WordPress gaming Google
Matt is using wordpress.org to game search engines. At first i thought this is an early april fools prank, but if you look at the html source of wordpress.org you’ll find the following at the bottom at the time of this writing:
<div style="text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;"> <p>Sponsored <a href="/articles/articles.xml">Articles</a> on <a href="/articles/credit.htm">Credit</a>, <a href="/articles/health-care.htm">Health</a>, <a href="/articles/insurance.htm">Insurance</a>, <a href="/articles/home-business.htm">Home Business</a>, <a href="/articles/home-buying.htm">Home Buying</a> and <a href="/articles/web-hosting.htm">Web Hosting</a></p> </div>
This doesn’t sit well with me and it’s gonna get really ugly. Remember last year’s hubbub over movable type’s new licensing terms? That one will look like a storm in a teacup next to this. The hiccup at sixapart brought many switchersover to wordpress and it’ll be interesting to see where people will defect to this year. My money is on textpattern.
Update: Matt responds, Andy has a follow-up
How big are social bookmarks services?
Can you tell that i can’t get del.icio.us out of my head? I just came across Ryan’s post that technorati dropped del.icio.us in favor of furl for their tag searches. Not because they’re taking sides, but because del.icio.us couldn’t handle the load. I wanted to write how it’s unfortunate that technorati only uses one of the many services out there, until i noticed that now they are actually integrating results from both del.icio.us and furl on tag searches, good thing. Take a look at this tag search for folksonomy as an example.
Update: Clearly technorati is trying to drive me crazy. When i do a tag search on folksonomy right now, i only get results from furl, not del.icio.us. A tag search for apple returns results from both del.icio.us and furl however. Your mileage may vary.
It also got me thinking. Is there any data about the marketshare of various social bookmarking services? The obvious posterchild in the blogosphere is del.icio.us and wists got a lot of coverage when it launched recently, but it looks like furl is also doing well, albeit more under the radar.
How fragmented is the market? It almost looks like a new service is launched daily. What’s their userbase? Last time i read a number Joshua wrote del.icio.us had around 50000-60000 users, but that was some time ago and i don’t know numbers for any of the other services. How active are their users? What’s their userbase, what’s their target-group?
What’s their business-model (subscriptions, donations, ads, selling out their user’s data, …)? Do they offer any sort of api to access their data (del.icio.us and wists do, furl apparently doesn’t)? Are there any plans for integration between different services? Are there architectural, behavioral or cultural differences which make integration futile?
Lots of questions, few answers. The buzz game social bookmarks market places del.icio.us and furl head-to-head at the very top at the time of this writing, followed by feed me links and gibeo, two services i haven’t even heard about before. More reading: Travis’ comparison between del.icio.us and furl, 10 cool things to do with furl. I could sign up for some services to get a feeling for how you use them and how others are using them, but for reasonable results it’s not enough to sign up and tinker around a bit.
Perhaps i’ll scour many2many for something over the weekend, or does anyone have better pointers? Activity-spidering their link-lists might be an interesting starting point as well…
Del.icio.us recommendations
I was thinking about reading lists and book recommendations, something like last.fm for books. Danah boyd wrote about this some time ago, how it wouldn’t work because you’d have to enter and maintain your profile manually and there’s no way to get a critical mass of people to do this.
Then it dawned on me that reading recommendations for the web would be pretty great as well. Of course it’d be a privacy nightmare to have all your browsing tracked and i doubt that many people would opt into something like this. But there are already lots of social bookmarking services with large amounts of data about what people like to read. Building a recommendation engine on top of something like that shouldn’t be too difficult.
When you add a bookmark on del.icio.us, you get a link to other people having bookmarked the same page (e.g. these are all people who bookmarked Eric Meyer’s emergent semantics presentation). You also get a list of common tags associated with the link.
Why not take this to the next level by finding similarities between people’s bookmark repositories? Something like “people who bookmarked these articles also bookmarked …”. This could also utilize tags associated with your links, looking for domain-specific similarities for recommendations. Ambiguous tagging (some people might use “coding”, others “programming” to tag the same article) makes these domains fuzzy, but for deriving recommendations from a large data set this shouldn’t pose a serious problem, we’re not talking matters of life and death if things go awry after all. It’s not all important how many similarities you miss as long as the similarities you find can be translated into relevant recommendations.
My own experience in this area is limited to del.icio.us, so i don’t know how other services like wists or spurl handle this. Do you know of any services or hacks that do this already? Any thoughts on why this would rock/suck?
Also: while i’m on the topic of del.icio.us, congrats to Joshua for getting funded and going full-time with del.icio.us.
Yahoo launches 360
Yahoo beta-launches 360, their blog/diary/social-software thingy. Funnily enough, they require me to login just to get to their featureless beta placeholder page. It’s invitation-only right now, but you could check out Russell’s or Jeremy’s page. Another of these yahoo services that i don’t see myself ever using, but then i guess i’m not their target group anyway. Also, read Dave’s take on it, once again some really good points:
You know it was somewhat cute when Google did the invite-only thing with Gmail, but you could use it to communicate with people who didn’t use it. This software is broken for people who aren’t 360 users!
