Category — internet

“To ‘follow’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re following is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost,” says James. “I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘follower’ is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life,” he says.

A load of Twitter - Times Online

Me <3 Hacker Newss:

Ask HN: Is it always this meta?: I'm rather new around here, so I don't know the full history of HN. Are there always so many meta discussions going on? Is this just a phase?

[Answer by mechanical_fish] Yes and no. This is the community's immune response. A couple of weeks after an influx of new users, the community stages a massive navel-gazing festival designed to test the new folks' mettle.

Once we shake off the people who don't really want to be here, we'll return to our usual diet of startup announcements, website reviews, complaints about techcrunch, artfully disguised attempts to reignite holy wars so that we can all spectate, and questions that have been asked every six months since the beginning of the site. Not to mention: news and information.

— NOTICE: This has been an attempt at humor. Do not refer to it as a “theory”, lest ye be mocked. Please phrase replies in haiku form.

Hacker News | Ask HN: Is it always this meta?

Fascinating story of a link spreading through twitter, blogs, delicious and etcetera. Still unfolding.

royal bacon - The anatomy of a viral campaign

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted,” wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

“Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers.

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.

While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.

BBC News - Study shows how spammers cash in

This week’s printed version of The Economist carries an article on blogging, Oh grow up. Blogging, the article argues, has now become mainstream, and this “looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death”.

While I agree that blogging has become mainstream, I am skeptical that it “is no longer what it was”. As an explanation of the change The Economist quotes Calacanis‘ Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging:

“Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it,” he offered by way of explanation. It was, he said, “the pressure” of staying on the A-list—ie, of keeping his blog so big and impersonal—that got him. Only a few years ago, so few people blogged that being a blogosphere celebrity required little more than showing up. Now it takes hard work. And vitriol. “Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarised, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it,” Mr Calacanis lamented.

The term blog is a contraction of “web log”, and was originally used to describe a personal website where the author maintained an informal record of events, musings, rants, photos and etcetera. What The Economist calls “professional blogs” are simply online media outlets with comments; they are the opinion columns (and, sometimes, newspapers) of the twenty-first century.

The pressure that Calacanis talked about only exists for those who are interested in reaching a massive audience, those that are trying hard to become “internet famous” or to make money directly from their blog. But those aren’t bloggers in the traditional sense; “online columnists” might be a better suited term.

The Economist is conveniently missing some facts suggesting that Calacanis hasn’t retired at all from his online posting activity:

• Calacanis ditched his blog for Jason’s List. From the note on Jason’s blog: “you can find my commentary/blog posts on my private mailing list now”. What makes this list “private” is that the archives aren’t publicly available; instead, you have to subscribe first to the list, which you can do for free and as long as you use your real name.
• After the dramatic farewell, Calacanis’ blog has seen 8 new posts (so far) after. A couple of those new posts are repostings of e-mails he sent to his private mailing list.

To quote Dave Winer:

Now if you ask me — there never was such a thing as a pro blogger. It’s a contradiction in terms. It’s like calling someone a professional amateur. It’s like salty orange juice, a drink whose taste is derived from its acidity. Blogging is an amateur activity. It’s users writing about what they do, not professionals writing about what users do.

In the quest for the definitive blog ranking system, some optimistic guys (and maybe gals, who knows) have launched today the cleverly-named site blogged.

This is how it works: you submit your blog, with a description and some keywords (which they call tags, which is, you know, more 2.0 and stuff), and their team of editors will eventually review and rate your submission.

This innovative approach to organizing and ranking web-content has only two minor problems:

1. Editors need to be extremely well-versed in the categories they are responsible for. Their opinions and tastes should be in line with those of users.
2. You need an army of editors. A big one.

So maybe they can hire lots and lots of editors. Maybe they already have, who knows. But is their editor hiring process good enough? Judging from my initial explorations, the answer is “No!”.

See for yourselves: blogged Programming Blog Directory. Horrifying, isn’t it?

According to blogged, About.com: Web Design / HTML (grade: 9.3) is a better programming blog than Joel on Software (grade: 9.1), and the best programming blog of all is Slashdot (grade: 9.9), Coding Horror coming in a distant second (grade: 9.5).

