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JournoTwit - The best way to organize your tweets

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:19:17 -0700

Since I started using Twitter on a regular basis, I felt overwhelmed by the endless stream of data generated by the people I was following.

The official Twitter page quickly became inadequate to manage my tweets, so I began to search for an alternative through the myriad of Twitter clients available out there, both web and desktop based. After trying out a few desktop clients, I decided to restrict the search to web clients only: between work and home, I may use up to 4 different computers and 3 different operating system, and I really didn’t fancy the idea of keeping the same client up-to-date everywhere — even if such client existed.

Over the past months I tried dozens of different web-based Twitter clients, and narrowed the list of must-have features to the following:

The interface should be simple to use and not too cluttered.
I should be able to categorize tweets in columns (à la TweetDeck).
I should be able to know, when visiting the site, how many new tweets I have to go through.
I should be able to mark tweets as read.
It should display media files (at least pictures) inline with the tweets.
The interface should provide all the most common twitter actions like reply, retweet, follow/unfollow, shorten url, upload pictures etc. etc.

The good news is that I found at least one web-based client able to do all this: JournoTwit.

Introducing JournoTwit

JournoTwit was born – as many software projects – to scratch an itch:

Probably the last thing anyone was expecting me to do — even myself, was to create my own twitter client. However, I’ve been a little fed up with not having the features I wanted and running 5 or 6 accounts, I was getting annoyed at using several different applications just to have them logged in concurrently. […] In under 24 hours I put together a twitter client that functioned enough for me to call it my one and only. A few more days and I added in enough features that I felt it was good enough for public consumption. It is however, not perfect and I have plenty of improvements on my to do list for it.

JournoTwit’s introductory post by Andrew Spode Miller (@spode)

After months of public consumption, JournoTwit became a feature-packed Twitter client able to compete with a lot of mainstream alternatives – albeit remaining always relatively unknown to the masses. You can call it a niche Twitter client, able to satisfy a few basic needs:

The ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts at once.
The ability to categorize all incoming tweets automatically, according to the type of information within them.
The ability to keep track of unread tweets.

These three features alone were enough to make JournoTwit my one and only Twitter client. And no, it’s not only for journalists and writers.

Interface overview

After logging in, JournoTwit looks like this:

Note: I am using the edge version of JournoTwit, a sort of development snapshot with the latest features.

At the top, some more-or-less intuitive icons allow you to perform all the most common global actions:

Tweet
Manual refresh
Mark all columns as read
Add new columns
Quick search
Edit settings
Logout

Next to this global toolbar, there’s a list of links, each corresponding to a column. Clicking a link toggles the visibility of the corresponding column.

In each column, tweets are displayed in different column according to their state:

Read
Unread
Selected

You can select one tweet at a time by clicking the + icon. This toggles the tweet-specific actions:

Reply
Send a direct message
Save as favorite
Retweet
Translate

Pretty intuitive and easy to use, so far.

Default columns

When you login, you’ll notice that all your tweets are not presented in the traditional, disorganized single-column stream layout. Instead, they are sorted automatically into different columns, according to their type:

My Feed: All the tweets you sent. By default, this column is minimized.
No-Mention: All tweets containing your username without the “@”, i.e. every time someone mentions you sneakily, without sending you a reply.
Messages: All the direct messages you sent and received.
Mentions: All the tweets containing your twitter username (with “@”), such as replies to your tweets.
Statuses: All the tweets posted by people you follow that do not contain any link or cannot be categorized through other columns.
News: All the tweets posted by people you follow containing links to articles or non-multimedia web pages.
Retweets: All the retweets posted by people you follow.
Visual: All the tweets posted by people you follow containing links to pictures or videos. Where possible, media is displayed inside the tweet.
Audio: Same as above, but for audio items.
Chatter: Attempts to collect all conversations involving you or people you follow.

Surprisingly, these default columns are enough to make your Twitter experience easier and more manageable, without configure a single setting. They’re obviously not perfect: some images are not resolved automatically, for example, but it works well otherwise.

Still this may not be enough for your needs or maybe simply not the right thing. No problem: JournoTwit is extremely flexible when it comes to organizing and sorting out your tweets.

Adding new columns

All columns except for Mentions and Messages can be modified as you see fit. These two columns cannot be modified simply because there’s nothing you need to modify it, if you think about it. But they can be deleted, of course (and re-created in a blink, if you delete them by mistake).

Let’s go through the slightly geeky process of creating a column.

When you click the Add New Columns icon on the top-left corner you’ll be prompted to further clarify whether you want to add a…

Set of Columns: i.e. the default columns provided by journotwit or a single column containing all the tweets. Useful if you mess things up and you want to start over again.
Preset Column: choose from many different columns according to your needs, from different tweet types to memes (#followfriday, #musicmonday, etc.).
Custom Column: create your own personal column, according to your specific needs.

Because the overwhelming majority of my readers is composed by geeks, I’ll just describe how to create a custom column, so that you can fully understand the power of this tool, in the right hands.

Adding a custom column

The creation of a custom column doesn’t take long, but there are quite a few things you can configure. First off, you have to specify whether you want the column to collect local or global tweets: local means the people you follow, while global means everyone on the planet. Simple enough.

Then comes the juicy geeky part: search terms and tags. Simply type a valid Twitter Search query in the textbox, so something like this:

from:jonobacon OR #ubuntu -jaunty

…will hopefully fetch all tweets posted by @jonobacon or tweets about Ubuntu, but not related to the Jaunty Jackalope release. You can also add more text box and thus perform more search queries within the same column.

Then you can filter by tweet type, enabling or disabling Statuses, Visual, Links, Audio, ReTweets and Chatter. Useful to remove the noise (if you follow @brentspiner, make sure you disable ReTweets…).

Finally, you only have to configure a few more settings:

Whether you want to be alerted with a beep when there are new tweets in this column.
Whether you want the column to display tweets, a tag cloud or even an image slideshow.
The name of the column.

That’s all. Simple enough. As a side note, the “No-Mention” column is nothing but a custom column in disguise: if you try to edit it, you’ll see it’s nothing but a search for “username -@username -from:username”.

Other features and advanced settings

For the tweakers, JournoTwit also exposes the a set of global settings you can modify to enhance your experience or disable annoying behaviors (depends how you look at it):

Behavior

Unhide column when new tweets arrive? (default: yes)
Hide columns on Mark as Read? (default: yes)
Play alert sounds? (default: yes)
Animate when new items arrive? (default: yes)
Default #hashtags and search bar to a local search? (default: no)
Ignore Tag Coulds when marking all as read? (default: yes)
Ignore Slide Shows when marking all as read? (default: yes)
Warn when deleting columns? (default: yes)
Automatically translate tweets using Google Translate? (default: no)
Show “Did You Know?” messages on refresh? (default: yes)
Slide show transition time(s) (default: 5)

Display Adjustment

If you are unsatisfied by JournoTwit’s default look and feel, you can change the fond size, the color theme (there are 18 possible choices) and even match the color of the icons with the current theme.

Black Listing

Straight from the contextual help:

“Here you globally black list a #hashtag, such as #microsoft, or a search phrase such as “Windows 7”. Remember to separate them with a space and that you can block on a per column basis too."

This is just what you need when you want to filter out pointless tweets. Use with care though!

Conclusion

Maybe it’s just me being a geek, but I think JournoTwit nailed it when it comes to making Twitter more productive: everything just works, and fast, unlike some of its more feature-boasting competitors. I have been using it on a daily basis for weeks, and I’ve never missed a single tweet since (unless I explicitly wanted to do so).

That being said, there are a few small features I’d like to see:

I’d like to be able to mark single tweets, not entire columns, as read. In this way, when I go on vacation and come back, I can catch up with unread tweets more gradually, like I do with Google Reader.
I’d like to use shortcut keys to navigate the interface, like with Google Reader.
I’d like to configure tweets so that they only show up in one column, not in more than one (for example in Chatter, My Feed, and Mentions at the same time).
Support for Twitter Lists…

I already told @spode about some of these, and he said he’ll look into it, we’ll see what happens. Anyhow, just give it a try, and see if you like it!

10 reasons why I didn't update my blog

h3rald@h3rald.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:30:00 -0600

“It has been a while since my last post, sorry about that”
I read this sentence (or something along those lines) on many blogs on the Internet, including mine. As a matter of fact, I actually didn’t write a meaningful post on my blog for a long time and no, probably this is not going to change that either.

