Friday, May 26, 2006
Over the years, when I needed to get quick information for a Microsoft Platform SDK function, I would Google it and find the MSDN reference page at the top of the list. Recently, the MSDN pages have all but disappeared, or are far down the Google index. I'm now forced to search with Yahoo. Has anyone else noticed this?
For example, I'm working on a Crypto API issue right now, and wanted to get the reference for this function:
CryptVerifyDetachedMessageSignature
If you Google it, you get everything EXCEPT a Microsoft page. If you search in Yahoo, you get what you expect.
What's going on here? Is Google impartial or could it be that in the fierce competition with Microsoft, they are intentionally reducing traffic to Microsoft?
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
With three young children (all under 7 yrs old), I've got a beef with just about every existing website targeted to them. They are all so chock-full of ads and links that my children can never do much until veering off to some page where they don't know what happened. Usually it's because they clicked on a Google ad, some other ad, a registration link, a link to buy something, etc. They cannot browse the web even on "safe" sites without constant supervision to get them un-stuck.
I also realized there are lots of good animal wildlife and other educational videos on sites like Google Video, YouTube, etc. It would be great if the kids could watch them, but those videos are mixed in with everything else which is entirely unsuitable for them. Given that I'm working on TagTooga.com which has great feed capabilities, I decided to create a kid's video site: KidSafeVideo.com which takes live feeds from TagTooga.com of videos I've selected from Google Video. I tested it on my kids today, and they love it. I could really see something like this in a classroom, with video on topics from Lions to Volcanos at the teacher's fingertips!
The site is entirely non-profit. There are no ads, and there will never be clickable ads, if any advertising at all. There are no links offsite. It is a very simple site with videos categorized by topic. There are about 50 videos there now, mostly animal oriented, with some funny cartoons as well. Everything is suitable for young children. You might want to check it out to see if your kids like it.
KidSafeVideo.com
PS> Now for the Geek/Technical note. Check out how it's done by viewing the source of a page on kidsafevideo.com. You'll see that the video feeds are coming from a bit of javascript pulling from TagTooga.com.
I can add and delete videos at will from TagTooga.com, and changes are automatically reflected on kidsafevideo.com.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The Web is evolving in an amazing way, and it's happening right now. I'm convinced that Yahoo's acquisition of del.icio.us is going to be seen as an incredibly smart move -- and one that will not be good for Google. Yes, Google may still remain the search engine leader, that is, search engines as we now know them -- traditional ones. But more and more people will be using other means to search the web. Web 2.0 means. Social Bookmarking. These are growing rapidly, whereas growth in traditional search is not.
If you compare searching on del.icio.us vs. Google (or Yahoo), you'll find that:
1) del.icio.us response time is a little slower -- that's fixable in the long run.
2) del.icio.us content is Web 2.0 technology heavy. There's a lot of content on Ajax, Ruby on Rails, etc., but not so much on "shipping logistics", for example. Traditional search (Google/Yahoo/MSN) is deep in everything.
3) Traditional search relies on algorithms, is slow to recognize new sites (ever hear of the Google sandbox?), and puts too much weight on a site's age. Del.icio.us recognizes new sites quickly and rankings come more from collective (democratic) agreement vs. algorithms.
4) I believe Yahoo's strategy is to ultimately use the information/data gained from del.icio.us bookmarking as the major influence in determining search engine results pages (SERPS) for the Yahoo search engine. Unless Google has something we don't know about, they are way behind.
A few scary notes about Google:
1) Adsense is their only revenue source, and margins on this will tighten and competition will become fierce. While they may retain leadership, their total market share percentage will decrease.
2) Google has too much going on and they've lost focus. Successful companies lead by seasoned business veterans have butt-loads of cash on hand too, but they're not spending it in 52 directions at once. This reminds me a lot of past companies like "Internet Capital Group" and CMGI -- and we all know what happened to them. Google might be creating neat stuff, but.... what's the business model? So far, Adsense is it, and we know what's going to happen to those margins and the competition is coming.
So what's going on in Web 2.0? The amount of activity out there is amazing. Here are some lists:
Bookmarking
Blogging Services
Business Networking
Classifieds
Community
Job Search
Knowledge Sharing
Web 2.0 List 1
Web 2.0 List 2
Web 2.0 List 3
Web 2.0 List 4
Web 2.0 List 5
Web 2.0 List 6
Web 2.0 List 7
Mashups List 1
Mashups List 2
Mashups List 3
Mashups List 4
Mashups List 5
Mashups List 6
Mashups List 7
Podcast Sharing
Portals
Social Bookmarking
Search
Social Networking
Necessity is the mother of invention. Why are all these sites springing up? It's because traditional search is not fulfilling a need or isn't doing it well enough. The ultimate Web 2.0 winners will be stealing a lot of traffic from traditional search.