Anybody that has spent any time at all reading programming blogs (e.g. me) can tell you that neither Slashdot nor About.com: Web Design / HTML are blogs, and neither of them is really about programming.

I guess the blogged guys have never heard about Yahoo! and why/how it lost in search. And I guess they haven’t noticed Technorati’s struggles, either. Sigh. If they would have just read the right blogs…

Seems today is Pacman day.

First I find, via Rinzewind, a text-adventure version of the classic game.

Some hours later I run into a beautiful Steampunk reinterpretation (via Boing Boing).

Such anachronism. And yet such beauty. :: sigh ::

Rashmi writes about the Calacanis-Winer “breakup” and asks Has anyone else noticed this trend - men being more open on their blogs?.

I don’t think men are being more open. I think these people have a clear case of diva-ism.

The blogosphere has given the so-called A-list bloggers an opportunity to behave as capricious prima donnas, and they are using it to the full. This is nothing new for men. Men have behaved like this in other spheres, such as the arts, for a long time.

But maybe it is not only the blogosphere what fosters this behavior. Perhaps it is also Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological gurus and “alpha-geeks”.

Lately I’ve been noticing that a big percentage of entry titles in the RSS feeds I read contain a numeral. Often these titles are of the form: “N ways of doing X” or “M best Ys.

This trend seems particularly pronounced in the del.icio.us/popular feed. As I write this, the top two popular bookmarks are Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google and Top 57 Wikis By Rank.

Today I noticed Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers, one of Jakob Nielsen’s last columns. The summary of the article goes:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Apparently writing numbers as numerals, instead of spelling them out, improves scannability of the text. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what our language teachers taught us.

And not only numerals make your facts easier to extract from the text, Nielsen claims that numerals can also increase your credibility:

Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.

This might explain the numbers-in-titles phenomenon: the “10″ in the 10 R’s to Apply if you Want to Succeed makes the title/article so credible that 668 people found fit to bookmark it. Scary stuff.

David, aka Mikus, has written a note on the predominance of Windows and IE among the platforms and browsers used by the readers of his blog (according to his server stats). Apparently only 32% of David’s readers use Firefox/Mozilla, and just 3% of them use Linux.

Here are the statistics for the traffic on anaulin.org:

So 44.17% of my readers use a browser that identifies itself as Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape (41.12%, 2.54% and 0.51%, respectively). And 10.15% use Linux. Surprising; I expected that my Mom’s use of Windows+IE would seriously skew the statistics.

I don’t know if my readership sample is more representative than David’s but, clearly, our blogs are visited by very different types of computer users. We could probably draw some interesting conclusions about the content in a blog just by looking at the platform and browser statistic for that site. For example, I would expect The Daily WTF to have an even heavier skew towards the Linux+Firefox crowd than my blog.

I wonder what are the stats for Slashdot. I bet these days it is mostly Windows+IE users visiting them…

At Las penas del Agente Smith I read that the guys that run El Manifestómetro [1] have launched Lo prometido es deuda, a wiki to track politicians’ electoral promises. The initiative has already made it into the mainstream media: El Pais has published an article about it.

A wiki containing quotes from politicians’ promises, with accompanying evidence, searchable by campaign and candidate name seems an interesting way to engage citizenship in an attempt to hold politicians responsible for their promises. I can imagine plenty of interesting ways of using the data: computing politicians with the most un-fulfilled promises, politicians that promise the most, trends in the kinds of things being promised, etc.

As the site becomes more mainstream, the amount of spamming and “improving” of entries will give the editors a hard time keeping the wiki honest. So if you are Spanish-speaking, and have some minutes to spare, have a look at the suggested tasks for editors, and sign up!

–
[1] El Manifestómetro tracks participation in Spanish demonstrations, to keep politician’s “improved” participation numbers in check.

I wanted to make a short break from work, so I decided to fool around on the internet a bit. The result: I ended up trying out Google Co-op, and creating Google Teleco, a custom search engine to search everything related to the ETSI Telecomunicacion UPM.

