yowkee essential

Technorati's front page's changes

Instead of just listing the “Top Search This Hour”, Technorati is now offering the list of Top Search and Hot Tag at its front page. It’s a minor step forward by Technorati. But it’d sure slowly changing blogger’s habit, pay more attention to Tag, Tag and Tag. With more accurate tagging and your blog posts got more attention.

What’d be my wished feature on Technorati? I hope it’d separate tagging by different language and providing search based on different languages, this should have boost blogging to the other level world wide.

Digg/Pligg/SpyMy

I found SpyMy via Jeff Ooi. Initially feeling it’s great that someone is making a similar Digg service for Malaysia, which was long expected. People who following the web trend among blogosphere would find Digg is the good solution to your flooded feed aggregators. Digg’s success is mainly due to its users’ posting and voting features, and other “cool” Web 2.0 characteristic, in layman terms it provides more interaction to users. That’s also why its users are mostly computer geeks and youngsters, and people tends to compare it with Slashdot

But I was disappointed while surf over to SpyMy and notice the similar interface. Take a looks at the screenshot of SpyMy, Pligg and Digg, do you think this is something we should do?

Web 2.0 service like Digg or reddit is US-centric and articles posted mostly only interested to geeks. So there’s big potential to expand to other more specific areas. To segment the market for Digg-alike web service, I could think of following potential fields:

• Region-interest: it has been lots of web portal focusing on region’s interesting news/events/activities. And these portals are all lacking of the interaction to allow users to vote for their favor posts or commenting. Good target to apply digg-alike service.
• Different language: it could surely see that users stick with the web with the language they’re most familiar. A Malay-only or Mandarin-only users posted/voted service should have potential.
• The other “niche” fields like shopping, books, movies, musics, even technology specific to Linux, Windows, Gadget…etc for the particular interested group of people

So and so, there are plenty of areas to explore and deploy the idea. Nevertheless, the key point is, you could copy the idea and develop your own version — but not copying the exactly same web behavior (the flow of the web service) and user interface! Let’s do porting and expanding, not copycat.

Validate Web 2.0

The guys at 30 Second Rule create a Web 2.0 Validator at their spare time. It's created with Og/Nitro in 30 minutes! Now it seem pretty reasonable to judge Web Two-Ooh sites by whether they're using some rapid development tools like RubyOnRails. Ha ha.. Not really. But this is a fun validator to play with.

I type in delicious and it got only 7 out of 42 rules (note: the rules are set by users, Web 2.0 is users-oriented, remember?). The following is the current set rules:

1. Is in public beta?
2. Uses inline AJAX ?
3. Uses python?
4. Uses the prefix "meta" or "micro"?
5. Is Shadows-aware ?
6. Uses Google Maps API?
7. Refers to mash-ups ?
8. Has favicon ?
9. Mentions startup ?
10. Attempts to be XHTML Strict ?
11. Uses Cascading Style Sheets?
12. Appears to be web 3.0 ?
13. Mentions Less is More ?
14. Refers to the Web 2.0 Validator's ruleset ?
15. Mentions Dave Legg ?
16. Appears to use AJAX ?
17. Appears to be built using Ruby on Rails ?
18. Makes reference to Technorati ?
19. Refers to VCs ?
20. Refers to Flickr ?
21. Mentions Nitro ?
22. Links Slashdot and Digg ?
23. Mentions Ruby?
24. Mentions Cool Words ?
25. Appears to use MonoRail ?
26. Has prototype.js ?
27. Creative Commons license ?
28. Uses Semantic Markup?
29. Refers to web2.0validator ?
30. Refers to del.icio.us ?
31. Uses microformats ?
32. Refers to Rocketboom ?
33. Actually mentions Web 2.0 ?
34. Use Catalyst ?
35. Mentions RDF and the Semantic Web?
36. References Firefox?
37. Appears to over-punctuate ?
38. References isometric.sixsided.org?
39. Validates as XHTML 1.1 ?
40. Mentions 30 Second Rule and Web 2.0 ?
41. Uses the "blink" tag?
42. Appears to have Adsense ?

I wonder what's the "Cool Words" in rule 24, thought there would have rule on "support REST URL", but no. Anyway, enjoy the story behind the development, have fun playing with it.

Wikipedia is 5 years old

Wikipedia turns 6 5 years old on January 15, 2006. The famous information resource on the web has served billions of query over the years, despite its accuracy and credibility was under fire a few times over past few months. The issues raised mostly related to people modified entries related to them, or false/fraud information. That including Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, edited his own biography around 18 times, everybody-known podcaster Adam Curry’s edting of Podcasting entry, and the false claim on JFK murder.

