Sun Microsystems hosted a programming summit yesterday with many big names in programming in attendance. Tim Bray has a good write-up about the day, the process putting together the event, and some of the outcomes. GroovyJames Stachan JavaGraham HamiltonGilad BrachaMartin Buchholz ParrotDan Sugalski PerlLarry Wall PythonGuido van RossumSamuele PedroniSean McGrath Good to see so many major coders in one spot to share ideas. Tim predicts "that as time goes by, more and more of the code written in the Java ecosystem won't be in Java. This is a good thing."…
Edward Tufte is giving a lecture at Stanford tonight at 7:30 p.m. about his new book Beautiful Evidence. Tufte will discuss the theory of analytical design and methods for displaying eviidence. He will display the design decisions for reporting tools such as the Columbia shuttle investigation. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is on my Christmas list and I have been wanting to learn more of Professor Tufte's methods for years. If you would like a ride to or from the event I will be driving from San Mateo and returning to San Francisco….
Which company is the number one player in live search in terms of total traffic and user share? The above chart plots total market share Feedster, Technorati, and PubSub over the past month compared to all sites as calculated by Hitwise. Feedster and Technorati jostle for the top position while PubSub is way below. I expected to see a clear winner and was surprised at the results….
Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal writes about how marketers increasingly turn to weblogs for marketing data. The article mentions Volkswagen utilizing reporting tools from Techdirt to keep informed of "items that appear on blogs and message boards, as well as in mainstream news outlets." Sony hired Intelliseek to find out how its customers compared its new digital Walkman to Apple's iPod. Karen Rizzo, director of marketing for Kryptonite, mentions how rapidly their product's reputation fell apart online when a message in an online bicycle forum spread across the online world. I expect to see more automated reporting tools…
Bloglines is now available in Spanish, Japanese, traditional Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese. Mark should open up the interface and allow users to add their own launguages like Google's interface….
A few months ago Jeremy Zawodny posted his Movable Type template for a RSS feed of all comments regardless of their approval status. I liked the idea as a way to keep e-mail clutter to a minimum. I took the idea and created my own recent comments RSS feed template using no namespaces or CDATA. The feed validates. I created a new index template and set the RSS file to regenerate with every index build. Every time you post your comments feed is rebuilt. For some people that will be not often enough but for me it works well….
Jason Kottke's recent experience with Sony has him reconsidering his role as a publisher. Is the hassle worth it? Only big publishers have the budgets to deal with any hint of legal issues. I raised this issue at Lawrence Lessig's Law & Blogging session at BloggerCon. Regardless of fair use, being on the right side of the law, it is difficult to gather the resources to respond to legal harassment. Lessig differentiated between a "nastygram" and an actual legal filing. Jason has demonstrated good judgment and community building in the past. I received an e-mail from Jason before he pointed…
Howard Rheingold is teaching a class titled Toward a Literacy of Cooperation at Stanford on Wednesdays from 4:15 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. from January 5, 2005 until March 16. The class covers the economics of cooperation and will utilize weblogs and wikis to communicate between classes and with people from all over the world. Syllabus readings include Smart Mobs, Eric Bonabeau, Joi Ito, and Micah Sifry are all required readings. Non-students who live in the area can show up to the course without signing up.If you live outside the area we hope to be able to deliver a videostream to…
Ben Edelman read through the 63-page EULA for Gator and found some pretty interesting clauses. You agree that you will not use, or encourage others to use, any unauthorized means for the removal of the GAIN AdServer, or any GAIN-Supported Software from a computer. Ad-Aware and Spybot are of course not on the approved list. Gator displays advertisements on a computers with its software installed. These advertisements are triggered by the sites you browse, often showing a competitive offering for e-commerce sites. Like spam, the way to make companies like Claria (makers of Gator) go away is to simply not…
Python 2.4 is now available. Unification of integers and long integers, better floating point number support, multiple calls per XML-RPC operation, cookie support, and a subprocess module for spawning platform-independent processes are just some of the new features….
Red Herring published an interview with David Sifry of Technorati. The questions are pretty hard hitting and you get more background on Dave than the typical Technorati mention, like what he remembers about his high school prom. Secret to success? Work your ass off. Q. As much as Technorati is popular today, the company's position in the industry can be considered tenuous. Do you have an exit strategy? A. Watch this space. Q. Are you profitable? A. Not yet….
