Surfarama

Hehe, check out the The Dogster Movie…just goes to show that Ted is as mad as bag of snakes.

In case you havn’t seen it, some Ex Googlers have started a blog recently to tell some of their stories from the early days…it is a great read, Xooglers.

I started about half way through and found that actually I wanted to read everything starting from the oldest posts and moving forward, because the stories they are telling are unfolding in a more or less chronological way…and a regular blog doesn’t make that easy to do.

So, next best thing, I have created a new RSS feed for the site which will deliver all the stories in the reverse order, from oldest to newest…you can subscribe here anytime to start from the beginning:

[this link will not show up in your feed reader...you'll have to visit the site to get the feed, sorry]

Another example of RSS serialization :)

OK, so here’s a bit of an experiment…

Try clicking this link.

What you’ll see is a breakdown of recent news, blog posts, bookmarks, and pictures related to the Wikipedia article on hackers, achieved by running a content analysis of the wikipedia page and searching for related content. Cool huh?

Tagalyzer.com takes a referring url and applies the Yahoo! content analysis API to identify the important keywords, and then uses those keywords to poll the Yahoo! News API for recent news, the Technorati API for blog posts, del.icio.us for bookmarks, and of course Flickr for pictures.

If you just link to the main page it will pick up your referring url automatically, but you can also grab the TagIt! bookmarklet (drag it to your browser links bar) for returning related content for any page you’re browsing. Or, thirdly, you can craft a url like “tagalyzer.com/?referer=SOME_URL” and it will take “SOME_URL” as the referer. This is what I did above and it would be useful for building into your blog template for example if you wanted to add a link for each of your post permalinks.

Actually that quick how to also kinda summarizes the three use cases I see:

• Any page just links to tagalyzer.com and click throughs return related content from the referring page. Simple
• You craft a url with the referrer variable and add it to your blog template for each post, as I have here.
• You use the bookmarklet to discover related content as you traverse the interweb. Nice.

Of course there is a catch…it does require the referring page to be quite topic specific to get some good results. A link referring the home page of someones personal blog for instance would probably comes up with some pretty random content due to the generally non specific nature of most personal blogs…for this reason you’d be better off linking from your permalinked pages so the analysis focusses on the topic of a specific blog post.

Anyway, keen for any feedback. Useful? Buggy?

LOL, this is classic…I was doing some cleanup today and uncovered this dusty old piece of code…my idea of a really simple web based feed reader circa 2001/2002, which I put up here just for the record.

Please don’t laugh, and remember this dates back before Bloglines appeared. I’m guessing around late 2001.

The funny thing is I think there are still some good things about it…no registration, and it is about the simplest possible thing that could work.

If you’re reading this the old fashioned way (in a browser), then you’ll no doubt notice the new design.

It’s a WordPress port of a template designed by the very talented Andreas Viklund for OSWD…unfortunately it is a bit of a hack involving changes to some core files, so probably isn’t very useful for regular theme use, and there’ll definitely be some ongoing changes as I tweak it some more…it’s still a bit rough around the edges.

Anyway, I think it comes out alright and I wanted to use it specifically because I like the way it has ‘network’ tabs implemented at the top which is a nice way to connect some of the sites I have set up.

Richard McManus links to a post on WellUrban today about Zoomin…the closest thing in New Zealand to Google Maps. My interest was tweaked because the writer alludes to the impending release of a Zoomin API…whoopee, that’s great news.

And at the same time it reminds me of one of my pet peeves: web sites with a contact form, which apparently doesn’t do anything. Case in point…I emailed the Zoomin folks a while back asking about an API and never heard a word back. Not a big deal I suppose, but how hard is it to respond to simple questions like that?

UPDATE: And now I have joined the NZ2.0 Google Group, which I think the Zoomin folks are in on too so they’ll probably think I am a twat.

I am always the last person to get these things…but if you havn’t already checked out End of the World, go and have a laugh.

I need to simplify man…and I need to make some space on my dev box, so it’s all gotta go. Starting with Linkroll.com which is now listed on eBay…don’t be shy. Delight and amaze your friends with your very own social bookmarking site. Why entrust your bookmarks to someone else’s bookmarking site when you can have your own? Etc etc.

I developed linkroll on a whim a while back now, and if someone else wants to take it over that would be great…I am thinking about getting another server actually so hopefully this will go some way toward that.

eBay drops charges for developers network…sweet, this really is good news.

Now we just need to find the extra hours in the day to hack on all this stuff ;)

- I hear you killed a man Billy…why’d ya kill him?

- He’s hackin’ on me

Name the movie.

The dominant online auction/classifieds outfit in New Zealand is not eBay, but rather a home grown company, TradeMe. They are by far the busiest local site around and have done really well. I like it.

No reason though why we can’t have another, especially when it is free and developed courtesy of coolio web2.0ish web services social application platform thingy company, Ning.

Yes sir, why not Auckland Classifieds, Ning style. They’re even springing for a Adwords campaign, sweet ;)

UPDATE: Tagalyzer has gone, but only cause we’re busy cookin’ up something more interesting (I hope)…a little PHP, a liberal sprinkling of API, a dash of AJAX, some secret sauce…mmmm, tasty.

And just for fun, Tagalyzer…what’s your blog about? What else would you like to see here?

Mainstream media syndicating blog content

Originally uploaded by Charles.

The other day I mentioned my brothers friend who got mugged in New York and wrote about it on his blog. Pretty crazy story that even got some press in the media stateside.

But imagine my amazement at coming across the same blog posting on page six of New Zealand’s biggest daily, The New Zealand Herald, over the weekend. I don’t know how often this happens, but I’ve never seen a blog being syndicating by mainstream media…I guess this is what is meant by citizen journalism(?).