Yesterday I started thinking why this happens, not only to me but to a lot of other non-professional bloggers. A professional blogger &emdash; for what I can tell &emdash; is someone like Michael Arrington or Gina Trapani: someone who has the luck (or course) to be able to just blog for a living.

I don’t blog for a living: my site is self-sustaining via a few very unobtrusive ads, just that. I have a full time job, and I blog in my spare time about my interests, without even trying to make “proper” money from my site. There’s nothing wrong with it: I believe there are some other people in my condition, and that’s quite normal.

That being said, let’s examine the ten most common reasons why I (and you too, maybe) end up not updating my blog, even when I have time to do so.h3. Someone already blogged about it

This is very irritating. I am obsessed with original content. I want to write about something other people never (or hardly ever) wrote about. As a consequence, I often find myself googling the same topic I’m planning my blog post on, and I obviously often get quite a few results, too!

I actually wanted to title this very post “The Blogger’s Block”, but I immediately thought of putting that very title into Google, just to see if someone else already blogged about it. Sure they did! Not original at all, tough luck.
It also happened a few weeks ago: I wanted to write about the current state of tech news sites and Antonio Cangiano comes up with a similar post. Very interesting indeed, but quite annoying as well!

OK scrap that, think about something else…

This can potentially go on for days, and the only solution is of course trying not to worry about it, and just write the damn thing (that’s what I did to write this post).

I didn’t research enough on the subject

This happens tipically with reviews, round-ups, etc. Things I actually enjoy writing, but which may be easily subject to (harsh) criticism unless ou do them right.
I wanted to write a review of the new Treo 750 I bought. I’ve been using for a while, I learnt a few interesting hacks etc. etc. Unfortunately the 3G iPhone came out, so everyone is all hyped up about it. Too bad that I, being Italian and living in Italy, I never actually touched the damn thing!
What has that got to do with my Treo 750? Well, it would be nice to write a review of a Windows Mobile 6 phone comparing to the upcoming Apple wonder, wouldn’t it?

The solution to this would be trying to limit the scope of your post: screw Apple, let’s just focus on my Treo 750 and on the amazing amount of programming languages I can use on it!

After researching for X days, I realized it was all a waste of time

This happens with big articles. I once thought about writing a comprehensive article about all the possible ways to deploy a Ruby on Rails web site. Cool, isn’t it? I started researching about all the most esoteric lightweight web servers, about JRuby, Glassfish, IronRuby, … A lot of things. And new solutions kept coming up, and with them more and more posts, and then even entire books on the subjects.

Very frustrating. I abandoned the whole thing, because there was simply no reason to go on researching: it was all a waste of time.

How to fix this? Again, reduce the scope of your article so that you are able to reduce the time you spend researching about it. Or maybe try to get paid to write it, so that even if there’s plenty of articles about the same subject, at least you have a concrete purpose to write yours.

Erhm, yes, by the way, keep an eye on SitePoint in the next few days/weeks, OK?

I only write when I’m inspired, and now I’m not

Very, very common. I normally think about a very cool article to write in the evening, or early in the morning, or whenever I don’t have access to a computer or the Internet.
Of course I don’t forget about it, but by the time I have a chance to actually write it, I really don’t fancy doing so. Oh, the irony!
It happened today, actually, during my lunch break: I was supposed to write this post but I didn’t feel like it. I lost my inspiration and all my artistic verve, so no, it can’t be done. Tough luck, wait until next time.

How did I solve this? Well, I started writing the post in my coffee break: there was no way to finish it in time, of course, but at least I started it.
I also saved it to my PDA and continued writing it when I had a chance. Eventually, I managed to finish it during my lunch break, the next day.

Try to write whenever you are inspired. If you are not inspired in your lunch break, do some work in your lunch break and then write when, in an hour or so, probably, you feel like writing again.

This won’t make Digg’s front page

Digg, Reddit, DZone, you name it. They are all excellent free tools for promoting your content. Don’t tell me you never wrote a post for the sake of making the front page of one of those sites. I did, I confess.
I didn’t make Digg’s front page in a while, and I’m probably never going to make it again. The reason? When it comes to promoting the right content in a fair way Digg sucks. As a consequence, 80% of the articles which appear on Digg suck. I’m sure you’ll be able to forgive my French when I say that Digg utterly sucks.

No matter how clever your story may be, unless you’re backed up by a swarm or an active community willing to Digg your story, you simply aren’t going to make it. When is the last time a proper programming article made it to Digg? I don’t remember, probably way before I unsubscribed to the Digg’s Technology feed, about a year or so ago.

Just write for the sake of writing. Don’t even submit your story to Digg (unless you’re writing about the iPhone, of course, then you may have a chance): post it to a less-known site, maybe, or to Reddit, instead. You won’t get as much traffic, granted, but you also won’t get tons of idiots writing pointless crap on your site and you won’t risk a server crash. If it’s destiny, then some good soul will post it to Digg, but nobody will digg it. That’s just life, I’m afraid.

It has been too long since my last post: the next one will have to make up for it

This happens when you start feeling guilty because you didn’t post in a long time.

“My next post is going to be superb, long, interesting and everyone will start flocking back to my blog!”

Wrong. First of all because statistically people just don’t “flock back” because you bestowed them of one interesting post (you have to keep up, too), and second because by doing so your mind will automatically discard all those bits of things you wanted to write about, but you never did because you’re waiting for that special next post which will be so much better and will bring your blob back to ~~spam~~ life.

It happened, it happened… again, all you have to do is just post all the tidbits you need, while you’re preparing your big shot: your blog will remain “fresh” and more people will enjoy your interesting posts, whenever they’ll come.

Nobody gives a damn, anyway

I didn’t want to upset my younger audience by using a nasty f-word in the title, but that’s exactly how it feels like it, sometimes.
I went to Rome last week, did you know? I twittered about it, you ought to know! And of course you’ll all be waiting for the usual 10-page-long article on my awesome vacation. Like when I went to London, remember?
No, sadly not everyone may be interested in this crap. So I probably won’t post about it: who cares? When you start thinking like this, you may stop posting for weeks: not everyone may be interested in everything you post, and I believe that’s normal.
Especially for a blog like mine, which is deliberately open to all my interests: programming, technology, travelling, etc. That’s why most blogs try to be themed: they write about a particular subject, even a single programming project, and they (try to) do it well. The trade-off is that a themed blog may run out of posts amazingly quickly, if you’re not carefula and if you’re not 100% devoted to your blog’s theme.
A themed blog will build up a faithful audience, like when I was writing almost exclusively about CakePHP: a lot of PHP programmers where flocking here daily. Then things went wrong and I really couldn’t be bothered to write about the same crap. Which leads us to the next topic…

If I write about this, a large chunk of my audience is going to be upset

This applies especially to themed blogs: if you’re a well-known Firefox addict, you can’t suddenly start writing about Opera, praising its speed and the features it offers out-of-the box!
If you take a side, you’d better stick to it, if you want your audience to stick to you: the ten people who happen to read this blog are probably quite shocked by the amount of times I “changed side”: from CakePHP and PHP to Rails and Ruby, from Firefox to Opera (well, wait until my next SitePoint article comes out, at least…). Probably they are not the same people who read this blog a year or so ago.

In the end, it’s entirely up to you: if you are prone to radically change our opinion (and this happen in technology, much more than in politics), which involves changing the whole theme of your blog, maybe you should consider not having a themed blog at all.
And if you don’t feel 100% sure you want a themed blog, you definitely shouldn’t go for a themed domain name, or you may end up abandoning it afterwards. And when that happens, unless you’re writing damn cool posts like Why, it’s going to hurt your audience. On the other hand, if you’re sure you’ll get ten times more visitors, go for it.
No, h3rald.com stays… I may end up raving about Safari at some point within the next ten years though, don’t be upset!

I’m not an expert on the subject, so I shouldn’t blog about it

This is a common problem I have when I try to write about something I don’t know extensively enough. When I started to learn Ruby, I was eager to start writing about it: it seemed just too cool to be true!
I thought about writing a longish post on learning Ruby from scratch, but then I realized it wouldn’t have been a great idea: I was just starting to learn a new language, I didn’t know all the nitty-gritty and writing about it to teach others was going to be a bit presumptuous, maybe!
Instead, I opted for a lighted 10 reasons to learn Ruby article, clearly stating in the first paragraph that I was just a noob getting excited about his new toy. It worked, actually: people seemed to enjoy it, and I was partially excused for the few mistakes I made here and there.
You don’t have to be an expert to blog about something: you just have to be totally honest about what you know, and what you don’t know.

