technology

BuzzMetrics/Mouthpiece has a fantastic statistic – further analysis of a survey of awareness of the term ‘blog’ showed that two thirds of blog readers had never heard of the word blog or did not know what a blog was. This is great news, it spells ubiquity. Memes need a buzzword to catch on, but by now blogs are more than online diaries. The weblog publishing model, with built in syndication, tracking, real-time search, permanent, item based archiving and linking and easy to use publishing tools is the way everything will eventually be published on the web. With magazines and professional websites being blog driven, blog refers to the way something is published not what. There is no more need to know what a blog is than know what an internal combustion engine is if you drive a car. This is a paradigm shift as important as the browser. Web 1.0…

Interesting – by acquiring Intermix, Rupert Murdoch has picked up MySpace. Not only that, but Intermix was sued (and settled), having been accused of deception in bundling hidden spyware. Two good reasons to ditch MySpace. News Corp. to buy Intermix for $580 million | CNET News.com

… OK not quite, but this news below does seem like a parody from the Onion: Microsoft confirms RSS plans: “As previously reported, Microsoft is also proposing extensions to the RSS specification that will add support for ordered lists. That would enable, for example, e-commerce sites to more easily publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best-selling products.” Do they mean extensions to the RSS spec, or an RSS module? Since what is being described can be done with a module, it would be crazy to change the spec. And if all Microsoft is doing is writing an RSS module, then Jeez, their PR machine needs to understand that this is not a big deal. You can already publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best selling products in RSS, the problem is not with the standard but the aggregators – no aggregator will display metadata…

“Umbria Communications of Boulder has developed a Web crawler that monitors hundreds of thousands of blogs, turning the information from them, via natural language algorithms, into marketing data that is potentially much more reliable than traditional tools such as focus groups.” The results: Most mentioned non alcoholic beverage: Starbucks coffee Most mentioned fast food: McDonalds Most mentioned female celebs: Britney Spears, Paris hilton etc. Well there’s a surprise. Blog software tracks consumer preferences

This is funny on so many levels. A Google Adsense rep calls me today to pitch some form of customized Adsense for Wists. He then sends me an email saying: “Here’s an example of how Flickr.com is using AdSense: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/manhattan/ (you may need to hit refresh to see the ads load)” 1. Flickr was bought buy Yahoo and now has Yahoo ads. 2. Who in their right mind refreshes a page just so they can see ads. 3. Why pitch something with an example where it is broken. Caveat: I hope this doesn’t get anyone in trouble – its obviously a harmless error. [update: seems like they are in the middle of the switch, so depending on the number of times you refresh the page (not exactly normal behavior), you get either: no ads, Google ads or Yahoo ads. No less stupid, however]

So Google is the biggest media company in the world as of today. But I’ve been in San Francisco for a week now and haven’t had one free drink, or had to speak to a single ‘bizdev’ guy in a button-down Oxford. Things just ain’t like what they used to be. Google now most valuable media company | CNET News.com

The first of the gambling IPOs, PartyGaming (which are in the UK because it is illegal in the US) is about to go out for $9 billion (5 bn GBP). As I wrote before, I noticed that a large percentage of comment spam was coming from affiliates of these companies with pending IPOs. I suspect that, like porn, conversion rates for gambling affiliates are such that they can’t afford to advertise on Google and therefore resort to things like comment spam to scam Google. In other words, because CPA affiliate programs like the poker sites’ don’t appeal to sites with any readership (a medium traffic site can go for Adsense CPC advertising and a big brand site will opt for CPM revenues with guaranteed income based on readership) their affiliates tend to be low end sites. Low end sites would normally have to buy traffic, but if the cost of…

Answer, write a blog about Gawker – do it well, show that you can write and it will end up on their radar. Which after all is a repeat of Gawkers’ method itself: Write a gossip column where the initial subjects are other gossip columnists, hacks and flacks, then it will get noticed by the people who promote stuff. Down right PReditorial! Flattery will get you everywhere. Chris Mohney did just that, with arguably the longest ever resume: Gawkerist: Nick Denton Finally Pays Us to Stop Blogging

Having finally got to meet my all time favorite tech writer, Jon Udell at the Syndicate conference last week, I said how much I enjoyed his screencast tutorials. In light of that am putting together a some screencasts of how to use Wists. This one is the most simple, showing how to add a bookmark while browsing. (A trick overlooked by most people is being able to highlight and drag text from the page being bookmarked to the bookmarklet description field). I’ll post more screencasts to the Wists blog, although we are working on redoing the Wists UI, so more on that shortly.

One of the things that the unchristian wrong are good at is making sure that a significant portion of safe surfing products for children also block out sites which promote science or political thinking that doesn’t tally with their own medieval sense of morality. By providing free software they tailor the web to their own ideology. Hmm, time to fight back. I’d personally rather have any child of mine be able to learn about things on the web as well as block porn – so I’d be interested in creating an alternative family filter for people who want their kids to be educated. For example it could block sites such as WorldNetDaily, Jerry Falwell properties, Creationist drivel etc. etc.

It seems that everything is topsy turvy: Everything that is bad for you is good for you and everything that is old is new again. Irony aside, this is something of a web 2.0 reboot, with some lessons learned by coming full circle with technologies that are right for the web. SOAP vs CORBA, RSS vs ICE, PHP vs Some weirdo proprietary stuff. The changes: RSS hits the mainstream and is built into consumer portals – 10 years after it was a by-product of, er, a consumer portal, MyNetscape. Scripting interfaces to enterprise aps – the first web enabled version of enterprise aps were scripting language based e.g. Sybase was Perl based. Ajax, or DHTML as Flickr mercifully put it. In 94 you could navigate a 3d world on the web, in realtime with talking Avatars that made absolutely no money (The is nothing comparable to Onlive Traveller even today)….

We’ve added a Wists javacript wizard which allows you to publish and of your Wists linkrolls on your site, matching the look and feel, rather like Flickr’s badges or the headline feeds we used to syndicate at Moreover. You can choose to show Thumbnails and text links, just thumbnails or just text. To fore up the wizard within Wists, click on ‘publish on your site’, next to the XML icon.