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Button Link to Visitors’ Map

Posted on October 9, 2005 ·

A hack to the hack:  Steve Rubel reported on yet another Goggle Maps mash-up displaying  the location of your blog-readers.  I like the functionality, hate the appearance, so here are the steps to improve it:

  • Submit your site to Gvisit.com
  • Get the script that allows you to display the visitor list on your blog, and paste it into your blog template / sidebar. 
  • Display

    your blog. You’ll probably dislike the big block of city listings..

    that’s fine, just click on the list, it will take you to the gvisit

    site and display the map. (If your list is empty, relax, come back

    later, gvisit updates hourly)

  • Copy the URL your browser shows while you are at the map display.
  • Now go to Brilliant Button Maker  and create a button you like. Mine looks like this:
  • Make the newly created image a URL, pointing to the address you just copied 2 steps above.
  • Replace the gvisit script with the new one, which will look something like this:  <a href=”http://www.gvisit.com/map.php?sid=youridnumberfromthecopiedurl”><img alt=”Visitor-map” src=”http://yourfilelocation/yourbuttonfilename.png” </a>

 Voila!  Now you have a cool button that takes you to the Visitor Map directly, like mine does:  Visitor-map 

Update (10.24) I’ve taken the Visitor Map (Gvisit) off. MapStats is the clear winner. See here.

 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Software ·
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Sponsoring the Web 2.1 BrainJam

Posted on October 4, 2005 ·

SQLFusion is now a proud co-patron of the Web 2.1 BrainJam along with Kron 4, D-BAM,  and  TechCrunch. 

A BrainJam is a new type of event (inspired by BarCamp, Gnomedex, TechCrunch BBQ and WebZine2005) that brings people from diverse backgrounds together to focus on a few key questions, sharing knowledge, collaborating, solving problems, demonstrating cool tools, networking and hopefully making the world a better place while having fun. You only need to bring your mind, your past experience, some new Insytes and something for note taking. The event coordinators supply you with a general direction for the conversation, WiFi access, some collaboration tools and an opportunity to create magic.

It will take place this Friday, October 7th, and registration is open now at a hefty $2.80.   That is not $2.80 per minute, but the full price 🙂  But should you not be able to afford it, Scholarships are available: all you need to do is write and explain why you are deserve  a scholarship in 1,000 words or less, or under 2 minutes in audio/visual length.   (You have to appreciate the Organizer’s humor…)

Talk about Organizer, he needs help, please check out the Wiki.

See You there!
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Filed Under: Bay Area, Blogging, Business, Marketing / PR, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Web 2.1 Announced :-)

Posted on October 4, 2005 ·

Skip Web 2.0 (not that you have an option unless already registered) and go for Web 2.1 directly.   At $2.80 even I could afford to register:-)  Here’s the program wiki.

(via Jeff Nolan)

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Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Social Networking, Software, Technology ·
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The LoN(in)g Tail of Software

Posted on October 4, 2005 ·

As always when something significant happens, my RSS reader is choke full of writeups on  Ning , the uncloaked version of Marc Andreessen’s 24 Hour Laundry.  (not to be confused with the French Laundry)

I don’t know how to say it without actually saying it, so I might as well blurt it out: this is The LoN(in)g Tail of Software, using Joe Kraus’s classic definition – just like JotSpot.

references:  John Batelle,  BlogSpotting, Om Malik, Jeff Clavier, TechCrunch, Corante and the rest of the world…

Update (9/5): Chris Anderson, the “Father of the Long Tail” writes about Ning: The Long Tail of social software.

Update (9/6) :  ZDNet joins me in drawing the parallel to JotSpot.

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Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Humor, Software, Startups ·
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Browser Market Getting “Crowded” Again

Posted on September 20, 2005 ·

Just kidding… it’s great to have 4 choices, instead of just IE & FireFox.

After their Birthday Giveaway, Opera finally went free.  (hat tip: Espen)

Flock, the social browser is still in Beta, but it’s signup list grew to 15,000 overnight (hat tip: TechCrunch)

 

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Filed Under: Software, Startups ·
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Technorati Winning the Search Wars? Not Exactly. Just a Skewed Test.

Posted on September 15, 2005 ·

The announcement of Google Blog Search prompted Steve Rubel to set up a test blog to compare several Blog Search tools.  But what exactly is the objective of the comparison?

Steve’s original definition: “ Let’s see how quickly/well they work “   Then, in the test blog itself he talks about testing “the different engines’ ability to spider the full-text of a blog “. 