I included 25 web sites to search: the official site, the SlashDAT! site, all department sites I could find, and all student association sites that I could find and did not reside already under the below the etsit.upm.es domain. If you think I missed a site, you are welcome to add it yourself by clicking on the “Volunteer to contribute” link on the Google Teleco page. You can also add it to any page by including the code provided in the Add this search engine to your webpage link.

Take Google Teleco for a spin!

Now, how weird is this: Heatseek just launched. It is a browser for porn. Yes, exactly, an internet browser designed for the sole purpose of surfing for porn. Apparently it has a ‘panic button’, lets you create ‘playlists’, and encrypts everything you download.

It is Internet Explorer-based, and runs only on Windows. No safe porn surfing for Mac users.

From TechCrunch.

Google Mars is totally cool. Geeks rejoice!

Now I am waiting for the local Mars business search.

Diego has cast the “five weird habits” meme on me. The problem is, I don’t know which of my habits are strange. They all look perfectly normal to me. I’d better go and ask someone that can judge my habits objectively. Just give me a sec.

Ok, I’m back. This is what I got:

1. I ask ‘What?’ often even if I did understand what was said to me.
2. I am indecisive about parking spaces, so I take too long to choose a spot to park.
3. I scratch myself.
4. I don’ like The Beatles. (This is not a habit, though. And I consider it pure common sense, nothing strange about it.)
5. I get upset when people call me Russian, even though I look and sound Russian. (This is inaccurate, as I do not get upset. I merely get surprised. And the thing about me sounding Russian apparently only happens when I speak English, so it is not entirely true either.)

So there you have my five supposedly weird habits. Nothing strange about them, in my opinion. Now let’s see who should I damn with this curse… mmm… Ok, I would like to know five strange habits from the following people: Tatus, Helga and Fer.

In November 1999, I left a very secure job with Big Media for a startup technology company that I was pretty sure would be bankrupt within six months. Why would a 41-year-old father of three take a $25,000 pay cut to work with a bunch of guys who still got carded when they ordered beer with their pizza? It’s a long story, but one I now have lots of time to tell. This blog is partly about that, but mostly about what happened during the following five years and three months, while I served as Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google.

This is how the first post of Xooglers begins. It is a new blog written by Doug Edwards, who was Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google until recently. As the tag line says, Xooglers pretends to be “A gathering spot for ex-Googlers to reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search”. It might actually be an interesting read, specially if some ex-googlers join the conversation.

(via John Batelle’s Searchblog)

One of the (thousands of) reasons why posting is being irregular on this blog is that I’ve been spending some time setting up Planeta Teleco, together with Chema from Las Penas del Agente Smith.

Planeta Teleco is a planet-style aggregator for blogs related to one of my two alma maters, ETSIT UPM.

Although there is some polishing left to do, Planeta Teleco is now officialy up & running :: cheers ::. If you are somehow related to the ETSIT, and you want your blog syndicated on the Planeta, just send an e-mail to Chema or to me (details on the planet’s main page).

Scoble writes that his 11-year-old son Patrick has started a blog, which he nameds Mini Scobleizer. The tag line of Patrick’s blog is “I’m the son of a 40 year old blogger you can check his blog at scobleizer.wordpress.com/”.

Just the tag line just gives me a lot to think about. And not just the tag line.

A 11-year-old describing himself as the son of a famous blogger? Bragging in the first post that ‘my dad didn’t help me at all on this one’? Getting 29 comments (at the time of this writing) on your second post, probably just because your dad linked to you?

Interesting stuff. Never occurred to me to call myself Mini-Ulin. But then, I am 1,56m tall, so the ‘mini’ goes without saying, I suppose…

Over at business2blog I read that Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs buys a space station in Project Entropia for $100.000. Clive Thompson explains why it makes sense:

Because it’s just like owning the Mall of America — it’s a place to conduct business and make real-world cash. Indeed, Project Entropia currently has 236,000 registered accounts, and the game allows you to use Earth money to buy in-game currency, which makes it spectacular place for any entrepreneur to set up business, really.

