Paging Johnny...
Thursday, July 19th, 2007I just saw this ad next to a GMail message about ScribeFire:

There must be a better method for finding an amnesic Johnny Depp than poorly targeted Google ads.
Christopher Finke is a software engineer. He is available for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.
I just saw this ad next to a GMail message about ScribeFire:

There must be a better method for finding an amnesic Johnny Depp than poorly targeted Google ads.
Just found some new content for my About Me page, courtesy of Victor Agreda, Jr.:
"The template on his blog kicks Safari in the nuts, runs like a coward, and leaves it writhing in pain without help."
(For the record, I gave my blog template a stern talking-to, and it has promised to stop doing this.)
The whole thing is pretty funny, but I laughed out loud at around 18 seconds left:
Wow, the Internet gets annoying on April Fools day. The best April Fools jokes are subtle pranks, not long, drawn-out, unfunny "jokes," and they do not include the phrase "this is not a joke." I'm turning off my computer and I'll come back online tomorrow when things have settled down.
Somebody e-mailed me this satirical article about Digg's userbase revolting, which "quotes" me talking about Kevin Rose defacing my blog. I'm undecided as to whether it's actually funny, but I did like this bit:
"What, is our Alexa ranking gonna drop from 73 to 74?" said Digg CEO Jay Adelson. "You know, for every 30-something who decides he's got something better to do than digg a couple hundred stories a day, there's a 15-year-old kid willing to skip his homework and take care of that for us. We're not worried."
Had I read that quote in any other context, I probably would have reluctantly believed that Jay said it.
This morning, Digg removed ranking information from user profiles. I commented on the story, pointing to my top users list for people who were still interested in their rank. Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded to my comment thusly:
"We no longer display that rank information, so don't be surprised if Chris's list is no longer accurate (or stays unchanged). (A Netscape developer?)"
Well, my list has been updated since then, so we can safely assume that I wasn't using that information (which I've said from the beginning). As long as Digg displays the name of the user that submitted each story, it will be trivial to determine the top users. I'll continue to aggregate the data until I'm forced by Digg (or asked nicely, with a "pretty please") to take it down.
Side note: I love the "(A Netscape developer?)" parenthetical that Jay included. I'm not sure of its meaning though. Is it "How did a Netscape developer manage to crack our code and get this information?" or is it "Netscape has developers now?" In any case, it's irrelevant, but I still laughed.