Well, there’s not much to test there, we already know from the announcement that “Bloogle” only indexes feeds, so that’s a given.  Nevertheless, Steve picks a search term ( “ms. mxyzptlk” ) that is AFTER the extract Blogger uses for the Atom feed.  No wonder the search term produces no results – it’s not supposed to.

However, when Steve declares Technorati a winner, he clearly characterizes it as a test on timeliness: “ Only Technorati indexed my blog search post from yesterday so far, nearly 18 hours after I posted it “

There is a small problem though:  Steve’s post is already  indexed on Google at the time of his second post, but of course one can  only find it by searching for a text-string BEFORE the feed cutoff (like i did in the above link).

Conclusion: this “test” is irrelevant to the speed of the search engines, all it did was confirm that Bloogle indeed performs as stated.

Of course one can debate whether searching feeds instead of the original html is a good idea or not, but that’s a completely different issue.   And, perhaps the right question to ask is just how we should manage our feeds?

I have previously argued that it’s a better practice to publish full feeds anyway.  At least for people who care more about their message getting out, than click-throughs on ads on their site.

On the other hand, indexing full content seems to be a bit shaky, at least for Technorati: they admittedly “get lost” and mix up post body, title, tags from different posts in their index. If parsing full html is so difficult (not that I agree with that), than perhaps using the feed is a safer bet (?) 

 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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Ridiculous Advertising – or the Case of the Hijacked link

Posted on September 12, 2005 ·

I was reading yet another article about the Oracle-Siebel deal, and clicked on  the “CRM company” link in the second line:

“So here we are, in the midst of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco, where the hosted CRM company today announced news of the release of its AppExchange sharing service…”

Considering the context, common sense would dictate the link goes either the Salesforce.com or perhaps another relevant article.   To my greatest surprise I found myself at the homepage of NetSuite a direct Salesforce.com competitor!  Now, I happen to like NetSuite, but even I don’t expect this…  so let’s investigate:

  • Hovering over the link shows the URL of the very post I am reading at the bottom, at the browser’s status line.
  • A second later a box pops up, identifying it as a sponsored link.
  • Yet another click reveals it is IntelliTXT by Vibrant Media.

John Battelle discussed IntelliTXT’s unfavorable reception when they launched last year:

 “Hypertext links that appear within the editorial content of a site, including those within graphics, should be at the discretion of the editors. If links are paid for by advertisers, that should be disclosed to users.  
All online pages should clearly distinguish between editorial and advertising or sponsored content. If any content comes from a source other than the editors, it should be clearly labeled. “

Absolutely.  And NEVER, EVER hijack a URL to a direct competitor’s page.

Update (9/12) Apparently I am not the only one disliking IntelliTXT. 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Marketing / PR, Software ·
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The Long Tail Stolen…

Posted on September 11, 2005 ·

Tomorrow Marc Benioff will unveil Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, or “eBay for Enterprise Software”.  A Marketplace where customers can try and buy on-demand applications.  

“The power of that is you can reach this long tail of applications. SAP and Oracle may deliver 10% of the applications you need to run your business, but there’s this large percentage of your business that won’t be managed by Oracle or SAP. This is the long tail of applications.”  says Benioff. 

This is his way of fighting the All-In-One players, including NetSuite, which is more in his league, but also SAP, Oracle.  “It looks great on PowerPoint, but on planet Earth, it won’t fly,” predicts Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite.  Who is right remains to be seen, but clearly a key factor is the ease of integration between the additional app’s and salesforce.com, or even between the other app’s themselves.

Salesforce.com may be the first one to bring us the AppExchange, but for all I know, credit for applying the Long Tail theory to Software goes to Joe Kraus of JotSpot (and previously Excite).   And it’s clearly not just theory.  

JotSpot is clearly not just about wikis, the intent is to become a widely used platform upon which the long tail of software applications is served up easily and affordably.   So does that make JotSpot an Application developer?  I seriously doubt it, although they developed sample app’s they can’t be the jack-of-all-trades.  Although  Joe never talked about the business model associated with being “the platform”, I’ve always thought they will one day introduce a Marketplace, where third party developers and the user community find each other.   But first they need critical mass – something Salesforce already has. 

I’m eager to see JotSpot’s next move… 

 

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Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software ·
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Pre-AJAX AJAX Applications

Posted on September 6, 2005 ·

OK, so this title does not make a lot of sense … I’ll explain:
There’s a lot of hype around AJAX ( Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which, in laymen’s terms is a set of technologies that allow web applications to have the look’n feel (and speed!) of desktop applications.

