Niall Kennedy's home on the web
PubSub created an events page for the Golden Globe Awards as an extension of their provided sample subscriptions. (via Gary Price)
PubSub also has a slick Flash demo of its services linked from the home page. The demo provides usage cases and execution using PubSub’s services.
I have more referral traffic this week from the Technorati Developer’s Contest page than domestic Google and Yahoo! combined! Ranchero has about a third as many referrals as Technorati. Technorati released some new features this week but holding off on the announcement draws more attention to my work. Thanks!
A new version of the Atom sydication format working draft is online. There are element changes such as a change in the publish date and updated tags, and new category support. The new draft also adds a length attribute to link elements, enabling podcasting and other applications. Format freeze is supposed to happen Monday, January 17.
Last week Starbucks announced a new drinkable chocloate beverage called Chantico. Beginning last Saturday consumers could purchase a six-fluid ounce cup, creating many conversations across the blogosphere involving the new drink and the newly formed category of “drinkable chocolate.” This new product also provides a perfect opportunity to play the role of the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company tracking the reaction to a new product introduction.
How should we measure the reaction to a product that has been on the market only four days? With live search companies of course! I will use search engines Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub to compare the coverage of the keyword “Chantico” over the past 21 hours. Why 21 hours? I submitted the search to PubSub at midnight today PST so in the interest of parity I will restrict search results to the publish date given by each search engine.
Technorati provided the most results and the most recent example in this case. PubSub provided LiveJournal entries missed by Technorati. The best solution is to continue to use both services to catch all references. Feedster had a horrible showing.
Feedster had very few results, but their most recent value was closest to the value published on their page. Their publish date value for the most recent entry is eight minutes — 2005-01-11T23:10:50Z compared to the actual entry of 2005-01-11T22:02:14Z.
Technorati’s linkcreated value for the most recent entry in its watchlist was 2005-01-12T02:44:22Z while the page text referenced an equivalent value of 2005-01-12T05:02:29Z, a three hour difference. According to the weblog the posting was at 2005-01-11T07:52:41Z.
PubSub provided a most recent issued element value of 2005-01-12T08:31:19-05:00 and a server time of 2005-01-12T05:26:28Z. The same entry had a issued value of 2005-01-11T21:36:00Z in the feed.
Apple released the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle at this morning’s MacWorld Expo keynote address.
The Mac mini is available for $500 in an anodized aluminum enclosure housing a 1.25GHz G4 processoor, 40 GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, slot-loading Combo Drive, and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card with dedicated memory.
The iPod shuffle is available in 512 MB and 1 GB flavors for $100 and $150 respectively. The music player has no display and doubles as a USB data stick. The new iTunes Autofill feature should be very interesting for loading up the latest podcasts. What is the “(2)” for in the picture you might ask? “Do not eat iPod shuffle.”
Technorati now supports site search as a beta feature. Pass the “from” parameter in your URL string with your desired base URL and you can restrict your search to just those references. Technorati also has a searchlet for home page integration.
As an example you can search my weblog for the keyword “technorati.”
Just spotted on Adam Hertz’s blog links to Technorati tag URLs. The syntax is http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + keyword. Adam added a Technorati tag and a contest tag for a recent entry. A sign of things to come from Technorati? Could be a decentralized del.icio.us. Adam is Technorati’s VP of Engineering.
A Technorati cosmos search for the base URL shows Adam is the only known source using the tag links.
Kevin is playing along too, this time with a subdomain.
MSN Search beta returns your search results as RSS. On the search results page view source. Right after the copyright statement you will notice <div id="rss_feed" class="clear"> and a link to the RSS feed for your search. Use the parameter q for your keywords (properly escaped of course) and the format parameter should be rss.
Very interesting. Yes, Feedster and Technorati will still have a fresher index, but they now have to make a stronger business case. You can add {frsh-100} to your query string to give fresher results a higher weighting but the search results are not LIFO, leading to constantly changing results due to the weightings of MSN.
Google has an archive of Usenet postings since 1981. Google has a page full of memorable moments from twenty years of postings.
Lots of interesting reading and a reminder I have not yet been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I plan to attend the Steve Case and Walt Mossberg event on Wednesday night for another good history lesson.
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos!
This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won a runner-up prize!
NetNewsWire 2.0b10 added support for Yahoo! News as a special search engine subscription feed. I thought Technorati should be added to that list too, but the issue of 500 daily queries per API key might impede implementation and user experience. So I hacked my own solution.
Download the AppleScript, decompress, and place the file in under the NetNewsWire scripts directory: Application Support > NetNewsWire > Scripts. You should now see “Technorati Cosmos” in NetNewsWire’s AppleScript menu.
When you first run the script you will be prompted for a Technorati API key. If you have any problems with the persistence of the key you can edit the AppleScript and enter the key directly.
This AppleScript has been tested with NetNewsWire 2.0b10. The code is available for modification, integration, and reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
