Entries Tagged 'Web' ↓

It occurred to me the yesterday, with more and more people seeing the power of Javascript and CSS, more websites are getting slick. Ok, that’s a pretty obvious statement, but here’s something that’s not obvious: This presents a great opportunity for easter eggs!

Easter Eggs are little hidden things in side of a bigger program. Some times it just the developer’s names, other times it can be something totally unexpected like a flight simulator hidden in a spreadsheet program. With the power of Javascript and nice tutorials like this one, there’s a lot of opportunity to have some real fun!

Just think, with all of the computing power a modern browser affords us developers, it should be very easy to recreate tons of games from the Atari 2600, early Nintendo systems. The imagination can very easily run wild….

I’ve been reading The MineThatData Blog for a few weeks now, and the other day there was an interesting article about understanding the traffic that a website receives. The article talked about using sites like Alexa, Blog Juice, Bloglines, and Technorati to measure a site’s popularity.

Overall it seems like a good approach to aggregate this data together to get the “big picture” of where one’s website stands in the web. I’ve tried this but I’ve noticed that Technorati doesn’t seem to report the numbers I expect it would.

For example: I got a link to my blog from Hip Egg a few weeks ago, and this link has not been reported on Technorati. I know this blog is small potatoes in the grand scope of the universe, but it strikes me as odd that my more recent updates are featured in my “favorites” (as is Hip Egg’s posts), yet the link from him hasn’t shown up.

My working assumption is that Technorati has some kind of filter where lower popularity sites aren’t “updated” as often as the bigger sites. Either that or the link database is broken. But links for other sites seem to be working, although I’m not watching them as closely as I watch my own stats.
At any rate I wonder how many other blogs (or sites in general) are suffering from this problem. Metrics for websites are difficult to agree on, so a site or sites where a reputation can be established and measured becomes more and more important. Aggregating data from multiple sites is a good start, but if there are too many “issues” with how a site is ranked, then the data becomes suspect and it becomes harder to get a clear picture of what’s going on.

Here’s an interesting article about data mining and auction fraud.

Graphs, and what you can do with them, never ceases to amaze me. The article talks about how looking at the relationships between users on eBay can help uncover fraud and the accomplices that help keep it going. They do this by seeing if the relationship between groups of users turns into a biparte graph. That is, there is a concentration of links between two groups of users, and few links with other users.

The links between users refers to the “feedback scores” that eBay users use to determine a user’s trustworthiness. Usually, when someone begins ripping others off, they get bad feedback until it reaches a point where no one will do business with them. This is the way that community sites commonly work (i.e. letting the population of users determine each other’s rankings). The issue is that sometimes there are people lurking in the shadows assisting the fraudster, but because they are never the target of the bad feedback, they are able to keep going supporting new fraudsters (i.e. a new user id).

This setup allows a scammer to setup a new user id and get its feedback levels boosted quickly without having to engage in a lot of “legitimate” transactions. Think of it as passing a baton in a relay race: Instead of one person running a mile, why not let several people sprint as fast as they can for a quarter-mile and then hand off to someone “fresh”.

Think about it: When was the last time you checked someone’s feedback ratings on eBay? Probably right before your last purchase/bid. But, when was the last time you checked the people who gave the feedback to see what their reputation was? Probably never. I know I had never thought of this before reading the article.

This technique produces a graphical representation of this relationship which stands out quickly to a user. (Also, as side note, there are mathematical formulas that would/should see this also.) A normal user would probably have a relationship graph (over 2 or more degrees) that looks like a star-burst pattern. A potential scammer would show up in a clustered bipartite graph. This would give the community of users (eBay bidders) a powerful tool to determine who is the real deal and who is trying to give them a wooden nickel. Very cool stuff. Graph theory to the rescue!

I’m a big fan of O’Reilly books. They are a great reference when tackling pretty much any programming topic. I own a ton of their books.

A few weeks ago I was searching for something (I can’t even remember what it was) and I stumbled across a new feature on their site. They are now selling short (around 50 pages) PDF’s called “Short Cuts” that are basically short papers on some topic that they don’t have a book for yet. Its a pretty neat idea, the PDFs range in price from around $5 to around $10 or so.

And the coolest thing is that there is a promotion going on where you “Buy 3 books for the price of 2″. With the short cuts I was hooked because there were a couple that looked interesting and the price was hard to beat. The whole process was pretty painless and within minutes I had my new PDFs.

Fast forward to today: Again I’m searching for something (RTF documentation to be exact) and a hit turns up on O’Reilly’s site. This time its for one of their pocket reference guides. I was bummed because it looked like the book had the answers I was looking for, but I knew the odds of finding it locally were low, and I didn’t feel like waiting for it to show up in the mail…

And right around then I noticed the book was available as a PDF for *half* price. It turns out that O’Reilly is now offering a lot of the pocket guides as PDFs for immediate download, and they are pretty much half the price of the dead tree book. Isn’t that awesome? the best part is the 3 for the price of 2 sale is still going on.
So, I wound up spending $10 and now I’ve got 3 more PDF of pocket guides. Go check it out if you are in the market for any of the pocket guides. Also, several of their newer books are available in PDF form also. Sadly, their older books aren’t in PDF form yet, which bummed me out because there’s a couple that look really interesting. This is the long tail at work.

This is a very interesting article:Wired News: MySpace Predator Caught by Code

Finally, a mashup that does something useful. :)  As the article points out there are certain patterns of usage that probably would raise red flags. What surprises me the most though is people aren’t excited about this type of technology being used.

