28 November 2002

Happy Thanksgiving KILKENNY, Ireland -- I'm most thankful for settling into a home with Ruth and for having continued opportunities for growth among friends and professional colleagues.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: Blogging Ecosystem Metric MYELIN co nz -- Handy listing documenting a metric of the blogging ecosystem. It shows most linked content and sites generating the most links. It's fun to see who is listening, by referrers or trackbacks. This Blogging Ecosystem is run by Phil of Second p0st. The original idea came from The Truth Laid Bear, who has since gone on to other things. This is a Python PHP dataset.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: Technorati Link Detector David Sifry -- If you have a blog, you should know who is linking to you. On first try, I noted 8 unique inbound links in the Cosmos pointing to Topgold's Blog. That's twice as many as detected on Blogstreet. [David Sifry]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Inktomi Repositioning INTERNET -- Web Search 9 marks the first major overhaul of Inktomi since last year. Web services interface that allows content providers, portal and paid inclusion partners to exchange information with the Inktomi search engine. Algoritmic and editoral techniques, such as Web site synopsis written by a human editor, that better interpret a user's intent and deliver more accurate, comprehensive techniques. Spelling suggestions. Paid inclusion customers will have the ability to provide tailored local content for more than 30 regions. Improvements in information freshness (the index refreshes every 10 to 14 days, paid inclusion every two days) and the scope of the search (up to 3 billion documents).   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Dial-up Modem Simulation WEB NOVICE -- Here's a nice page on simulating dial up modem speed. [ia/]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Will Entertainment Spur MMS? THE REGISTER -- Do you believe that entertainment will leapfrog messaging in MMS? Juniper Research interviewed 40 industry leaders and concluded that MMS has the potential to generate revenues in excess of $8.3bn by 2004. Approximately $5.6 billion of that will be generated through content delivery and provisioning, rather than pure peer-to-peer messaging, at $2.7bn. In areas of high footfall, this would mean that a successful services would be one that leveraged the intelligent multimedia platform and its inherent anytime, anywhere nature. Juniper thinks business use alone will account for $1.4bn of MMS revenue in 2004. That's trend starts next year and could represent people who desire MMS downloads of news summaries, liggers' lists and erotic content.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Matchstick Performance Art David Mach -- Check out this gorgeous online gallery of burning matchstick art. Artist David Mach creates sculptures from the colored heads of matches, then sets them on fire. Mach made his first matchhead in 1982. Kinskihead was a response to a reviewer comparing one of his magazine installations to a weekend modeller making a ship or the Eiffel Tower out of matches. The reviewer talked about matches as if their rightful place was at the bottom of the materials league. The reviewer was referring to modellers who don't use matches but just matchsticks, small pieces of wood. Mach explains, "Live matches offer an entirely different proposition. The first head, Kinskihead, was set alight by mistake. It was originally made out of blue and red matches but once burnt they became different shades of grey ash. What interests me is the violence and power involved in that change and the fact that this performance comes from such a cheap, throwaway, almost non-material." There doesn't seem to be any limit to the subject matter. There's an edginess to the lethal incendiary device capability of the exhibits. In fact you can describe three clear lives to these sculptures: the original head with colour; the performance of burning it; and the burned head, instantly aged black and white version of the original. Not bad for a nothing material. [Jeff Winkler and Cory Doctorow]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: Indexer Organisations SONG BIRD INDEX -- I know Helen Litton is an indexer, but Songbird has hundreds of other indexer organizations and freelance indexers. [IA SLASH]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: Find Sounds and Respect Copyright FIND SOUNDS -- Comparisonics have a great library of sounds to use. In compliance with the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, Comparisonics removes links to copyrighted sounds from FindSounds.com and FindSounds Palette at the request of the copyright holder. [netbib]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Living for Paranoia Garringreen Hotspot -- Frank O'Rourke wants to read Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive. This animated post on paranoia will get him started. Ireland may copy the initiative in a lighter version, according to front page news from Karlin Lillington. [Mark Fiore and The Aardvark Speaks and technoculture] Mark Fiore is a political cartoonist currently living in San Francisco, the Promised Land of satirists. His work appears in print and on the web and is seen by scrillions. Formerly the staff political cartoonist for the San Jose Mercury News, Fiore has now branched out into animated political cartoons.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

The Internet as a Set of Footpaths BBC -- The Internet is not a highway; it's better visualised as a footpath. It's unplanned, decentralized, organic. BBC discusses simulations of attacks upon a few critical network nodes. Redundancy isn't needed in good times, when "shortest distance between two points" applies, but during stress, diversity is a distinct advantage. In a related thought, Simon McGarr ruminates how blogs fit into this mix. He equates blogs to streams that bubble through the Internet. Although the current thoughts reflect on comments about the prospect of the Internet failing at critical nodes, that's always a possbility in the aftermath of physical events, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center. So maybe it's important to think around key failure nodes, and to leverage different infostreams, such as public access wireless devices that can work around individual failure nodes, just like smart Internet routers. [JD on MX and Tuppenceworth]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Buy Eminem's Former House EBAY -- They're selling the Michigan home once occupied by Mr. Marshall Mathers and one of the offers is for $1m. More details on the seller's website. [Reuters and Cory Doctorow]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Google Live Query and the Intelligent Kiosk NYT -- Wouldn't you gawk at a screen containing images harvested in real time from active Google searches? You can do that now, when sitting in Google's lobby in California. Last week, visitors in the lobby "were transfixed by the words scrolling by on the wall behind the receptionist's desk: animación japonese Harry Potter pensées et poèmes associação brasileira de normas técnicas." Live Query shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google's search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian - any of the 86 languages that Google tracks. Live Query shows you the collective consciousness of the world. [Web Wordsmiths and Jennifer Lee]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Sighting: FedEx PowerPad DESIGN TECHNICA -- FedEx Corporate Services are developing the FedEx PowerPad in conjunction with Motorola. It's to be powered by Pocket PC and used by 40,000 FedEx Express couriers to get online, near real-time, wireless access to the FedEx network. Exclusively designed for FedEx, the FedEx PowerPad will enhance and accelerate package information available to customers by enabling couriers to wirelessly send and receive near real-time information and updates from any location. Additional functionality will be added, such as up-to-date information on shipping rates and inclement weather advisories. This is a big deal for box kickers. [G! has 8 hits]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Yellow Card: IEDR News Popups IEDR ie -- Making the news appear as pop-ups means they won't work for many people who drive around the Internet with pop-ups inhibited. And John McCormac questions why IEDR need a content management system for a site with an apparently long interval between major content updates. [W3C and Pop-Up Stopper and Hackwatch]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: Heavy-Backpack HEAVY-BACKPACK -- Here's a "Creative Catalogue" promoting over 80 "individuals, collectives, companies, and their creative work." Each includes a Flash-powered slideshow of visual samples along with answers to the following questions about each designer: "Name? - What? - Company? - Where? - Age? - Listening to? - Looking at? - Link?" [Coolstop Daily Pick and jenett.radio]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: clean-stream.co.uk CLEAN-STREAM co uk -- Solutions here for scrubbing mail for viruses, spam and unwanted content. Some of the site's pages may challenge search engines that try to crawl the content as they are Iframes. Clean Stream won't keep you on site if you prefer to jump directly to a main anti-virus vendor. If you want to investigate a viable solution that will cut your costs of Internet messaging, look at how Clean Stream works. This technology needs to be considered by all ISPs.   [Comment on Shoptalk]