Monthly Archive for September, 2005

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Web 2.0 conference in Brussels

Published on September 13, 2005 in Web2.0. 1 Comment


The guys from Shoob are organising a Belgian Web 2.0 Conference in Brussels on October 6th.
There is a MEDIA 2.0 track (“challenges for traditional media”):

And a ENTERPRISE 2.0 track (“important communication channels for connected companies”):

Presentations and panel discussions will be in French or English. Subscription (payment with -of course- Paypal) is here.

Technorati: – – –

Pareto doesn’t do search

Published on September 11, 2005 in Google, Search and Web2.0. 2 Comments


I’m gonna talk about a post that is 6 months old, I know, but I recently re-read it and wanted to link it to Technorati’s recent traffic troubles.
Joe Kraus from JotSpot (and previously Excite) wrote an excellent article called “The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens.“. I’ll concentrate on the following segements:

(about Excite) That means if you wrote each of the millions of queries on a slip of paper, put them all in a fish bowl and grabbed one at random, there was a high likelihood that this query was asked only once during the day. Of ten-plus million queries a day, the average search was nearly unique. The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail”, queries asked a little over once a day.

Now apply that information to Technorati: it has been struggling for a while with the “Cosmos” function: what blogs link to specific pages. As Dave Sifri says:

However, Cosmos search (or URL search) is still being worked on, and is often timing out under the increased load. Unfortunately this is also one of the searches that bloggers find most compelling, as it helps you to all know who is linking to your blog, and it is the very first type of search that Technorati made available, so it is near and dear to our hearts. Everyone here also uses it every day, so it really sucks when it isn’t working right.

Even if “search is hard“, the average web user is spoiled by Google: a random search in 8 billion objects comes back in less than a second. That is the benchmark. Technorati has no problem doing that for its tag search, but that is way easier. There are 2 million different tags, but I would expect more than 50% of traffic comes from a limited group of say 10.000 tags. Just put a cluster of reverse proxy caches in front of your tag search servers, keeping copies of each page for 15 minutes, and the number of actual search results to be generated drops dramatically.
But search results on a random combination of words, several million times a day, within 17 million sites and 1.5 billion links in your database: “the average search is nearly unique”, that’s hard. You need an expensive Google-like architecture to cope with that. Unfortunately for Technorati, Icerocket, Feedster, Pubsub and Blogpulse are capable of doing it, either because they have less traffic or a better architecture. So some high-profile bloggers like Kottke and Calacanis are jumping ship.

Technorati has already burned some credit, but could survive if it can perform to Google standards within weeks, not months. Or it will not be the weapon of choice for blogger’s vanity searches. And that’s how this blogging thing got started in the first place.
Technorati: – –

Brusselse Stadsblog gaat van start!

Published on September 5, 2005 in Brussel and NL. 0 Comments

(post in dutch)

Persbericht:

Na twee maand voorbereiden gaat ie eindelijk van start: Brussel.blogt.be, de eerste Brusselse stadsblog. Met nu al een tiental vrijwilligers, en hopelijk binnenkort een pak meer, wil de site uitgroeien tot een baken voor zij die Brussel een warm hart toedragen. Het doel is niet keiharde journalistiek te brengen, maar wel persoonlijke ervaringen, sterke anecdotes, ongezouten meningen, amusante foto’s, en hier en daar een poëtische noot. Zo wordt een beeld geschetst van Brussel, gezien door de ogen van zij die er mogen – of moeten – leven en/of werken.

 

Geschiedenis van de blog

Brussel.blogt startte in juni 2005 als een idee van Peter Forret, een ervaren blogger uit de Marollen. Ingeweken of niet, hij voelt zich een trotse Brusselaar, en ziet hoe in Gent mensen met dezelfde gevoelens daar een uitlaatklep voor hebben: Gent.blogt.be. Ze schrijven over wat ze doen en laten, wat ze hebben en missen en wat hen kwaad of blij maakt in ‘hun’ stad. “Dat zou hier in Brussel ook schitterend marcheren”, denkt hij, en hij lanceert een oproep op zijn eigen blog: blog.forret.com. Dankzij wat communicatie-duwtjes in de rug van fm brussel, brusselnieuws en de Standaard Blog, komen er heel wat reacties binnen van enthousiaste kandidaat-auteurs. Enkele kennismakings-meetings in de Monk later, is er al een kerngroepje gevormd die in Augustus starten met een test-site. Nadat duidelijk uit de bijdrages blijkt dat de Brussel-bloggers op dezelfde golflengte zitten wat betreft de vorm en de inhoud, worden de laatste organisatorische horden eind augustus genomen. Brussel.blogt.be gaat nu begin september echt van start! 

