Wisconsin ho!

Charla and I are off on holiday tomorrow: we're going to spend ten days in Wisconsin, where she grew up. We've hired a picturesque cottage by Green Lake, which should be a restful place to forget all about cyberspace, London and being an entrepreneur for a while.

It's my first trip to the US, so I'm looking forward to the experience of tasting a new culture, as well as seeing Charla's birthplace and meeting her family and friends.

Back on September 11th (my birthday!).

Technorati Tags: holiday

How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog

There are some real pearls in this article on "How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger":

What a buzz all the bloggers are making these days! It seems like just about everybody is pouring their musings into a text box. Are you feeling tempted to start a blog of your own? Here are some ways to bypass the trend.

Steps

Find five completely random blogs, and read them daily for a month. After thirty days, you will absolutely dread your self-imposed requirement to read all that dreck. Any blog you create will most likely be on par with what you've been reading. Don't put anyone through that.

Consider that your voice, even if it is truly a good one, is a tiny peep against the massive wave of tripe out there. The odds of anyone you don't already know finding your blog are low.

Write on a regular basis in Wordpad instead. If that doesn't satisfy your urge, and you feel that you must post your blog online, then you might just be craving attention and validation--which you'll never truly find in a blog. If you give up on your Wordpad journal after about three days, you'll do the same with a blog. That just takes up server space.

Ask yourself if you really have the time to commit to a blog. What about that treehouse you wanted to build? Or the book you wanted to write? Or the car you wanted to fix up? Or the restaurant you wanted to take your wife to? Or the new career you wanted to pursue? Instead of writing about pretty much nothing, or whining about all the things you wish you were doing instead, start doing something that'd actually be worth writing about. And if it's really worth writing about, you'll be having too much fun doing it to tear yourself away from it.

Tips

If attention and validation is what you're looking for, know that you will get neither from blogging. As above, very few people will ever know that your blog (or you, by proxy) exists. Of those who do find it, a large percentage will be flamers and trolls, who will only post comments to you about how you suck. The remainder of comments posted to your blog will be sappy treacle, which you won't trust as being sincere anyway.

Warnings

The information you post on the Internet is likely to linger for years and years to come, as web pages are archived by "snapshot" services like the Wayback Machine. Once it's out there, you can't take it back. An employer running a Google search on your name years down the line might be turned off by your now documented obsession with your cat.

It's all so futile—I quit! (not really, I love my blog : )

Technorati Tags: blogs, humour, futility

Blogscurity

Om Malik muses about the relative utility of blog search:

There have been some doubts about the viablity of the while notion of blog search. My contention has been that when doing blog search, contextual relevance is more important. Other people think that instant or near real time results are more important. What do you think?

My thoughts left in the comments:

One drawback with e.g. Technorati is much the same as with Google: it focuses on general/global, rather than personal relevance, and therefore very much lives up to its name in skewing results massively towards the A-listers.

You won't readily find my blog if you search on "digital identity" on Technorati, even though I write on that subject a good deal—hopefully some of it worth reading if you're into that subject—and have had a few tens of incoming links from A/B-list blogs over the last couple of years. But unless your incoming links are fresh (last month or so), you rapidly drop out of sight in the blogosphere.

Personally, I mostly rely on recommendations by the 52 bloggers I read regularly (thanks guys!) to discover personally-relevant stuff, but if I am searching on a "global" topic like "useage statistics for MySpace", both Google and Technorati can prove very useful.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blog_search

The unlinkable lightness of banner ads

I just saw a really cool ad for FAST enterprise search where two little puppies, representing Microsoft and Google, tussle for a rope, while the elegant greyhound of FAST lurks in the wings. The point is, of course, that FAST is the real market leader.

But I realised that I just can't permalink to this ad: it's embedded Flash, and the hosting page may switch the ad at any time. Clicking through the ad leads me to the plain old FAST blog.

Maybe advertisers haven't thought that sometimes they get it so right that viewers will want to link to the ad itself? Missing a trick, I feel...

Technorati Tags: advertising, flash, permalink

i-together progress update

I rarely blog about i-together, as we have been in stealth mode for ages. However, we have got to a second iteration of our middleware/application prototype, and are now approaching a proof of concept demo (yay!) in mid-September, so I thought it was time to start communicating a bit more about what we're trying to do.