There are a lot of professional bloggers out there, and I’m not one of them

Finally, this can be summarized in two words: inferiority complex. “Proper” blogs fire out 10+ posts per day, and I don’t even write ten points in a month! Again, those a professional bloggers: they live for blogging (and make an awful lot of money out of it), and they most likely have someone else blogging for them, too!
Think of TechCrunch or LifeHacker, for example: they have a small legion of talented writers working for them &emdash; even if Michael Harrington does rant about Twitter about three times a week himself, though.
At the end of the day, what matters is the quality of your posts. Not the length minf, the Quality. I personally think that non-professionals (I said “non-professionals”, not “amateurs”!) are allowed to write about once a week, if they can provide good content, that is.

But you still do have to write at least once a week (OK, let’s make it ten days), otherwise either you’re justified (you genuinely don’t have time) or you may be a victim of one of these common fears. Watch out, and happy blogging!

Google Apps for your domain: a shared hosting killer service?

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 21:51:00 -0600

A while ago Google started offering services like Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Calendar to domain owners. Sure everyone likes Gmail, but one of the few bad things about it is that it never feels “unique”: your email address is always gonna be gmail.com or <something>googlemail.com. Not a big deal? Well, sure, not really, but it really depends on the people using the service and how fussy they are:

small/medium business wouldn’t like this: @gmail.com gives farless credibility than @domain.com
When using Gmail with the Send As feature, messages will be sent “on behalf of”, and this can potentially mess things up as some spam filters don’t like it.

Now it seems to be official: Google is starting to offer customizable services to anyone who wish to sign up for it, not only as a restricted beta service.
What does this mean? Well, it can be the (free and easy) definitive web solution for small business, kids, grandmas and everyone who wants to establish a presence on the web by paying only the annual domain renewal fees…

Included applications

Note the title: Google Apps for your domain, not only Gmail. Here’s what you get:

Gmail – You know what it offers: a state-of-the art AJAX interface, speed, reliability, very effective spam filter, loads of space, tagging (labels) stars and all the rest.
Google Calendar – One of the best online calendar available. Features and AJAX interface, full integration with Gmail, ability to create private and public calendars, reminders,
Google Chat – Google’s instant messenger, available through Google Talk desktop application or online, seamlessly integrated in your Gmail interface.
Google Web Pages – aka Google’s page creator, easily create webpages using Google’s WYSIWYG online editor.

Now, try imagining these four services combined and (almost) fully customizable… Still no idea? Well, keep reading for a list of all the included features.

Included Features

In order to use Google Apps for your domain, you must of course own a domain. The next step involves changing your domain’s MX entry to “ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM”, and follow the instructions to create an administration account for your Google applications, and after a while every email sent to your domain’s accounts will be routed to your new Google-powered inbox. Similarly, in order to use Google Page Creator on your domain, you’re required to change the CNAME record of your DNS to “ghs.google.com”.

Note: in order to avoid inconveniences especially if a lot of users use your domain’s email, it is recommended that you pay attention on Google’s instructions on how to set the whole thing up. For further information refer to the official FAQ. In order to be able to use Google Page Creator on your domain, you must setup an URL to publish your webpages: of course do NOT set this to “www.yourdomain.com” or any subdomain currently in use or your visitors will access the pages you created with Google Page Creator.

Here’s what you get:

For a bigger image click here. Let’s now have a look at what are the main differences from the standard Gmail.

Include your own logo

Your own logo will be displayed on the upper left corner of every page. And this is truly sweet. All you have to do to change it is uploading a 143×59 PNG or GIF image from your domain management panel (see below).

Use your company name instead of Google’s

Besides a custom logo, it is possible to set a company name to be used instead of “Google” or “Gmail” in page titles and links. I chose “H3RALD.com Mail” and that’s displayed everywhere, including on the sign-in page.

Control Panel
All the custom settings can easily be managed through an easy-to use control panel:

It’s really easy to use and has wizards to setup all the included services and options like setting up user accounts, settings etc.

User Accounts
Through the control panel you can add new users and modifying existing user accounts to access your services. You can create administrators who are able to access administrative domain-wide settings, and standard users. Every user gets 2048MB of space for their emails, and that’s pretty generous considering that it seems that you’re able to create around 25 user accounts.

Already have a list of users you’re like to import? Just save them in CSV format and upload them.

Would you like to be able to contact all your users at once, e.g. via a newsletter? Google thought about this as well, and you can create your own personal newsletters which can be sent out automatically to your @yourdomain.com email accounts.

Internal Messaging System
But there’s more. We all know Google Talk: yes it’s nice, but probably MSN has more features, smileys and all the rest but it still remains a perfectly usable instant manager, which also allows file transfer. Your users can use Google Talk to communicate with each other or simply chat through their webmail interface, More features? Well, for example you can setup Google Talk to work on federated networks.

Appointments/Projects management
Google Calendar is an excellent online calendar, and now you can use it within your own domain as well. This means, for example, that it can be used to set your company’s appointments, reminder, project deadlines by creating an unlimited number of custom calendars to share with your collaborators.

Design your own site
I know a lot of restaurants, shops and people who would like to have a small site for their business or activity, but they can’t develop web application themselves. So the most obvious solution is to hire some professional web developer to rip them off… erhm, to create a website for them. Now it is not necessary: by setting the correct DNS parameters, you can allow users to create their own webpages using a foolproof and advanced web editor powered by Google: Google Page Creator.
I didn’t set it up on my own domain, but a preview of what you can do with Google Page Creator is available here.

Scenario

After considering all this, I came to the conclusion that what Google did can help a lot of people and at the same time prevent some evil webmaster to charge them hundreds of Euro (they really get away with it!) for basic “websites” with “three or more static pages”.
All you have to do is buy your own domain, and that can be as cheap as 8$ per year, the rest comes for free, from Google:

The best webmail interface you can possibly imagine
Nearly unlimited space for everything
A truly effective spam filter
About 25 fully-featured user account, possibly more if you ask nicely
Your own “corporate instant messenger”
Your own calendar to manage appointments, meetings etc.
An intuitive and advanced web page creator – not like Geocities

All this for free. Yes, with ads (I’m not here to discuss privacy concerns), but after all they’re not displayed on your main site.

What about Server Side technologies for my sites?

OK kid, now that would be a little bit too much, even if I can foresee some possible “Google Web Widgets” at some point. “Create your interactive and dinamic website within minutes, no programming knowledge required”… that would be great (for Google) and bad (for freelance web developers). One thing at a time, after all G(od|oogle) has the whole eternity to fulfill his Goals.

Review of ten popular social bookmarking services

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 13 May 2006 07:06:27 -0600

Social bookmarking¹ is perhaps one of the pillars of Web 2.0, allowing people to save, tag and share their Internet bookmarks online anytime, anywhere. Since del.icio.us² came out, the Web is not the same anymore: no more IE favourites or Firefox bookmarks, no more “Save page as…” etc., people nowadays want to do everything online without being bond to a single computer, and also make everything they do or read public – apparently. This is one of the key concepts of Web 2.0³: sharing information in a quick and easy way, without any restrictions.Del.icio.us was the first, but of course not the only one social bookmarking system which became popular in a few months: many other followed its example, many companies developed their own alternative to del.icio.us, adding and removing features, changing bits etc. etc. Result: someone said that “[…] There is almost 1 new social bookmark/digg like service appears one daily basis […]”⁴.

Nice, and there are also many reviews of each one as well⁵! Here’s another one…

Preliminary Notes: This round-up does not include all social bookmarking sites and yes, there are a lot missing. I decided to pick 10 services out of the dozens available for one simple reason: make this article more readable. I’m really sorry if your favourite social bookmarking site is not listed: if you feel creative you can add your (short!) review as a comment to this article.
Although I recently wrote a very positive review of Ma.gnolia⁶ and I know its lead developer, I do not consider myself partial towards Ma.gnolia, you’ll notice when I review it.

Common features and concepts

The social bookmarking sites reviewed in this article are: del.icio.us², Ma.gnolia⁷, Furl⁸, Spurl⁹, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0¹⁰ Blinklist¹¹, Smarking¹², Shadows¹³, Simpy¹⁴ and Blogmarks¹⁵.

