technology

This thing written by Brian Donovan a couple of years ago, is very interesting. Its basically like tinyurl, except that the links are to any point in a web page, regardless of whether there are any (named anchor) links created by the author. I remember talking about this with Evan a while back. Brian Donovan's Ahoy

The only channel I ever watch on TV is PBS. I ditched Cable, because the only channel I ever watched was HBO. I like the Tivo interface, but there is no way that I'm paying a rental fee or premium for TV listings, as a very occasional viewer. I also don't have a land line telephone. The Toshiba PVR with DVD burner, below is ideal - it gets free listings from TV guide, directly from within the channel 13 signal, so you buy it and stick a co-ax cable into it and you're done. No signup with any service and no phone connection required. Works with Cable but not Dish services, if you are into paying a mortgage for TV. Cheap: $320 Toshiba | RD-XS35: Multi-Drive DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive

Its like watching a real life version of the Risk board game. Google is telling the other players, 'I won't attack you for the next ten moves' as it prepares to roll the dice and line up all its armies next to Microsoft who will also do the same. Because a Microsoft/Google battle royal is kind of innevitable, Google wants to avoid any other trouble. Its caving on personal media with an Apple board seat for Google's CEO and holding off a PayPal and listings assault on Ebay, with a 'partnership'. Both companies will lose in the medium term, in the long run one will survive. Remember what happened to Novell, IBM, Commadore? I think Google will win in 'three rounds', but nothing is certain. Its a game of dice , after all. Microsoft: 'We Are Watching Google'

Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank. Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy. In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy's real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure). This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax 'page flakes' but there is no advertising system for Ajax. To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C's....

The sometimes delusional cycle of Web 2.0 companies and VCs looking at Alexa rankings, does often acknowledge that Alexa is a bit skewed, as if its out by perhaps 50%. Well its a boat load skewed, Alexa is actually only about 5% accurate if one uses data from Gawker. Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact - I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn't, Deadspin, Alexa's accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore. Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin's 10,000 ranking. Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15...

Amazon's EC2 is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while - If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss. EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2. From there on you pay only for CPU time and bandwidth. This is the grid computing that Oracle has been bullshitting about, and chenges the landscape for hosting - allowing instant, on-demand scaleability and no upfront hardware costs, or per unit rackspace fees. I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the 'launch' problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks. I...

Has Digg Been Hijacked, by FUD Today a largely factually based story with referenced quotes and run by the Associated Press, which was also reported in most US newspapers is flagged by Digg as potentially Inacurate. I've noticed recently that a large number of political stories, particularly left of center ones, get slapped with the 'Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inacurate" - Because enough people who want to deliberately create uncertainty in light of the truth, say so. This is the way wikipedia does it, and to be honest, with no other option for wikipedia, it means that Wikipedia is largely useless and hopelessly banal for contentious political issues. But news is not like Wikipedia - users are directly linking to a source not editing it. If people on the political fringes moan, that does not necessarily mean that the source is innacurate. The Wikipedia reputation system...

Michael Dell once said that to fix Apple, they should: "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders". Apple is doing just fine, it survives on true innovation, but perhaps Dell should be shut down now. Profit Falls by Half at Dell - New York Times Three days after its announcement of a vast safety recall, Dell reported little but bad news yesterday: profits down by half, and an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.

We've moved Wists to hardware with five times the horsepower and into new datacenters. the overall speed is several times faster than just before the move. Traffic has been doubling every two and a half months (interestingly with no reflection of this on Alexa - oh well), and we're getting ready for the roll out of Wists rev 2! Since its such a pain for people to install bookmarklets in Internet Explorer, we've automated the process with an installer. Wists, top web picks from for all. Wists, social shopping scrapbook, wishlist

When junk mail comes through the door with moneymaking scams like - make $100,000 in 2 months, its typically supported by testimonials that aren't quite outright falsehoods, but are, lets say - economical with the truth. ...It typically goes straight in the trash can. So when one of the worlds biggest business magazines prints an even bolder claim "this kid made $60 million in 18 months" in tabloid sized lettering on its front cover, and it turns out to be an outright falsehood, does Business Week look like something serious investors and business people should subscribe to, or something to put in the trash can? There is nothing actually wrong with the companies or the people mentioned in the piece - they are all interesting. However, Scott Rosenberg etc. are rightly on Business Week's case. In doing so the tech press may turn this around to make the responsible reaction...

An idea that my good friend Simon Perry had a while ago - provide inline links to specific points in video and you create the video web. Without time based web links into binary files, video would be like a web where text links were only to entire websites, not individual pages- useless. Official Google Video Blog: New Feature: Link within a Video

Probably the single biggest asset that Friendster has now: United States Patent: 7069308