Not only does it makes sense (to me, anyway), but it feels as the all those futuristic novels where people lived and transacted in virtual worlds as much as in the ‘real’ world are coming true. And really, why not? If you do some work and provide some services in-game, why not be paid for it with ‘real’ money?

Trying to think about the implications of this is making me dizzy. I’ll better go grab a tea. Talk to you later.

A little over two weeks ago I got an invite to beta-test TailRank, a site which promises to give you recommendations on blogs and other web content based on your personal interests. I suppose the idea is to turn it into something like Last.fm for blogs.

As soon as I got the invite I registered, and share a couple of links. But I found it difficult to understand how was I supposed to use the site, and what should I do in order to get better recommendations. Also, it seemed to me at most recommended items had been shared by Kevin Burton, the creator of TailRank himself, who seems to be the most active user, as well. It didn’t seem too interesting to read items shared by the same person, so seeing no clear value in spending more time playing around, I decided to wait a bit and try it some time later.

This morning I decided to give it another try. First, I couldn’t log in because I couldn’t remember the username I had chosen. So I used the ‘remind password’ form, twice, but with no luck: no e-mail came, and no message on the site. Frustrated, I registered again, with same e-mail and different handle. So now I have two accounts, but the profiles seem to be somehow mixed up, presumably because of the identical e-mails. Clearly something that needs fixing. At least now I have two working TailRank accounts.

Next I explored the site a bit more again. To my great surprise, one of the links I shared in my first round of the site now appears as shared by Burton, and not as shared by me. Weird.

Then I tried to upload the OPML from my Bloglines subscription, but no luck. Got a Java error. Thrice.

I tried to get some recommendations, but once more, the content seems to be monopolized by Burton, and the recommendations don’t seem enticing.

The idea behind the site is a good one, but it still needs some work. There seem to be a few bugs, and the interface could use some refining. For example, there is no clear link to update your profile, and the ‘logout’ link does not appear on all pages, just on some.

In general, I would enjoy a cleaner interface that made it easier to use the site. As I see it now, it is difficult to understand what is going on and how are you supposed to use it. And the ‘home’ page is way too overloaded with text; it makes my brain ache when I look at it. A logo would be cool as well.

It would also be nice if TailRank incorporated some kind of ‘automatic’ harvesting of what a user is interested in, so that you don’t need to go through the tedious process of inputing links manually. For example, it would be nice if TailRank could pick up automagically my del.icio.us subscriptions and ’share’ them in my TailRank account. It would be something like an Audioscrobbler plugin, but for web-surfing instead of for music. That would be great.

A very nice feature of TailRank is the possibility of include in your own website the results of TailRank recommendation. I suppose that can be a very cool thing to have, say, on the sidebar of a group blog that keeps a TailRank account.

Summarizing, I think that the TailRank idea is cool, but it still needs some polishing (but hey, that is what a beta is about, isn’t it?). I think it has lots of potential, if only it would become a bit more user-friendly. Keep up the good work!

UPDATE 2005/10/25 The OPML bug seems to be fixed, but for some reason TailRank only imported 37 feeds from my 63-feed OPML. No reasons given. I am still finding it difficult to understand how to use the site. For example, it took me a lot of clicking around to find out how could I tag the feeds I just imported. Read Kevin’s comment below for some more information about TailRank development. If TailRank is the result of just five weeks of work, I am impressed!

Bloglines has made some updates, and now it is possible to navigate your feeds using keyboard shortcuts.

Geekily enough, the keys for ‘next article’ and ‘previous article’ are ‘j’ and ‘k’, respectively. In case you don’t know, these are also the keys used for navigation in the legendary Vim editor and in many other Unix applications. Gmail and Google Reader are also using ‘j’ and ‘k’ for their shortcuts.

Yay for Bloglines!

Via Alt1040 I see that Jakob Nielsen has published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 . Here is a summary:

1. Legibility problems: small fonts, low contrast.
2. Non-standard links: not underlined links, no difference between visited and not visited links, JavaScript, links opening in new windows.
3. Flash.
4. Content that’s not written for the Web: not short and ’scannable’ enough.
5. Bad search.
6. Browser incompatibility.
7. Cumbersome forms.
8. No contact information.
9. Frozen layouts with fixed page widths.
10. Inadequate photo enlargement.

