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08
Mar 10

Thinking of Linking

Hyperlinks in the form of web links are the lifeblood of today’s internet and world wide web. Examination of your web server’s log files, either directly via tools such as Webalizer or indirectly via analytics services such as Yahoo’s or Google’s can show you who’s visiting your web site or blogs.

But who’s visiting your site isn’t the whole picture; following a hyperlink is an active process. To complete the picture you need to find out who’s linking to your site, which is a passive process.

Hyperlink

If you’re running a blog you may be able to use trackbacks or pingbacks to find out when a site links to you, but only if the linking site support the trackback or pingback protocol and then only if this is enabled on both sides of the ping relationship.

So what about those sites which don’t support trackbacks or pingbacks or who don’t want to be discovered that they’re linking to you?

That last use case may seem overly paranoid, but as Chris Heilmann recently discovered, knowing who’s linking to you is less a luxury and more an essential piece of information that can reveal unwanted content placed on your server by a third party … and third parties placing content on your server is never a good thing.

Working for Yahoo! and working with people such as Chris, who understands how the web and the net work, has taught me a massive amount over the last 4 or so years. So in this case the answer is glaringly obvious once you stop to think about it, the major source of who’s linking to who is … a search engine.

Google Reader

So now not only do I know who’s visiting my sites but also who’s linked to them, by using Google’s Blog Search and synching that through Google Reader to NetNewsWire, my RSS reader on my laptop. The moment someone links to me and that gets picked up by Google’s spider, I get an alert. Of course, this doesn’t cover all eventualities but it’s always a good thing to have more than one source of information, especially when that comes for free.

NetNewsWire

Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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04
Mar 10

Genius or Desperation?

I’m sorry Facebook but your ad targeting systems are wildly inaccurate and reduce that valuable screen estate to the right hand side of my browser window to irrelevant line noise. Google’s and Yahoo’s ad targeting is pretty darn good but looking at Facebook right now offers me:

  • Omniture Research; which Obama used, apparently.
  • Free laptop from Vodafone Business; I’m not self employed so a business tariff is a non starter.
  • Everyone plays Mafia Wars; except me and most of my friends.

So when I do actually look at a Facebook ad, it’s because it’s caught my attention, like this gem from the Royal Mail.

You already have the LP, the CD and the MP3 … now get the Collectible Stamp.

Royal Mail Classic Album Covers Facebook Ad

A click through yields the latest campaign from the Royal Mail which exhorts us to buy stamps (but not use them, but to collect them instead, at least I think that’s the premise) which reflect the classic albums we already own in a variety of formats (but what about 8 track or cassette tape?).

Royal Mail Classic Album Covers Ad

Given the amount of competition the Royal Mail faces and the fact that 25% of First Class letters fail to arrive on time, I’m not sure whether this latest ad campaign smacks of genius or of desperation.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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03
Mar 10

Reclaim and Own Your Short URLs

There are many reasons to like the use of URL shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com. These free services take a long URL such as this post – http://www.vicchi.org/2010/03/03/reclaim-and-own-your-short-urls – and compresses them down to a much more manageable shorterned version – http://bit.ly/aG1RBx or http://tinyurl.com/ylaodny.

They increase link sharing; the vast majority of social networking sites use 140 characters as the maximum size for an update, using the full version of a URL you’re sharing reduces the amount of space for you to put your own thoughts into the update. Just compare the full URL http://www.vicchi.org/2010/03/03/reclaim-and-own-your-short-urls at 65 characters against http://bit.ly/aG1RBx at 21 characters.

They can track and yield click and referrer information; the information that bit.ly provides is so useful, showing live clicks, geographic and referrer information amongst others.

another awesome bit.ly site down graphic

But almost a year ago, Delicious founder and ex-Yahoo! Joshua Schachter made some pretty compelling arguments against short URLs:

The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher’s DNS server, and the publisher’s website. With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver.

…

But the biggest burden falls on the clicker, the person who follows the links. The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party.

Or to put it another way, you no longer own your links or the data clicks that those links yield. If the service dies, your links break, pure and simple, and that does happen, as the demise of the original tr.im and cli.gs services show.

Get used to it... tr.im is currently unavailable

But there is a way to take all the benefit that short URLs offer and keep ownership of your links and all the data that clicks on those links will give you and that’s to run your own URL shortening service, which is precisely what I’ve done with vtny.org which is running the YOURLS code behind the scenes. This gives me all the benefits and metrics that other URL shorteners provide but with the added and crucial benefit that I now own the links and the data they generate, in this case via the vtny.org/4 short URL.

