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The News – 08/03/01
Attack
of the Blogdex!
MIT’s Media Lab has released Blogdex, and index of, what else,
blogs. Blogs are random musings published by those who think the world will
care, like me.
Basically, blogs make it easy to publish Web pages to any site you have FTP
access to. The idea behind Blogdex is that most blogs have hyperlinks in
them, and thus blog authors represent a good sampling of what people are
interested in on the Net. Blogdex visits 9,000 blogs a day, and extracts
the links. It then ranks the links by popularity.
The service is still getting off the ground. The number one
link on today’s Blogdex was mentioned in only eight blogs. Number two is
pseudonymous commentator Robert X. Cringely’s article on TCP/IP. The number
10 link was www.iwantanewgirlfriend.com,
which is itself a blog, and which is sponsored by a sex toy I’ve never
heard of: the world’s only oral vibrator, Tongue Joy. Others on the list
concern the 20th anniversary of the PC, the fatness of
Americans, and the poor guy who got nailed, literally, in the eye.
It's pretty easy, at this point, to manipulate rankings based on such a
small sample. Since Blogdex users can link back to the original blogs, being on the list
means your blog can be exposed to more people. In a shameless display of oneupsmanship,
I've added the top 10 sites to my
Stratlets blog. Let's see if I end up on the list.
BTW, as yet another lesson of how important it is to have your own important business
marks turned into domains, www.blogdex.com is not registered to MIT, but to an enterprising
entrepreneur hoping to make a buck.
I’m having a hard time seeing this as representative of where
ordinary mortals are going on the Web. A far better pulse can be gotten at
Google’s Zeitgeist,
which is a ranking of the most popular search terms on one of the Web’s
busiest search engines. Here's today's top ten with my glosses:
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1. sircam
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SirCam is an
Internet worm that is actively spreading.
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2. max payne
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Max Payne is a
popular video game.
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3. planet of the
apes
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Popular movie
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4. code red virus
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Obnoxious computer
virus
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5.
howard stern
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Apparently there was
a fist fight on Howard Stern’s radio program recently.
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6.
george
harrison
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There have been a
lot of rumors and counter rumors about Beatle George Harrison’s health.
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7.
etna
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Mt. Etna is erupting
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8.
heather mills
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Heather Mills is hot
and engaged to Sir Paul the Cute One.
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9.
israel
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Who knows?
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10.
rivaldo
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Brazilian soccer
midfielder
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Now this is more like it: more sex, some rock and roll, some mayhem,
and something for the geeks.
Those wanting a second opinion can check Lycos’ Top 50, which includes with each listing an explanation
of why they’re popular. Whichever list you look at, it behooves business people to realize that
the Internet has become a mass market phenomenon, and there's all kinds of people using it for
non-business uses. No matter how popular your business site is, it's not likely to appear in one
of these lists.
Blogdex
Briefly
Noted
- Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: I'll be speaking at the Minnesota
Entrepreneurs Club pre-meeting workshop at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 7th in St. Paul, MN.
The meeting is at the
Minnesota Business Academy.
My topic is "Will You Have to Have It? What You Need to Know About Future Tech and Your Business."
MN Entrepreneurs
- Sunrise Period for .info Domain: From now until August 27th,
registered US and EU trademark owners can register their .info
domains. BulkRegister is charging a registration fee for $5 per name,
with a discount for volume. Registrations must be for a minimum of 5
years. Like all registrars, BulkRegister does not guarantee that the
trademark owner will actually get the domain name. But there’s a
better chance now than in the next phase, called Landrush, when names
will go to any registrant. I have no idea how trademark ownership will
be determined during the Sunrise phase. I’d be very surprised if the
process can be completed by the deadline.
BulkRegister.com
- Open Services Coming? Gene Kan, ex-Gnutella, ex-InfraSearch, current
JXTASearch leader, writes about an evolving technology trend akin to
Open Source, which brought us most of the tools that the Internet runs
on. An outgrowth of the peer-to-peer (P2P) movement, Open Services
involve the sharing of idle resources, which, due to
Moore’s Law, have
become extremely abundant. As Kan puts it:
The price of performance is decreasing
constantly while the performance itself is increasing ridiculously. That
means I'm pretty happy to share my Pentium 8 50gHz with you because I only
need all that horsepower while Windows boots. After that, the CPU is hardly
utilized because I can't hit 50 billion keys in a second. Between keys, my
computer could be cracking RC5 or musing on colon cancer.
Nice dig at Microsoft there, BTW. Anyway, what Kan and others are proposing
is a codified way to share your computing resources a la current P2P
schemes like SETI@Home,
Parabon, AllCast,
and Envive.
OpenP2P
Can’t Get Enough of ME?
In the unlikely event
that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the
fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a
datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a
Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you
can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP
access, and the free software from www.blogger.com.
This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts
to your Weblog.
I’ve dubbed my Weblog
entries “Stratlets”, and they are available at www.stratvantage.com/stratlets/.
Let me know what you think. Also check out the TrendSpot for ranking of
the latest emerging trends.
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