Category: Computers

— New Alexa rankings are out, and we’ve jumped-up 18,000 places to 76,964. Some other popular blogs:

* Sullivan: 14,448
* Scripting News: 28,852
* Kottke: 52,961
* Den Beste: 55,912
* LGF: 57,188
* Evhead: 73,873
* Ken Layne: 90,666
* Matt Welch: 91,444
* Sgt. Stryker: 113,335
* Nick Denton: 114,119
* VodkaPundit: 126,185

— A new blog, The Truth Laid Bear, claims to be measuring links to blogs:

Therefore, I decided to try to develop a way to measure, somewhat more objectively, where the most “interesting” spots in the blogosphere were. One measure of doing this would be to capture who is being linked to by other bloggers the most. Easier said than done — but not impossible, as it turns out.

It turns out his method leaves a lot to be desired: according to him, there are 49 links into bennett.com, but according to my server log, there are 1877, and I can tell you exactly what each one of them is. He says there are only two links to Jerry Pournelle, ridiculous, and only 7 to Jason Kottke, one of the top five blogs in the entire universe, and Dave Winer’s Scripting News, the biggest tech blog, isn’t on the list at all.

Back to the drawing board, Bear – Alexa rankings are more accurate than this crap.

— Reptile sounds interesting:

Reptile is a P2P (peer to peer) application designed to locate and filter the best news on the Internet. Reptile provides a distributed and decentralized mechanism to search, cache, subscribe, and publish news and other content. Reptile also provides an infrastructure for increasing information diversification and reducing censorship and bias.

And best of all, it’s almost free – a $10 donation is all they ask.

— Nick Denton continues his exercise in meme creation, promoting a false theory of blog history:

Pedantic nitpick: she doesn’t even mention their precursors, the Bay Area techie blogs; I feel history being edited here.

As we’ve demonstrated here previously, the first and oldest blogs belonged to the people known today as warbloggers: Ken Layne, Bill Quick, and myself. The elves didn’t get on the bandwagon until 1999, by which time blogging was already old hat. But it’s a fun troll, clearly one of Denton’s favourites, and it earns him points with the elves.

— dive into mark/May 30, 2002 started this idea making the rounds of Elf Blogs, an automatic way of allowing RoboPundit to find your site summary:

This sounds like a fantastic idea. Specifying the location of your RSS feed in a standard machine-readable format would solve a real problem.

Just add: “<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml” title=”XML” href=”http://yoursite/index.rdf”>” to the index template in a Movable Type blog and I’ve got you. It goes in the same section as the META tags.

— Bay Guardian Lit – May 2002 reviews Rebecca Blood’s blog books:

Nothing like publishing books on allegedly “hot” new technologies to make those technologies jump eagerly into the ashcan of history. So let’s raise our bottles of caffeinated fruit soda to Perseus Books for publishing two new books (forthcoming in July) on the latest neato thing the kids are playing with: blogs! Both are projects of Rebecca Blood, apparently a “famous” blogger, and are cunningly titled We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture and The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. How nice. Precisely the sorts of things that someone who identifies herself in flap copy as a “freelance web-development consultant” would write. We can practically hear the sound of exploding brains as they splatter against a thousand bloggers’ computer monitors. Maybe it’s time to go back to reading the newspaper.

I would say the Old, Big Media is just going snarky on Hot New Tech, but I suspect they’ve nailed it, based on the previews of Blood’s books that I’ve seen. But I was wrong once before, so anything’s possible.

Via Blood’s blog.

— According to Alexa, , people who read my blog also read:

Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Briefing www.sgtstryker.com/
Dailypundit www.dailypundit.com/
Matt Welch mattwelch.com/warblog.html
Vodkapundit – Chill Before Serving www.vodkapundit.com/
Lgf: Would You Like Fries With That? www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
Live From The Wtc www.janegalt.net/
Protein Wisdom www.creatical.com/weblog
On The Third Hand…by A Bellicose Woman site-essential.com/
India : Culture, Travel, Cuisine, Business, Leisur… www.welcometoindia.com/

Sounds about right.

— Personal RSS Aggregators

Has RSS run out of steam? Quite the opposite. There’s more action than ever, but it’s shifted into a decentralized mode. That’s just what the RSS network needed to do in order to truly operate at Internet scale.

RoboPundit uses Peerkat, described in this article.

— Washtech.com says:

But the company says the number of sites people typically visit in a month jumped 25 percent last year. The average Internet user went to 71 sites from home in February, vs. 57 a year earlier.

This has to be a healthy trend, and blogs might be playing a part in it.

I’ve changed the name of my blog robot to “RoboPundit” because some domain-squatting twit had already registered the old name.