All these social bookmarking sites have some features in common which can be used to define social bookmarking itself:

They allow users to save URLs online, adding some notes to it, and share them with others
Each url can be tagged with custom tags user can create and manage
RSS is widely supported, so you can included your “recent bookmarks” in your blog, for example
They allow users to import/export bookmarks in various formats
They support the creation and management of user profiles
Bookmarklet, buttons or other cute little things are provided to make your life easier and bookmark faster

Such features will not be mentioned over and over in each review, of course.

Review parameters

Besides an overview for each service and some notes regarding their intended audience, some other parameters will be considered and rated from 0 to 10 (the higher, the better):

Speed
I’m currently on dialup, and so I’ll be able to effectively test the speed and rendering time of each site. The higher the mark, the faster the site is.

Features
Notes concerning added/missing features, and overall features rating.

Simplicity
Do you need to be a certified geek™ in order to use the service or even your dog can learn how to use it, if he tries hard?

Interface/Design
This parameter concerns the visual appearance of a website. Note: it can be particularly subjective, I’ll try my best to be objective.

Userbase
Basically the amount of people which use a determined service.

Ready to go…

del.icio.us

Speed: 10 – This is by far the fastest site to load, perhaps because it doesn’t have any fancy eye-candy at all
Features: 6 – del.icio.us offers only the most essential features, nothing too fancy, but nothing too bad either
Simplicity: 6 – You need some time to get used to it, but it’s not confusing like some others. Hardly any documentation or tutorial provided, but hey, this is the geek’s choice after all
Interface/Design: 6 – Personally I like it, but I know I have no taste for design and interfaces. An average user would say that it’s too plain and no, nothing fancy at all
Userbase: 10 – Judging by the amount of people coming to my site after one of my article made it to digg, compared to other social bookmarking services, this is BY FAR the most used one. Everyone has a del.icio.us account, then, maybe, something else
Overall Rating: 7.6

Overview
This is THE social bookmarking service, it is the first, the most supported (every other service allows importing from del.icio.us), and the most used, with several thousands of registered users. Obviously, this made it the main term of comparison for other bookmarking services, which claim to be better because they are successful exactly where del.icio.us is lacking, e.g.:

Eye candy
they offer better user interaction (comments, messages)
Ratings are supported
More AJAX and effects
Other sites cache bookmarks internally or may offer thumbnails

Nevertheless, del.icio.us still remains the geek’s choice, the numbers speak by themselves. It is also my choice at the moment, because of its simplicity (in the sense of “no useless things are included”) and speed.

Suitable for: IT professionals, computer enthusiasts, tech-savvy people in general. Your old auntie probably won’t like it, but at least she’ll keep away from it and leave you in peace.

Ma.gnolia

Speed: 5 – It’s a bit slow if compared to competitors. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the server, maybe it’s Ruby on Rails.
Features: 7 – Saved copies, AJAX 5-star ratings, AJAX private/public lock, groups & messages
Simplicity: 8 – Fairly simple to learn and use, excellent documentation online
Interface/Design: 10 – I really like Ma.gnolia’s website design over all the others: clean, simple and professional with AJAX features in the right place.
Userbase: 6 – It’s fairly new so not many people are using it. It’s being pushed by Zeldman & ALA’s crew though
Overall Rating: 7.2

Overview
This was my first choice and the first social bookmarking site I reviewed⁶ and tried properly. It is developed in Ruby on Rails and it excels in simplicity and visual appearance, but it has some rather annoying CONs. First of all it’s a bit slow for my liking, especially now that I’m on dialup. Second, the search is currently limited to tags only: it’s obviously a temporary thing and it will be back soon though, but I gave it a 7 instead of a 8 for features for this reason.
Ads are visible on the top of every page – subscribe (soon) to remove them… oh well.

Suitable for: Anyone, although it seems to be the choice of web designers and people involved in website development.

Furl

Speed: 7 – Fast enough, no complains and no unnecessary objects or images either.
Features: 6 – saved copies, plenty of tools including their own toolbar, multiple categories but no tagclouds and not as customizeable as the others
Simplicity: 7 – Simple, organized, essential. Documentation available.
Interface/Design: 5 – This is nothing fancy at all compared to the others, a fairly traditional web interface. Web 2.0? …Pardon?
Userbase: 8 – This is one of the oldest social bookmarking services and it’s easier than del.icio.us, that’s why the fairly large userbase.
Overall Rating: 6.6

Overview
When I tried this service after trying the others I wasn’t impressed at all. The interface is fairly standard, all done in a traditional way, no AJAX at all: if you absolutely hate Web 2.0 hype, even when it’s actually useful, go for this. To rate a bookmark I must click on edit and select the rating from a select menu: our children wouldn’t believe it.
The good thing about Furl, and what made it popular, presumably, is its simplicity over other similar services like del.icio.us, that’s the most logical reason I could find to explain its popularity.

Suitable for: Anyone, users against or not yet accustomed to Web 2.0 interactivity

Spurl

Speed: 8 – Fast and pleasant to look at, no complaints
Features: 7 – Saved copies, del.icio.us sync, useful stats, no ratings, multilingual, some quirks (see below)
Simplicity: 8 – Yes, this is really simple and straightforward to use. Extensive documentation available.
Interface/Design: 8 – A really clean, simple, but yet nice looking and organized interface.
Userbase: 6 – Fairly popular, not as popular as del.icio.us but on the right track
Overall Rating: 7.4

Overview
Now this is is an interesting service. The first thing that I really liked about it is the good del.icio.us integration: not excellent because it seems to take quite a bit to import my del.icio.us bookmarks, but everything you bookmark with Spurl can be send to del.icio.us at the same time and vice versa! They also offer interesting stats regarding your bookmarks, report broken links, cache webpages, etc.
Some annoying things must be noted though (hence the 7 in features): the bookmarklet will popup a window – not great; it doesn’t support ratings and the tag management could be improved: del.icio.us and ma.gnolia can suggest tags when saving a bookmarks, while Spurl unfortunately doesn’t. It also seems to be less tag-centric than the others (except for Furl of course). It is multi-language and offers a 18+ filter – but if you forget to mark a bookmark as “explicit” it won’t work, and as result you can get porn links on the homepage…

Suitable for: Anyone, del.icio.us users who would like to try something new without losing sync with their favourite service.

Yahoo MyWeb 2.0

Speed: 6 – Not too fast, like other sites in the Yahoo network.
Features: 5 – “Web 2.0”? Well, yes, it has tag clouds and allows bookmark sharing, but that’s about it.
Simplicity: 7 – Integrated with Yahoo services (and toolbar), fairly easy to use, if you don’t know something the FAQs are handy.
Interface/Design: 6 – Clean, simple and a bit boring – perhaps I’m just to used to the rest of the sites in the Yahoo network
Userbase: 8 – Grab some random users and a big chunk of Yahoo enthusiasts: not bad!
Overall Rating: 6.4

Overview
When I first read about it, I though: look, Yahoo is ready to embrace the Web 2.0 philosophy, then I tried it and changed my mind: it has tags, tag clouds, it allows sharing but nothing more than that. The interface is still Web 1.0, and AJAX methodologies are not used at all.
Basically this service grasps the basic concepts from del.icio.us & C., simplifies them and re-presents them in a form which can be easily understood by the majority of Internet users of the planet (and primarly Yahoo users) and yet look innovative. Excellent marketing work, perhaps, but nothing too new or particularly useful there.

Suitable for: Anyone, in particular Yahoo users for the excellent integration with the rest of Yahoo services.

Blinklist

Speed: 7 – Fast, especially considering the type of interface
Features: 10 – The service which offers more features than anyone else, simply that. Ratings, quit bookmarks, video tutorials, AJAX where needed, tabs, starred links, message board etc. etc.
Simplicity: 7 – Considering the amount of features it offers, it’s simple enough to use. Impressive Help section.
Interface/Design: 9 – I really like its interface, the scary amount of AJAX code it uses et al. Not a 10 because the five icons at the top (Gnome-like?) don’t go well with the rest of the design, only that.
Userbase: 7 – Not too popular, and new to the scene
Overall Rating: 8

Overview
This should technically be the winner. These guys truly did their best trying to build perhaps the most “Web 2.0 compliant” social bookmarking service ever. The downside of it is just the huge amount of AJAX involved in all this, but if you’re fine with that, Blinklist is truly amazing. It uses a digg-like approach to blink the urls which appear on the site instantly: an AJAX div fades in allowing you to fill in the bookmark’s details and then it fades away incrementing the blink count and adding it to your collection. The private area has a quadri-tabbed sidebar with: 1) real-time chat, 2) popular tags view, 3) recent tags used, 4) cloud view. It supports site thumbnails but not saved copies unfortunately, advanced profiles, avatars, ratings…
Advanced, “cool” and (perhaps too much) on the edge. In Italian we have a word for things like this, but I won’t mention it here. Just think about Fast and Furious, the feeling when browsing this site can be similar to driving an heavily modded car: if you like the way it works, it’s the best thing ever – if not, well, del.icio.us does the job alright.

