Mike Blumenthal

A number of weeks ago Google announced that they had closed one LBC security hole that allowed mapjackings, last week they indicated that they had closed yet another. Yesterday I highlighted a prominent mapjacking of The Plaza Hotel that Google almost immediately remedied. Kudos to Google for all these moves. But are they enough? Today …

Twitter and UK newspaper websites – Robin Goad,  Hitwise UK. Last week (w/e 14/03/09) Twitter.com was the 54th most visited website in the UK, up from 66th the week before. One consequence of Twitter rapid rise up the rankings is that the micro-blogging service has now overtaken most of the UK newspapers online. As the chart below illustrates, last week Twitter …

Update I am happy to note that The Plaza has been returned to its rightful glory as of this evening (3/16/09). Unfortunately the spammers domain 24x7locallocksmith.com still has 229 entries in the index across the US. The Plaza Hotel in NYC has been an important, even iconic, location for events real and imagined in American …

In the past I have written extensively about how Google was indexing KML & RSS files and integrating that information into Maps and why that made having your own kml information and geo sitemap important. At the LatLong Blog, Google has announced that this user generated map content will now be more fully integrated with …

Yesterday in my post making fun of Locksmith Hijackers picking inappropriate targets to hijack, I made a geeky Maps log joke that was so ludricous on all levels that I could not conceive of even one person taking it at face value…I was wrong both as to the potential humor and to the fact that …

Maps Guide Jen has commented that Google has now fixed the most recent hack that allowed records claimed in the Local Business Center to be hijacked: Hi Mike, Thanks again for bringing these cases to our attention. The issue involved was different from the ones that affected listings a few months ago. Like those, it’s …

In January I speculated Google’s Streetview Data be could used to replace TeleAtlas. One of the elements missing from this scenario was that TeleAtlas also provides Google with routing information and Google had not yet developed routing capacity. Well it appears now that Google has internally developed directional routing and has released it in their Map Maker …

SearchEngineLand is running an opinion piece that I wrote: Despite Fixes, Google Maps Still Vulnerable To Spam which summarizes much of the recent goings on with insecure records at Maps. In the article I voiced the opinion that Google in unleashing an immature product on us had gained much, while loosing little and that the real loosers …

Gogole Maps is now presenting a stronger indication that a previously claimed record can not be claimed by a second party. This new feature was pointed out to me by the folks from the Inn at Tanglewood Hall, a bed and breakfast in York Harbor, ME: There are a number of ways to get to …

The Locksmith industry brings out the worst in search marketing and where but New York City to get the worst of the worst? A recent trend in hijackings there and elsewhere across the country has been cross industry hijackings where a restaurant or hotel record is stolen by a blackhat locksmith for the benefit of …