Where there is money, or kudos, to be gained by artificially inflating the importance of a web page or article there will also be people who attempt to do just that.  Black hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the term for techniques that involve gaining increased rank by nefarious (sometimes illegal) means.  Here is a particularly ‘meta’ example… a link, placed by hacking the citation list in an academic journal, to improve the Google ranking for a site selling Ugg Boots.

I don’t think this is what Larry Page had in mind when he drew upon citation analysis to develop Google’s original ranking algorithm.

With a little tweak you can get it to enter your own email address for you:

javascript:location.href=’mailto:youraddress@gmail.com?SUBJECT=’+document.title+’&BODY=’+escape(location.href);

This assumes you have made Gmail your default mail application.

That was just one of several ways that Mr. Obama’s campaign operations, some unnoticed by Mr. Romney’s aides in Boston, helped save the president’s candidacy. In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.

That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla. “It’s one thing to say you are going to do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it,” said Brian Jones, a senior adviser.

From: this NYT article

Inspired by that tweet from ‏@traskjd, and my own (admittedly minor) frustration with the chore of selecting ‘New Zealand’ in many a web form country drop-down, I created a free Select My Country Chrome extension.  It does pretty much just what it says on the box.  Please read the instructions on the extension page – you need to select a country in the extension settings or it won’t do anything for you!

The extension was tested here, here, here and here.

Filed under: Uncategorized ]]> http://benhealey.info/2012/10/17/a-chrome-extension-to-automatically-select-your-home-country-in-web-form-drop-downs/feed/ 0 Ben traskjd_tweet extension_screenshot