Medewerkers gezocht

Een project als Brussel.blogt kan uiteraard alleen bestaan door de inspanningen van een groep vrijwilligers. Daarom is iedereen nog steeds van harte welkom, zij het als redacteur, als fotograaf, als illustrator of als poëet. Alle geïnteresseerden kunnen contact opnemen via brussel@blogt.be.

 

Partners

Brussel.Blogt heeft vanaf het begin nauw samengewerkt met Cindy De Smet, een Gentse docente Mediakunde die eerder al met een paar andere Gentenaars Gent.Blogt opstartte. Ze is ook actief als blogster op smetty.be, edublogs.be en samen met haar partner Erwin, de drijvende kracht achter Doppler Radio, een der eerste – en meest bekende – podcast client softwares.
Het is mede dankzij haar visie van een “blogt.be” club, waar naast Gent, Mechelen en Brussel nog andere steden gaan deel van uit maken (o.a. Aalst, Antwerpen, Brugge, Hasselt en Genk staan op stapel), dat er een geinteresseerde partner gevonden werd voor de technische aspecten. Hosting provider Combell.com neemt het op zich de hosting en de bandbreedte te voorzien van Gent.blogt, Brussel.blogt en hun toekomstige broertjes, hetgeen met bvb de podcast activiteiten van Gent.blogt (interviews die je via -grote- MP3 files kan beluisteren) geen te verwaarlozen detail blijkt. 

Voor meer info: contacteer Peter Forret op 0497/479.851 of via brussel@blogt.be

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Flickr changes image URLs with some glitches

Published on September 2, 2005 in internet. 1 Comment

Old URL:
photos23.flickr.com

New URL:
static.flickr.com/23

Just this week I started getting problems with Flickr images that were embedded in my own sites. I got a “red cross” instead of a picture. When I checked the image URLs that I was using and the ones that Flickr currently uses, I saw they had changed, and the transition was not flawless (at that point).

Where each image used to reside on one of the photosXX.flickr.com servers, they now have the URL http://static.flickr.com/XX/… (with the same server id XX). Apparently in some cases, the image URLs were not automatically redirected to the new address, which caused the crosses. Some Flickr users were complaining about the same problem on the Flickr forums.

While I am writing this, more and more URLs start working again, i.e. there is an automatic redirection to the correct URL. But basically this 1 month old explanation of the Flickr image URLs has to be updated:

http://photos{server-id}.flickr.com/{id}_{secret}_[mstb].jpg becomes
http://static.flickr.com/{server-id}/{id}_{secret}_[mstb].jpg

FLICKR STORAGE HISTORY
In the early days of Flickr, the images were stored on separate servers: photos1 was 69.90.111.71, photos2 was 69.90.111.72, …, situated in Vancouver, BC (Canada): probably adding 1 storage server at a time while the gigabytes were pouring in. After the move to Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA) in July of this year, all photoXX DNS names were changed to point to the same 68.142.213.135 IP address – or storage1.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com.

Today, instead of maintaining the 33 DNS entries, they opted for working with 1 domain name static.flickr.com and let the load balancing/cache distribution (analyze.forret.com shows there is a “X-Cache = HIT” HTTP header that is a caching directive) decide from which server the image should be grabbed. You can actually get an idea by this little hack:

  • photos1: “storage3.flickr.mud” shown on the ‘home’ page
  • photos2: “storage5.flickr.mud”
  • photos3: “storage3.flickr.mud”
  • photos4: “storage7.flickr.mud”
  • photos5: “storage4.flickr.mud”
  • …

A total of 8 storage servers, I’m guessing.

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