Suitable for: Web 2.0 lovers, geeks, anyone brave enough to try it without getting too shocked

Smarking

Speed: 7 – Nothing superfluous in the interface, but it could be faster
Features: 8 – Proper messaging, advanced profiles, STATS!
Simplicity: 7 – Easy to learn and use, has a FAQ and a wiki
Interface/Design: 7 – Very traditional but functional interface. Not too fancy or advanced, but does the job
Userbase: 4 – About 300 users
Overall Rating: 6.8

Overview
Don’t expect anything too fancy from Smarking, but a few features caught my attention. For one, it supports a proper messaging system: other services allow you to send notes and a link to other users, while this one has a proper, built-in private messaging system… OK, not a big thing but nice to have. The design is not too great: it does the job but there’s hardly any image, nevermind AJAX effects or similar.
What really impressed me (hence the 8 in features), are the detailed stats that this service makes available publicly: detailed domain stats, tag stats, user stats and more while others simply don’t bother.
It was developed using Python and PostgreSQL by an Italian student of Computer Science – apparently there’s someone who is able to program properly in my country as well. Good job: nothing too exceptional as social bookmarking service, but an exemplary work.

Suitable for: Italians in particular and everybody else as well.

Shadows

Speed: 5 – I don’t know if it’s because of Rails or the interface, but this site doesn’s seem to perform as well as the others
Features: 7 – enhanced commenting, saved copies, thumbnails, groups
Simplicity: 6 – The usual FAQs are there, but other than that there’s no particular effort to make newbie’s life easier
Interface/Design: 5 – Simple but not quite pretty interface, no graphic effor whatsoever, AJAX for adding and editing comments
Userbase: 6 – Not a tiny userbase but not huge either
Overall Rating: 6

Overview
Maybe it’s just me, but I wasn’t too impressed by Shadows: it doesn’t offer any particular innovative feature other than enhanced commenting. You can start real discussions about your bookmarks and interact with other users fairly well, but the question is: do you really want to? Perhaps an interesting way to build communities, but other than that nothing special.
The interface is not too pretty, unlike Ma.gnolia it looks like they didn’t make a terrible effort trying to design something pleasant to look at and the final result is quite boring. They seem to support thumbnails, but clearly they use a third party service like Alexa because there’s hardly any thumbnail displayed, generally: wrong choice – see Blogmarks below for a better thumbnail support.
And yes, the default green smily default avatar is terribly cheesy and truly annoying (not that the others are any better…).

Suitable for: Anybody? Nobody? Maybe people who like a more community-like approach

Simpy

Speed: 7 – It’s fast, but again, its interface is not anything fancy
Features: 7 – Detects broken links and redirections, notes, groups
Simplicity: 6 – It has FAQs but it could look confusing for inexperienced users
Interface/Design: 6 – Nothing special, no eye candy, no AJAX even where it would be appreciated
Userbase: 7 – Medium-sized userbase
Overall Rating: 6.6

Overview
The best feature offered by Simpy is the link detection service, able to detect broken links, duplicates and redirections. Everything else looks pretty normal and nothing special: it offers tag management, groups, notes, the usual tools. Copies of your bookmarks are NOT cached, and clicking on the cached link will take you to web.archive.org, hoping that it cached the page you’re looking for (hell even I could do that!).
No AJAX, nothing too pretty. Boring? Well, no, let’s call it functional and essential.

Suitable for: Anybody, moderate experience required

Blogmarks

Speed: 5 – It’s slow. One of the main reasons ought to be the thumbnails: every bookmark has an associated image!
Features: 7 – Excellent thumbnail support, Private tags, usual things
Simplicity: 6 – It’s pretty straightforward, but there’s only one page to help new users
Interface/Design: 7 – Simple and essential, no AJAX, not too fancy
Userbase: 7 – One year old, medium userbase
Overall Rating: 6.4

Overview
Again, nothing too special – except, of course, that all bookmarks have a thumbnail: a good thing which made me feel popular for about 0.7 seconds when I noticed a little picture showing my own site when someone bookmarked it, but on the other hand quite annoying and pointless for dialup users.
No Web 2.0 interface, just plain old stuff which does the job but is not particularly pleasant or innovative. Private tags? A good thing maybe, and probably the only real innovation compared to other similar services.

Suitable for: Anybody, moderate experience required

Conclusions

Although del.icio.us is still the leading service for social bookmarking, its competitors are obviously getting better. Among the ones I reviewed today, at least some of them look promising: Blinklist is definitely the most advanced in terms of features offered and technology used, and I think I’ll try it out a bit more and see if it can be better than del.icio.us in the long run. Spurls is also tempting especially because it offers various interesting features without forcing you to abandon your del.icio.us account – and that was an excellent (and wise) feature Spurl developers chose to implement, without any doubt. Regarding my old favourite, Ma.gnolia, it still deserves a mention, mainly for being a succesful blend of latest technology and class design, without being too extreme.

So… what’s your favorite then?

Notes and Resources

¹ Social Bookmarking, Wikipedia Page

² del.icio.us, the first social bookmarking service

³ What is Web 2.0? – O’Reilly article

⁴ Mother of all social bookmarking services icons – A cool mosaic of all the social bookmarking sites’ icons.

⁵ Other reviews and comparisons of social bookmarking services:

Social bookmarking resources
Comparison charts of the most popular social bookmarking systems [PDF]
PCmag round-up of various social bookmarking sites
Social Bookmarking Tools (I) – A general review
ALL Social that CAN bookmark – The most comprehensive review of social bookmarking sites.

⁶ Ma.gnolia – Social bookmarking made (extremely) easy

⁷ Ma.gnolia – Social bookmarking service

⁸ Furl – Social bookmarking service

⁹ Spurl – Social bookmarking service

¹⁰ Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 – Social bookmarking service

¹¹ Blinklist – Social bookmarking service

¹² Smarking – Social bookmarking service

¹³ Shadows – Social bookmarking service

¹⁴ Simpy – Social bookmarking service

¹⁵ Blogmarks – Social bookmarking service

The Internet Philosopher

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 11 May 2006 05:00:41 -0600

Recently I got this rather short email from a guy named Daniel Lampinen:

Hi. Respect for being an internet addict – that’s good. I have moved to India just to afford and get time to be on the internet as much as possible:

http://www.ropix.org/english.html

Spam? Yeah, must be: I get this kind of stuff all the time, and this looked like another person asking for money. Or maybe not? After all this guy is not asking for anything in his mail, he’s just telling me something about myself and perhaps try to get me to visit his site¹. I did indeed – after all it was just one click away – mostly for curiosity.That website was one of the most plain ones I’ve ever come across, perhaps to help the visitor to understand that content is the only think that matters, not design. Daniel seems to be Swedish, and he immediately apologizes for his imperfect English: indeed there are some mistakes here and there, but I could understand enough about him, his way of living and his beliefs that I decided to write this article about him.

An Internet Philosopher

“I’m trying to live for my opinions and ideas”

This is Daniel’s “statement” which guides his entire life. He lives for his opinions and ideas, he lives to debate them with others, to talk to others about them, and eventually getting money for doing so: that would be his ideal way of living, and he partly realized it already.
It all started last year (2005), when he was a mailman in Stockholm: that was a boring job, probably like a million other jobs anywhere in the world. He didn’t want to do that, and – believe it or not – he didn’t want a business career either: he just wanted to spend time on the Internet, creating things. Not cool websites or successful e-businesses, just express his own opinions, thoughts and ideas and spread them online, he defines himself a philosopher, and yet I could not find anything better to define him: he literally lives for his thoughts.

A few months ago the Italian Telecom broadcasted one of the most peculiar adverts I’ve ever seen: they were portraying an hypothetical past, where Gandhi was appearing on TV, on the Internet, on mobile phones, on big screens in the streets pronouncing one of his famous speeches. The advert ends with a sentence like “Imagine what could have happened if he could have used our communication systems”, trying to promote Telecom’s services, and it has been criticized² many times for this.
I immediately thought about this advert while reading Daniel’s homepage. Obviously he’s far from being Gandhi, but at least he attempts to live in a simple and honest way and tries to communicate with as many people as possible. And he lives in India, he recently moved there from Sweden mainly because it’s much, MUCH cheaper than any country in Europe or in the rest of the Rich World.

