Monthly Archive for April, 2007

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Metatale RSS widgets

Published on April 17, 2007 in Belgium. 11 Comments

I continued to work a bit on stuff one could do with the Metatale data. As a result, here are 2 RSS-based widgets for Metatale, that you can embed on your site:

Top 100 in RSS format

metatale search
The ATOM/RSS feed MetataleTop100 (through Feedburner) now lists all 100 blogs in the top 100 of Metatale. You can use it in your RSS reader (it’s in my Bloglines), show it on your blog (like my Metatale Flemish Top 20 page) or recycle it with Yahoo! Pipes or whatever. It’s RSS, so it’s easy to process.

I’ve included in each blog description: its place in the Top 100, its Metatale influence indicator (a number between 0 and 25, plus a graphical representation of it), a screenshot of the homepage, a link to check Pagerank and incoming Technorati links and one for a more comprehensive blog dashboard.

Search results in RSS format (a.k.a. What’s my score?)

I also have a way for you to show your own ranking on your blog. You can do a search for a keyword in the blog names (‘blog.forret.com’ or ‘forret’ would show mine, ‘wordpress’ will show all *.wordpress.com blogs like the image I’ve displayed here) and get the results in RSS. You can choose a ‘small’ or ‘short’ output format (without screenshot and links), because the screenshot is 270 pixels wide, and that might be too much of a good thing for some sidebars.
Use the following wizard to create the URL of your custom RSS feed:

Metatale custom RSS
Search for:
Short result (no screenshot)

For both applications: all suggestions are welcome!

UPDATE: because Clo asked me nicely: here’s a Javascript version of the widget:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" src="http://tools.forret.com/metatale-js.php?s=[search term]"></SCRIPT>

Metatale launches

Published on April 17, 2007 in Belgium. 1 Comment

One of Bart‘s secret projects has just launched: Metatale, an analysis tool to measure influence of Flemish blogs. What better way to start the buzz amongst Flemish bloggers than by publishing a top 100 of most influential blogs, our local alternative for Technorati Popular Blogs.
Metatale top100
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Twitter: watch your mouth

Published on April 12, 2007 in Google. 6 Comments

Whether Twitter will turn out to be a conversational revolution or a giant waste of time, I’m still not sure about. Sometimes it feels like instant messaging (chatting *with* someone), sometimes like just changing the subtitle of your MSN/Gtalk (just a shout, no specific destination), sometimes it’s more like talking to yourself. But make no mistake: you are not just talking to yourself!

Thanks to its huge geek-appeal (over 145.000 backlinks in Technorati), Twitter is well on its way towards a respectable PageRank 8. Twitter also uses pretty URLs, (twitter.com/[user]/statuses/[messageid] ), which Google likes a lot. Twitter also generously links from one account to the other (Twitter Friends). And Twitter has a LOT of (small bites of) content. As a result of that, whatever you say in Twitter may come back to haunt you through Google.

Exhibit 1: Pietel
Twitter exhibit 1: Pietel
When you do a Google search for “Pietel”, his Twitter account shows up as result #4 of 226.000. Being the good boy that he is, he just wrote that he finished his work assignment at home. But if his last remark would have been: “stupid job, silly colleagues, moron boss“, would he like that to show up on Google?
(depending on what Google server you fall, your results might be different, but the Twitter result has a good chance of ending up on the first page of results).
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Interpersonal Intelligence and Mental Violence

Published on April 10, 2007 in science. Closed

This is a text by Rauno Lindström that has now disappeared from its original URL. I don’t agree with all points in the text, but I store it here for easy reference. The definition of ‘interpersonal intelligence’ will remind you of “EQ“.

Arguments for the existence of a kind of intelligence which codes how a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of the others, was brought forward by Gardner (1985). He defends extensively this ability which he calls the interpersonal intelligence but he does not give any definition for it. I argue for one meaning which the definition should contain. My insight is based mainly on experience, very little on the psychological literature because I am a physicist. I try to illuminate my ideas by a few examples from everyday life. My view of the interpersonal intelligence consists of similar aspects as the social intelligence by Barnes and Sternberg (1989). They defined the social intelligence as consisting, in part, of the ability to accurately decode social information. The testees were given two tasks. First, they had to judge whether a couple pictured in a photograph was real (genuinely in a relationship) or fake (two strangers). Second, they were asked to judge which of two people in a photograph was the other’s supervisor. However, I wish to emphasize that the interpersonal intelligence does not really become apparent in the test items where the testee is to react only to the behavior of another person. In fact, testees possessing quite different interpersonal intelligences would response in a very similar way. The interpersonal intelligence becomes discernible when the testee self is involved in the matter. It shows the extent to which a person is willing to take into account the viewpoints of the other persons versus his or her own viewpoint. I think that it is possible to predict very well this kind of behavior of an individual if one has known him or her for a long time.
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