What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20060427 Thursday April 27, 2006

Pinging Technorati

There are lots of ways to ping Technorati. Your blogging platform may do it already. You could use a slick editing tool like ecto that will do it for you. You can even roll it yourself in c-sharp. But however you do it, it's important that you let Technorati include you in the distributed conversation by notifying that you've posted.

Recently, there have been some problems with Ping-o-Matic that I worked with Matt to unravel. If you use a ping relaying service and are having difficulty getting indexed by Technorati, please ping directly! Of course Technorati will continue working with ping relayers such as Ping-o-Matic, Pingoat and so forth; they're providing a valuable service to the blogging communities that we are grateful for. However, when in doubt take the direct route!

More soon to come on the Technorati Weblog!

           

( Apr 27 2006, 11:27:31 PM PDT ) Permalink


20060425 Tuesday April 25, 2006

The Google Web Spam Ecosystem

Over the last year and a half, I've spoken extensively to friends, colleagues and audiences about web spam. At eTech I showed how spam blogs behave statistically atypical, as soon as you start looking at the publishing characteristics (such as linking and posting rates), the spam comes percolating up to the top. For instance, this chart is a sample of linked-to domains from blogs hosted by Google's blogspot service (the y-axis is in thousands of links per day):

The highlighted domains are sites that the spammers are trying to put in front of mouse cursors by making them look important. Besides being a nuisance, this is part of a larger hazard to the whole web advertising market.

While Technology Evangelist pointed out Google News' role in the spam ecosystem, Niall has previously noted that Google provides lots of tools for perpetrators of web spam to employ. AdSense is the prime object and subject of spam. A video posted yesterday on YouTube details the anatomy of some typical AdSense abuse:

There has been a recent explosion in abuse of AdWords, Google's PPC (pay per click) advertising platform. It is apparent that the techniques do not follow Google's own clear guidelines. Unfortunately, users and legitimate advertisers pay the price, while Google and the unscrupulous advertisers profit.
Google has always put its users first and one would hope that they will continue to abide by their charter. My aim with this video is to urge them to do something about these issues sooner rather than later.
Web spam isn't new, this has been going on for years and at this point, one must conclude that Google's not serious about doing anything about their spam problems. There used to be a qualification step for AdSense and they'd reject sites that didn't meet some basic criteria as legitimate sources of content. But that stopped about a year and a half ago and the spam has been pouring on ever since. The video is a call to action to complain to Google; they have a fidicuary responsibility to move against the abuse. The video shows a search for forklifts to illustrate rampant ad policy violations. The video narration asks, "Why is google allowing this to happen?" and answers
This is the dirty little secret about these tactics: Google profits from every click on it's network. Be it on ads that are clicked on google.com or ads that are clicked on websites that are running google ads throuth the adsense program. This is a very difficult thing for them to self police because doing something about it will effect their short term profits.
I'm not condemning AdSense per se, it's a great service and revitalized web advertising after the flame-out a few years ago. But black-hat SEO's have definitely cranked up the game over the last year or so and are putting the whole market at risk again. Google may not be particularly motivated to go out and find the abuse but they have to act against it when you bring it to their attention. Watch this video:

             

( Apr 25 2006, 12:28:25 PM PDT ) Permalink


20060423 Sunday April 23, 2006

Using the Google Maps API

Just for giggles, I fiddled around with the Google Maps API on the Happy Valley Odyssey of the Mind blog by putting up a map of Ames, Iowa, where the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals take place.

I tried setting polylines to outline the perimeter of the Iowa State University campus but it seems like the Google Maps API is pretty brittle; if you get it wrong, there's no debugging apparent (I checked the Javascript console), you just get a blank map. I'll have to poke at it a bit more some other day. Doing the basic stuff is easy though, check out How to add a Google Map to any web page.

Be sure to stop by the Happy Valley Odyssey of the Mind blog and make a donation, it's a great cause!