The URL shortener at vtny.org goes live

Photo credit: playerx and revrev on Flickr
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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01
Mar 10

Posterous; Paused. Possibly Permanently?

I’ve never run or hosted my own search engine. I’ve run and hosted web servers, mail servers, proxy servers and caching servers (I’m even contemplating running my own URL shortener), but never a search engine. There was a time when I ran an enterprise instance of Alta Vista back when I coded for a living and was part of the team building Factiva.com, but that doesn’t count.

If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.

Playing with Posterous

But I’ve never run my own search engine. So I didn’t know any of this. I probably should have, but I didn’t. Mea culpa.

So what has any of this to do with Posterous? I use Posterous. I like Posterous, a lot. I’ve written about Posterous, quite a bit. I also use Posterous to not only post to my Posterous blog but also to my own WordPress powered blog, on a domain I’ve owned for a goodly number of years, via Posterous’s autopost function … and which nicely and neatly produces an exemplar of how to have duplicate content hosted on multiple domains, with multiple URL addressing systems, for each and every post I produce.

How could I have not noticed this? Other people have, including Ian Delaney’s excellent write up, punnily entitled Past Posterous.

Sadly, it looks like despite the ease of blogging that Posterous offers, there is such a thing as too easy and so for now, with regret, I’ve postponed my use of Posterous, possibly in permanence. Unless of course, they offer a way of specifying canonical URLs.

And with profuse apologies for the overuse of alliteration in this post.

Photo Credit: I Bought a Mac on Flickr.

Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

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01
Mar 10

Winter, Followed by Spring and Back to Winter Again

I’ve never been a massive fan of Crowded House but 1991’s Four Seasons in One Day could have been written with this weekend’s weather in mind. We started with Winter (cold, wet, miserably damp), followed by Spring (heavy showers, glorious sunshine and the odd rainbow or two), followed by Summer (clear blue skies).

Centre Point against an (almost) Spring sky

Then this morning, we returned back to Winter again, complete with breath misting in front of your face, frozen puddles on the station platform and people ignoring the frozen puddles and ending up resplendently sprawled on the platform.

Winter returns to the morning commute.

Blogging about the weather … how very English.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Journal — 1 comment
26
Feb 10

Mashup, Location and London

Last night I was at LBi in the old Truman Brewery on London’s Brick Lane for Mashup’s Location … It’s Moving On. I’ve spoken at a Mashup event once or twice before but this time the organising team threw caution to the wind and asked me to chair the panel discussion.

Prior to kicking the panel discussion off, I attempted to gently suggest some topics to my fellow panelists that we might want to discuss.

We started off with a quick review of my Theory of Stuff and how it applies to deriving value from location and location data and briefly visited Gartner’s hype curve which puts location based services on the so called Plateau of Productivity. This is a good thing apparently. I then presented the panel with a series of  ”yes, but” style trade offs to mull over.

  • Smartphones vs. other phones; 21% of phones expected to have GPS by EOY 2009, but what about the other 79% without?
  • LBS and LBMS vs. other (older) location systems (APIs and so on); LBS and LBS apps get all the publicity but what about key location APIs, platforms and services?
  • “where’s my friends” vs. creating value and creating data; ”where’s my friends” doesn’t work as a (sole) business proposition but creating value added data does — FourSquare and Gowalla are creating geotagged local business listings from check ins.
  • “where’s my business” vs. location based advertising; Tesco and Starbucks are the latest companies to launch apps to drive customers to their premises, but what’s needed to drive location based ads?
  • “where I think you are” vs. “where I say I am”; For a user, being able to be their own source of truth is imperative, but how can you reconcile this with your business needs?
  • “where you are” vs. “where you’ve been”; (AKA tracking vs. privacy) How to walk the fine line between providing enhanced relevance via a user’s location and being accused of tracking them.

I was then joined by Chris Osborne (#geomob and Ito World), Alex Housely (Rummble), Jon Fisher (Vodafone), David Glennie (MIG) and Alan Patrick (Broadsight) for an hour’s worth of lively, animated, opinionated and occasionally profane panel discussion, making the job of ring-mastering all the more challenging and a whole lot of fun at the same time.

The #mashupevent audience look on from the bowels of Brick Lane

The audience chimed in with a variety of questions, some pointed, some speculative and some downright rambling before we retired to the bar and then out to sample one of Brick Lane’s finest curry houses; it’s a shame we didn’t find one of the finest but a decent post event wind down took place anyway in the basement of an establishment which had “Spice” in the name. I think.