From what I could read about him, his life is quite simple: he tries to spend as little money as possible and not in futile things. He lives in a cheap hotel in Puri, India, where he can access the Internet – that’s all that matters. Perhaps it may sound a bit freaky, but certainly not as freaky as going out getting trashed every night, buying drugs or waste money on trendy clothes – at least from someone’s point of view.

“Yeah, OK, it’s all good so far but how can he live like that? Has he got a job?”

Yes and no – not in a traditional way, at least. He sells stuff, his thoughts, ideas and writings to be more precise, and no, there are no set prices: he goes “[…] by this principle (the Annalakshmi³ principle): pay as much as you think my work is worth.⁴”.
It’s quite similar to charity and it’s an interesting idea, whose success highly depends on the conscience of the giver: the more honest his soul his, the more he’ll give.

Business Talk

Don’t call him a beggar. Daniel has his own way of seeing the economy of the Rich World and also his own views when it comes to money:

“This should be mentioned: give money to Unicef instead of to me. But give money to me instead of buying a expensive new couch.
[…] If I can inspire you to consume less, it may be worth some money. How would the world look like if everybody payed each other because they wanted to, not only because they legally had to? Pretty good, right? On some places in the world there’s today restaurants where you can pay as much as you thought that the food was worth. See this like a newspaper or a book that you can choose to pay for.

There’s plenty of different policies on what you should put your money on. On of the policies is to follow the market totally (except when it comes to classic charity). That one use to result in that you think it’s ok to buy a Gucci bag for $1000 but think it’s out of the question to give something to someone that “doesn’t wanna work for the money”.

[…] It can even be fun to get fooled by a souvenir salesman in a warm country – if you let go of some of the pride and the “millimeter justice”. Do that. You can still give as much or more to Unicef. I prefer a society where people put money on other people – both those struck by a catastrophe and rich people in your country – instead of buying un-necessary stuff.⁵"

Daniel accepts donations in many ways⁶, and it must be noted is that his supporters may even choose how he should use his money, you can tell him what to buy or not to buy, and he’ll respect your decision: someone told him not to buy drugs and he never did, while another asked him to buy good food, and maybe a beer at local restaurants, and he did exactly that⁷.
If you’re curious about what he buys, Daniel added a list of expenses⁸ to his site which diligently updates every time he spends money. Prices are in indian rupees (1$ is about 45 rupees!), and it looks like this:

10 Bread
9 Tip to roomservice
30 Internet ticket
10 Drinking water
40 Riksa taxi
10 Muffins
10 Bananas
25 Bread and chips
10 Tip to roomservice
36 Candy
15 Bread
20 Internet ticket
12 Tip to roomservice
20 Tip to roomservice
7268 Hotel room for 8-18 April (plus food+bewerages+internet+laundry)
15 Tip roomservice

In a nutshell, when it comes to money and buying things, Daniel lives by this simple rule:

“Work with unwanted things as little as possible, consume as little as possible, communicate as much as possible”

But is it really that simple? Could you live like him and still be happy? Certainly he has a big advantage: he lives in India, where everything costs much less than in Europe or the US. If you decide to try, he can help: he can give anybody suggestions on how to live cheaper and even keep you motivated to do so, and all he asks in exchange is what YOU think his suggestions are worth. All the payments for this service must be made through a Swedish company⁹, which is technically his employer.

He can also sell “ideas” in the same way: you start emailing him explaining your situation and your needs, and he’ll try his best to come up with a solution and his own opinions. You won’t believe it, but a Swedish company¹⁰ was really pleased to hear his opinions and thoughts about innovation and used his suggestions to improve their services.

An Internet Addict

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Daniel’s website is his journal. Not a proper blog, but just a single static webpage hosting all his daily thoughts: you can’t comment to them, but reading some passages may be interesting enough.
The best way to do so is trying to search for a particular word (in Firefox it’s pretty easy) and read what he wrote about that, I tried with “Internet” and here’s something I came across:

“Now I’m finally realizing my two year old plans to be in a poor country. The only thing I’m gonna do is thinking, and surfing on the internet, see how long my money will last, and try to get new money to my VISA card by doing work that can be done with a brain and internet, for example producing ideas and point of views to companies in rich countrys. What’s good for everybody, is that I don’t need many dollars/euros to survive.”

This was one of his early posts, and yes, that’s exactly what he started to do…

So, I’m living at the internet. Hotel room, beach, internet. That’s pretty monotonous. But all together better than better than s[**]t job. I’m gonna contact medias that cover the internet and offer to write things in behalf of a person that have filled his life with only internet.

Internet, internet, internet. I’m happily addicted to something that makes me smarter and finding the right people. The only thing you need is a cable. People are crowding at the internet cafes here at the tourist street by the beach, and it’s a nice atmosphere.

An happy internet addict. Although how good this addiction is can be debatable, Daniel seems to have found his perfect way of living, and the only thing he needs is an Internet connection and his brain.

“Yesterday I searched on Google for the swedish words for “I am an internet addict” and e-mailed the words “respect for being an internet addict – that is good” to the bloggers that had written the sentence “I am an internet addict” during the last year."

Yes, that’s exactly the message I got by email a few days ago. At first I must say I found it even a bit offensive: “I am not an Internet addict! You might be, but I’m not.” – He obviously didn’t mean to insult neither me nor any other blogger he mailed: for him, “being an internet addict” is probably one of the best things people – especially young people – can do.

Shocked? Yes, it’s understandable: we hear a lot about Internet addiction in these days, and I was reading in a recent study¹¹ which pointed out that:

“[…] When 54 percent of Internet addicts say they have a history of depression, 52 percent drug or alcohol abuse and 34 percent an anxiety disorder, it seems even clearer that cyberspace is just another place for unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors to manifest themselves.”

Is it though? Daniel Lampinen truly admints he’s an Internet addict, but he most definitely doesn’t have any history of drug or alcohol abuse:

“On [the] Give me money [page] there’s now a list of demands from the givers. The first demand come from the latest giver: no drugs. Which I’m fine with. As you can see on What I’m buying, I’ve only bought one joint (in Christiania in Copenhagen). And that was just a statement because I think others is gonna be free to do it. I never take anything to “get away from reality”, or to “have fun”. Not even beer, which I only take to relax. That’s how dull I am. The reality rules."

There you are.
So why did he choose to become an Internet addict? Well, most definitely because he was tired of the Rich World’s society: he had a boring job which he didn’t enjoy, and he simply realised that the Internet could – at least sometimes – be better than ordinary life. He openly admits he’s a weird human being, and he’s fine with that, but you can be sure of two things:

he’s totally, absolutely honest, in anything he does, and he’s not afraid to express his own opinions without adjusting them according to the people around him
he maintained his individuality at the cost of living in a poorer country

How many people in the Rich World can accomplish either of these things? Please raise your hands…

Notes

Very special thanks to Daniel Lampinen for allowing me to write about him and providing all the pictures for this article.

¹ Daniel Lampinen’s website, English version.

² Gandhi e Telecom Italia – Comments on the famous Italian advert. [Italian]

³ Annalakshmi – A non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the joy of Indian culinary, visual and performing arts to one and all.
Annalakshmi is an international chain of vegetarian restaurants that augments its dining experience by showcasing Indian arts and handicrafts as well as cultural dance and music performances. Inspired by the Hindu concept for Abundance, Annalakshmi operates on the basis of “Eat as you Want, Pay as you Wish” where the guest decides not just what to order but also how much to pay.

⁴ From Daniel Lampinen’s UI Ideas page.

⁵ From Daniel Lampinen’s Money page.

⁶ Daniel’s Money page lists all possible ways to dive him money, most notably:

Paypal
His IBAN bank account number (an international number):
SE1580000008201644439081
With this code: BIC. SWEDSESS
His free page.

⁷ It’s documented in the Gustav 100Kr page.

⁸ Daniel’s list of expenses.

