SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

I started seeing several warnings on different PCs from the Trend Micro Web Reputation service this morning.   All warnings pointed to http://public.bay.livefilestore.com as the source.

My first thought was that it was a new virus outbreak that had infected several PCs so I got stuck in and started to investigate.

All virus scans on the local PCs were coming back clean, so something else must be going on?

Eventually I tracked it down to Windows Live Messenger as I discovered that Livefilestore.com is a Microsoft site used for file storage in the cloud.  

When you have the Windows Live Messenger main window open – you’ll notice that towards the bottom of the window is the “What’s new” section.   This section has constantly changing updates from your contacts.

What I discovered was that the virus warnings were appearing just as certain “what’s new” updates cycled through.   It looks like Trend is blocking livefilestore.com which is used to store photos which are then previewed through messenger.

Until Microsoft and Trend sort this issue, you can click on the icon of a spanner next to the What’s new” heading and deselect updates or block updates from specific people.

Alternatively you can just close the main messenger window as this stops the warnings too.

Posted in IT Hints and Tips | No Comments »
Tags: Trend Micro

APIs are a great way of developing custom SEO applications.   By tying together these building blocks, you can quickly and easily develop tools such as our example free SEO site comparison tool.

Here’s our Top 10 list of SEO APIs:

#1 SEOMoz API

SEOMoz – a leading SEO Software company with years of SEO consulting background have developed their own link graph of the web – known as Linkscape.    They offer free access to this link graph via their API.   Offering access to back links, page authority and page ranking statistics, SEOMoz is number one in our top ten list.

#2 Alchemy Keyword API

Alchemy provide an advanced API based around term/keyword extraction.   Using advanced linguistic algorithms, the API is able to extract common phrases and is even able to infer the topic of the content.

#3 Google Search API

As the #1 search engine, Google provide numerous APIs to most of their online tools.   The AJAC Search API provides access to Web Search, Local Search and Multimedia Search.

#4 Yahoo Search API

Always popular in SEO, the Yahoo Site Explorer tool provides reliable backlink data on websites.   You can access this data via the Yahoo API.  The future of this tool could be limited due to the integration with the Microsoft Bing engine.

#5 Bing API

Microsoft’s search engine is growing in popularity and becoming increasingly advanced.   Microsoft have realised the potential of APIs by providing access to Web, image, InstantAnswer, Phonebook, RelatedSearch, Spell and more.

#6 Majestic SEO API

Another link graph of the web is provided by Majestic SEO.   Majestic have used their own crawling technology to provide an extensive data.   Through the free API you can gain access to the number of referring domains and the number of external backlinks to a site.

#7 Twitter API

Twitter, the popular Social Networking application provide extensive search access to their data and trends via free API calls.

#8 Compete API

Compete, a web analytics company, provide free API access to their site traffic and history statistics.   Compete also provide their own trust data based on surveys and analytics tracking.

#9 Backtype API

Backtype indexes comments from blogs, social networking and other social media.   You can access the resulting data via their free API.

#10 Amazon Alexa API

Alexa have been analysing site traffic for years via their free browser toolbar plug-in.   They’ve teamed with Amazon to give API access to this data.   Unfortunately, unlike the above APIs, access isn’t free however calls are very cheap.

Posted in SEO | 5 Comments »
Tags: API

Game developer Rovio have just announced that they’re introducing in-game payment support for their popular game “Angry Birds”.

The new “Mighty Eagle” is a new bird which can decimate a level, leaving nothing remaining, however to use him, you need to purchase via a one time payment from within the game.

However there are catches…

To use him again, you need to go back to the level and complete it yourself.

You can see details here which were announced at the Nokia World 2010 event:

Posted in Fun | No Comments »
Tags: Angry Birds