EContent Magazine profiles Kinja

Kinley Levack profiled Nick Denton’s Kinja.com in the October issue of EContent Magazine. Product Manager Matt Hamer provides some behind-the-scenes insights into Kinja.

Because many of Kinja’s users are getting their feet wet in the blogging world, they neither need, nor are expected to have, any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes how-tos. Users add new sites using the regular URL, at which point, “it is queued for parsing.” Hamer says. “We don’t require our users to find, understand, or enter the URL of the Weblog’s feed, if it is available at all. Our crawler respects the robots exclusion protocol, so if it is allowed, we attempt to find posts and permalinks by parsing HTML.” If an HTML parse is unsuccessful, Kinja automatically reverts to other sources, such as Atom or RSS feeds. “A cleaned excerpt of each post is stored in our system for digest display,” according to Hamer. “After a Weblog is added to the system, it is visited periodically at a frequency based on the actual number of posts found. All the Weblogs in Kinja have been added to digests by users.

Technorati Sherlock Mozilla search plugin

I just finished writing a Sherlock/Mozilla plugin for Technorati (zip, gzip). Although my sidebar item code works in simulation it breaks in Mozilla 1.7.3 and Mozilla 1.8 alpha 4. The same sidebar sends my next results code to Ask Jeeves for some odd reason as well.

Unzip the archive to your “searchplugins” directory under the Mozilla or Firefox parent directory. You should have two files: the source and a PNG image. To make Technorati your default search engine in Mozilla you need to select it from the drop-down list under Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet Search.

Once you have added Technorati to your list of Mozilla search engines you should be able to perform a Technorati search using the Search Panel sidebar (F9).

You can pass keywords or an URL.

The same plugin is supposed to work with Sherlock 2. I have Sherlock 3 and because Sherlock 3 uses a different structure I am unable to test Sherlock compatibility. If you are using Mac OS 10.2 please try the code in Sherlock and let me know!

Technorati Hackathon reflections

Last night Technorati held a Hackathon at their new offices near SBC Park. There were about 30 people in attendance including the Technorati crew. Some remote users joined via IRC. Good pizza, the beer did not run out, and the salad was almost untouched. Thanks to Liz Westover for putting together the event. Dave and Tantek spoke about Technorati and its APIs. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and our interests related to Technorati and the hackathon. Ideas were thrown on the whiteboard but by the end of the introductions no one was interested in splitting up into groups and taking on an API project. Aaron Swartz created the best -and possibly the only – hack of the night by using the Python and the Technorati API to deliver a cosmos listing for each member of the United States House of Representatives and Senate. There were some issues about how to locate the best representation of that person’s cosmos since most sources would not point at the person’s official URL and there are name overlaps such as Adam Smith of Washington. Micah Sifry offered money for the development of the political hack and it was a successful strategy. I spent some time editing the Technorati API, attention.xml, and XOXO docs. Talked with Kevin Marks about some possible changes to the Technorati user experience and pitched allowing an expanded user profile. I also edited the Hackathon wiki to include as much data from the night as I could. I started working on a Java implimentation of the new attention.xml storage API. Around 1 a.m. I packed up and went home. I am unsure if the event was a success for Technorati. Dave must have been disappointed by the lack of hacking. I learned some things about Technorati.
  1. Once you claim a weblog you need to leave the claim code on your site to keep the claim.
  2. Technorati’s API includes outbound links. You can pass a weblog’s URL and see all of the sources linked by that person.
I like the new Technorati offices. Better location and not as much empty space compared to their old office. You attract better people when you are less than a block from a bookstore. [Update: Dave thinks the event was a success and wants to start having Saturday hackathons once a month at Technorati.]

Adidas MLS soccer deal: 10 years for $100 million

Adidas secured exclusive rights to Major League Soccer clothing and equipment for the next 10 years. The deal is reportedly worth over $100 million according to The Financial Times and $150 million according to the Washington Post. Adidas will be the only sports brand advertised during television broadcasts of MLS games and English language broadcasts of the 2006 World Cup. Adidas was able to sign an entire league for less than one-fifth the cost of Nike’s £300 deal with Manchester United. Hopefully all twelve team’s jerseys will not use the same style. Adidas is currently using its Shark jersey with teams around the world.