Although I still have to be a bit mysterious, the idea basically goes something like this:

Search has become the dominant mode of online information access. However, people very often find that even leading search services such as Google fail to provide relevant and personalised search results for anything but simple searches. This is largely because while these services give the impression of understanding people’s natural language queries, they actually just reduce each query to a set of keywords that they match against similar keywords found in web pages.

At i-together we are working to develop a “collaborative” search service, not dissimilar to e.g. del.icio.us in general concept (the content pool is made up of human-tagged bookmarks, rather than automatically categorised links as with mainstream Search), but with a rather different approach to helping the user create their searches and bookmarks.

We hope to enable users to both search and categorise web pages in a way that is much closer than current search or tagging services to the way people communicate through natural language (although, ironically, we don't support actual natural language query input, because computers don't really understand that yet!).

Human beings use natural language to communicate with one another in an amazingly richly-structured yet flexible and intuitive manner; at i-together, we are attempting to build a service that will help people extend that incredible innate communicative ability into their Search life.

Well, watch this space, as they say...

Technorati Tags: collaborative_search, delicious, i-together, search

Search spam-back

Oh dear. Has search privacy really come to this?! Paul Madsen is droll as ever:

TrackMeNot is a Firefox extension that clouds your search history to the major engines with multiple fake searches - the "swamp with noise" model for privacy.

Here is the log of some random queries the extension made on my behalf:

*** Log started at Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:49 GMT ***
[ACTION] type: saveOptions=true | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:49 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='user centric' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:50 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='whatis user-centric' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:52GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='defn user-centric' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:53 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='consistent defn user-centric' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:54 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='paul madsen' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:03 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='paul madsen' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:04 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='paul madsen' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:05 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='paul madsen' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:06 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='feel insecure' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:07GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='paul madsen' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:08 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='ego surf' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:01:09 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='britney spears' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:02:02 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='hide searching' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:03:03 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='identity manage' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:03:05 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='halle swim' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:04:06 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='marriage help' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:04:07 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='data encryption' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:04:08 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='private eye' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:04:09GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='divorce lawyer' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:05:03 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='child custody' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:06:03 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='dating tips' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:07:03 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='firm abs' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:07:04 GMT
[QUERY] engine=google | query='viagra ' | 200 | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:07:06 GMT
[ACTION] type: showLog=true | Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:02:24 GMT

Well this isn't going to help.

Technorati Tags: obfustication, firefox, search, spamback

tvGuide uk

At last—a useable tv guide for the UK!

tvGuide uk has customisable channel favourites (no log-in required), a draggable timeline and lots of contextual menu goodness. Plus links to channels' web-based programme info and the IMDb for films.

Recommended.

Technorati Tags: mashup, tv_listings

Identification everywhere

A great post by Eric Norlin on the illusiory nature of "anonymity". I quote:

I'd argue that anonymity ... does not exist. In order to explain, allow me to (simplistically) break all "real-world" interactions into two broad categories: social and transactional. Social interactions do not involve the exchange of any currency. Transactional interactions directly involve currency exchanged for goods or services.

In the transactional realm, the default is *not* anonymity. Even in the case of cash (which is a government institution *proxy* for identity), anonymity is not the default. Every transaction in the real-world involves not only explicit identification (ATM cards, credit cards, driver's licenses, or the proxy of cash), but also implicit identification. By implicit identification, I mean the subtle body language and sociological clues that all persons engaged in transactions use (both consciously and subconsciously.) There is not a waitress or convenience store clerk on the planet that will not begin "identifying" the ability of a customer to live up the implicit social contract of commerce based upon their attributes (appearance, cleanliness, socially accepted standards of behavior, etc). This is not the real-world as we'd like it to be. This is the real-world as it is.

I don't believe this changes radically as we move to the social realm of interactions. Rightly or wrongly, people make "identifications" of nearly everyone in their surroundings. Some of these "identifications" are wrong, and some are right — but all are done. The bottom line of the real-world is that the human animal, at a subconscious level, *identifies* its surroundings (probably as a remnant of survival mechanisms). Anonymity — or the "state of being unacknowledged" — is a near impossibility in the "real-world."

Identification is everywhere in our lives—we are constantly identifying and being identified. This is one of the key points of the Identity Society project—but Eric sure does put it eloquently here.

Technorati Tags: anonymity, identification, identity, identity_society, identity_web, transactions

Bookmooch

p2p, virtual-currency based book exchange?! Yep.

[via Joi Ito]

Technorati Tags: books, p2p, virtual_currency