Stories by Katherine Noyes

Six dirty SEO tricks you must avoid

The past several months have afforded several high-profile examples of how search engine optimization, or SEO, should not be done. Last fall it was DecorMyEyes and the case of the abusive business proprietor, and just recently it was JCPenney and the case of the short-lived black hat success.

Splashtop Linux: A free Chrome OS alternative

Web surfers tired of waiting for the official release of hardware featuring Google's Chrome OS now have a browser-based alternative right at their fingertips: Splashtop Linux 1.0, a downloadable instant-on operating system tailored to life in the cloud.

Why there's no stopping the Android train

It's a rare week indeed that doesn't see the emergence of some fresh news of Android's ascendance, but lately the evidence has been coming particularly fast and furious, suggesting that there really is no stopping the mobile platform--at least not anytime soon.

Fedora and openSUSE Linux drop Unity efforts

Canonical made quite a splash last fall when it announced that the Unity interface used in its Ubuntu Netbook Edition would become the default interface in the Linux distribution's desktop version as well beginning with version 11.04, or Natty Narwhal.

Why you need to have a Linux LiveCD

As a longtime fan of Linux, I'm a big believer that most business users would benefit greatly by dumping Windows and switching over to the open source operating system instead. It's stable, it's reliable and it's highly secure, among many other advantages.

Three reasons why your business should avoid Facebook

For small businesses, the conventional wisdom today is that social media have become the best way to reach out to potential and current customers, and that companies need to be out there participating actively on Facebook and other social sites. After all, that's where consumers are, right?

Myriad updates come to open source software

January was a busy month for open source software, with numerous packages receiving key updates and improvements. Since so many have been released in rapid-fire succession, now is a good time to take stock of what we've seen so far.

Linux vendors teaming up for an app store

There seems to be no end to the momentum propelling Linux into the mainstream these days, and this week news came out that's surely among the most exciting developments yet.

Tiny patch cuts Firefox 4's startup time in half

While all the world scrutinized the proposed "Do Not Track" feature for Mozilla's Firefox 4 on Monday, a tiny patch quietly emerged that promises to cut the open source browser's startup time in half on Windows.

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