PS> I forgot to add these thoughts:
Look how many tools and supporting services are popping up for del.icio.us:
del.icio.us Tools Part 1
del.icio.us Tools Part 2
del.icio.us Tools Part 3
By the way, what's the point of DMOZ anymore? del.icio.us (and other Web 2.0 sites) are the "end-around" play on DMOZ. DMOZ is the feudalistic model of the web. Some "lord" of a particular category, possibly some geek in Belgium with a penchant for porn, decides, if and when he ever gets around to it, whether your site will be listed in a directory that gets syndicated to major search engines and thousands of web-spam sites.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
I ran across Clay Shirky's article
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality and immediately thought of checking the stats on a few TagTooga.com pages.
Amazing what I found... In a nutshell, a power law distribution says that "in any system sorted by rank, the value for the Nth position will be 1/N. For whatever is being ranked -- income, links, traffic -- the value of second place will be half that of first place, and tenth place will be one-tenth of first place." I took a look at the "Julian Beever" page on TagTooga.com, and here's what I found:
1st item listed: 312 click-throughs.
2n item listed: 119 click-throughs (theoretical = 312/2 = 156)
3rd item listed: 85 click-throughs (theoretical = 312/3 = 104)
4th item listed: 73 click-throughs (theoretical = 312/4 = 78)
5th item listed: 64 click-throughs (theoretical = 312/5 = 62)
6th item listed: 52 click-throughs (theoretical = 312/6 = 52)
7th item listed: 37 click-throughs (theoretical = 312/7 = 44)
Here's a link to the
Julian Beever Page.
The page owned by the artist himself is (amazingly) 4th in the list. The 1st in the list isn't necessarily the best site, but was simply lucky to be listed first once the page started getting popular.
So... Now you know the value of being listed 1st, or 2nd, or 3rd, etc. on Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, or anywhere else...
Friday, March 17, 2006
This might be of interest to people.
As you know, McAfee recently had a serious error with a DAT file that mis-identified good files as viruses. Depending on your settings, if your server did an on-demand scan when that DAT file was active, you may have either quarantined or deleted important files. These lost files may not become apparent to you until your server next reboots, which may be when patches are next applied. In some cases, we have been able to tell that you've lost files and have already notified you, if you have not heard from *** Support, and you are running McAfee Virus Scan, we strongly recommend you review the on-demand scan logs of your McAfee to ensure that you restore any quarantined or deleted files before you reboot your system.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
You all know what reverse IP lookup is: trying to determine which websites reside on the same web server, whether it be a shared hosting server where the sites are unrelated or a dedicated host. The TagTooga.com site now has "Reverse Google ID Lookup" -- the ability to find sites using the same AdSense Google ID.
When a site is detected to use Google ID's, the listing in TagTooga.com will include a
icon. If you click on it you will see the Google ID and the other URLs having the same Google ID. Here is a snapshot of an example from
software/charting analysis:
The image shown here is the admin's view, which includes options for banning a domain or Google ID from the TagTooga.com site. Normal user's don't have banning ability.
PS> Using the same Google ID on multiple sites does not imply wrongdoing -- but you might uncover something a less-than-reputable site owner didn't want you to know...
Friday, March 10, 2006
Most blogs have a right sidebar to display blogrolls, or linkrolls. Wouldn't it be cool to display HTML snapshots of the linked web pages instead of text links? Well, you can do it with TagTooga.com. You can check it out at
http://tagtooga.blogspot.com/ where I've created a demo blog with an HTML image feed.
You can also create the standard text link blogrolls and linkrolls...
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
A new social bookmarking engine called TagTooga was released just today, so it's still lacking content. However, if you're a programmer interested in AJAX, Web 2.0, Javascript, etc., it might be worth your time to take a look. The site was designed to function as much like an application as possible. Once you get past the login/registration, there are virtually no complete page reloads. Clicks to edit, search, etc. cause inline divs to pop-in. The XMLHTTP calls to the server are such that the responses are instructions on what to do: update a div with HTML, show an alert message box, eval Javascript code, etc. So a single XMLHTTP response might update a couple divs in the DOM, run some Javascript to update the client-side state, and show an alert.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Hi! Just wrapping up the Beta release of the Movable Type API ActiveX Component. I'll be releasing examples all day tomorrow. Here are a few already:
Get Recent Posts
Get Category List
Get Post Categories
Assign Additional Post Category
Remove Category from Post
Fetch Trackback Information
Information about downloading the ActiveX is on each example page.
The Movable Type API provides an interface for the MT XML-RPC calls (mt.getPostCategories, mt.setPostCategories, mt.getCategoryList, mt.GetRecentPostTitles, mt.getTrackbackPings, mt.publishPost, etc.)
The same API will be available in the Tortuga Movable Type .NET Class Library within a week. There is also a WordPress ActiveX Component that provides functionality for the WordPress Admin web pages that is not accessible from any XML-RPC. For example, one cannot create new categories via an external non-web app, but the WordPress ActiveX (and .NET) components will allow you to do something like this.