       

( Apr 23 2006, 07:36:08 PM PDT ) Permalink


20060420 Thursday April 20, 2006

Mindstorms Open Source

I've been wondering how Lego will maintain a business around Mindstorms and at last, I think we have an answer: they'll hop on ye olde cluetrain. By enabling the community of Mindstorms enthusiasts to drive innovation openly, I finally feel confident that the Mindstorms technology will enjoy long term viability. From the Gizmodo post:

Jon Lund took some time out from liveblogging the CustomerMade conference in Copenhagen to email in and tell us that according to Soren Lund of Lego, the software behind the upcoming highly anticipated Mindstorms NXT will be published as open source; Lego is currently in the last stage, figuring out which public domain license to use before releasing it. Power to the people! (read on)
The dreaded EOL'ing scenario, such as that suffered by the Sony Aibo, would have been a really crappy outcome for Mindstorms. Instead, they're innovating and opening up. Thanks, Lego! Oh, and one hting: BSD/Apache style licenses, please!

         

( Apr 20 2006, 03:25:53 PM PDT ) Permalink


20060419 Wednesday April 19, 2006

Air Force One Tagged

This is totally amazing! With all of the gazillions of dollars and BTU's of hot air poured out over "homeland security," here comes Marc Ecko laughing in the face of the beast by tagging (as in, the spray paint kind, not folksonomy) Air Force One!

Coming next: "Mark Ecko In Gitmo"

         

( Apr 19 2006, 09:29:21 AM PDT ) Permalink


Buh Bye Scott McClellan

Here comes a changing of the guard at the War House: McClellan Out as White House Press Secretary. Now I just wonder what the final parting words from Dubya to exiting Press Secretary Scott McClellan will be, let's see:

  1. You're dead to me.
  2. Will ya still be joining us in Kennebunkport?
  3. Recall the first rule of the war club: nobody talks about the war club.
  4. Keep what you've seen to yourself 'cause I have some stories of my own. Remember that cutie in Helsinki?
  5. Don't go writing any books now, you know I don't read!
  6. Ya know what they say, Scotty: What happens at the white house, stays at the white house.
  7. Publish memoirs and I'll make sure you're joining Dick Cheney's next hunting party...
  8. Ya know the "forget everything you've just seen" light flash in Men In Black? Was that real? Ya think we can do that? It'd be for the good of us all.
  9. You're not going to one of those quote think tanks, are ya?
  10. If things don't go well in Donnie's corner, would ya like to come back as Secretary of Defense?
Follow along.

       

( Apr 19 2006, 06:43:50 AM PDT ) Permalink


20060418 Tuesday April 18, 2006

Taking on the World

I posted last month about how winning feels good. With the thrill of victory comes a new challenge: what's next? Well, my daughter's team's second place showing in the Odyssey of the Mind regionals was followed up by first place in the State competition, so next up: the World!

The World competition is in Ames, Iowa. I've never been there. I've flown over Iowa plenty of times, traveling to and from Chicago. But the corn fields, cattle corrals and pig pokes of Iowa ... will be a new to me. All told, we're running up thousands of dollars to pull this off but I'm sure for the kids this will be one of life's great experiences, so it's all worth it. I have an alter-ego running a separate blog to track that endeavor and our challenges. We've got paypal links to accept donations (tax deductible, even) but simply talking about and linking to that blog will help, so please shine a little light on us.

     

( Apr 18 2006, 05:20:20 PM PDT ) Permalink


20060411 Tuesday April 11, 2006

User Generated Content By Any Other Name

Today, like many days, the phrase "user generated content" left my lips in the course of conversation. It's a habit. OK, maybe it's a bad habit. Since Tim Bray posted about his hatred for the label, I've been increasingly self-conscious about using those words. I agree, it's laden with exploitative connotations. Derek Powazek adeptly decomposed the nastiness further. Yes, not long ago editorial, movie editing, audio mixing and other tools of creation were only accessible to the pros. Yes, the burst of creativity that has accompanied the mass-amateurization of media of all kinds begs for an improvement of the vernacular. However, Scott Rosenberg, lamenting the absence of a credible replacement, reminds us that content from the pro's still has value (Seymour Hersh didn't blog the latest plan of attack, now did he?). Breaking habits often requires conscious adoption of an alternative. So, what? People Contributed Media? Individual Creations? Actually, I'm more intrigued by "user distributed content" but maybe I'll post about that later and then I'll have to wring my hands over a better name for it.

