JohnBs personal blog

Apparently oohgle is "Out of Home Google".

So there I was driving home from work tonight and saw a poster (billboard) at the side of the road. It was an entirely green poster and across it’s diagonal was a graphic of a browser search box (you know the thing top right of your browser window) with the usual magnifying glass and the letters ‘oohgle’ in it.

Perhaps it was the geek in me that reached out for my iPhone and punched the letters into my search box to find out what the heck it is. The search results (including paid advertising for the term just to be sure) take you to oohgle.com which describes ‘oohgling’ as:

"When you see an Out-of-Home ad and then follow it up online, you’re Oohgling. Out-of-Home advertising is great at creating interest and intrigue and that’s often followed up with an on-line search to find out more."

Well it certainly intrigued me in and I ‘oohgled’ for the first time - i’ve done it before but I didn’t know there was a name for it!

Anyhow, it appears just to be a marketing campaign for a company named PosterScope about some tool that analyses the relationship between OOH and Search. Interestingly enough using any search engine apart form Google doesn’t seem to return any results (at the time of writing) otherwise i guess it would be called oohyah or something perhaps?

But it’s interesting how such a simple poster which essentially gives nothing away about the brand/product (obviously) intrigues people and gets them to search for it when they get home - therefore creating the link between offline and online marketing - something that most traditional ‘marketeers’ have struggled to grasp especially in these times when getting a good ROI and being able to accurately measure a particular campaign is so important.

Can we expect more advertising just of search boxes with terms in them?

So just a quick post for now, but last week I was clicking around Aptana – which i’d encourage everyone to take a look at. Anyhow, I kept seeing these ‘Deploy to Cloud’ links so I figured I’d click one.

Anyhow, cutting a long story short I’ve now deployed my (WordPress) blog to the Aptana Cloud, I’ll cover more about it in a further blog post. But basically, it’s fully featured application hosting (currently PHP only) available straight from within Aptana and includes mySQL, Subversion, Staging/Private Servers starting from $0.04 an hour!

Perhaps more excitingly though is that in a survey of features users may want to see on Aptana Cloud is ColdFusion – so make sure you fill the survey in

http://www.aptana.com/cloud/wizard/other/platforms

I was listening to a recent episode of Security Now where the guys were talking about Click Jacking. It’s a relatively new threat to emerge, plus since it’s browser based it’s completely OS/Browser independent – in fact it even goes as far as affecting Flash (although the latest update has blocked the threat from occurring).

It’s a remarkably simple exploit – in simple terms by using a combination of CSS and iFrames a ‘layer’ is placed over a legitimate site and when you think you’re clicking on a button you’re actually clicking on something on this ‘layer’. Before Flash was patched the threat even allowed a website to enable your webcam by ‘popping under’ the ‘Do you wish to give Flash access to your webcam’.

The threat gets even worse by playing on what we all do when we browse the internet, the old ‘remember me’ tick box or ‘Do you want Firefox to remember your password’ because it’s using a browser, any site that you’re logged into could be loaded ‘invisibly’ – eg, Facebook, Ebay, MySpace etc (which all have buttons in well known positions) and then a new layer of fake buttons loaded onto the page – there’s an example of such an exploit here www.snipurl.com/clickjack (It’s safe to visit) – it uses MySpace to demonstrate the threat but it does so extremely clearly.

So what can you do about it? Well if you’re using IE, Safari, Chrome (as of the time of writing) then there’s not actually a lot you can do except being vigilant about the sites you’re accessing and not using persistent login sessions to websites. If you’re a Firefox user then you’re in luck because the recently updated NoScript plugin is able to blanket protect you (even if you have script enabled – cos the web just ain’t the same with script disable) and remember this isn’t a Javascript exploit! Once installed go into the options for NoScript and enable the ‘Forbid <IFRAME>’ option (and probably enable JS, Flash, Silverlight whilst you’re there)

Still labelled as ‘beta’ Microsoft Windows 2003 has made its debut on Amazon EC2 with prices ranging from $0.125 per hour up to $1.2 per hour for a plain Windows environment whilst Windows plus SQL servers ranges from $1.1 per hour up to $2.4 per hour.

More importantly Amazon EC2 has removed its beta label (for Linux) after 2 years of operation and a much required SLA has been provided with a 99.95% availability with service credits provided in the event of availability falling below this level.

They’re also talking about stuff that’s going to be coming in the future  - a management console, load balancing and auto scaling! Way cool!

More information here

One of the really useful tools I use is Jungle Disk. It acts as a proxy to my Amazon S3 storage and maps a network drive so I can access my storage pretty darn easy. The latest version of it’s JungleDisk Desktop is a great app and well worth checking out if you make use of Amazon S3.

Yesterday, Rackspace acquired Jungle Disk along with Slicehost a Xen-based virtual machine hosting company. Rackspace’s aim is to use these new acquisitions to support ‘Mosso’ – it’s cloud hosting division which includes CloudFS which offers the same as Amazon’s S3 service along with Cloud Servers using the Slicehost technology.

Moving forwards, JungleDisk will all connections to either Amazon or Rackspace cloud storage.

To read more visit here

So on the 12th September, Marie and I tied the knot and started out our married life. We held the ceremony near to our home town of Guildford, UK – of course in traditional fashion the bride was late (15 minutes) but other than that the day went without a hitch. We had a great time and hope all our friends did too.

On Sunday we jetted off to Greece for a two week sailing Flotilla around the South Ionian sea. Basically it’s follow my leader with about 12 yachts (32 foot+) – we’re told where to go each day and what time to get in to port by, sail for the day and then we have a siesta before we go out for dinner and the odd drink or too! It was simply amazing and the people we spent the two weeks were so diverse, for example – Amy Winehouse’s former PA, the Global Marketing Manager of Nokia…and of course us!

So now we’re getting back to normal reality and appreciating the finer details of life – like putting toilet paper down the loo (this is a big no no in Greece!).

A while ago I heard Google may be working on a browser, but on arriving in the office this morning I find out that Google Chrome is due to launch today, this moring all I could find was the ‘comic book’ talking Google Chrome up and highlighting the features it will have. Well now it’s landed, I’m writing this post from it - it’s a little unconventional bit i think i’m really going to like it, it has so really nice ideas.

Available for Windows only at the moment from here

….then I’ll begin.

Over a month since I last blogged, jez, anyone would think I’ve been busy? Time to dust away the cob webs and do some blogging.

I’ve got a lot to talk about, Shado (CMS), Virtualisation and hosting environments….getting married 4 weeks today so I best be quick