by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 29, 2004 | Usefull Things
Scoble blogged about Blog Catalog which is a kind of yahoo/DMOZ directory effort for blogs, very nice.
On the general usefulness of RSS, reading Scoble’s site again made me realize just how much RSS has changed the way we use the web. Scoble says he is subscribed to more than 900 feeds and has some ideas about information overkill.
I remember my life before RSS aggregators, I managed to read a small amount of sites regularly, perhaps 10 at most, simply because going to each one was just a pain in the behind. I never read peoples personal pages and I never knew half of what is going on there since my main source of information ended up being slashdot. These days it is different, I keep up with around 90 feeds during the day they offer a good 2 minute distraction from work every hour or so. I am also finding myself much better informed about general happening because I can subscribe to a wide variety of feeds.
The fact that one person can have 900 feeds shows you just how far aggregators and the whole RSS technology has progressed and what it has enabled us to do. Yes RSS has flaws that is being worked on, but so far it has done a great job. I think it also says something interesting about the mental stability of someone who wants to subscribe to that many feeds, but that is another discussion ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 28, 2004 | Usefull Things
Via boingboing comes a link to a good article on places to look for malware on windows machines.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 24, 2004 | Usefull Things
I am trying out a Google search term highlighter on my page. I noticed a lot of people coming to my server and finding category or date based indexes for their searches. They then go and use the Google Cache to come and view the page that does the search item highlighting in order to find the specific bit they are interested in.
To help those poor people find things easier I figured I will try highlighting all search referrals. I tried a PHP script that can do this for many search engines but I think it had issues with my existing PHP code on the site, now I am using a Javascript tool called Google Highlighter. It is only for Google searches but that is fine since that is the most used search engine these days.
To see how it works use the search box on my site to search for something, like “devco”, and click on one of the results you will see your terms highlighted in colors similar to those used by Google.
I think it may actually be best to only put it on pages where confusion is most likely, the front page and date based pages. The assumption is that if you get to a individual entry page it will be fairly obvious quickly if it applies to you or not.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 19, 2004 | Usefull Things
Slashdot carries the news that a9.com has finally launched. A9 is Amazon‘s search engine that uses Google for search results and image searches, IMDb for movie information and GuruNet for Reference lookups.
It features a nice DHTML interface complete with drag and drop facilities. The whole idea here is to combine useful search related stuff into one page. It remembers all your searches. It tracks everything you click on and it provides a Diary facility to let you annotate your searches and sites you visit. Using all this information it can provide you with recommendations for sites that will interest you etc. It links all of this with your amazon.com account and no doubt use this gathered information to suggest books for you to buy etc.
The history of sites you visited and searches you ran can be edited by you, and I tested this it does stop entries from appearing in your history, but I also noted that by deleting a specific topic from your search history it does not undo what it learnt from you, it still knows you are interested in what you searched for even if you deleted the historic record of those searches!
Some tasty bits from their T’c & C’s:
Use of Third Party Service Providers: We may, from time-to-time, employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include sending e-mail and analyzing data. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes.
We work closely with some third parties. In some cases, we will include offerings from these businesses on A9.com. In other cases, we may include joint offerings from A9.com and these businesses on A9.com. Click here for examples of co-branded and joint offerings. You can tell when a third party is involved in the offering, and we share customer information related to those transactions with that third party.
For reasons such as improving personalization of our service, we might receive information about you from other sources and add it to our information.
On the point of what information they record as provided by you they say the following:
You provide most such information when you use A9.com to search or otherwise communicate with us. For example, you provide information when you enter search terms; set bookmarks; download and use our toolbar; communicate with us by phone, e-mail, or otherwise; and employ our other services. As a result of those actions, you might supply us with personally identifiable information or information about things that interest you.
So if you are still considering using a9.com at this point, they also offer the following advice to you:
If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.A9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you.
While I like what they have done, I think I will stick to generic.a9.com for now.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 19, 2004 | Front Page
Last night I posted my 200th entry. The blog as it is has been around since 6th September 2003, the older entries in the archives were added all at once with some back dates to the time they were written. I updated the theme of the site on the 1 year anniversary to what you see today. Some stats:
These stats exclude all my own machines, and only include browsers that supports javascript or loads the stats image, so this excludes spam bots, rss aggregators, search engines etc.
Number of unique visitors: 8201
Search Engines: Google 5439, Yahoo! 170, AOL 40, MSN 6, Virgilio 6
Top 5 keywords used in search strings: allofmp3 (726), devco (621), mutt smtp (336), openssl frontend (79), nikon d70 reviews (69)
Browsers used: IE6; WinXP 3436, IE6; Win 2000 1046, IE6; Win98 307, Moz 1.6; WinXP 301, Netscape 6; MacOSX 284
Browsers Total: IE 5591, Mozilla 1683, Netscape 610, Opera 242, Konqueror 35
Operating Systems: WinXP 4222, Win 2000 1576, Linux 726, Win 98 539, Mac OS X 351
I started the blog to have a place to put stuff where I can find it again and also to experiment with the blogging revolution and some of the technologies it employes such as personal CMS systems and RSS/Atom. I also wanted to discover the workings of the new wave of personal sites that interact with each other, where people comment on the same topics and know about each others posts using sites like Feedster and Technorati.
It has been interesting to see the positive growth and improvements made in this regard mostly by a grassroots movement but it has also been interesting to note the success and failures of businesses trying to capitalize on this new media.
Feedster is the leader in weblog searching and while being useful often suffers under its own success with slow response, downtime or other issues. And still I have to wonder about its place in the market given that I almost never see referrers from it – which may be an indication that only a small % of web browsers use it – and also to see it suffer under the growing pains of RSS such as inclusion of paid for ads that appear in the RSS feeds in their search results. Google now at least fetches my RSS feeds often – they may be checking for updates on weblogs.com since they are quite quick off the mark once I posted something. New articles appear in the Google search results very quickly after publishing.
For me, Google is still king and I hardly ever use Feedster for anything, and usually once I used it, I go and do a Google query in any case since it tends to be more relevant and useful results. Often I do the Google query while waiting for feedster to produce results and find what I wanted by the time feedster managed to render a page. I know the Feedster team has added some new machines and stuff recently and indeed it is a bit faster now.
Other useful sites like Technorati has a great idea and good software but it is often unusable due to load and so forth, hopefully the recent cash injection they received will allow them to upgrade their service and be a useful resource again, for now it is just too irritating to sit and wait for their progress indicator that never gets anywhere most of the time.
