February 2005 Archives

  1. Feb28

    Yahoo! Search web services

    Yahoo! introduced REST APIs for web, image, local, news, and video search as well as Overture listings.

    Yahoo! uses an application ID and limits requests by IP address. Service limits are set at 5000 requests per 24-hour period starting from the first time Yahoo! receives a call from the IP. This configuration allows for a developer to distribute his or her application without worrying about a user setting up their own API key. There could be issues on shared hosting setups where there are hundreds or thousands of domains sharing one IP address.

    You may not use the Yahoo! APIs for commercial purposes. Yahoo! asks developers to use a special click URL they can track the use of their APIs.

    True URL
    http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog
    Click URL
    http://rds.yahoo.com/S=96857362/K=niall+kennedy/v=2/XP=yws/SID=e/l=WS1/R=1/H=0/IPC=us/SHE=0/SIG=11k13a6du/EXP=1109747155/*-http%3A//www.niallkennedy.com/blog

    Yahoo! does say please, but I see no reason for a developer to include the click URL in his or her application. Translating some parameters from the click URL above I am transmitting back to Yahoo! information that the user searched for "niall kennedy" (K) using the Yahoo! Web Services experience (XP) version 2 (v), the time the search took place (EXP) and more data not easily discerned.

    The API response includes in its HTTP headers a P3P policy and an attempt to set a yahoo.com cookie.

  2. Feb28

    Search engine statistics

    James Lamberti, Vice President of Search Solutions at comscore Networks, presented today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. comScore gathers its data from 1.5 million users and Lamberti provided some interesting statistics on search behavior.

    • Toolbar searches in the United States have grown 136% since June 2004.
    • 18% of searches come from toolbars.
    • 58% of searchers have not installed toolbars.
    • 12% of searchers have uninstalled the toolbar.

    20% of the search users constitute 68% of the search volume. These users are less likely to click a sponsored link (27%).

    The search race is closer than I thought. comScore measured the work search market share as 37% Google, 30% Yahoo!, and 19% MSN based on total searches.

  3. Feb28

    Craigslist postings transmitted to space

    On May 15, 2005 the Deep Space Communications Network will transmit craigslist postings, a video message from Craig Newmark, and a clip from "24 Hours on craigslist" from Cape Canaveral into space.

    This announcement seems like an April Fool's joke. A view of Earth through craigslist postings would be an odd cross-section of our culture. Hopefully the Voyager interstellar records are discovered first.

  4. Feb28

    Flickr deal still being negotiated?

    Richard Koman of Silicon Valley Watcher cites a high-level Yahoo! source and reports Yahoo! and Flickr are still in negotiations over purchase price and no final agreement has been reached.

    A high level source within Yahoo told SiliconValleyWatcher that the two companies are in negotiations over the purchase price and that as of late Friday night Pacific Time, no final agreement had yet been reached.

  5. Feb26

    David Sifry 106 Miles talk

    I just finished editing the audio of David Sifry's talk at the February meeting of 106 Miles, a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley. Dave shares his experience as an entrepreneur with examples focused on his current business Technorati. The MP3 file is 17 megabytes in size and 74 minutes and 46 seconds in length.

    Next month's 106 Miles event will address financing a new business, a great choice since over 20 minutes of the last meeting dealt with venture capital investments and had all entrepreneurial engineers tuned-in.

    Questions

    1. 00:00 Brendon Wilson - Have you given much thought to the legal exposure to use content that is not necessarily Creative Commons licensed or is Creative Commons Non-Commercial? Has anyone asked to be removed?
    2. 06:24 Glen Reid - Seems like you should be able to check for a Creative Commons license to use the feed and display full-text if you would like.
    3. 07:16 Tantek Çelik discusses license relationship value in HTML.
    4. 08:49 - How does Google get away with caching pages? I use Firefox with AdBlock. Aren't you worried about that?
    5. 17:53 - How did you start four startups in such a short time in such disparate areas?
    6. 25:36 Russell Beattie - What is your long-term vision for Technorati?
    7. 34:15 Gordon Mohr - How has Technorati been funded and is there a point in time in which it switched from being hard to fund to being easy?
    8. 50:32 - Besides the money where does the VC add value to you? What makes the VC more than just the money itself?
    9. 53:51 - Do the VCs vary the amount of risk they are willing to swallow?
    10. 55:41 Joyce Park - At the last 106 Miles we had Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, we were particularly interested in their partnership since they have done multiple things together. You, on the other hand, have gone from being CTO -- the technical guy -- to being the guy. Could you tell us about that?
    11. 65:00 Jeremy Zawodny - How do you go about your decision making process? How do you decide when to drop everything and focus on a big event versus long-term roadmaps?
  6. Feb24

    Rumor: Yahoo! has purchased Flickr

    Yahoo! supposedly purchased Flickr last week and will make an official announcement on March 1. I have heard similar chatter and frequent Flickr sightings on the Yahoo! campus. How will Flickr manage its community in a buyout situation? What will happen to pro-level users? It seems like Pyra all over again.

