Shout out to Mark Pilgrim for building a web service that visualizes relationships between web sites (via Google) quickly and succinctly. Going down my “neighborhood” list, I see a lot of familiar faces and quite a few I don’t recognize.

Question mark: has Google’s API obviated the need for data mining? It used to be that you needed very expensive algorithms and extensive data sets to predict these kinds of relationships (a la Amazon’s recommendation engine). Google has the data set now and has exposed the algorithm via “related sites.” Of course, the catch is your site has to be visible to Google to be able to play.

After a long delay, the first public beta of Quicktime 6 is available for Mac and Windows. This version bakes in MPEG-4 support (the format based on Quicktime’s own standard) as will as JPEG 2000 and some other interesting sounding things like “skip protection.”

All of which I will test as soon as I finish downloading the damn thing; the installer is about 9 MB, and I’m sure that installing will download other components as well. Boy, am I going to be glad when we get broadband again.