All in all, a geotastic evening all round.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Update: 1 March 2010

It seems that the topic of the Mashup* event and the buzz of publicity that the team created on social media streams, including Twitter, were sufficient to get my introductory deck onto the Featured Presentations & Documents section of the SlideShare home page.

SlideShare Home Page

Updated and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

deliciousness — 1 comment
25
Feb 10

Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at

The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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24
Feb 10

Steaming Crab Dung?

Yes I know it’s short for Dungeness Crab (Steamed) but that’s not what it says on the receipt is it?

Steaming Crab Dung?
I feel sorry for the sole pan fried Monk as well …

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Journal — 1 comment
22
Feb 10

Visualising Tag Clouds

If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, I strongly suggest you point your browser of choice there right now and see what gorgeous visualisations of tags it comes up with. This is my delicious tag cloud …

Playing with tag clouds: http://delicious.com/vicchi

… this is the tag cloud for this blog …

Playing with tag clouds: http://www.vicchi.org/

… and this is the tag cloud for the blog I write for work.

Playing with tag clouds: http://www.ygeoblog.com/

All of which were produced using the default settings, with no tweaking, shows just how varied my personal approach to tagging is and how strongly tied to usage my tags are.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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22
Feb 10

Contextual Location (and Echoecho Redux)

I recently wrote about echoecho, an SMS based location sharing service and rather dismissed it as another PlayTxt or DodgeBall, both of which are now shuttered, and argued that EchoEcho fails my Theory of Stuff.

Nick Bicanic, the CEO of Purpose Wireless, the company behind echoecho was good enough to look me up and drop me a long email commenting on my blog post and — very politely — pointed out that I might want to revisit my opinion of the service. An edited version of that email to me formed the basis of his latest blog post on the topic of location as a context.

Trapped in an echo of light

So have I done echoecho a disservice? Quite possibly … to find out I (re)installed it on my iPhone and onto my BlackBerry.

(intriguing aside 1: it’s a novel experience to have to install onto two devices to test out a service. Not a bad thing. Just different).

As Nick pointed out “it’s not all that fair to describe a new service by saying what it isn’t – so let me tell you what it is. echoecho allows you to ask and answer the question where are you? as easily and simply as possible … that’s it … think of it as a cross between a permission based SMS and a tweet – the idea is that it becomes as easy and ubiquitous as SMS.”

After playing with echoecho (and according to Nick it is all lowercase and not WikiWord style) I really like the service. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s very easy to use and I can see myself using this with friends and family. Heck, if my Mum actually remembered to turn her mobile on then she could use this and use it easily. Yes, it’s restricted to a range of smart phones (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and so on) but the same applies to a whole plethora of LBMS.

(intriguing aside 2: the installation on my BlackBerry kept on repeatedly prompting me to view permissions and once viewed and saved prompted me to view and save permissions. Repeat until bored. A hard reboot of the handset fixed this finally. I don’t envy people doing BlackBerry development).

Echo Tunnel

But let’s go back to the Theory of Stuff for a moment; where does the money come from? It’s a free service so you can’t (directly) monetize the People. You’re not tracking your audience’s location (and Nick assures me they’re not) and there’s no additional data to derive, such as local business listings or a set of geotagged POIs, which is a (mostly hidden) side effect of FourSquare and Gowalla who seem to find themselves the poster-child(ren) of LBMS at the moment.

So at face value, much as I admire the simplicity of echoecho, I initially came to the conclusion that the service fails the Theory of Stuff but with a caveat. If there’s something clever going on under the hood that’s not immediately apparent to the casual observer or if there’s a way of getting People to make Stuff through the service then echoecho might pass the Theory.

Nick agreed with me, “Clearly if the app is free then the money can’t come from the app. But that’s a failure only in the most immediate literal sense. By that logic every freemium model is a failure during its free stage“.

All of the above has shown that there’s a need for at least one caveat to the Theory of Stuff, which should state that the Theory should only be applied if there’s an attempt to monetize. echoecho isn’t and should, for the time being at least, be exempt.

But there is definitely something clever going on under the hood, a bi-directional open API location sharing service. It’s that platform that echoecho is built on top of and it’s that platform that I’m going to be watching very closely indeed to see what comes out of Purpose Wireless. And of course I’ll be looking to apply the Theory of Stuff to that offering.

Photo credits: katachthonios and sayzey on Flickr.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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