotten rid of all the fluff and sends you straight to a Ford Dealer in Maryland. It is a very niche market, but for those interested in buying a Ford in Maryland it’s a nice site to get where you want to be.

My friend in Italy just asked me about having a virus on his computer. I pointed him to a free open source anti virus program, but I later realized that I had made a mistake. It was way too difficult for him to download. He should have just gotten a purchased package like Kapersky Lab Antivirus.

It is a highly rated antivirus software in response time and detection rates. It also offers things like Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-RootKit, Anti-Hacker, Intrusion Detection, Firewall, Anti-Spam protection. That’s just about everything that people could need to protect their computer.

They also offer a great, but unique service on their website. It’s a Free Online Virus Scanner. It uses Microsoft’s ActiveX Technology to scan your computer. Yes, that does mean you have to use IE which makes this product suck.

On second thought, at least when you get a free antivirus program then you can’t complain about it being a crappy antivirus program.

I’ve been finding that while I love blogs I think that I love forums even more. I think the reason I like forums is that there are multiple people that participate in a discussion. A blog sometimes reaches that point, but on a forum it really creates a nice collaboration between people.

Today I came across a nice sat nav and gps forum. It’s a simple and straightforward forum with lots of activity. A number of the threads are unique to the UK, but there is a lot of good information available for those looking into sat nav and gps. I should give one warning that the forum is very technical. If you don’t enjoy a lot of the technical details of this technology then you might not enjoy the forum as much. I’m a nerd so it’s a great forum.

Wow, a new Trojan was created that is able to defeat an OnScreen keyboard. People are so creative.

Today we will analyze a new banking trojan that is a qualitative step forward in the dangerousness of these specimens and a new turn of the screw in the techniques used to defeat virtual keyboards. The novelty of this trojan lies in its capacity to generate a video clip that stores all the activity onscreen while the user is authenticating to access his electronic bank.

The video clip covers only a small portion of the screen, using as reference the cursor, but it is large enough so that the attacker can watch the legitimate user’s movements and typing when using the virtual keyboard, so that he gets the username and password without going into further trouble.

Luckily I haven’t seen too many OnScreen keyboards out there. My bank is using a 2 factor authentication which is more secure in my opinion. As long as you remember the 2 factors.