Tango, photography and whatever's bleeding edge
I’ve started a public Google calendar for tango events (milonga’s, salons) in and around Brussels. My preferred site, milonga.be has gone down, the agenda at tango.be is quite ugly (it uses frames *shiver* ), and Marisa & Oliver’s agenda cannot be exported. So I made my own:
Continue reading ‘Brussels Tango on Google Calendar’
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Last year, when Flickr wanted to create a ranking system for its pictures, they developed an algorithm for “interestingness”.
There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.
from About Interestingness
Taking into account views, comments, notes, favorites and user reputations, it is an advanced wisdom-of-the-crowds long-tail recommendation engine. The exact formula is unknown and the indivual ‘interestingness’ score of a photo cannot be displayed. Just like with Google PageRank, people try to guess how it works internally.
Continue reading ‘“Interestingness” for Google web search’
Trackbacks are a good way to alert other bloggers that you citing them on your blog. It also helps to drive traffic to your own site (if your comment was insightful or tempting).
Unfortunately, some blog hosts like Blogger, Skynetblogs do not automatically send a trackback ping to all the blog URLs in your blog post. So how do you send such a trackback from your blogspot.com site to other blogs (provided they support receiving them, obviously)?
If the trackback was not accepted, it could be for one of the following reasons:
Just so I don’t forget, this is how to put a Google Site Search (search within your domain) in your Blogger template:
<FORM METHOD="GET" ACTION="http://www.google.com/search"> <INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="num" value="10" /> <INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="hl" value="en" /> <INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="<$BlogURL$>" /> <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="as_q" style="width: 100px;" /> <INPUT TYPE="submit" value="Search!" /> </FORM>
Copy/Paste into your Blogger sidebar and off you go!
While searching for something really innocent on Google (honestly!), I got the following warning:
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (“DMCA” – 1998) criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself, and heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. OMG, what kind of illegal practices had Google just protected me from? Clicking the ChillingEffects link shows the DMCA complaint in question: the Perfect 10
Yesterday I was browsing through my freshly arrived Tufte book “The visual display of quantitative information“. One example of “garbage in, garbage out” that he gives is the London Stock Exchange index (which went way down one year in Dec) and the solar radiation in that same year (which obviously also went down in the winter). Plotting both lines in the same graph gives the impression of correlation (Stock Exchange went down because of lack of sun).
Now take a look at this chart:
This seems to imply that, since the term “RSS” is more searched for than “blogs”, that RSS is more popular than this whole “blogs” thing, right?
And this is exactly what was written in businessweek.com. It was cited by socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com, who -to their credit- added the wise remark that:
To be honest, I do think that RSS is as important as I said above, but in terms of use frequency it’s also got the semantic advantage of only having one tense. People will write about and search for blogs, blog and blogging for example – but RSS is a one-term wonder.
Last year, Google took in about $2.7 billion through ads on other people’s sites, accounting for 44% of its ad revenues. Most of that money probably came through big sites, but a decent portion must have come from the little guys. When you add up all the under-$100 AdSense balances earned by the Scott Karps of the world, the total must be a pretty impressive number. That’s free working capital for Google, or it can invest the stash and make even more money. It’s a devilishly good idea.
roughtype.com via kingsley2.com and google.blognewschannel.com
Nicholas Carr then goes on clarifying that if you have more than $10 on your account, and you officially terminate your Adsense account, Google will send you the money anyway. In any case, there are thousands of Adsense accounts with sleeping money that cannot be touched until they break the $100 barrier.
Let’s see, thousands of small $ amounts that are blocked, that still represents tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars. Let’s see if we can come up with a business model to recover some of that money without breaking the Adsense Terms of Service.
Goal: fill the bucket, i.e. reach the $100 mark and then leave.
Continue reading ‘Adsense: The long tail of spare change’
I had been wondering just how much information Google Adsense uses to select the right contextual ads. Specifically, do they use the referring page also. I just got part of the answer:
Continue reading ‘Adsense also looks at search terms’
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