Let’s see how does this blog do against this list.

1. The fonts look big enough to me, but they could be perhaps a bit bigger. The contrast is ok.
2. My links are not underlined, and I don’t differentiate between visited and not visited links.
3. There is no Flash here.
4. Hopefully the posts are short and readable enough. I am constantly working on this.
5. The Search box is the one that comes with Wordpress seems to work ok. No one is using it, though, according to my logs.
6. I tested this site with IE and Firefox. Hopefully it looks ok in Safari and other browsers as well.
7. No forms to fill here.
8. My e-mail and some info about me can be found in the About me page.
9. All the column widths are fixed.
10. There are no photo enlargement options.

It seems that I should work a bit on the CSS and make the links more usable, and perhaps enlarge the font. Changing the layout to liquid will be more complicated, because of the large header image. Perhaps I should skip the header image altogether.

Wednesday 31st of August is BlogDay. On this day, all bloggers are invited to recommend to their readers 5 new blogs, preferably blogs from other cultures, languages, theme or point of view.

Are you going to participate? I am planning to.

More information and detailed instructions on the BlogDay website.

The Economist is running an article about the apparent decline of spam (Winning the war on spam, $). The article claims that, according to data collected by MessageLabs, spam peaked some time in 2004 and has been slowly declining ever since. For example, between January and June this year, it declined from 83% to 67% of all emails sent. Apparently, users have learned how to recognise and ignore spam, seriously damaging spammers’ business model, who are moving on to more aggressive (and presumably more lucrative) strategies. Phishing, for instance, has increased dramatically in the last year.

Apart from a smarter user attitude, improved spam filtering technology and an important number of lawsuits are helping make spamming unprofitable. Remarkably, it have been traditional consumer-protection and fraud laws, and not specific ‘internet laws’, which have been used in these lawsuits.

It seems to me that this evolution signals the maturing of the internet as just another communication tool. We are getting more familiar with the new medium, we are getting smarter about defending ourselves, and not making a fuss about it. Judges are learning how to apply ‘old’ laws to this new medium. The internet does not seem to be, after all, the ‘new economy‘ that some claimed would be governed by new rules. It will take a while longer for life online to normalize itself, but when it does I am sure we will see that it is not, after all, so different about human life offline. Just another manifestation of it.

This morning, while listening to the latest edition of the TWIT podcast, I heard for the first time about Lulu.com, which has apparently been around for a while.

Lulu.com describe themselves as ’self-publishing’, but I prefer the ‘on-demand print’ description used in the podcast. The idea is simple: anyone can go to the site, register and put her book on sale, both as an e-book or in dead-tree version. Then, if someone does buy the book, it will be printed and shipped to the customer. The author can gets up to 80% royalties, which is a whole lot more than what an author with a ‘real’ publishing house gets. They claim to have some 13.000 titles available, and are currently experiencing a grow of around 1.000 new titles per month. Books published by Lulu.com are also available through Amazon. They also publish calendars, audio and video. If you are curious about the quality of the resulting books, check this post by Chris Davis, which includes close-up photos of books ordered off Lulu.com.

All this Lulu business means that you (or I) can write a book and make it available to millions of people on the internet, and make some money with it, without needing to go through a lengthy process of applying to publishing houses, getting rejected, applying again… Of course, the money will only be significant if thousands of people buy your book, but that is not totally impossible. I believe nowadays someone can effectively market his work on the internet at almost no cost, with active involvement in the appropiate communities, blogging and so on. And if you are not that interested in the money, you can lower the price of your book, as that is something you get to set yourself on the Lulu site.

In case you are wondering why was I listening to TWIT, I was curious about what makes it so (apparently) popular. But I did not find much of interest there. A bit too much of ‘we are the most subscribed-to podcast on iTunes’ stuff. And a bit too much time (1h 14min) for not-so-much content.

Lulu.com, though, is something to remember. Just in case you write a book. Or just feel like producing a printed version of your blog.