Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London's Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.
The last week has been crammed with planning for and finally realising the first WhereCamp unconference to be held in Europe. More of that later but before WhereCamp EU, there was the London Twitter Developer’s DevNest.
Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.
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.
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?
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:
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 - /2010/03/03/reclaim-and-own-your-short-urls - and compresses them down to a much more manageable shorterned version - https://bit.ly/aG1RBx or https://tinyurl.com/ylaodny.
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.
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).
