...more recent posts
The long tail:
The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day....
You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail - from those queries asked only once a day.
The site feels a little spammy, but this guy has been around for a while and I think he's legit. And he is now selling a dual EV-DO wireless solution that he claims will get 256 kb/s up and 3.2 mb/s down. Takes two PC card slots, and he has to saw the antenna off the bottom card. It's ridiculously expensive, but this is the bleeding edge.
After living joyfully without fear of pop up ads for quite some time now (between Safari and Firefox's excellent pop up killing powers,) I have been dismayed recently to see these ads appear again. Although I guess they are more 'pop under' than 'pop up'. The trick they have found to beat the blockers is to spawn the new windows using our old (*cough*) friend Flash. Ah, isn't Flash wonderful?
I don't know if Macromedia (Flash's parent company) is going to do anything about this. Or, it would be nice if the browser makers would let you keep Flash installed, but toggled off, and then let you activate it if you really want for a specific site through a menu item (I hear Omniweb can do this.) But until someone does something to fix this problem you will either have to live with some pop under ads once again, or, and I admit I am severely tempted, uninstall Flash. Thanks to Macromedia for at least providing these uninstaller programs (for all platforms.)
Completely bizarre. Sony Ericsson launches the ROB1, a bluetooth wireless roving robot camera you can control from your bluetooth cell phone:
The ROB1 has a range of up to 50 meters (165') and streams what it sees back to your mobile phone so that you can control it properly. The ROB1 should be quite maneuverable, able to move forwards and backwards, and turn on a dime - literally. The ROB1's camera can be pivoted up to 70 degrees up or as far as 20 degrees down, so that you can frame the shot just perfectly. There is even an assist light up front to light up your way as you navigate.Here's a flash demo from the Sony Ericsson site.
Ping-o-matic is a meta pinging tool for notifying multiple sites that keep track of recently updated weblogs. I'm trying to get the XML-RPC interface to work from our posting script here. It is responding as if it is working, but I'm not seeing myself show up in anybodies 'recently updated' lists. I'll get it eventually though.
Rogers Cadenhead has a free PHP class that does all the heavy lifting.
is an RSS/Atom aggregator with a difference: It allows you to keep track of your feeds through e-mail - you create an OPML file listing your feeds and Newspipe will collect them, convert them to e-mail messages and send them to your mailbox.Obviously this would be a great way to read RSS/Atom feeds on your mobile device. For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows; requires python 2.3 or above and access to an SMTP server.
This means you can read, organize and archive news feeds using your current mail client (or even webmail), without needing to use a separate program. Newspipe can send you news items as plaintext or HTML mail, both as single items or grouped in a digest.
For my personal security efforts: Tunneling your email traffic over SSH on OS X.
is a tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.AJAX is the latest web development buzzword. Stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is the technology that Google is using to create all the amazing UI interactivity in it's recent web application offerings.
Jesse James Garrett has a great overview article explaining this technology.
Sexy Motorola PEBL V6 cellphone. Edge capable (Edge is Cingular's high speed network offering - not quite as fast as EV-DO but still nice.) Includes Bluetooth, and an MPEG4 VGA video camera, plus POP3 and IMAP-compatible email app, and MP3 ringtone support. Strangely I'm not lusting after this one, but I think it will be very popular. Clearly a very nice phone. Sort of surprising to see Motorola making some nice design decisions lately (remember way back when their Startac was king?)
Sprint released an EV-DO laptop PC Card even though they have made no announcement concerning their anticipated EV-DO network roll out. The card release is reasonably leading people to think it will be soon.
EV-DO is the 3G cellular data technology that Verizon has had out for many months in a lot of major US markets (including NYC.) Very high connection speeds, but with a tiny bit of latency (like all cellular networks - really only a factor if you are playing on line games,) and a growing (but unconfirmed on my part) reputation for not working so well through lots of walls.