I’ve got some Pownce invites; leave a comment if you want one.
If you’re on Pownce, let me know so I can add you as a friend. Here I am on Pownce.
Author Archives: Christopher Finke
History Cloud
Something I’ve always been fascinated with is the way that certain words can define a time period. Over the last decade, for example, there were periods of weeks where you couldn’t turn on the television without hearing “anthrax” or “lewinsky” or “taliban” or “tsunami.”
I’ve been working on a little project to help visualize what these “hot topics” were for each month over the last seven years, and I’m calling it the History Cloud. What I’ve done is parsed the main pages of several major news sites going back to mid-2001 and extracted the words most commonly used in news articles during each month. I’ve arranged these words in a tag cloud to make it easy to see which terms dominated the news. Clicking on any of the terms in the cloud shows the stories from that month that made the term popular, courtesy of Google News.
My favorite feature of this history cloud is that when you hover over a term in the tag cloud, the other terms that are related to that term are highlighted as well. This makes it even easier to tell why a certain term was in the news. For example, if you hover over the “bush” tag in May of 2001, the highlighted related terms are “energy”, “education”, “tax”, and “plan.” Contrast that with the “bush” term in April of 2003, where the related tags are “UN”, “Iraq”, and “Iraqi.” Oh to be back in the innocent days of early 2001…
If any of this sounds interesting to you, check it out. Feedback is always welcome. FYI: there are a few months with little or no data; clicking on these months just won’t display any tags.
Kevin Rose’s new project: Pownce
Digg founder Kevin Rose’s “IM competitor” startup that was hyped on Digg two months ago has been introduced, and it appears to be a Twitter clone with support for posting files. It’s named Pownce, and it calls itself “a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends.”
It’s invite-only right now (I’m on the waiting list), so there’s not much information available about the app. Leah Culver (Pownce developer) has blogged about Pownce here, but doesn’t really add any information not on Pownce’s about page. (Viewing her Pownce profile page does give some insight into how the service may work.) As is standard operating procedure with Web 2.0 startups, there’s a Pownce blog (currently content-less save for the requisite Hello World post), which I’m sure will be the best place to watch for updates on Pownce’s progress.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of this site; it’s got a big advantage over any random startup since it will undoubtedly be splashed all over Digg due to Kevin’s involvement, but we’ll see if it’s able to make the jump from being popular with Digg fanboys to being popular with the average Web user.
Give this woman a raise
MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski refuses to talk about Paris Hilton. She tears up the first script for the Paris story (after trying to light it on fire) and shreds the second one. The world needs more reporters like this.
Google redefines the folder
Inside the official announcement of some upgrades to Google Documents is this section about the new “folders” feature:
“Almost from the day we launched people have been clamoring for folders. They’re here! […] documents can live in more than one folder at a time.”
I don’t know about you, but where I come from, that’s not a folder; it’s a tag. A folder is meant to be a real-world representation of a manila file folder, and I don’t know of many real-world documents that can bend the fabric of space to be in two different file folders at once.
In order to avoid watering down the definitions of both tags and folders, Google should call a spade a spade and a tag a tag.
Feed Statistics: Now with more statistics
Update: Feed Statistics has been discontinued and is no longer supported.
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Time well spent
Check out my brother Jacob’s home-brewed Simpsons Movie trailer.
If YouTube (and home computers capable of producing video) had been around when I was 13, I think this is very similar to something I would have done. Instead, my sister Gina and I made fake radio shows using the WAV recorder that comes with Windows and a sound-effects CD we got from the library.
Dear Google…
Why do people only write formal letters to corporations when they have a problem? It’s like the college-aged child who only writes home when he needs money. I’d like to see more of this:
Dear Google,
How are things with you? I’m doing well, if you were wondering. Congratulations on your DoubleClick acquisition; it sounds like you really burned Microsoft’s biscuits on that one! LOL What else are you up to these days? Just thought I’d drop you a line.
Have a good one,
Chris
P.S. What are you doing on Friday – want to grab some beers? I’ll send you an invite on Facebook.
Come on, let’s show our favorite mega-companies how much they mean to us with some no-strings-attached correspondence.
AOL News and Netscape.com
AOL News has undergone a redesign to be more “bloggy” (according to Reuters). Part of this update is that now they’re featuring the top stories at Netscape.com under the “User Submitted News” in the left-hand sidebar.
I wouldn’t mind that section being a little higher up on the page though, maybe replacing any of the nine (yes, nine) links to stories about Paris Hilton being released from prison…
Diggers get what they want, don’t want it anymore
Digg finally implemented threaded comments yesterday, and the top story on Digg right now is a harsh criticism of the new system. The consensus appears to be that while the new system is a step forward in terms of technical functionality, it’s two steps back for usability.
New features on a large community site will always draw complaints from a vocal minority, so Digg may just have to wait a few days for these users to get acclimated to the changes. My personal opinion is that it’s definitely a good step to allow for true replies and threading, but the system seems over-engineered. Having to click to see any replies is a poor design choice, and with all the extra borders and headers, the page gets cluttered very quickly.
My unsolicited advice to Digg is to follow Netscape’s or Reddit’s lead and simplify what you’ve got. Drop the “click to view replies” links, keep the pagination (“Click to view the next 50 comments”), and get rid of about half of the extra borders and headers that have been added. Do this and you’ll get one of your famous “We love Digg for listening to us” frontpage stories, and the deluge of feedback e-mail I’m sure you’re getting will slow to a trickle.