Questions can be sent to Matt Fausey mfausey@worldwideweb-x.com
By the way, I forgot to mention. All the blogging components support HTTP proxy and SSL (Blogger 1.0, Blogger 2.0, MetaWeblog, Movable Type, Technorati, Yahoo! Site Explorer, yada yada yada...). Not sure if SSL is used yet, but if it were, the support is already there. Anyway, it would be nice to see XML-RPC over SSL because right now the logins/passwords are passed in plain-text.
-Matt
Friday, September 30, 2005
The Tortuga .NET component now has a Yxplore class that provides
an easy-to-use API for the Yahoo! Site Explorer Web Services.
The Yahoo! Site Explorer web services allow one retrieve information
about the pages that exist in the Yahoo! index. It also allows you to
find inbound links for a given site or URL.
The Tortuga .NET component, which also includes classes for
Blogger 1.0, Blogger 2.0, MetaWeblog, RSS, Atom, and Technorati,
can be downloaded HERE.
These classes are free to use in both commercial and non-commercial applications and web sites.
The Tortuga ActiveX will also include the Yxplore object, and this is to be released on 4-Oct-2005.
The existing download contains objects for Blogger 1.0, Blogger 2.0, MetaWeblog, RSS, and Atom.
(Technorati ActiveX is also due for release on 4-Oct-2005.)
C# Example Programs:
Yahoo! Site Explorer C# Example for Finding Indexed Pages
Yahoo! Site Explorer C# Example for Finding Inbound Links
Enjoy!
Matt
Thursday, September 29, 2005
A .NET Technorati Search Component is now available for BETA testing.
I will be posting sample code articles today/tomorrow as I continue testing.
As usual, this is a free component...
CosmosQuery C# Example
KeyInfo C# Example
SearchQuery C# Example
OutboundQuery Not Working?
Best Regards,
Matt
The class library's name will be "Tortugati" for two reasons: (1) don't want to infringe on copyright issues with the name "Technorati", and (2) the goofiness of the Web's technical jargon is growing rapidly, so why not add to it?
Monday, September 26, 2005
Sunday, September 25, 2005
The MetaWeblog .NET component is ready for testing. The download is:
MetaWeblog .NET
Here are some examples:
MetaWeblog API .NET: NewPost
MetaWeblog API .NET: EditPost
MetaWeblog API .NET: Post with Image
Comments are always welcome.
Best Regards,
Matt
Friday, September 23, 2005
The MetaWeblog ActiveX component is ready for testing. The download is:
MetaWeblog ActiveX
Here are some examples:
MetaWeblog API VB Example: NewPost
MetaWeblog API VB Example: EditPost
MetaWeblog API VB Example: NewPost with NewMediaObject
MetaWeblog API VB Example: Fetch Post Info
MetaWeblog API VB Example: Upload Changes to Post
More VB examples will be released. Following that, I'll release the Beta for the MetaWeblog .NET component in the next few days. The official release with online documentation will occur a few days following that...
Comments are always welcome. By the way... it seems like MetaWeblog depends entirely on Blogger 1.0 to get the user's blog information. The only way I see to get the blogId for a blog is to use blogger.GetUsersBlogs, which is what blogging clients such as Bloggar and Qumana do when I examine the chatter using the Ethereal protocol analyzer. If I am incorrect, please let me know.
Best Regards,
Matt
Thursday, September 22, 2005
I'm working on an entire suite of blogging/syndication components and don't intend to stop until I've just about implemented every major client-side protocol that exists. .NET and ActiveX components are already available for Blogger 2.0, Atom, and RSS at
Blogger 2.0, Atom, RSS components. The Blogger 1.0 and MetaWeblog .NET and ActiveX components are finished and in testing phase. In both cases, all components are housed in a single DLL: Tortuga.dll for the ActiveX, and TortugaDN.dll for the .NET class library.
The latest ActiveX can be downloaded here: http://www.worldwideweb-x.com/TortugaBeta.zip
It's a Zip of the DLL, so you'll have to register it yourself with regsvr32.exe. Once testing is complete, and documentation finished, I'll update the official download.
Questions and comments are always welcome. Tomorrow, the MetaWeblog testing should be complete and those examples will be posted. Then, on Monday/Tuesday we should see the documentation and offical release finished. Then it's on to SBS (Simple Blogging Service). And then onward to many more...
Here are VB Blogger 1.0 examples:
Blogger 1.0 API Visual Basic Example: GetUserInfo
Blogger 1.0 API Visual Basic Example: GetUsersBlogs
Blogger 1.0 API Visual Basic Example: Create Post w/ Title
Blogger 1.0 API Visual Basic Example: Edit Most Recent Post
Blogger 1.0 API Visual Basic Example: Fetching Post Content
Blogger 1.0 API Visual Basic Example: Delete Post
Best Regards,
Matt Fausey