⁹ F-Bolaget AB

¹⁰ Intip

¹¹ Is Internet addiction a real problem? – Arstecnica.com

Digg Effect - the day after

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 04 May 2006 19:59:00 -0600

…So it turns out that my last article appeared on Digg homepage.
This was quite a pleasant surprise: I didn’t expect that an article submitted to my own site could make it that far! I thought you’d need a relatively well-known website, mafia’s support, some divine intervention and a terrific amount of luck, but it seems that sometimes an interesting article about an interesting subject can be enough. I’ll probably write a more detailed report of what happened soon, in another article rather than a blog post, but for now I just wanted to post a short summary here.

Two days ago I decided to write a roundup of the six Rails-inspired PHP frameworks, CakePHP, Symfony, PHP on Trax, Code Igniter, Biscuit and Pipeline. The reason for this was that I couldn’t find anything comparing all of them and such comparison could have been useful for some new bakers_. OK, I confess, when I started writing the article I thought I’d submit it to Digg and see what happens: I saw that another roundup made it to the first page and people were quoting it everywhere on the net. It’s a nice article, but – in my humble opinion – not too exhaustive.
Then I read a comment by someone to the digg of the latest Cake release stating:

Yes, they are similar – both were inspired by Rails, but Cake has gone further to differentiate themselves. Here’s a decent (but not great) overview of some frameworks: http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/

At that point, I thought that another round up, perhaps more Cake-centric, was in order. The other reason was that in one of my recent blog posts I tried to compare CakePHP and Symfony, but obviously my emotions got in the way and in the end I noticed I was kinda attacking Symfony. That was a blog post though, and that’s half-allowed, but I felt that I should have written a slightly more objective article mentioning also all the other competitors.

Anyhow, right when I went to submit my article to Digg, it turns out that another guy wrote a similar round up, which made it to Digg’s homepage. That was an annoying cohincidence, but in the end things didn’t go too bad: his roundup was more generic, while mine was more specific and detailed.

After submitting my article the reaction wasn’t instantaneous… 5, 7, 10, 13 diggs in the first two hours. Then shortly I made it to 30 and when the 40th visitor dugg it my article was moved to the first page!
I immediately noticed it when I refreshed my stats page: a minute before my girlfriend was here telling me “oh look, over 400 visitors… not too bad”. Then I refreshed the page and it said 539, I refreshed again and said 600-something… eeep… Digg effect!

A special praise goes to my new hosting company, BlueHost: the server didn’t go down and it managed the extra traffic fine! A good test for CakePHP as well, since I built this site with it.

So here I am… over 5000 visitors read my article, about 600 people dugg it, nearly 40 people commented it on digg.com and 20 directly on my site. And – except for the usual Rails-is-better-than-anything-else comments – they were generally positive. Over 250 people bookmarked on del.icio.us and many blogs mentioned it in many different countries.

Money? Didn’t make much with adsense at all: programmers don’t click on ads!
Bandwidth? About 1GB was gone in the first five hours, now is obviously slowing down: oh well, I still have another 398GB available till the end of the month :P

Ma.gnolia - Social bookmarking made (extremely) easy

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 05:53:33 -0700

Social Bookmarking[1] is not something new anymore; in fact, some people say they've seen too much of it already (imagine that!). One of the worst things - or best, depending on your point of view - of the whole Web 2.0[2] hype is that everything evolves at least ten times faster than it did in good ol' Web 1.0 (if you let me use the term): there are many, many more web pages created everyday by literally anyone, from web developers to total newcomers to the Web, to amateurs who just want to share their content because it's 'cool'.
However, this is not a rant. Web 2.0 is inevitably going to become more and more user friendly, and you can't do anything about it. Why? Because it pays. Who's most likely to click on the flashy banner on page X featuring product Y not knowing that by doing so company Z will get a penny: your grandmother who is just now learning how to use the Internet or your brother who's majoring in computer science?
However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I strongly believe that the Internet becomes a much more user-friendly place everyday, and, to put it bluntly, the web developers and companies who understand this will become popular and make money.

I remember when I first read about social bookmarking: people were screaming here and there that you had to share your bookmarks on the Net, and this 'delicious'[3] thing was getting more and more popular. Then it became 'delirious'[4], and it was better, because it also meant free...then the shadows[5] came...
I was never a big fan of the whole concept, I admit, but an old friend of mine from a community[6] turned up and asked me to try a new website he coded in Rails[7]: a new social bookmarking service, simple to use and free: ma.gnolia[8].
I immediately felt the impulse to reply (as this happened on IRC[9])"i.dont.give.a.sh.**". I really didn't want to try yet another social bookmarking thing, as I had had enough of it even before I started to grasp the whole concept properly. Hoever, since the guy is a friend of mine whom I respect a lot, especially for his skills and knowledge, I decided to give ma.gnolia a try, and here's what happened.

A website which smells good
One of the things any Web 2.0 business cannot afford to overlook is the design and user interface of their product. It does matter! If you want to please your customers, make something that looks good. This is not a new idea at all[10], and it has been shown to work in many situations.
The first impression I had about the ma.gnolia website was similar to the one I had when visiting CSSZenGarden[11] for the first time: code is poetry. I particularly like the latest trend in web design, which preaches simplicity, functionality, clean-looking pages, xHMTL+CSS instead of other assorted bloat, pastel colors, rounded corners, and so on, and there are no rounded corners in ma.gnolia.
The ma.gnolia website succeeds in making the visitor feel comfortable: it doesn't clutter the page with pointless images or weird widgets, but limits itself to only the essential items needed for usability - logo, banner, essential navigation (bookmarks, tags, people, groups, messages, profile, support and tools), content, a few well placed and unobtrusive images and icons, and a footer with the same usual boring-but-necessary links (copyright, about, terms of service, privacy policy, contact us), nothing more. What else do you need?
People might disagree, of course, and it's certainly not the answer for all tastes: there are some people who really can't stand 'plain' websites, and they think that the whole philosophy is pointless: De gustibus non est disputandum (There is no accounting for taste). We had the same concerns two thousand years ago and the Romans got it right. Even the Romans would have agreed that ma.gnolia is easy to use, too plain or not.

Quick features overview
The obvious first step before starting to use ma.gnolia is signing up for a (free) account. Right? Wrong. For non-committers, or casual, let's-try-it-and-see-what-happens users there's a (free) trial account. You can start using fully functional ma.gnolia right away, but unless you register, nothing you do will be permanent. This seems to be a new Web 2.0 trend as well; before, you needed to make everything free to get people's attention, now it must be free and not require registration. Makes perfect sense.

Adding bookmarks
Trial or not, you can start adding bookmarks right away through the form on the front page, which is simple enough. As long as you didn't discover bookmarks (or favorites for the browser-impaired) the day before yesterday, you probably already have your little collection of bookmarks meticulously catalogued in many different folders. Well, you can import them into ma.gnolia in a few very easy steps, and that, believe me, will save time. Some people may think I'm wasting my time stating the obvious here, but when I tried del.icio.us the import feature wasn't available, and this was enough to make me walk away.

'Casual user', 'non-web-savvy', 'non-geeks': ma.gnolia obviously targets these types of people. Everything on the site is well-documented and easy to use. Ma.gnolia's project manager said in a recent interview[13]:

[...] The rest of us muddle along for about 30 seconds, and if we still don't get it and aren't enjoying the experience, we leave, never to return. To avoid that fate -- to make the complex simple -- our lead IA Tanya Rabourn put in the hours and the iterations needed to make Ma.gnolia comprehensible to the non- expert.

This makes sense to me: Web 2.0 seems to be more user friendly, simply because a lot of non-geeks are browsing the web everyday and clicking on adverts.

Once you import all your bookmarks, you'll have an almost exact copy of your bookmarks collection, now available online! If you don't want to share them, because you believe in anti-social bookmarking or you just want to have a backup, you can import all your bookmarks as "private", and you can toggle the status by clicking or , whenever you like: the magic of Ajax[14] will do the rest.
You can also rate your bookmarks from one to five stars, but only yours: ma.gnolia is not a pointless competition to be the one who links the most and best websites.

What if I want to delete a bookmark? Quick hint:

Yes, you can tag as much as you like
No, there are no folders. Forget it. For me it started with Gmail[15] and it was shocking enough: there are no folders, but you can tag your messages. This can be disorienting for some, but once you have overcome the initial trauma, you will realize that tags can be better than folders in some cases. At any rate, Web 2.0 uses tags everywhere, so you'd better get used to it. A tag is basically a virtual label you can put on something - here, a bookmark - to make it belong to a defined group. Tags normally don't have a hierarchy like folders, and each item can have more than one tag. Simple.