    [Update 22:02] Two sources claiming one degree of separation tell me the rumors are true. Purchase price is rumored to be around $40 million. Caterina Fake neither confirms nor denies the claim. I guess we will know more in five days.

  7. Feb23

    Microsoft issues security patch resets home pages to MSN

    BusinessWeek: "It looks like Microsoft tried to get a little benefit for itself when it repaired a serious security flaw."

    Microsoft issued a security patch for MSN Messenger earlier this month that reset a user's browser home page to MSN by default. BusinessWeek reports similar behavior within the AntiSpyware program as well.

  8. Feb23

    Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast

    Tomorrow's Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast to the outside world. No IRC, no audio, and no video stream will be published of the event.

    We wanted to be able to have the most relevant technical participants in attendance, not just the employees who have cleared enough rounds of public relations training to be able to speak on behalf of their respective organizations.

    We have assembled many of the key players from the academic, search, and web publishing world to exchange ideas and implementations both in deployment and under development. I am excited to see what may come of the event.

    The tools we all use will benefit from the discussion, even if the end-users are not aware of all of the details involved behind-the-scenes.

    Just some of the organizations represented in their respective industries:

    Indexing

    1. Amazon.com
    2. Ask Jeeves
    3. Feedster
    4. Google
    5. Project Honey Pot
    6. Technorati
    7. Yahoo!

    Publishers

    1. America Online
    2. Blojsom
    3. Buzznet
    4. Google
    5. Microsoft
    6. PGP Corporation
    7. Six Apart
    8. UserLand
    9. WordPress
  9. Feb22

    Jason Kottke to work full time on his weblog

    Jason Kottke just announced he is going to run kottke.org full-time supported -- he hopes -- by user donations. "This is me taking online personal publishing seriously because I feel it deserves as much."

    Jason decided to not take advertising dollars but he does have prizes for his pledge drive. It will be interesting to see if Jason can make his dream come true!

  10. Feb21

    Charlie Rose February 15 episode on weblogs

    I just uploaded the full audio of the February 15, 2005 episode of The Charlie Rose Show featuring Glenn Reynolds, Ana Marie Cox, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Trippi. The MP3 file is 15.6 megabytes in size and 34 minutes and 7 seconds in length.

  11. Feb21

    Netflix San Francisco subscriber numbers

    Netflix CEO Reed Hastings claims "one of every nine residents of San Francisco is a Netflix subscriber" in tomorrow's New York Times. Seems a bit high to me.

  12. Feb19

    Six Apart article in AP

    The Associated Press is running a pretty funny article about Six Apart. The quotes about Mena cracked me up.

    Ben is shy and gets uncomfortable when people talk about him," said Andrew Anker, Six Apart's executive vice president of corporate development. "Mena gets upset when everyone is not talking about her every day.

    Mena turned over the CEO title to Berkowitz, who keeps her happy by calling her "Queen."

  13. Feb18

    Web Spam Squashing Summit

    I have been busy this week organizing a Web Spam Squashing Summit to bring together key players involved in publishing and indexing content on the world wide web. Participation is limited to persons involved in creating tools that will affect a solution to the problem affecting our industries.

    Getting all the key players together in one room is no easy task. Invitations were sent out to everyone we knew played a substantial role in the weblog and indexing industries. Dave Sifry put up a weblog post to invite anyone we may have overlooked to express interest and tell us a little bit more about their solutions and involvement.

    The Web Spam Squashing Summit is a technical summit and the limited space graciously provided by Yahoo! will be filled with persons with the ability to positively contribute to the discussion.

  14. Feb17

    Jerry Brown starts a weblog

    Oakland mayor Jerry Brown has started a weblog on TypePad to discuss the issues of interest to Oakland and to provide a direct voice. His first post was crossposted to the San Francisco Chronicle and currently has 54 comments.

    I'm glad to see all the lively responses to my entry into the blogosphere. I welcome the robust debate.