Traditional “web behavior” has been one of the main reasons for user reluctance against hosted Enterprise Applications, and innovative companies have come up with AJAX-style solutions for quite a while. Norway-based 24SevenOffice, a provider of hosted, modular All-In-One applications (ERP, CRM, email, calendar ..etc) has had an AJAX-like UI for a year and a half or so. Of course the term AJAX did not exist, so they had to explain at length the benefits of a faster, friendlier, easier-to-use Web Application.

It took a brand like Google, and the gliding-sliding oh-so-beautiful and fast Google Maps for AJAX to become a “household” name and one of the hot IT trends this year. Now longer do we need the long explanation, AJAX is chic du jour, all new web apps have it, and the major hosted Enterprise App’s also go the AJAX way: see NetSuite’s announcement. They claim to be first major business application with broad support of AJAX, but as stated above, they are a little late to the party… Late or not, it’s nice to see mainstream adoption and friendlier Web-apps finally.

For more technical info, as well as a good compilation of reference material, check out Rasmus’ 30 second tutorial. (via Jeff Nolan).

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME, Software, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
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The Emperor’s Naked: Technorati

Posted on September 2, 2005 ·

(Updates at the bottom)

Technorati is dressing up a dying sick body in fancy new clothes.  Who cares, if the body fails it’s basic functions?   

The latest new feature, Blog Finder meets more criticism than welcome:  here, here, here, here, to list just a few, but it’s all so irrelevant. Let’s face it: it really does not matter, whether this latest feature works or not.  There’s an old IT axiom:  Garbage In, Garbage Out.  If you have the wrong data to begin with, it really does not matter how many layers of extra services you put on it, the output is still worthless.

Everybody seems to be talking about performance problems; for example here, here, here, here, here and  here, but IMHO not getting data out of Technorati is by far not the worst; getting the WRONG information is far, far worse.  Techorati has major problems parsing the main pages of blogs built on standard templates of major bog platforms, and the result is the result is entries in their metadata where:

  • the body of a post appears with the title of another one (mostly, but not always, the previous one)
  • the body of a post is associated with tags of another one.

I myself, and other bloggers documented this before: here, here, here  and here again just giving a sample, and here’s a  little gem of a title and article that have nothing to do with each other:

Technorati

 (actually, the above image is a “triple whammy”: the tag, title, body come from 3 different posts)
 
I always wondered that if parsing the main page is so difficult (it is not, actually) why doesn’t Technorati use the permalink page, or even better, the RSS feed instead of the main page where they “get lost” – perhaps THAT is a performance issue?
 
In any case, as seen above, the search problems are the tip of the iceberg, the real problem is building the wrong index.  From a blogger’s point of view, this makes us look like complete fools – posting meaningless articles.

Now, let’s talk about communication:  emailing techorati support is a complete dead end.  Bloggers quickly learned the trick: emailing Dave Sifry (CEO), or perhaps Kevin Marks, or tagging blog entries with their names used to result in a response, and sometimes even corrective action.  That’s no longer the case.  I understand.  The CEO personally emailing back is not exactly scalable communication.  But why doesn’t Technorati have a searchable Knowledge Base, or at least a FAQ of known issues and solutions?  This is really Customer Service 101.

The SiliconBeat, Joi Ito, and many others welcome Dave Sifry’s post discussing the problems: “ Once we got our keyword search infrastructure back on track, our infrastructure team has been working 100% on fixing Cosmos search. Our current plan is to have Cosmos search back up and running by the end of September .“

Sorry, Dave, but your keyword search is far from fixed, it still results in timeout in more than half the cases.. in fact the Technorati homepage is often unaccessible.   On this chart  a response time above 3 seconds is considered critical – wow, I am generally happy getting anything below 30 seconds, if at all.   On the input side, Technorati claims to index posts within minutes, yet several influential bloggers complain they have not been indexed for weeks.   Dave strikes an honest tone and discusses some of the issues, but frankly, I doubt he really knows the status of his own business.

All this makes me wonder if Technorati is an “idea company” – they truly are Innovators of the Blogosphere, just can’t execute.  This makes me wish BL Ochman’s recent “hot tip” about an imminent buyout were true. 

 Update (9/10) This is pathetic:  New Orleans is listed as #6 on the Tehcnorati Top Search list, yet clicking on it results in this:

Technorati new orleans

Update (9/11) Can’t log in to Technorati account, infinite loop asking to log in again and again …


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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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