 

( Apr 11 2006, 09:57:02 PM PDT ) Permalink


Public Libraries

I've always been fond of public libraries, they can be a great resource and it's so... non-web (2.0 or 1.0). I've used 'em for youth sports coaching materials, current non-fiction, jazz CDs and such. They can also be real funny; sometimes they have contemporary titles but other times there's no hope in getting what you want without going out to the bookstore to buy it. I did a search for a title, "What Would Buddha Do at Work" on Contra Costa Library catalog and the first hit was for What would Buffy do? : the vampire slayer as spiritual guide. Buh!

   

( Apr 11 2006, 10:52:37 AM PDT ) Permalink


20060325 Saturday March 25, 2006

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Blogging

A common question from newcomers to the blogosphere is "how do I get my blog read?" There are all kinds of ways gather attention to yourself but there seems to be a set of best practices that come out whenever this topic comes up. So here's a rough swipe at a blogosphere visibility FAQ.

Post Conversationally
Use links to reply to other blog posts, cite sources and define terms. If you just treat your blog as a pulpit, a soapbox in a silo, your only hope of acquiring attention is to be a celebrity a priori. In other words, Arianna Huffington didn't need any best practices when she started blogging, she was already an attention focuser. So what if you're not famous? Don't be a wallflower, converse with links. If you read a blog post that you want to comment on, you can certainly leave one (if the blog permits comments, I don't since I don't have time to administer spam) or better, post to your blog linking to the permalink of the blog post you're commenting on. I don't bother with trackbacks either, too much spam to be useful to anybody.
Pay Attention To Get Attention
Use a feed reader to keep up with the conversation. I like endo and NetNewsWire but as the readers built into browsers get better and become full featured authoring tools (watch for innovations from Flock and Microsoft IE7), they'll be the read-write tools, the IDEs (integrated development environments) of the web. OK, now make it easy for folks to subscribe to your feed. Set up an account on FeedBurner and dress up your templates with feed-adding URLs (MyYahoo, Bloglines, etc).
Make Sure A Sound Is Heard In The Forest When Your Tree Falls
Most blogging platforms (be it the CMS like Movable Type and/or authoring tool like ecto) support sending an XML-RPC ping when you post, use it! Technorati also has a Ping form that you can bookmark. The benefit is that you'll be indexed by Technorati's real-time search system.
Claim Your Blog
Associate your Technorati profile, picture and tags with your blog by registering and claiming your blog. Your posts will be more visible in Technorati search results (with links to your profile and display of your picture) and with tags assoicated to your blog, the blog directory.
Tag Your Posts
The blogsphere's posts are neatly bound together by topic on Technorati's tag pages. Pick the top 5 or 10 subjects that your post is about and embellish your posts using reltag, Technorati has the tagging quick-start guide. Editing tools such as ecto and MarsEdit make it easy to add tags.
Post Often
The blogosphere's attention is focused on right now, not then. As Seth Godin points out:
Take a look at the top 10 blogs and you'll notice that many of them post dozens of times a day.
No, you don't have to be that prolific but if you have something interesting to say, say it early and often. On the other hand, don't prattle. Frequent posters who talk about nothing aren't doing themselves a favor in the over all data stream.
Be Well Formed and Valid
Your blog is much more palatable to the tools of consumption if they are easily parsable. HTML renderers such as web browsers, indexers like Technorati and feed readers just work better when your output validates. Use the tools at Feed Validator, check your markup and CSS.
So I think that sums up what I've observed in the big contest for attention. Yes, there's more to it than that and no, I don't follow these rules at all regularly 'cause I'm too heads down on building plumbing for the underlying fabric. But since I get asked these kinds of questions every few weeks or so when someone I know jumps into the world of micropublishing, now I have a permalink to refer them to <grin /> Once you've got these basics, check out Ten Technorati Hacks. Welcome to the blogosphere!

