...more recent posts
The searching zeitgeist
Google now has a cool page of statistics about what people are searching for. (via /.)
Bust? What bust? Douglas Rushkoff explains the history of the web, and why it's doing better than ever, despite what some would have you believe.
Nothing very original, but that's never his point. He's more of a summing it up for people on the outside kind of writer. And I think he gets the general feel correct. The internet stock crash was a good thing for the web, because the web is not about making money off of people, it's about communicating with them.
Note to self: you don't really want to stand directly downwind of the fireworks.
Looking for more guinea pigs, err I mean people who want a weblog type thing. Need a place for your blog? (with full comment system, automatic archives, picture uploading, etc....?) Drop me a line: jim at datamantic.com.
While talking yesterday about my recent flurry of dreams I realized that while I occasionally (like yesterday morning) have dreams where I am in a fight with an animal, that animal is always a shark. For as long as I can remember. Maybe 20 dreams over the last few years (that is a complete guess) and never once with an animal other than a shark. Weird. And I hadn't ever noticed this. I can't even think of any other animals that have ever appeared in my dreams. Maybe bugs.
Why can't I send google the pages that have changed on my site? The point is they wouldn't have to hit my site so much with their robots. Plus, the updates would be live. Who wouldn't push their content to google one time rather than take all the hits? (where each hit to a page that hasn't been updated is wasted bandwidth.) Win-win as they say.
I'm not suggesting google change their ranking criteria. Just because you send them pages doesn't mean you'll return higher in searches. Maybe you'd sign up to send them pages, and then if they are already indexing you, they would send you some sort of password to authenticate that your pages are from you. If you're not being indexed they just note your interest, and then send you the key when (or if) they ever start to index you.
Actually, couldn't this be a revenue model for google? Have the service, but only let people send updates once every n hours (or days.) But, it you pay a little, you can send them more frequently. Or if you pay more, in real time. So their model could be free for what they do now, but with the addition of a temporal aspect, so people could search (at least among sites pushing their updates) for things using a very recent time criteria (for instance, you could search for news stories in the last 6 hours about thunderstorms in New York City, or any other sort of recent news event.)
Or am I missing something?
Thinking a lot about email recently. I want to adapt this system to handle all my email (sending, receiving, and most importantly archiving.) Long way to go. I'd love to hear what bugs people about their present email setups (or what you like too, I guess.)
Looks like inside.com is going to (try to) start charging $3.95 a month for most of it's content. Right. That should work.
I guess I knew about this before, but I never really took a good look at Ward Cunningham's WikkiWikkiWeb until recently. Wow. It's a collaborative writing space. You might start with this definition page, and make your way from there. Or maybe start here. Or maybe here. Or, really, any of these. Just keep clicking. Very nice. Even if you don't care about the topic ("an informal history of programming ideas" ) just getting a sense of how the whole thing is structured is pretty cool. So I'm impressed, but I have to say that just letting anyone modify anything on the site seems positively crazy.
Here's a Hack the Planet discussion thread that is worth looking at, at least for the great David McCusker ouija board metaphore:
Yeah, now we're all playing Internet Ouija Board, with lots of folks who want to spell out different things while pretending they are merely passive observers.Plus, this really nice response to Dave Winer's dream of the web as a "fantastic writing environment"
Yes, and that's a good dream. In fact, it's the best one I know about currently, unless I extend the concept of writing to include something more, until the final result is a fantastic dreaming environment.Fantastic dreaming environment? I'll take one of those please. Does it run on OSX?