WAMP! BAM! POW!
This morning, I needed to troubleshoot an error that was occurring in my Feed Statistics plugin when running on a Windows machine as well as under PHP 5. Since I normally do all of my development in *nix environments, I didn’t have such an environment readily available. Having installed Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Windows XP before, I knew that I could do it, but it would probably take the better part of an hour.
I did a quick search for WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) and found the WAMP project – a single-file download that ostensibly installs Apache, MySQL, and PHP 5 in a Windows environment. I had tried this kind of package before with little luck, but this one literally took 3 minutes to set up, and after 5 minutes of debugging, I had found and fixed the bug in the plugin. Total time spent was less than 10 minutes when I had expected that it would take more than an hour – definitely one of the best software experiences I’ve had in recent memory.
(As for this post’s title, I think all of the comic references at Brian’s blog are rubbing off on me.)
Feed Statistics Plugin Fixed
Update: Feed Statistics has been discontinued and is no longer supported.
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Top 1,000 Diggers: 2007/06/20
This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.
Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/20
In other Digg news, the fatal flaw with some Digg RSS feeds that I first mentioned here exactly 2 months ago still has not been fixed. I had gotten my hopes up since Digg was down for hours the other day, but still no luck.
If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.
Feed Statistics: Now with fewer bots!
Update: Feed Statistics has been discontinued and is no longer supported.
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Feed Statistics: Updated Already?
Update: Feed Statistics has been discontinued and is no longer supported.
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Feed Statistics Plugin for WordPress
Update: Feed Statistics has been discontinued and is no longer supported.
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Name Out Loud
People have been mispronouncing my last name (Finke, pronounced fink-ee) my whole life. Usually, they make the mistake of dropping the “e” (Fink); I don’t really mind or even notice this anymore, since “Fink” was an obvious nickname bestowed upon me all through elementary and high school, but occasionally there’s a creative soul who goes with a long “i” and says “Fienk” (rhymes with, uh, nothing, but has the same i-sound as “bike”). Since most of my interaction with other people is on the Web and via e-mail (a notoriously silent medium), I wouldn’t doubt it if 95% of the people I communicate with every week aren’t sure how to pronounce my name.
Mike Cassano, a guy I met at the University of Minnesota during the Chipmark project, has come up with a fun solution to this pronunciation problem, and it’s called “Name Out Loud.” Basically, you go to their website, hit “Record” on a little flash app, say your (ahem) name out loud, and their app saves your recording so that your Internet friends can hear exactly how you pronounce your name.
Here’s how to pronounce my name, Christopher Finke.
It’s a neat idea, and it definitely would have saved this guy some trouble.
Top 1,000 Diggers: 2007/06/13
This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.
Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/13
If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.
Safari on Windows: First impressions from a browser developer
I’ve been playing around with the beta release of Safari on Windows XP, and here are my initial experiences and impressions: (I don’t use Safari on the Mac all that often, so I’m not claiming that these are bugs in Safari for Windows only.)
- Bookmarks importing does not work. It didn’t auto-detect any of my Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, or Navigator profiles like the webpage said it would on its first run, and it also doesn’t do anything when I choose “Import bookmarks” from the File menu and give it a bookmarks file to import.
- The tab and status bars are hidden by default, which is a shame. Tabbed browsing should be given the spotlight, and the status bar is where most people look to see where the link they’re about to click is going to take them.
- Looking at the browser’s UI and rendered pages literally hurts my eyes. It may be due to some font setting on my computer, but while Firefox/Navigator/IE on my computer all look fine, any text in Safari (including the menu options) is slightly blurry. I won’t be able to stand this for any extended amount of time.
- Doesn’t support middle-clicking on tabs to close them. This will frustrate me very quickly.
- Using a blue icon that says “RSS” instead of the de facto standard orange feed icon? Lame. However, their actual feed viewer is very nice.
- Clicking on the “Add Bookmark” toolbar button and then pressing either “Cancel” or “Add” in the resulting dialog crashes the browser. Every time. (Turns out that the same thing happens when closing the Toolbar Customization dialog.)
- It doesn’t support adding more search engines, as far as I can tell. Yahoo! and Google are all I can have?
- I can’t get it to display XML files as anything other than plain text.
So, while I’m glad that Apple has taken the step of releasing their browser for Windows (we welcome any competition), I’m not that impressed with the actual offering. (It kind of reminds me of Firefox 1.0 – much better than Internet Explorer, but not nearly as good as any recent Mozilla (or Netscape) browsers.) I’ll submit these bug reports to Apple and hope for something usable when Beta 2 comes out.
Is Digg hiding stories from search?
This link to the Navigator 9 download page was submitted to Digg around noon on Tuesday and received 10 diggs over the next 24 hours. A story about a Firefox-based browser release submitted by a top-100 Digger? That sounds like possible front-page material to me – why only 10 diggs? Maybe it’s because the story was excluded from Digg’s search results: it doesn’t appear in results for netscape or navigator. Is it possible that it was buried, and that’s why it’s not in the regular results?
No, it doesn’t appear in the search results for buried stories either. In fact, I can’t find it at all by searching on Digg. Has Digg instituted some sort of double secret probation for stories it doesn’t want its users finding?