Category: Internet

And suddenly your readers are no longer anonymous

Radio users used to be hidden behind the informative name “frontier.userland.com/xmlAggregator” in my referer logs. No longer! Now I know who’s reading this site! And some of them are darned interesting, like Nicholas Riley, whose blog is subtitled “thoughts from a computer science graduate student, medical student, and Cocoa programmer (this week).”

This alleviates an information asymmetry that’s existed since the beginning of writing…
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The people in my neighborhood

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.
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Why Justin Hall rocks

Justin Hall: an information hustler (scroll down to entry for 5/9 for the article). I don’t always remember to point to Justin because his site doesn’t do RSS and none of his articles have permalinks. But he was the protoblogger back in 1996, writing honestly about his life and the stuff he was doing and the people he loved.

And this story brings out all that’s warm and real about Justin:

A friend at Deloitte & Touche asked me to talk with these kids about my career as a freelance writer. And so I stood up in front of them and shared – “I’m homeless, in debt, and my clothes smell because I live out of a beater car.” And they looked at me confused and a loud little girl with long thin braids in a bright pink parka down in front during the second section said, “Why should we listen to you then?” and I said, “because I do what I want and I love my life.”

28 May 2002: Updated with new Justin permalink!!!
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Google galore

Dave points to new services from Google: Glossary, Sets, Voice Search, Keyboard Shortcuts. Cool tech. This is what differentiates Google from other past search engine failures. By now, if it were another Yahoo or AltaVista, Google would have launched six auction portals and a weather page instead of thinking of ways to make the user’s search experience more productive.

That said, I’m trying to understand where the hell they’re going and failing. I can certainly see how Glossary will be useful, but it’s slower than the main Google search. Sets? I can’t think of a practical application offhand, but if someone’s interested in the part of traditional Google searching that provides related links, Sets could be a good way to focus the results of such a query. Voice Search? Busy signal. Might be cool if it gave the results over the phone rather than making you have a browser. Keyboard shortcuts? Very cool, but I have the funny feeling that I’ve just used ten years of browser and markup development to recreate the Lynx experience on a Google search results page.
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The power of the blog

I was contacted yesterday by an individual who was able to fill in some of the blanks in my ongoing search for information about my wife’s family. You may recall that we hit some dead ends in Calitri searching for her great grandfather, as his name is very common in the family. We were also unable to find information about his wife. This was because, my source tells me, she was actually born in another town.

What’s cool about this is that I never would have found this person and his information without this blog. It’s a two way communication tool. The part that makes it two way isn’t necessarily the technology, although things like comments and discussion areas help; it’s more about asking the question in the first place.

Best viewed with Lynx!

Brent: Best viewed with Lynx:

And now we’re returning to simple HTML, not unlike the HTML of 1994. More structural markup, less of that complex and weird junk. Layout is done through style sheets.

Sites designed that way look good in Lynx. You don’t even have to try. I didn’t go out of my way to make this site work in Lynx.

This site looks pretty good with Lynx, too. And it’s a Manila site. The secret is in the CSS. There’s still navigation, but except for the calendar it’s way down in Lynx; the content stays at the top.

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Amateurs and professionals

Dave and Babble talk about the difference between being an amateur and a professional. Here’s one difference: mentioning amateurs in your weblog gets you a hell of a lot more hits from Google than mentioning professionals, but it’s rarely in the context you meant it the first time.

Oh, and I still feel the same way about music that I did then (Shaw’s “Choral music, like sex, is far too important to be left solely to professionals”), but I feel that way now about journalism and software development too.

Hating your customers, part (n + 1) : Anti Deep Linking

Wired: Site Barks About Deep Link. Jeez, what is it with these people? “No, go away!” says the Dallas Morning News. “Don’t link to our stories! We don’t want people to be able to find what we’ve written!”

I think that the New York Times through their partnership with UserLand has shown a much more enlightened mode of operating—if you want to build a reputation, make your content more visible, not less. But then, that’s why they are the Times and the others are the Dallas Morning News.

Oh, and by the way, here are some deep links to the DMN articles. The same deep links that got BarkingDog.com in trouble. Link them from your site, won’t you? Let’s push back on this one a little.
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Zoe:email::Radio:Web?

Check out this person’s Zoe. Then think about it a lot. What does it mean to have a highly indexed mail store? For a technology with as high a signal to noise ratio as email, a lot. Cross platform, browser based interface (personal web server a la Radio, this one in front of a fully functional email server and a highly indexed mail database). Early beta still. But a lot of promise.
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