"lazyweb" entries

Four short links: 17 June 2009

Four short links: 17 June 2009

Word Mining, Open Ideas, Power Meter BotNet, and Realtime Web Traffic Tracking

  1. NY Times Mines Its Data To Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse — the feature that lets you highlight a word on a NY Times web page and get more information about it is something that irritates me. I’m fascinated by the analysis of their data: boggling that sumptuary is less perplexing than solipsistic. Louche (#3 on the list) has been my favourite word for two years, by the way, since I heard Dylan Moran toss it out in that uniquely facile way the Irish have with words. I think Irish citizens get this incredible competence with the English language for free, along with staggering house prices and beer you can walk on.
  2. Open Ideas — Alex Payne’s blog of Concepts in the public domain, awaiting collaboration and appropriation.
  3. Buggy ‘smart meters’ open door to power-grid botnet (The Register) — Paul Graham said that we’ve found what we get when we cross a television with a computer: a computer. Similarly, intelligent power meters are computers, computers that apparently haven’t been well-secured. To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer’s smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.
  4. Chartbeat — the sexiest web analytics ever. It gives realtime count of users, whether they’re reading or writing (based on whether focus is in a form element), where they’re from, mentions on Twitter, and more and more and more. This is a different form of analytics than Google Analytics, which tells you trends and historical access. Love this for the pure sex appeal of a heads-up dashboard that can tell you exactly how many people are on your site and exactly what they’re doing. (via Artur)

Twitter Aphorisms, Epigrams and Repartee

I recently encountered the following zinger on twitter: @jayrosen_nyu: Scoble is like a guest at a hotel for one, where a huge staff is trying to anticipate his every need. And he's angry. Shades of noted wits from the past! As when Dorothy Parker, asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, said "You can lead a whore…

Social Network Signature for Entity Resolution

In the lazyweb department, I had an idea the other day that I thought I'd put out more broadly (lest someone else have the same thought, plus the thought to patent it.) And that is the idea that one side-effect of the "social graph" is to create a unique identity signature. Who my friends are can be used for entity…

German and Japanese Wikipedia scanner

Time for more excitement on the Wikipedia front. Last week Virgil released the English Wikiscanner, as I wrote about previously. This week, it is time for German and Japanese edits to be exposed, with the newly-released German and Japanese Wikiscanner. Sadly, I don't read either German nor Japanese, but I am sure some of you readers do. If you find…

Web performance book could use examples of slowwwwww Ajax

Andy Oram writes on the O'Reilly editors' list: "Steve Souders at Yahoo! is writing a book for us on Web performance. The focus of the book is on speeding up downloads and browser behavior. He doesn't concentrate on Ajax, but some of what he writes is definitely relevant, and he is asking us for get examples of sites where Ajax…

Presidential Primary 2.0?

If Web 2.0 isn't really about any particular suite of technologies, but rather about understanding how to harness the internet more effectively, whatever your field of endeavor, have we really searched out how to apply it to politics. Peter Meyers had a great take on this question on an internal O'Reilly mailing list. He wrote: So far the Web's been…

Social Blog Aggregators Revisited

Recently, there's been a number of interesting posts on building personal blog aggregators. This really does seem like the next thing that is going to make some blog company succesful since just there's just too many feeds to read. Global aggregation and popularity engines like Digg and Techmeme only adds material to read. I'm sure hundreds of people have had…

Workware Instead of Shareware?

There's an interesting suggestion over on bitporters media, about how Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to create a new form of shareware: Think AMT + Adsense or “AMTSense” as I will call it through out the rest of this post…. AMT at the core is a WEB SERVICE, so why not add features to the API that allow users…

Flickr and Interestingness

Recently, I was looking for a photo to illustrate a talk I was giving at a company meeting. I was telling the old story about three men working. A passerby asks them what they're doing. The first man grunts "working" and goes back to his stonework. The second man says, "I'm building a wall." The third man stops, gazes off…

Lazyweb: My GMail Wishlist

I dropped something heavy on my laptop the other day just as the system was rebooting, and managed to trash the disk. While it's in the shop, I've had to rely on GMail as my main mail application. (I normally read mail with mail.app on the Mac, but have everything autoforwarded to GMail for backup and access from other computers.)…