Maddin, Dienstag, 9. August 2005, 09:35 Fun with HTTP Headers Andrew Wooster coded a little web spider to check out the various HTTP headers that are in use. He made a couple of interesting and entertaining findings.
He missed out on slashdot's Futurama themed "X-Fry" and "X-Bender" headers though:
X-Fry: I must be a robot. Why else would human women refuse to date me?
X-Bender: I'm one of those lazy, homeless bums I've been hearing about.
Maddin, Mittwoch, 9. Februar 2005, 09:15 Open source is sexy
Ximian’s founders Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza made a couple of Teenbeat-esque photos to prove that open source can be as sexy as Bill Gates.
Maddin, Donnerstag, 3. Februar 2005, 12:46 Why Google became a registrar Recent news reported that Google has become accredited to register and sell web addresses. In the same news Google announced that they are not planning to sell domain names. What are the reasons for Google to become a web registrar then? Here is my guess: fresh URLs. When I was working at a major search engine in Germany (which is now offline), one of our main problems wasn’t the crawling or indexing of web sites - we got that part figured out and did it well - it was finding initial starting points (URLs) for our crawler.
As Fravia has taught us, a large percentage of all websites are not indexed by search engines. Commercial sites (and spammers) make sure that their web pages are known by as many web crawlers as possible. They use "submit a link"-forms, announce their sites via mailing lists and spray paint them on your neighbor’s garage door. On the other hand smaller sites (the so called "long tail" of the internet) rarely make this effort. These pages are the homes of special interest groups, non commercial organizations, communities, fan pages, obscure research projects or plain silliness - in other words: they probably contain interesting stuff. Occasionally it takes quite some time until a search engine discovers these sites, if they are discovered at all.
Being a registrar Google should get access to the master data, which contains a list of all registered domain names. This information could be used by Google to broaden their sources. Note though: this is only my take, I might be mistaken.
Maddin, Mittwoch, 26. Januar 2005, 13:59 Sometimes your content stays longer than you would expect Marc Jen is a newly hired Google employee. On his first day he started a weblog to keep a detailed account on his days at Google:
hi, my name is mark jen. i used to work for microsoft, and now i work for google. this is a blog of my personal experience as a new google employee. everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved by google before it is posted.
Most of his entries were very critical with his new employer. He doesn’t describe Google as evil but he puts the shining image of the company in perspective. It is not surprising that he decided to erase his weblog content today.
But even though his page isn’t in the Google cache anymore (surprise, surprise), you still can find his texts on the net. E.g. Bloglines keeps an archived version of every RSS feed they proceed. When you subscribe to his feed in Bloglines, you are able to read his ten last entries, which cover all his Google stories.
This is obviously only one example. There are more places on the web that automatically keep copies of your content. The lesson learned here is: Think twice before you post something. When it is out, it is out and you probably won’t be able to get rid of it.
Update: His blog is back online with a couple of paragraphs missing in his previous posts.
Maddin, Donnerstag, 20. Januar 2005, 13:24 Following rel=”nofollow” Following the first wave offpositiveexcitement about the rel=”nofollow” tag, which Google introduced to fight comment spam, a couple of critical minds voicetheiropinion.
Independent from the question, whether “nofollow” is a good or a bad idea, this discussion shows again the immense power of Google. Pagerank seems to be an accepted fundamental basis of the modern internet (comparable to e.g. hyperlinking).
Maddin, Mittwoch, 22. September 2004, 17:41 Orkut, what is it good for? After a couple of months of curiosity I was able to obtain an invitation to Orkut [1]. I played with the site a little bit and still don’t get it. What is Orkut good for? Besides finding dates obviously.
The thing that ticks me off the most, are the lousy search capabilities. This is a project by Google, remember? I can’t even limit my searches to a specific community. Finding someone in a community with more than 1000 members is impossible.
And what is the point of the communities? To every topic a community is dedicated to exist already at least on comprehensive webpage, web-forum, wiki, mailinglist, etc.... Why would I want to participate in a webforum that is not accessible to everybody who is interested in the specific topic? Maybe there is more to communities, I should join one occasionally... But is there more to Orkut?
Maddin, Mittwoch, 18. Februar 2004, 09:33 New Toy in Town Watching other people's browsing is quite addictive. The easy to use global bookmark exchange del.icio.us [1] makes it possible. This should become increasingly interesting with the number of people using the service.