  15. Feb16

    Technorati mention on Charlie Rose

    Tuesday's Charlie Rose show featured a main segment on weblogs with Glenn Reynolds, Anna Marie Cox, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Trippi as guests. Fourty-two minutes into the program Charlie Rose asks what people can do to find the voices of interest in the world of weblogs.

    Charlie Rose: "How do you find out people who are showing a particularly incisive mind and ability to communicate?"
    Glenn Reynolds: "If I had a big organization, like say if I ran The New York Times or some piece of it, I would pay somebody -- and you wouldn't have to pay them a lot, it's not very hard -- to just plug the URL for every New York Times story into Technorati which will then give you a list of every blog that links to that story and see what people say. And if you find a bunch of people saying there's a mistake in it, I'd run a correction *snap* just like that and I'd credit somewhere on the website the blogs that pointed it out. And you would turn a bunch of adversaries into a bunch of unpaid assistant editors and fact-checkers overnight. And I don't understand why more organizations don't think that way."
    Charlie Rose: They might after this program.

    A great mention of what Technorati is all about and how companies can involve weblogs in collaborative reporting and editing.

    I grabbed an audio clip of the full comment as well. (792 kilobytes in size, 51 seconds in length)

  16. Feb15

    Internet Explorer 7.0 to launch before Longhorn

    A new version of Internet Explorer will launch before Longhorn. A beta version of Internet Explorer 7.0 will be available by this summer. Gates made the announcement during a keynote presentation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

  17. Feb14

    Six Apart site redesign

    I just noticed the new website design over at Six Apart. Lots of colors and rounded corners. They used real employees and not models or stock images to decorate their pages. Every page on the site is powered by Movable Type. Mule Design handled the redesign.

    Their news and events feeds are passed through FeedBurner. The Movable Type home page is now a subdirectory of Six Apart. Six Apart added a contact form for security vulnerabilities.

  18. Feb14

    WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn arrives

    WordPress 1.5 is now available for download. If you are upgrading you should follow directions and "reward yourself with a cold soda and some candy."

    If you are in the San Francisco area Matt Mullenweg is hosting an upgrade party tomorrow night.

  19. Feb11

    MythTV 0.17 now available

    MythTV 0.17 is now available. MythTV is an open-source home media center platform using Linux, MySQL, and other goodies.

    The new release boasts FireWire capture and increased support for Mac OS X and HDTV among other features.

  20. Feb11

    Yahoo! Slurp crawl delay

    You can control the minimum delay between accesses for Yahoo!'s Slurp crawler by adding a "Crawl-delay" line to your robots.txt.

    User-agent: Slurp
    Crawl-delay: 20

    Thank you Yahoo! Search Blog!

  21. Feb10

    Orb Networks presentation at Mobile Monday

    Ted Shelton of Orb Networks

    Ted Shelton of Orb Networks was the final Mobile Monday presentation. Orb Networks offers media streaming from your broadband connection and Windows XP computer to any Internet-connected device with a web browser and RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. You can browse and listen to music, movies, and television from your home computer while you are away from your desktop PC.

    Orb Networks started in July 2004 and launched its first product at last month's Consumer Electronics Show. They do not have to pay licensing fees since users have already licensed their own content. The top use of Orb is streaming music. Orb is a platform, not a network.

    Orb currently charges $10 a month to stream content from your PC and determine the best encoding rate for your current device and data connection. They currently have over 2000 users. The next product release will allow members to share images.

    I recorded the entire Orb Networks presentation as well as the question and answer session. The MP3 recording is 23 minutes and 55 seconds in length and a 10.8 megabyte download.

  22. Feb10

    MobiTV presentation at Mobile Monday

    MobiTV guy

    Alan Moskowitz of MobiTV was the third presenter at this month's Mobile Monday meeting. MobiTV delivers 24 channels of live television to your mobile phone for $10 a month on top of your carrier's data plan. They are powered by Java and claim to be one of the first recurring revenue applications using Java. You can channel surf on your phone with little effort. Alan shared some interesting statistics on MobiTV.

    • Mobile television use is 5.65 minutes per session with approximately 2.34 sessions per day.
    • Live television is used more often than their clips product due to its more intuitive interface and simplified choices.
    • Viewing hours are surprisingly evenly distributed with some rush-hour peaks.
    • The most popular moments were the Scott Peterson trial and Game 7 of the Boston Red Sox versus the New York Yankees for the 2004 American League Championship.
    • Comedy skits are watched to completion.

    The sweet spot for the service is transition content somewhere in between fun and learning. The Daily Show and late night talk show monologues provide viewers with a quick synopsis of the day's news in a fun atmosphere. MobiTV is currently expanding to the UK and Japan.