Wikipedia, which based on the open source collaboration software — Wiki, allows anyone who read the web adding, editing and voting for entries’ removal. That brings the never-ending debate about its credibility and accuracy of information. What’s people really worry about?

• Without knowing the authority behind the article, there’s always a chance something is missed out


• EVERYBODY could create the history. That made people worry

However, the physical encyclopedia in the real world, which has a team of experts proof-reading, made mistake too. Taking out the controvesary related to human and history, Wikipedia did a very good job on most other items — especially on those objective fact and information of technology. For years, it’s always my 1st or 2nd choice when I meet any unknown term (the other one is Google). Even come to history, does it so scary that it might bend the “official” history a bit? History is used to be the stuff controlled by authority — and Wikipedia is the pen given to people. What’s more important, it’s the transparency it guaranteed. Think about how web surfers found out all the details people’s editing their own biography? Because Wiki, as a collaboration and documenting web service, it keep everything in version control. So the Wikipedia users get to see the changes over time, if they do spend the time to dig through.

Wikipedia is in fact considering to start applying editing only by users, lock most of the text to anonymous. With the transparency of the process, I still have the faith to it. My favourite tool.

PODZINGER

PODZINGER is a Podcast search engine. Ever since podcast joined the world of weblogging, I’ve been wondering would there be such a service archiving the audio, analyzing/indexing the audio content. PODZINGER uses the speech recognition from BBN Technologies — transferring audio into words/text and archive them.

From the returned search result, users could directly subscribe to the podcast to their iTunes or Yahoo! podcast. Or download the audio to your local drive. It claims to have the feature to play the audio straight to the spot of your searched words. But right now, clicking the play button seems always getting the alert message of slow connection or files not found over there.

The search is pretty effective and accurate, though I don’t think it has enough podcasts being archived. It’s a good web service worth looking forward to.

Million Dollar Homepage

This idea is awesome! Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student, come out the idea of selling pixel on a homepage, for 1 dollar per pixel. The idea is outstanding and excellent, simply because nobody ever think this would get to any where. But he proved it works! The pixel ads are sold at unit of 10×10 (100) pixels block. At this time of writing, it has almost all sold out.

The key to this success would be the domain name of www.milliondollarhomepage.com. What would one expect if he/she want to put up advertisement on Internet? The 2 key elements to attract eye-ball from the billion of Internet users:

• Search Engine: nowadays search engine dominate all the Interne traffic. Therefore, to attract traffic and potential clients, adapting the philosophy of target driven ads on search engine.
  
• Good content: content is King. You got the well written articles, interesting news/stories, well build up user communities, people tend to gather at your website. And then the website is valuable to put up ads, for its traffic.
  

So how did Alex make it? Who would think a plain homepage with tons of ads attractive? Would it just simple logic —- that having people really interested and go looking for a page on web full of shining and eye-hurting ads? I don’t think so. He choose a good tactic to start. First selling to closed friends and relatives, then issuing press release and getting URL of www.milliondollarhomepage being famous. Once the website being famous day by day, it’s at least well worth for $100 for a smallest unit to invest. Nevertheless, it did bring traffic! So and so, the rock rolls on and Alex made it.

Of course, this is a easy to replicate money-earning model. I believe there’s some where out there people are doing the same tricks now. Just that they ain’t that famous yet for their URL. I doubt the followers would last long if more and more come into the play field.

This round, traffic beat the target ads keyword.

Yahoo's delicious

No doubt it’s the news of the day: Yahoo! bought over del.icio.us. With buying over Flickr and del.icio.us, the two most used photo sharing and bookmarking web service, Yahoo! seem to pretty agressive in getting the best web service in the fields. Technically they could all categorized as Web 2.0 (including the coming revamping Yahoo! Mail). But it would only make sense to the users come to Yahoo if it’s really integrated into its various services. Take Yahoo! photo as an example, it isn’t replaced by Flickr yet — though I think Flickr is much more friendly and fun to play with. And then where Yahoo is going to place del.icio.us?

On the other hand, it should really go out to get some better blogging service to replace its Yahoo 360.

Douban

Douban now has an English version. Douban is a Chinese website/webservices let users sharing their views or opinions on books, movie or musics, as well as what they are reading, watching and listening now (and what going to read/watch/listen to). Its path of being famous and having groups of supporters on China is quite similar to Craigslist — starting small, gathering more and more users by mouth to mouth.

You tends to share your activities and your opinion of something you like with the people having more-or-less the same feel. And what’s mostly our people doing in this civilized society, despite all kind of physical social activities with human being? We read, we watch, and we listen —- the great art beautify our life. Thus it indeed is one very potential social-web service to be created. I am not sure why there isn’t anything similar (excluding those specific forums) created in English world. But Douban English version would be a good observation.