A Day in Paradise

I’m blogging, I can’t help myself!!!

This is an extension to my latest comment on this blog entry.

If you search for just about any term in google, you will find that if a wikipedia entry exists it will be ranked among the top few entries.

This exposes a flaw in the concept of Google search algorithms, as despite the quality of the content of the page, simply because it exists on wikipedia and is well linked within the framework of the site, it gets shuffled to the top of the google search page results.

Creating a page which is within the first page of the biggest search engine freely editable by anyone with any agenda is just asking for abuse.

Del.icio.us has been pretty free of spam and spammy links. The reason for this is their very logical decision not to allow search engines to index the pages by adding the following metatag.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>

If wikipedia would do this it would solve a LOT of problems. The fact that wikipedia ranks so well not only means that objectionable content often floats to the top of the search engine rankings, but you also get a lot more random people who surf in through google (most likely looking for information) and end up editing the article and bringing the quality down.

So this is a callout to wikipedia, please get your pages out of google and work towards refining your content rather than being a nesting ground for link spammers, people with personal agendas and random vandals.

I’ve been waiting to reveal my conspiracy theory about the Google acquisition of YouTube, but then I saw this post about Sun’s Project Blackbox, and decided it was time to let the cat out of the bag.

Project Blackbox, is a mobile datacenter from Sun. About this time last year Cringley reported that Google was working on exactly this.

From Cringley’s article:

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

Sounds a lot like YouTube doesn’t it? One of Sun’s new Blackboxes will hold 1.5 petabytes of data, this is probably sufficient to hold most of YouTubes / google videos popular videos. Drop a couple hundred of these at the peering ISPs and you will have the latency and speed to pipe HD video into any home in the US.

The next step is obviously the YouTube DVR, which you just plug into your network cable and your TV screen, Google will then make deals with the major networks (like we’ve seen following the YouTube acquisition) and you can forget about terrestrial and cable TV.

The last thing I want to mention is the concept that google has to monetize YouTube, and the fear that google will start splicing the videos with commercials. This is not true, and if implemented would take away what everyone loves about youtube. There is no way that Google could monetize YouTube through advertisements to create an acceptable ROI for their stockholders. Google bought YouTube as a stepping stone to grab the largest market share of internet video, which will be monetized once we all sit down in the living room to watch the latest movie releases from YouTube on our big screen TVs. Some people have also mentioned that the stock jump in GOOG prices on the day of the acquisition paid for the purchase.

The move to video is the only way that Google can continue it’s growth as an advertising giant. They have saturated the Web space and need to provide other ways to provide advertising inventory to their clients. This was discussed by Garret Rogers last year.

Whether or not “Project Blackbox” was a surprise to Google, or if Sun even got the idea from Google, I doubt that it will have much effect on the final outcome of what Google’s larger plan.

So here’s to hoping that when Google owns the internet, we don’t wish we had Bill back!

Anyone who has taken pictures of a group of kids will see the usefulness of this cool application. You take several shots shot in sequence, and then you can create a composite image which uses elements from both pictures.

Just choose the best faces from any of the pictures you’ve taken and then add them to the composite image and let the program take care of the rest.

Thanks UB

I’ve finally gotten around to testing this new google docs and spreadsheet thing they have. It’s pretty nice. Like with all things google I’m impressed with the speed and simplicity of the interface.

It looks like I’ll be dumping backpackit soon

Now I need to see how I can publish this to my blog.

I just noticed that PHP Programming with PEAR has hit the bookshelves, and is available for order.

This is a collaboration between Stoyan Stefanov, Stephan Schmidt, Carsten Lucke and me. The original book was conceived way back at IPC2k4 so it’s been in the pipeline for a while now. The book covers different aspects of programming using PEAR, We tried to approach the packages which we featured from a solution-based point of view, so a lot of packages are covered and there is quite a bit of code that you can play with.

I’ve created an “unofficial community wiki” for the book where you can add reviews, links to your reviews (I know there are already some out there), comments, or eratta that you may find. So hop on over to The Pear Book and have fun! I’d also like to add links to other sources of information about PEAR, tutorials, books, etc.

Get them here

Yahoo! announced that it’s opening up its signup system to allow external sites authenticate their users using yahoo.

You build great web applications. We have millions of users who store their data on Yahoo!. Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) makes it possible for your applications to use that data (with their permission).

BBAuth also offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.

I have a couple of problems with this:

• Yahoo only accepts Yahoo email addressses. If people signup to yahoo for the authentication or YIM they will probably not check their yahoo account very often (I know I don’t). If I have a service which needs to alert people via email, I want to be able to contact the user at any email address they want, not just their yahoo email address.
• Until the Yahoo! Single Sign-On is widespread, it may be confusing to the users to get shuttled back to yahoo to authenticate / sign in.
• Using Yahoo! to remove “yet another signup form” works if you require only the information that Yahoo! requires, if you have to bounce the user back to another signup form to get some more information, it would be even more confusing. Of course, it would be cool if Yahoo! allowed you to require more information and then stored that as well.

Now the disclaimer, I have read no more than the introduction article, so if this is FUD then I apologise. There is PHP example code available, hopefully I can make time to check it out.

Thanks Kventon.