CalTech student Virgil Griffith is the creator of Wikipedia Scanner. A program that allows users to match Wikipedia edits with the IP addresses of those responsible, including major corporations. According to the article over at wired,

“On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company’s machines…In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself.”

The Wired article was published on August, 14^th. Just yesterday on the 16^th, Diebold released a press release stating they are changing the name of their subsidiary Diebold Election Systems to Premier Election Solutions. Dave Byrd, President of Premier Election Solutions says,

“This is both a fresh identity for our company and a unique opportunity for us to concentrate our focus solely on providing best-in-class elections solutions for current and potential customers,”

Mr. Byrd, I’m afraid Diebold may need more than a “fresh identity”. The people of United States unfortunately must confide in voting machines to act as pillars for democracy. With this responsibility comes the expectation of complete honesty. Changing identities seems more like something an escape convict might do. Electronic voting is already known to be vulnerable to tampering. Do the American people and democracy a favor and kindly remove Diebold from the electronic voting business.

Choosing a random keyword phrase, I decided to play with some Google SERPs and stats therein to see if I could find any correlation. I did find something pretty interesting. Google seems to favor and rank sites based on keyword density within the URL, title, description, and keywords, and places less importance on backlink stats. If we look at weddingpaperdivas.com (ranking 1st for ‘wedding invitations’) and partypop.com (ranking 2nd for ‘wedding invitations’) we notice that partypop’s backlink numbers are significantly higher than weddingpaperdivas’ but their keyword density for ‘wedding invitations’ is less that 03%. With weddingpaperdivas’, their keyword density for ‘wedding invitations’ is just under 50%. Even though weddingpaperdivas has less backlink power, their keyword density seems to be playing a huge part in pushing them to the top of the SERPS for this particular keyword phrase.

I love little statistical services like these. Especially when they can help SEO-wise. Barry Schwartz sent us over to Techcrunch to get the skinny on the Xinu service. However by the time I arrived at Techcruch to click the Xinu link, Xinu was kaput due to high server load. Xinu creator Miquel Camps Orteza has licensed this under the Creative Commons Atribución 2.5 España License and in return for his efforts is simply asking that you buy him a coffee. Thankfully Moving Labs has offered to host Xinu Returns, which was brought to my attention this morning via Rand Fishkin’s viral marketing post over at SEOmoz. Moving Labs specializes in building web applications and has 7 interesting little apps on their site that look pretty useful.

PeekYou.com, a people search engine dedicated to finding people online, has emerged in Beta today. Apparently the site has been in stealth mode since October of 2006. Since that time PeekYou.com has successfully compiled 50 million profiles piecing together information from various social networking sites and other online outlets.

After RateMyFace.com, RateMyProfessors.com, and RateMyTeachers.com, founder Michael Hussey is aiming to create the first open source directory of every individual online.

“People searching is one of the most popular online exercises, but until now it has been a largely inefficient and often confusing experience,” said Michael Hussey, founder of PeekYou. “PeekYou is a true Web 2.0 ‘people search’ - we discover and map where people exist online, almost like writing a biography about your life on the net. In doing so, we are building the ideal engine for individuals to monitor their own online identity.”

PeekYou.com is privately funded by Duggal Dimensions, LLC. Baldev Duggal has been involved in the photo a computer imaging field for over 25 years.

Some friends of mine have created a new website called SiteCardio that allows visitors to run a free website performance check. You’re asked to enter your URL, related keywords, competing websites (optional), and email address. It generates a report calculating several different factors into your overall score like Whois information, del.icio.us links, technorati, SE specific back links, potential link fragmentation problems, etc.

Check it out and let us know what you think: SiteCardio