Archive for the ‘web’ Category
Meta Tags: Basically Useless
December 3rd, 2009
Apparently Google has more or less abandoned the analysis of keyword meta tags. Which isn’t really surprising, since it’s incredibly easy to abuse them. Anyway, if you’ve still been using them, congratulations! Your life just got a little easier.
Envisioning Development
December 2nd, 2009
The Envisioning Development project has an interactive map detailing the cost of living in various neighborhoods of New York City. It’s nice to know that if I ever get a web design/development gig in NYC I can afford to live in Williamsburg and be the biggest hipster ever.
I wish there were similar maps to detail the CoL for other cities.
Google Wave Invites!
November 13th, 2009
Way back in June when I first mentioned Google Wave, I signed up for the waiting list. It’s now five months later, but I’ve just gotten an invitation to the preview! Google’s given me a few invites to pass out – let me know if you’d like one!
Wikirank
July 2nd, 2009
Wikirank lists the most popular articles on Wikipedia over the past 30 days. At the time of this writing, Igor Stravinsky occupies the top spot. His birthday was June 17, which I imagine accounts for his almost 1.4 million views that day. Is Stravinsky’s birthday a big deal on the internet? That would be incongruous and wonderful.
Speaking of internet holidays, did Randall Munroe ever decide on the date of Linksys Day? I need to know when to bake my router-shaped cake.
MIT GEB Lectures
June 4th, 2009
For the last few years, MIT has been putting the course materials for many (about 1,900) of its classes online for free as part of its OpenCourseWare project. Most of them are really fantastic, and the site is worth browsing through. Of particular interest to me is the series of lectures for a course devoted to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Which, if you haven’t read, you should; these lectures might help you along if you’ve found it a bit difficult.
Incidentally, the course is taught by an undergrad math major! The guy’s teaching style is a little rough, but he’s actually laudably competent.
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Twistori
April 23rd, 2009
If you ever wanted to know what the Internet’s collective consciousness is thinking, look no further than Twistori. It takes a stream of Twitter posts, filters them for phrases like “I believe” or “I love,” and delivers them to you.
Interestingness: A surprising number of the “I hate” tweets* are complaints about feeling obligated to update the poster’s status.
* This word bothers me. I have an odd attitude toward the evolution of language. Linguistic changes that occurred in the past are fascinating, but current changes are annoying and vaguely threatening. I am an old man. Hey you kids, get off my web log.
Tor
December 23rd, 2008
Tor is a program designed to allow its users to surf the web anonymously. When the user requests a page, Tor directs the request to one of the servers on its network, which sends the request on through the network until it reaches its destination. The destination server sees a request from one of Tor’s nodes, not from the original user, thereby providing them a degree on anonymity.
It’s also now possible for Tor users to host servers anonymously, allowing them to share potentially restricted content.
What prompted me to write this post was an article in Wired which noted that there’s now a web service called tor2web which allows a regular user to browse Tor’s servers (albeit without anonymity). Unfortunately, most of the servers seem to contain either (1) pornography, (2) conspiracy theorists, or (3) Linux user groups. Still, the technology’s pretty neat!
Incestuous Linking
December 11th, 2007
Incestuous linking occurs when a number of sites all link to each other in order to increase their search engine rankings. Sensible search engines (Google, for example) filter out these “incestuous” links.
As always, you can read more about this phenomenon on Wikipedia.
A fine example of incestuous linking can be found here.