    I recorded the entire MobiTV presentation as well as the question and answer session. The MP3 recording is 19 minutes and 20 seconds in length and a 8.8 megabyte download.

  23. Feb10

    Caterpillar Mobile presentation at Mobile Monday

    The second presentation from Mobile Monday was Anita Wilhelm of Caterpillar Mobile. Anita was a student of Marc Davis at Berkeley.

    Caterpillar Mobile's current product is a cameraphone game called Zooke. Zooke allows its members to create challenges for all members or only members of an immediate social circle. You might be on a mission to find the best George Bush bumper sticker in Berkeley and have other game players rate your findings. It is a community-driven reality play experience that makes everyone's day a little more exciting with minimal effort.

    I recorded Anita's entire presentation as well as the question and answer session. The MP3 recording is 20 minutes and 26 seconds in length and a 9.3 megabyte download.

  24. Feb10

    Garage Cinema Research presentation at Mobile Monday

    On Monday I attended the Mobile Monday meeting at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View. There was an impressive set of presenters all focused on mobile media. The first presenter was Marc Davis of UC Berkeley and the director of Garage Cinema Research.

    Garage Cinema Research is interested in adding metadata through context-aware applications. You can infer data about the general location of a cameraphone user from their cell tower triangulation, the time of day, and popular photography subjects in the area. If a user adds a category to their photograph, a server can return a best guess of the object in the photograph.

    In the first stage of their system two years ago his group focused on identifying the subject of a photograph. Garage Cinema Research is now focused on helping you figure out with who you would like to share your photographs. Your social network allows you to infer content and use that content to determine the interested parties. Initial research has shown a 200% increase in photography with the sharing sensor enabled.

    I recorded Marc's entire presentation as well as the question and answer session. The MP3 recording is 19 minutes and 43 seconds in length and a 9 megabyte download.

  25. Feb10

    Technorati office photographs

    Technorati office sign

    Last Friday I took some photographs of the Technorati office space to share with our community. We are located in what used to be a printing press building. What a perfect location blogging company! We even have a printing press in our building lobby.

    Enjoy!

  26. Feb09

    NewsGator platform roadmap

    Greg Reinacker just announced some big new products from NewsGator.

    NewsGator will now make a play behind the firewall with a product loosely named NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator Enterprise Software will integrate with Exchange and Active Directory and interact with Outlook Web Access, Blackberry, and Exchange ActiveSync without needing to install NewsGator Outlook Edition on desktop computers across the organization.

    Greg also announced a white label version of NewsGator Online and there will be many APIs on the way for NewsGator Online.

    The feedback loop taking place on Greg's blog is very interesting. Greg is actively engaging his community and it seems to be paying off. These same users will evangelize his product within the enterprise.

  27. Feb08

    43 Things is funded by Amazon

    Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon discovered 43 Things has a substantial relationship with Amazon.com. 43 Things helps users set and track their goals such as reading "Code Complete" or take more pictures.

    Why hide it?

    Update: Robot Co-op responds.

  28. Feb08

    Stewart Butterfield interview on Flickr

    Richard Koman interviewed Stewart Butterfield of Flickr about how people use Flickr through the site, APIs, and how Flickr will make a business out of photo sharing.

    • Flickr has 3.5 million photos, 82 percent are public.
    • 71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in Flickr.
  29. Feb08

    Ask Jeeves purchases Bloglines

    Ask JeevesI heart Bloglines

    Ask Jeeves officially purchased Bloglines. Mark Fletcher and his team will move to the Ask Jeeves remote office in Los Gatos where Mark will be GM of Bloglines. Teoma will power Bloglines search. Bloglines will gather and monetize users' attention data for contextual advertising. Bloglines launched 18 months ago in June 2003

    Official Announcements

    • Ask Jeeves. "Ask Jeeves plans to leverage these technologies across its search and portal brands, and as of today, Bloglines' Web search capability will be powered by Ask Jeeves' search technology."
    • Ask Jeeves Weblog. "There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren't already on their roadmap"
    • Bloglines acquisition FAQ. "Terms of Service and Privacy Policies remain unchanged."
    • Mark Fletcher's Weblog. "We don't think that world-class blog search exists yet; with Teoma and Bloglines that will happen."

    Commentary from journalists granted interviews

    • CNET News.com. "The average user of Bloglines visits the site four times a day."
    • John Battelle. "I'd be surprised if the deal was less than $25 million."
    • Marc Hedlund. "Bloglines builds the profile, Teoma runs the ads, and both sides win."