Addendum: fantastic review of yahoo 360 by Marc Hedlund which nails all the serious problems & omissions (via many2many).
What’s in my bag
Back when i posted about flickr’s what’s in your bag photo pool almost a month ago, one could have rightfully asked “so where’s your bag then?” (not that anyone actually did, but one could have).
So let me explain myself: back then, i didn’t have a digicam available. I could’ve snapped a pic with my phone, but i really like bags and i really like this idea of sharing your bag’s contents, so i waited for my next return home so i could borrow my brothers canon and snap a proper pic. Which is what i’ve finally done now. So here’s what’s in my bag, with abundant notes and everything. Enjoy.
Piggybacking on del.icio.us
A rich system of extensions and hacks for del.icio.us is growing on the web, piggybacking in fascinating ways on its infrastructure of users and data.
An excellent example i came across today is the del.icio.us linkbacks bookmarklet: it’ll display commentary and tags by del.icio.us users on any given site in a pop-up window as sort of site-annotations. Basically it’s just a new way to display existing and actively expanded data, but through re-appropriation of this data it’s potentially luring new users in, spurring further activity and allowing for novel and unforeseen uses of del.icio.us.
You should take a look at this nice overview of innovative del.icio.us tools and hacks for a small glimpse at this fascinating new infrastructure. Open apis aren’t particularly new, but i’ve never before seen such innovative and versatile development around a single platform. What i find most interesting is that most of these hacks are themselves user-friendly, installation-free web-services living on someone’s server or bookmarklets living in your browser, a prime example of the browser-as-platform paradigm.
Don’t make my eyes bleed
Having myself carelessly subdued to THREE! FULL! MINUTES! of seventh heaven in a moment of inadvertence made my eyes bleed. To unjustifiably wreak havoc on my innocent readers and make their eyes bleed, let me present you this lovely collection of seventh heaven slash fiction, most definitely nsfw and the most wrongest thing since, well, seventh heaven itself. Those precious moments when you realize what people are using the internet really for? Priceless.
Now my site will be banned by most any safe web content filter out there, i guess.
Yahoo acquires flickr
Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr. Dave Winer nails it when he says “[...] it should have been the other way around”, that would be something to get excited about from a user pov, no? Apparently they’re going to increase storage and uploads on free accounts and lower prices on pro accounts which is a good thing i suppose. I’m a little nervous about this nonetheless, ever since they dropped pop3-access on free y!mail accounts i’m a little cautious with anything yahoo. Besides, when you look at what yahoo’s been doing by and large, it looks like they’re trying really hard to get it right, but hardly get it right. Their offerings always seem a little cramped and forced, nothing i’d enjoy using.
The funny thing with yahoo is, whenever i sign up for pretty much anything, yahoo’ll buy it within a year or two. First e-mail account with rocketmail, sure enough they’re acquired by yahoo soon afterwards. First webspace for a website with geocities, sure enough they’re acquired by yahoo soon afterwards. Now the same with flickr. Judging by history they’ll buy del.icio.us sooner than later, you heard it here first.
Anyone remember passport, microsoft’s failed attempt at a central authentication service? There was a time when i fully expected yahoo to take that role of a central authentication service, simply because they bought any web property worth registering for and consolidated accounts.
In need of a collaborative writing tool
I just set up a private wiki for a little university project for collaborative text editing (i opted for pmwiki). After fiddling around with it for a while, a few things come to mind:
- The wiki writing process is rather product oriented, not process-oriented, e.g. it leaves little room for annotation, interaction or discussion between collaborators.
- Subethaedit seems much more spontaneous and process-oriented (if only it were available for platforms other than mac os x). However i somewhat doubt the final outcome of a document would be as polished as a wiki-product.
- The most important difference between these two forms of collaborative writing is that wikis are highly asynchronous in nature. Many wiki systems lock pages while they’re edited by someone else. Subethaedit on the other hand is rather synchronous in usage. Though i believe it can be used to some degree for asynchronous editing, i think it’s not intended nor tailored towards this kind of editing. For the project i’m using this wiki for, asynchronous collaboration is most likely of greater importance, so a wiki isn’t a bad fit. However synchronous editing might be beneficial at some point nonetheless.
These points might only be true for pmwiki and subethaedit though. Any suggestions for something that gives you the best of both worlds?
The Actual is the New Virtual
Another World Is Here: The Actual is the New Virtual:
At yesterday afternoon’s keynote conversation on the final day at SXSW, WorldChanging Ally Bruce Sterling and WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen asked: If the world is getting better, is it getting better fast enough? Who’s going to create a sustainable society, and how is it going to be done? Can we redefine, or redesign prosperity? Can we be sustainably prosperous?
Go read this. Also some great links to other posts on worldchanging. And while you’re there, subscribe to their feed if you haven’t done so yet.
