...more recent posts
Always propitious, Tom writes:
If the hot topic of the moment happens to be "Anthrax in violin varnish," then when I type those words, some crawl begins to sniff that thread - first among the bloggers I know and read all the time, then extending out to the great blogging ocean beyond. It does this without my having to tell it to. Then when I want to see what everyone has written about this topic, I click, and a cloud of threads from all the blogs comes captured in a snapshot array, duly attributed with links, inside some page or realm so that it's there, somewhat collated, just as whatever I wrote in my blog on that same topic is sniffable by anyone else.The thing is, the words "Anthrax in violin varnish" do not constitute a unique identifier. URLs, on the other hand, almost do. That's why daypop and blogdex use URLs as the basis for determining who's talking about the same thing. Words are too fluid. Is "Anthrax on violins" the same as "Anthrax in violin varnish"? Software will be hard pressed to decide. Yet this is what humans do well, and this is why blogs are important: because they harness a mulititude of human linguistic processing units (that's you and me) to work on these very un-binary questions of meaning. Go the other way, towards full automation, and you wind up talking about XML and the semantic web. And then the whole thing dies because writing is too tedious if you have to make it machine processable.
People have to do the work. We have to be the filter. That's blogging. You have to do the crawl yourself. "...first among the bloggers I know and read all the time, then extending out to the great blogging ocean beyond..." This is exactly what happens already, without any additional technology, when you're tuned into blogspace. You're the linguistic engine. By keeping up with your own corner of the world wide web (parts of which keep up with other corners which contain parts that keep up with still other corners, etc...) you are doing the crawl. And there is no better machine to do it. Blog on.
I've been thinking that all the hits weblogs get from search engines usually don't result in the searcher connecting with the information sought because in most cases the information a search engine has seen on a weblog will already have been pushed off into the archives by the time the searcher comes along. I wish google would spider my archives and not my main page. Probably I could set up robots.txt to create this outcome, but because google ranks results based on an algorithm that pays attention to how many other pages are linked to yours, having google spider your archives (which it would see as different from your main page which most people would have links to) would probably hurt your search result positioning.
A different idea I had would be to look at the refering page when a page here is requested. If it's coming from google (or another search engine) you could parse the refering URL, extract the search phrase that was entered into google, and feed that into the search engine here to bring up the requested page, but with only those posts that mention the search phrase. Maybe the top of the page could be a standard explanation like: "I see you are looking for something specific. I've tried to provide you just that information. If you'd like to see this page as it would normally appear, click here."
At least that way all my "antrax symptons" searchers would find what they are, errr, looking for.
Oh yeah, I know, "that won't scale" but not everybody is trying to scale. Why not take advantage of unpopularity by building in more features then you could for a high traffic site?
You thought it would never happen, but the AppleInsider message boards are back. Biggest waste of time on the apple flavored internet. Must resist...
The recent flurry of meta weblog discussion continues. Why this is happening now is unclear to me. Is it just the linguistic gas supplied by Chris Locke? Seems like we go through these times of blog analysis ("what is a weblog?") periodically. This time around has generated a lot of words. Doc points to the recent activity on the cluetrain email list. The thoughts are all interesting, but is the question? I think the reason why different words (either 'weblog' or 'blog') became popular (instead of just 'website' or 'homepage') is because having a 'website' implies some technical skill (even if it's just understanding basic HTML and FTP) but having a 'blog' only requires the desire to write publically. And most bloggers realized, naturally, that they weren't 'webmasters' and so they needed a different word. Having a 'weblog' is specifically not about displaying your mastery of internet technology. Having a 'website' often is (at least as a side effect.)
An American airlines flight just crashed into the densely populated Queens neighborhood of Rockaway (well, Belle Harbor more technically) around 129th street & Newport avenue. It was an Airbus plane that had just taken off from nearby JFK airport. It's unclear what happened.
I've changed the new activity monitor on the site. It is simpler now, and I think more usable. Of course it assumes that you either have a permanent connection or stay dialed in for long periods of time. I took out all the javascript, so now going to /monitor just turns the browser window black (the present window, not a pop up.) Resize or not as you wish. It will reload (once a minute now, but the black page is only .5K so it's not very much bandwidth really) until there is something new at which point it will just load up the front page which will indicate where the new post is. Also I realized I could have it print out the people who are currently monitoring, so I'm having it do that. Not sure if I'll keep that in or not. Could be sort of interesting.
If there is anybody from the outside listening in, the deal here is that if you have an account, then the front page of this site is configurable. You can add or remove any pages that exist anywhere on the site to or from your front page. Also you can tell the system to keep track of new (to you) posts and/or new (to you) comments for each page. Then every time you load up the front page it lists the pages you follow, and next to that the number of new posts, and then the number of new comments. Clicking on the page brings you to the page the same way a guest sees it, but clicking on [x new posts] brings up the page with only the new content. Clicking on [x new comments] brings you directly to a page containing new comments. The activity monitor is simply a blank black page that reloads itself every minute sending an id cookie to the server, and the server looks in the database to see if there is anything new for that user.
It's been our experience that this simple system greatly enhances the usefulness of the site. The most important result has been that old threads (even very old threads) which receive new comments are immediately called to everyone's attention. So while all the pages are chronological, in standard weblog style, we don't have the negative side effect where old discussions are less important simply because they are buried somewhere in your archives. If someone comments on something I wrote long in the past it is immediately brought to my attention.
The Washington Post has an article about peer to peer networking. Apparently the military is interested. The article is not technical, but I'm always interested to read anything that departs from the "P2P networks are for pirates" standard entertainment industry line.
The U.S. Joint Forces Command last week began testing new commercial software called Groove, developed by the creator of Lotus Notes. About 20 large corporations also are using the program, which allows people to create ad hoc computing groups, send instant messages, mark up files and do other collaborative work online without help from system administrators. Makers of similar "groupware" products got in line this week to take the military up on its appeal for help.Dan Gilmore has a column on this same issue in which he talks with John Robb (ex USAF special operations and now president and COO of Userland software) about how the internet can help our overly centralized leadership meet the highly distributed enemy of today. John Robb expands on the idea at his own website. (links from HTP and scripting news)
It's not just for stealing music and exposing your diary to the world anymore.
Prada is opening a new store in Manhattan with something called "elastic time" mirrors.
Move slowly and the mirror reflects your image back to you normally. But if you spin around quickly, you experience what the designers call "elastic time": The mirror slows down your image so you can view yourself from the back. This Wonderlandian trick is pulled off with hidden cameras and a screen that masquerades as a mirror.Cool. Popular science (mostly fluff) story here (via harrumph)
Christopher Locke (remember him from the other day?) and John Patrick (V.P. of internet technology at IBM) have an email conversation about business and the future of the internet (or is it about the internet and the future of businesss?) on line at borders.com. Tom at improprieties has some thoughts, plus pointers to here, and here for more.
This must be out of context somehow, or else he's just saying this to get a laugh watching all the people it bends out of shape, but according to the seattle times, Bill Gates thinks Microsoft is responsible for open source:
Gates also took some credit for the genesis of open-source software. He said Microsoft made it possible by standardizing computers: "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines," he said.A few months ago microsoft was calling open source "a cancer" and now it turns out they are actually responsible. Which is it? To be clear, Gates has been adamantly against free software (I know I'm mixing my terms here, but this is an overview) since the very beginning. Read this open letter from Bill Gates to early computer hobbyists from 1976. This same fight has been going on all these years. It's a shame those evil-doer hobbyists kept him from making money.