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Not often, but every now and again I get a little guilty about my Google ranking for a particular query. At the moment I’m getting a lot of folks looking up The Clarence Hotel in Petersham, which is our new Sydney Scared Scriptless Theatresports venue. Unfortunately though, I don’t blog that much about it, even though I’m sort of directing or producing the show or something like that.
I mean we have a Scared Scriptless web site, which is unfortunately not really functional at the moment, but it will be up real soon now. Ryan?
But for news about the shows, people are still somehow finding their way to my blog, and certainly the first paragraph of this post isn’t going to change that too much. At least the title isn’t going to top things off.
The thing about Google, is that it is supposed to level the playing field, find the things you need, with the rankings you want, filter out those who are trying to stack things in their favor, and everyone’s happy. The problem of course is that most people don’t actually understand the mechanics and structure required of a good site to support Google and it’s peers, meaning that to keep a level playing field, I should really dumb down my site’s data quality.
But then who am I to complain if I get a higher ranking? If my Google referers are anything to go by, I should keep writing for my audience of people interested in Kristy Kreme (check the spelling), Oriental Lillies, How to win lotto and of course Scared Scriptless in Sydney.
The answer of course is for web site authors to do it right the first time, a good starting point being Gina Trapani’s Scribbling.net post on helping Googlebot to understand your site.
Landmark ruling from Ninth Circuit finding that P2P software developers are not liable for contributary and vicarious copyright infringement. The EFF covers most of it. In particular, the most significant part of the judgement for the future of this type of technology is one which the blogosphere has been reiterating time and time again:
From the advent of the player piano, every new means of reproducing sound has struck a dissonant chord with musical copyright owners, often resulting in federal litigation. This appeal is the latest reprise of that recurring conflict, and one of a continuing series of lawsuits between the recording industry and distributors of file-sharing computer software.
[…]
Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. AT&T Corp. v. City of Portland, 216 F.3d 871, 876 (9th Cir. 1999). The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through wellestablished distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player. Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.
Chinese DVD players manufactured to automatically correct for low quality pirated discs (via Boing Boing); Electracy, the new electronic literacy (via Read/Write Web); Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted (via gapingvoid); and filming the new Charlie and the Chocolate factory, they dropped a US$540 000 camera into a river of chocolate (via Boing Boing).
As much as I appreciate the traffic, I wonder if j1332.inktomisearch.com could stop crawling my home page every hour, and actually crawl my whole site every week. Is that too much to ask? Geez, Google gets it, can’t you copy them, they’re supposed to be the benchmark?
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) — results and commentary will appear there in the future.
Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.
The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst
(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)
INSTRUCTIONS
To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).
REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://mentalized.net
(2) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software
(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.kashum.com/blog
(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 04/08/04
(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 01:50:00
(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Sydney, NSW, Australia
OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
(7) My blog is hosted by: My own custom software
(8) My age is: 37
(9) My gender is: Male
(10) My occupation is: Software Architect, COO
(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Sauce Reader
(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: My own custom software
(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 10/10/01
(14) My web browser is: Safari
(15) My operating system is: Mac OS X
Part VIII in the collection of miscellaneous bits and pieces.
I’ve just added another synthetic feed, new releases from Chaos Music.
Yep, I pay everything I can online, who wouldn’t if they could? Each month I pay several bills with BPay through my bank. It’s easy, and to quote the BPay site:
making life easier_
Not sure if the underscore is a qualifier at all, but there you go, making life easier_.
With Internet banking, you’d like to have a BPay account set up and configured already, so that when a bill comes in, all you need to do is click on it and type in the dollar amount.
Of course it isn’t this easy, because the intelligent boffins at companies such as Telstra, decide to use a different 20 digit biller number for each new bill, even if it is the same account. In fact, successive Telstra bills have successive page numbers, meaning I can put all my printed bills together and have a 62 page book of Telstra bills. Not particularly useful reading material, but amusing and handy for looking for missing pages at tax time.
So even though you’ve set up an account to click on, you still need to enter the 20 digit reference number for each bill. The account, by the way, consists of a 4 digit biller number, and that’s it. Compared to 20 digits, it’s almost a waste defining the account in the first place.
However, there are companies who have done it right, so it is not like Telstra are limited by the BPay technology. My mobile phone carrier, for example, uses the same biller reference number for every bill, so I don’t need to type anything in except the dollar amount. Now that’s making life easier_.
Telstra? Well, maybe we should just sell them off, and see how long it takes them to go bankrupt. I guess they could always sell off all the copper to BHP!
Bit of a telco week so far. Firstly, my ISP calls me to say that my ADSL connection is finally up after my house move. Great! Although I already knew that a week ago, when I accidentally tripped over a power board and powered up my gateway machine.
Secondly, Telstra bills me for $59 for connecting my new phone line. Of course disconnecting the old one is free, which begs the question, how come their processes are so stuffed that it costs them $59 plus mark up to connect a line, but takes nothing to disconnect it? Whatever happened to penalising people for leaving a contract? Surely the same guy who pulled out my line at the exchange could simply plug it back in the new hole? This really shits me, either connection should also be free, or I should be charged for connection and disconnection!
W3C’s (X)HTML validation service as an RSS feed. Sweet. (via MENTALIZED.NET)