Given the large size of the user base of MySpace, it is pretty impractical to have a set of eyes on every user and every posting that goes on. Granted, there is a real possibility of false hits when doing an automated search like this. But given that a computer can sift through the set of millions of possible hits and narrow it down to a few hundred (which can then be followed up by a human), to me it is a no brainer.

The best part of doing an automated data mining scan of a site like MySpace would be that its a computer, not a person doing the scanning. Computers don’t make judgements, or laugh at your music choices, they just scan. To me it seems like this would be the best of all possible worlds: Let the computer make the rough pass over the site, and pick out the most “questionable” users/postings for human followup. That way the “invasion of privacy” (if there even is such a thing on the internet anymore) is limited. And by making sure that a human is doing the follow up, we hopefully remove the problem of the over-zealous filter that assumes everyone is bad.
I’m curious to see what the reaction is when the reporter releases the code that lead to the investigations in the story. Will MySpace adopt its usage? Will vigilante surveillance groups pop up and patrol the internet? Interesting times lie ahead…

Everyone is talking about the Google office apps that were announced today. And while they are cool, I’m really kinda surprised that the new redesign of the Google Reader has gotten so little press.

I’ve been using the reader for a while now, and this new update to it is really great. My feeds were getting hard to manage (some feeds were updating often, others only once in a while) and the new format allows for fast and easy viewing, without letting good things slip by.

Its still a beta product which shows sometimes when it reports new items that aren’t there, but overall its pretty good. Google has a pretty good track record with these beta products, so if you are interested in an RSS news reader, head on over and check it out.

And speaking of press, Google’s Code Search sure did make waves this week, and that really puzzles me. The site is a great resource for finding code, but most programmers I know usually are looking for an explanation about how something works in addition to a code sample. In fact, I was surprised Google launched this seeing how other sites like Koders seem to be doing a good job of covering this niche.

But at least some folks out there have been having some fun with the search: Which women do nerds prefer?

I saw this the other day and groaned: 20 Smart Companies to Start Now

Its basically a wish list from a bunch of venture capitalists of companies they would like to fund (read: would like to see started so they can get a big chunk of it so that when it gets taken over they get a ton of money). The list ranges from the interesting to the insane, as most lists like this would. But one thing I noticed where a couple of entries that read more like a Nigerian Scam.

A few VC’s were offering a small amount of money, but wanting to see a “proof of concept” site with customers. That strikes me as odd because if a startup were able to get to that point, why would they need the VC cash? Having customers is a huge step, at that point you’re probably already bringing in some money. And I can understand that the VC’s don’t want to throw cash at just anyone, but bringing a site/product to life usually doesn’t happen for free for the developers.

Part of me knows that they are doing this to try and prevent a bubble-type-situation where money is flowing like crazy to anyone who can string together enough words to form a sentence. But another part of me thinks that these requests are going too far in the other direction. Especially since some of the requests are derivative products (as opposed to completely new ideas).

Why on earth would Google do this?

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Google Has Acquired YouTube

Google Video seemed to be doing ok, YouTube just seemed to be a collection of random (sometimes pirated) videos. Why would google open themselves up to this potential landmine of litigation?

Maybe the Internet Bubble is back… *sigh* And I was looking forward to a return to nice peaceful times when business plans had to make sense…

Lately I’ve been playing around with reddit. Its a social news/bookmarking site where users submit links an everyone else can vote up or down the link. Pretty interesting stuff. If you are familiar with digg, its the same thing, only with a smaller userbase (and less publicity).

Thanks to reddit I’ve found some really great things that I probably wouldn’t have found as quickly or if at all. Plus I’ve gotten to see some pretty interesting behaviors from the community of users:

1. People “discovering” a site. Occasionally a link will get tossed up for some cool site. Usually over the next week you’ll see other entries from that site getting posted. If its a new site (to you) this is pretty cool, but if its a site you’re already familiar with, it can get kinda old fast.
2. Flavor of the week vs Holy wars: Sometimes a topic is kinda hot so it gets mentioned a lot. This leads to a ton of links about that topic. On the programming side, Joel on Software comes up a lot, and anything he mentions gets analyzed to death. People on both sides of the discussion begin sending in links supporting their side/view. This leads to a ton of links about Haskell, Erlang, and a ton of other programming languages I could care less about.
3. One sided politics. I’ve noticed a lot of political-oriented links, and I’ve noticed that most of them seem to lean one way or the other. I’ve always assumed that if one point of view was brought up, an equal number of opposing/different points of view would be presented. On reddit, this doesn’t seem to be the case for some reason. Its an interesting thing to watch.

Like I said, its an interesting site. If you are looking for new content or wondering where the internet is, go check it out. Some day when I have time I’d like to write up something to poll the site and see a breakdown of how the community works. *sigh* Some day when I have time……

I was in GMail today and I glanced up at the little ads that run along the top. You know, the one liners. Since those ads are based off of the content of your mail box, more often than not there’s something up there I’m at least a little bit interested in.

Tonight there was an ad that said:

WTF? I know people named “Andrew” and I probably have an email or two with the name “Smith” in it, but this is just odd. I clicked on the link to see what it was. It was a parked domain. With a note that said “this domain is NOT for sale”. Other than that it just had search boxes and weather forecasts.

My question is why would someone buy ads for a domain like this? I know adwords are cheap and all, but if your site isn’t selling anything, and it isn’t for sale, then why advertise it? Maybe this is some new Web 2.0 trend/business model…