    Others of note

    • Susan Mernit. [D]oesn't the valuations of the other aggregators suddenly seem higher?

    Ongoing resources

  30. Feb05

    NewsFire 1.0

    David Watanabe just released version 1.0 of NewsFire, a minimalist and speedy feed aggregator for Mac OS X. NewsFire is shareware and may be purchased for $20.

    I still use NetNewsWire but NewsFire has impressed me for many months with its speed and ease of use. Please open the application to AppleScript so I can write some hacks!

  31. Feb05

    Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines?

    Mary Hodder reports Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines and Mark Fletcher will be a Jeeves employee on Monday. Is this true?

    Mark Fletcher is presenting a 20-minute case study this Tuesday on RSS syndication, ad splicing, and blogging at the Media Center event. Perhaps the announcement is meant to coincide with the conference and Mark will use this time to talk about the new Bloglines.

    Update: Bloglines acquisition is official. Supposedly announced on Friday with an embargo of midnight tonight.

  32. Feb04

    Tag-aware RSS feeds

    Brian Del Vecchio wrote a long entry about about splicing a RSS feed by tag and how aggregator developers can create more tag-aware applications. It is possible within the RSS specification, but most feed authors have overlooked how to properly declare tags within their feeds. Flickr does not include categories with its RSS 2.0 feeds and Del.icio.us feeds use Dublin Core subject to provide space-separated tags.

    Before the feed aggregators can make your life easier we need to all do a better job as content producers to provide valuable information for our users.

    RSS 2.0

    Each RSS 2.0 feed has an optional category sub-element with an optional domain attribute to designate a specific categorization taxonomy. You can have as many category elements as you need to with mixed or no domains.

    1. <category domain="http://del.icio.us/tag">foo</category>
    2. <category domain="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags">foo</category>
    3. <category domain="http://www.technorati.com/tag">foo</category>

    Using the category element with the domain attribute set to the best definition of the tag's context allows for easy recognition of tags within the aggregator. It also allows a user to search their own database or create smart lists for all items with Flickr or Technorati tags, or build into the application a list of known tagging domains for special status.

    IETF Atom

    The current Atom draft provides similar capabilities through the use of category elements with a scheme URI.

    1. <category scheme="http://del.icio.us/tag" term="foo" label="Del.icio.us tag for foo"/>
    2. <category scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags" term="foo" label="Flickr tag for foo"/>
    3. <category scheme="http://www.technorati.com/tag" term="foo" label="Technorati tag for foo"/>
  33. Feb02

    Ask Jeeves weblog

    Ask Jeeves launched a new weblog powered by TypePad. Bloglines is featured in the sidebar as top blogs and most popular blog links.

  34. Feb02

    Amazon Prime

    Amazon.com introduced a membership program called Amazon Prime that provides free two-day shipping for a yearly fee of $80. You can invite up to four family members in the same household to share the same Amazon Prime benefits at no extra cost.

    The household option is especially interesting. I might sign-up and share the account among members of my work family.

  35. Feb02

    Findory Neighbors

    Findory added a Findory Neighbors to help visualize the relationships between weblogs. I did an ego search and the results are interesting.

  36. Feb02

    Technorati Tags cleans up, adds RSS output

    I have only been at Technorati for one day but we already have two new features I am proud to talk about.

    If you have an API key you can now receive a RSS feed containing the latest weblog posts with a given tag using TagQuery.

    Our tags page is now more compliant with web standards through the use of lists and emphasis elements. Tantek posted about the decisions behind his changes to the page's markup.

    It has been interesting to see all the different uses of tags from companies interested in being included in Technorati's tags pages. If you use tags on your site contact us and let us know how we can be of service! My new work e-mail address is niall _at_ technorati.

  37. Feb01

    Feedster redesign

    Feedster has a new user interface on their web pages. A definite improvement, and the redesign helps users start using the site right away in varying capacities.

    The home page is not valid XHTML nor valid CSS.

  38. Feb01

    Google introduces Founders Awards

    Google employees are now eligible for quarterly awards of restricted Google stock worth $12 million vested over four years awarded to teams but distributed based on individual contribution. More details will be available after Google's conference call with investors later today.

    The new plan is a way for Google to provide incentives for new employees with a $190 strike price.

  39. Feb01

    MSN Search relaunch

    MSN Search relaunched with music and Encarta integration as well as RSS results.

    Bill Gates: "Input from millions of our customers - including me - was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be."

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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