Digital Rules: The Blog
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Follow Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard as he travels the world in search of great thinkers and big ideas.
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Search Engine Roundtable, the blog of Barry Schwartz, has updated with a much more slick and streamlined design. I&#8217;ve been eagerly awaiting for the day that Barry updates his design as his company, Rusty Brick, puts out some incredible work and his personal blog, CartoonBarry, is top of the shelf in blog functionality. Excellent job Mr. Schwarzt!
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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Google and the History of Link Building  I can't begin to tell you how sick I am of reading articles and posts that mention the two words "Google" and "penalty" in the same sentence!  So many webmasters are walking on eggshells these days when it comes to Google, and it just doesn't ...
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We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.  Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms for feeds that you might like, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't.  Normally, I'd leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut my server expenses now that my S3 bill is going up, serving some very big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan. If there's a big demand to bring it back, we can -- but that's going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don't think it's a good investment for me. Still diggin!
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Decision: Blogs vs. New York Times. For the last couple of weeks I've been emailing with people from the LongNow Foundation and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times, to determine who won the bet.  Ultimately we asked the foundation to consider all the argument and make the decision. They published their decision today. It's well worth reading because it answers some of the questions raised by the bet, for example, what is a blog, and how does Wikipedia relate to blogging. I don't agree with everything in the decision, but I do like the result -- we won.  The beneficiary of the bet? The World Wide Web Consortium. I chose them as the charity to receive the proceeds if I won the bet because web standards are what make it all work and the W3C is central to standards on the web.
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This is a bit disturbing:  "If your blog software does not support those things, don't worry, you can still play. To add your post to a Technorati Tag page, all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a special link. Like so:"  {{{ tagname }}}  There are a number of things wrong with this proposal:  1. They're encouraging people to always include the technorati.com URL within their specification.  While this is great for *Technorati* (and I love those guys and wish them all the best) its just going to increase their pagerank and act as free advertising.  If Microsoft were doing this would we really put up with it?  I don't th ...
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Here's the new Reddit for Scripting News... http://reddit.com/r/scripting/  Please, if you're a regular reader of this site, bookmark it, and when you want to contribute a link to the community, add it there. Do the normal thing you do with Reddit or Digg, move articles up or down, according to your opinion of how relevant they are to the community defined by this weblog.  Warning: I will moderate, heavily if necessary, to keep it from being abusive or overly immature. Sorry for having to post the caveat, but you know how it goes.
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Readers remark on cyber mugging, tree hugging, and de-bugging. Plus: Links to our most popular blog posts.
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Some months ago I started collecting the pieces I needed to build my own 64-bit computer. I'm not a complete stranger to building machines, I've put together a dozen or so during the past twenty years, but it's been quite a while since I started one from scratch, and my experience with this machine was more instructive than it was meant to be. Nevertheless, at long last Studio Dave has gone 64-bit crazy. Well, not really crazy, but certainly more than mildly enthusiastic.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:ProDevTips.com: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 6Nessa's Blog: Using an .htaccess with PHP Compiled as CGIArnold Daniels' Blog: How I PHP: The Output Handler - ContinuedMartynas Jusevicius' Blog: PHP 5 features: Class autoloadingSean Coates' Blog: Actually Solving a Problem (believe it or not)The Northclick Blog: Message Queue Project: First working versionStefan Mischook's Blog: A Question about object properties in PHP ClassesJob Posting: G2 Technology Seeks PHP Developer (Memphis, TN)Rob Allen's Blog: Zend_View: Access the view from a view helperDavid Walsh's Blog: Using PHP Generic Objects To Organize Your Code
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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Tycho:  Months after it was necessary, Sony has thrown their blogging hat into the ring...  of blogging.  I've heard people compare it to Larry Hryb/Major Nelson's blog, but with a rotating "crew" of bloggers - like a public relations version of the Wu Tang Clan - it's more like Microsoft's Gamerscore blog.  Which, coincidentally, I never read because it is run by a rotating "crew" of bloggers, like a public relations version of the etcetera etcetera.  The mental image is that of a corporate hydra, the brand seared and scabbed upon its breast.
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In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.   To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.   He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.
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"Copyright officials recommended on Thursday that U.S. law be amended so that companies that rely on copyright infringement to make a profit can be held liable for their actions."  Which of course applies only to US companies.  Kazaa should be free and clear.  ...  Should have supplied a link.  I'm a BAD blogger!