My weblog is currently licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I allow comments for every post, subject to my approval. Other persons are therefore able to add their own content to an individual entry page. The work is the individual entry on my weblog. By adding a comment a person is essentially creating a derivative of the work, an annotation to an entry. Are comments considered part of the work and therefore subject to the Creative Commons license? If so, I should probably remind posters that their submission is subject to the license. Any thoughts? Sidenote: Movable Type does…
The Playlist Club in London promotes an open DJ atmosphere where club patrons sign-up for 15-minute sets playable from an iPod. The best DJs of the night, judged by audience reaction, win prizes. It's like an open-mic night for DJs! (via PC Advisor)…
News.com officially announced support for TrackBank and Pingback links. Search engine optimizers are already excited by the prospect of "anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return" from the PageRank 8 site. CNET is also referencing TrackBack and PingBack URLs as link relations in the page header. I like the TrackBack button for readers CNET uses for readers to look at other related sources. I need to do some more reading on Pingback, still not sure what differentiates it from TrackBack….
Tonight I was thinking about the importance of the number of indexed weblogs when choosing a search service. PubSub claims to track 6.6 million sources, Technorati claims to track 4.7 million weblogs, and Feedster claims to track 1.1 million feeds. What can the target audience of these services do with this information? I decided to do some comparative research from the point of view of a marketing department tracking the buzz around their new advertising campaign. Kevin Kringle is a digital word-of-mouth marketing campaign created by Best Buy and SMG Reverb. The marketing campaign is officially under a month old…
I just finished watching The Charlie Rose Show from Wednesday, November 16. John Doerr, Bill Joy, and Jeff Taylor participated in a panel discussion at a TechNet summit at Google HQ. Below is my attempt to transcribe the first question by Charlie Rose and the second part of Bill Joy's response. Charlie Rose: What's going to transform the Internet the most in the next 10 years? Bill Joy: We go out to this sea of information and in some sense we go fishing. Google is the best fishing rod. But in fact our lives are overwhelmed with information that's coming…
The Canvas is a café and gallery located on the edge of Golden Gate Park in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. It is a nice, bright space with its own parking lot, good food, and interesting people. They also have free wireless Internet access and you will notice many laptops alongside food and drink. On a sunny weekend The Canvas can be crowded, and in the past The Canvas turned off their wireless Internet access to encourage turnover during their peak times. This weekend The Canvas decided to turn off all wall outlets, in what I assume is…
Russell Beattie will join Yahoo! on Monday as a consultant in corporate development and strategy. Congratulations, you held out and waited for something good to happen, and did a lot of thinking about what works best in your future. I commute from San Francisco to San Mateo every day, a bit short of Sunnyvale or I'd be up for a carpool. Yahoo! needs to compete with Google and get their own magic bus. My first thoughts? Russell needs a gadget budget so he can play with new phones, services, and operating systems….
Adam Bosworth gave a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in New York yesterday. Lots of good content covering programming languages, information overload, the need for simple technologies to warm people up to a bigger idea, and how the experts will still create the complex technologies while the simple methods coexist. "You want to see the future. Don't look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. On the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0: There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this…
This morning when I checked my e-mail I found a note from Liz Westover sent to the Technorati Developers' e-mail list. Liz mentioned some changes to the site David Sifry would announce later in the day but the developers received early notice. One of the features mentioned was very similar to feature I knew existed behind-the-scenes on the Technorati site. Something anyone could enable but was unpublicized and not publicly known. Tantek Çelik and Richard Ault let me preview a new site feature and I was supposed to keep my mouth shut since the feature was not yet public. Well…
Blogware has a site-search feature using Technorati integrated into Blogware 1.21 and Technorati Cosmos links on every post. Blogware users can enable the Cosmos links in the advanced section of posting defaults….
Verizon Wireless announced Ringback Tones, ringtones for incoming calls. When someone calls a user who subscribes to the service they hear music instead of a ring. Ringback Tones is a $1 per month service and users can license songs for $2 per year. Now available in Sacramento and Southern California, nationwide by mid-2005. You can play for New Kids on the Block for all those people you wish would stop calling you….
Today I downloaded an album from iTunes and the complete download of the album an alert box popped up reminding me to backup my music. To an iPod perhaps? Apple needs to make it easier for people to use their iPod as a backup device or at least turn a blind eye to the tools that help people backup and retrieve their music using Apple's hardware. I purchased Jack Johnson's iTunes Originals. Good narratives between tracks, but only a few of the tracks are originals….