                 

( Mar 25 2006, 09:26:08 AM PST ) Permalink


20060316 Thursday March 16, 2006

Endo

Years ago I thought AvantGo was sooo cool. I'd sync up my Palm Pilot, get on the bus and read the web sites I'd subscribed to. Ah, how times have changed. Lately, I'd been using Sage to read feeds in Firefox but the interface has always seemed inconvenient and Firefox is kinda slow and leaky under Mac OS X.

Last week I installed Endo (brought to you by the maker of ecto). While I was a little thrown by the way the feed group bar shifts focus, my feed reading has definitely been enhanced. The floating window notifications when it's updating are cool. The way it shows post tags right at the top (under the blog post title) is also very nice. I could imagine improving the feed focus on the left hand side (I'm hitting the scroll bar too much). I should be able to reorder the feeds so I can read them in order of importance (or if Endo calc'd importance on the fly by watching which feeds I go to first and mapped that against their update rates, better). But really no substantial complaints. It integrates nicely with ecto and has hooks to integrate with mail and chat applications but my favorite thing about Endo is: its cache! I spend a few hours everyday commuting, reading feeds on while I'm on the go is great! I basically left the laptop load up feeds before I hit the road and catch up on stuff while in transit.

Thanks Ado!

         

( Mar 16 2006, 01:14:00 PM PST ) Permalink


20060312 Sunday March 12, 2006

Winning Feels Good

A few victories to report:

Winning isn't everything, but when you're playing (or watching) the game, it's the outcome you want. That was my weekend, good stuff.

               

( Mar 12 2006, 09:12:32 PM PST ) Permalink


Etech Highlights

I know this is late coming and everybody's already moved on to SXSW. Sometimes I just leave things dangling a little too long but I have some scattered Etech notes and may as well get them out of the way.

So here we go. This years Etech Conference in San Diego was a real treat. The speaker sessions, the usual running into friends of past and present and the sunny reprieve last Wednesday were overlaid by a recognition of how much the technology world has changed in the last year. As the novelty of tags, AJAX and Ruby On Rails are wearing thin, people are getting down to business building real applications. The hype wake that's followed Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 acquisitions last year has spun up a lot of innovation -- a lot of tinkering projects are growing up and some are getting funding. Yes, a treat; albeit at times in a scary too-sweet-like-bubblicious way; see Building to flip is building to flop (via Marc Hedlund's excellent session Coder to Co-Founder). I can't do justice to the whole conference (see the Technorati Etech06 post stream) but heres a review of my highlights.

The Live Clipboard demo at Ray Ozzie's Tuesday keynote was truly awesome. Microsoft is vivificating data out of web pages that can interact with other services and applications. Contact information embedded in web pages as hCards will transparently be manifested as vCards. Events expressed as hCalendars will be manifested as iCals. With the potential for microformat expressions of the basic building blocks of many import human-centered entities being conjured up by Microsoft Internet Explorer, the web becomes a much more valuable medium.

Chatting with Tantek about it the next evening, I wondered if Microsoft's commitment to the technology might extend as far as making contributions to Mozilla so that Firefox and Thunderbird users can enjoy benefits comparable to those promised to MSIE users. Tantek seemed confident that the Mozilla community will soon enough implement the same capabilities. On Thursday, Bart Decrem seemed to imply as much; when Flock loads a page it recognizes microformats and can conjure the data so that it may be sent to other sites and applications. As Decrem put it, it's part of Flocks support for "roundtrip attention." He demonstrated Flock in that session (with Chris Messina) dragging web entities (inline images, highlighted blocks of text for citation, etc) to Flock's "shelf" and incorporating it into blog post authoring. And Flock does the right thing; text cited is marked up in the blog post as <blockquote /> tag with a cite attribute. Flock is an IDE (integrated development environment) for micropublishing and remixing on the web.

Also at Tuesday's keynote (2006-03-07), Jeff Han showed off a tactile multi-input touchscreen device. Tablet PC's are nothing new but these applications weren't your garden variety touchscreen tricks where you use a stylus to doodle and scribble (hoping that the handwriting recognition mistake rate is tolerable). He used his hands, his finger tips were employed as multiple styli that could manipulate data gesturally. There was an incredible playdough-with-pixels application programmed with fluid physics. He grabbed globules of stuff, squished it, pulled it apart, mushed it together and rolled it around while creating currents and eddies within a virtual oil-and-water lava-lampscape.

For years, starting with Windows 95, I've longed to see the replacement for the traditional desktop metaphors that operating systems use. Accessing data as files, via folders, dragging to trashcans, clicking on notepads and cutting/pasting to ethereal clipboards... we've trained ourselves to think within the confines of deficient interfaces. No doubt there's rhyme and reason to these metaphors but as humans we're always conforming to their constraints. Instead of us training ourselves to think that way, the computers should be taught to accept input and provide output that agrees with how we already think. Children don't need to be taught how to fingerpaint, they stick their hands in the goo and do what comes naturally. We should all go back to preschool from time to time, lest we forget how.

Han's other application was photo browsing. On a plane that served as a virtual light board, he used his fingers to zoom in and out, slid them around the board, stretched and shrunk pictures and arranged them manually. This was drag and drop without starting and ending points, without mouse pointers or mouse-downs.

It was truly awe inspiring to see him gesture his way through the data. OK, enough real and proverbial gushing, check this out.

Bradley Horowitz discussed Yahoo!'s embrace of user generated content (nothing really new there, right) and the epiphanous embrace of user distributed content. The beauty of Flickr isn't just in the community's folksonomic organization of the content it generates, it's in how widespread it's distribution reach is through mashups (like Technorati's tag pages, though he didn't cite us specifically) and blog post embedding. Yahoo! is clearly on a roll with the fabric of feeds that they produce, consume and remix.

Another highlight for me of course was my preso at the Data Dump. I showed that "Web Pages Lie But The Numbers Don't" by demonstrating how blog spammers reveal themselves when you watch their publishing metrics. Normal publishing operations have consistent characteristics, there are baselines to measure against, as far as their blog creation rates (in the case of domains that host blogs), post creation rates, link creation rates, tags and so forth. After my swim through the data underlying SEO dirty business, David Hornik provided a humorous wade into what VC's really do: email about schmoozes and meetings, shmooze about email and meetings and meet about emails and schmoozes. Such grueling duties, the object of which oftentimes boiling down to an email with "Introduction" as the Subject:, requires taking frequent breaks (Hawaii, Cabo, Hannukah, Aspen, etc) but provides fodder for other email Subjects.

Microformats and Flickr seemed to be the big winners at this Etech. Between people jazzed by Cal Henderson's geek out How We Built Flickr tutorial on Monday, to Antonio Rodriguez showing off Tabblo to passers-by, to Bradley Horowitz' singing the praises of Flickr and the emergence of Yahoo!'s FUSE vision (find, use, share, expand) and countless other cites in various sessions -- Flickr was ubiquitously on the lips of Etech speakers and attendees. Ray Ozzie really energized the interest in microformats with his morning keynote, by the time the evening rolled around, the microformats session had a packed house. The audience wasn't just listening, they were participating; observed all around were people creating hCards, reading about hCals and whispering to each other about the application potential.

Enough speaking of Flickr@Etech (again), see it. James Duncan Davidson's Etech Flickr stream is a good photographic chronicle of this years conference. Doc's is good too. That was my week.

                               

( Mar 12 2006, 02:22:48 PM PST ) Permalink


20060228 Tuesday February 28, 2006

Winter Fights Back

Last week we had the early taste of spring, with cherry blossoms blooming. Warm weather was asserting itself but clearly winter won't leave, at least not without a fight. Right now, it we have sunny skies in the east, and cracking thunder, and torrential rain and hail. The rain gutters are over flowed, rain water shooting off of the roof. The dog is freaked out.

They fight. And fight. And fight. And fight. And fight.

Minutes later: it stops. All is quiet. The dog is sleeping, again.

It's a lot like life.

( Feb 28 2006, 08:08:09 AM PST ) Permalink


20060226 Sunday February 26, 2006

Hug Yours

I don't know these folks, but having read the Dear Elena postings, I know them well enough. I'm hugging my little ones a little extra.

( Feb 26 2006, 05:35:13 PM PST ) Permalink