Unfortunately, you can't directly tag (or rate) bookmarks that you add from the main page, but since you'll normally be using some sort of bookmarklet for Ma.gnolia, it doesn't really matter. Also, at the moment, once you create a tag you can't rename it, but this feature will be added soon.

Connecting people
If you tried some other social bookmarking services before and you really enjoy the philosophy behind it, you'll be pleased to know that Ma.gnolia is even more social than others. When you register an account you can optionally disclose your real name, age, and gender, add an avatar, a webpage and so on, and you can create your own profile, just like anywhere else on the Internet.
Furthermore, Ma.gnolia allows groups: you can create, join, and leave a group of bookmarkers who share the same interests as you. Why would you want to do this? The answer to that question is simple and self-evident: because what is enjoyed by one person will likely be enjoyed by other people who share the same interests. Once you are part of a group you can send a bookmark to that particular group (), or at least that's that ideal; if you just want to send a particular address to only one person you can do so (), provided that that person is already in your contact list, and to do so there's a specific button (not icon this time) in everyone's profile.
You'll notice a Messages link in the main navigation panel, and that's exactly where the bookmark (and only the bookmark) will go once you send it to your friend. At the moment you cannot send a traditional message to someone, unless you send it along with a bookmark. This might change in the future, depending on user feedback, as well as the addition of some place to actually have some sort of discussion and comments - or so I've been told.
I'd be happy to see more community-specific functionalities being implemented, but there are some inevitable risks if Ma.gnolia decides to take this road. I'll let them decide, but for now, Ma.gnolia is more social than other services, but less social than, say, a discussion board.

Pages, stats and search
Perhaps one of the coolest features Ma.gnolia offers is the possibility of saving pages online. When you bookmark a web page, Ma.gnolia attempts to save an exact copy of that page on its server, so that you can access that resource even if it is deleted at the source, like an improved personal version of the WayBack Machine!
Two things need to be said - and yes, they might be obvious for some people:
1) Pages which require some sort of authentication cannot be saved; and
2) Saved copies cannot be viewed by people other than yourself.

Another feature is the ability to access basic statistics regarding bookmarks and people: most viewed or most recent bookmarks, hot groups, hot tags, as well as featured linkers, i.e., people who Ma.gnolia chooses to be displayed in some pages. They are generally well-known members or institutions that use the service.
However, the search function disappointed me a little bit. There is a very entertaining story on their About page[17] on how Social Bookmarking is supposed to help people to find things on the Web, and the last part in particular is pretty informative:

[...]In Ma.gnolia, people can save website addresses (or the 'url') and "tag" them with that words they think people need to find them in a search. That way, when somebody else searches a term, the websites that show up are only the ones that are good enough for real people to want to find them.
With Ma.gnolia, that's really all the work you have to do. Organizing is a thing of the past, since tags do the organizing for you. Magnolia will even suggest when to give certain tags to bookmarks based on how you tag other bookmarks, to keep things consistent and up to date. And since it's a website, your Ma.gnolia bookmark collection can be reached by you and your friends from anywhere, any time.
If searching was the first day of the web, finding what you want must be the second. Ready to discover how Found is the New Search? Give Ma.gnolia a try, and see what we mean.

It seemed logical, so I tried it myself. I searched for "ajax framework", and nine of the ten results on the first page led to this document:

ASP.NET AJAX framework comparison [18]

This is undoubtedly an interesting document, but not what I was looking for, and I certainly didn't expect almost the entire first page to consist of the same document. I asked for an explanation of this apparently odd behaviour, and it appears that the developer is aware of this, and explained me why this must happen: if someone saved www.zzine.org as "zZine Magazine" and another person saved it as "Microsoft", someone searching for Microsoft - provided that we don't show duplicate links anymore, will find a link to zZine Magazine as one of the first results, and it would not be relevant. This is due to the fact that the system searches tags, titles, and descriptions even if the URL is the same, or known. Still, I'd try to limit the number of identical results, at least by grouping together entries which have the same URL and title, or something along these lines.

Tools to play with
There's a whole section of the site devoted to Support and Tools, to make the whole thing even more user friendly. Regarding the support part, even the greenest of visitors to a social bookmarking site will have no problems, as everything is explained in very simple terms, and full of examples and tutorials. This can be an annoying read if you already know how social bookmarking works and if you're used to similar services, so my advice is: geeks stay out of this section - it will save pointless rants.
The upside of this is that if I send someone who has never used something like this before, he'll like it and definitely start using it; if you try this with del.icio.us, you'll have one less non-geek friend.

Regarding the tools subsection, I already mentioned the excellent bookmark importer (which worked perfectly, but should probably warn in case a page cannot be imported due to a 404 error). Ma.gnolia also offers:

- a del.icio.us importer
- del.icio.us to ma.gnolia GreaseMonkey script - to keep your del.icio.us and ma.gnolia synchronized
- a link roll generator, to share your bookmarks on your blog or page
- a universal bookmark exporter

Additionally, and most importantly, various bookmarklets[19] which allow you to instantly add a bookmark to your ma.gnolia collection with a single click, just like adding an ordinary bookmark. Not new, but useful and essential.

Conclusions
Ma.gnolia is definitely the best social bookmarking solution currently available for non-web savvy users. If you don't like having to spend more than five minutes figuring out how social bookmarking works, Ma.gnolia will become your new home, and you'll get addicted to it. I don't consider myself a total geek, and I honestly started using Ma.gnolia because it's simple and does the job...

...or perhaps the website is just so easy to use and nice to navigate that makes it harder to browse away!

Notes
[1]Social Bookmarking, Wkipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
[2]Web 2.0, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
[3]del.icio.us Social bookmarking: http://del.icio.us
[4]de.lirio.us Social bookmarking: http://de.lirio.us
[5]Shadows Social Bookmarking: http://www.shadows.com
[6]CyberArmy Community: http://www.cyberarmy.net
[7]Ruby on Rails framework: http://www.rubyonrails.org
[8]Ma.gnolia Social Bookmarking: http://ma.gnolia.com
[9]Internet Relay Chat, wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat
[11]Windows XP Official Page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.mspx
[12]CSSZenGarden: http://www.csszengarden.com/
[13]Darren Barefoot's Blog, Sugar Ma.gnolia, Blossoms Blooming:
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2006/02/sugar-magnolia-blossoms-blooming.html
[14]Ajax, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
[15]Google Mail: http://mail.google.com/
[16]Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/
[17]Ma.gnolia - About: http://ma.gnolia.com/about
[18] Daniel Zeiss, "ASP.NET AJAX framework comparison": http://www.daniel-zeiss.de/AJAXComparison/Results.htm
[19]Ma.gnolia - Bookmarkles directory: http://ma.gnolia.com/support/bookmarklets

What is AJAX?

h3rald@h3rald.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:30:08 -0700

"The Web is changing. The 30-year-old terminal-like technology it was originally is gradually giving way to new ways of doing things. The power of AJAX allows for rich user interaction without the trouble that has bugged traditional web applications."This is the introduction to the script.aculo.us[1] website, and regardless your opinion about the so-called AJAX programming technique, they are fundamentally right: the web is changing. AJAX is at least one way to do things in a different way, enhancing - although arguably, in some cases - users' browsing experience.

Application examples
What is AJAX then? Nothing too new, but not too old either. I'd define AJAX as the rebirth of Javascript, for example, it's not only Javascript we're talking about. The acronym stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML and it already gives an idea of the fundamentals of the technology: something build on asynchronous server requests and responses . This may be clear to coders, but the best way to try explaining this to everyday internet users is showing some famous applications:

Gmail[2]: The first example? The most famous? The most used? Perhaps. Google aimed to impress both end users and geeks with it's free, long awaited email service. What's so unusual in this webmail application?

An innovative and intuitive interface, more similar to a desktop application than a traditional webpage.
Rich formatting through an effective, easy-to-use editor.
Online spell checker.
Instant

Email auto save.

Kiko[3]: This is a very neat online calendar, free to use and customizable. Features include:

Multiple user/contacts/events administration.
Personalization of the right click menu

Drag and drop events across the calendar.
Easily switch through different calendar views without any page refresh.
-

Writely[4]: An online word processor. Although it is not as advanced as its desktop's cousins, this is a truly admirable effort to port a desktop application to the web. The service is free for now and it allows users to create, edit, share and export text documents. Among its features there are:

High degree of document formatting - modify font size, style, colors, alignment, insert images and links etc.
Enhanced exporting options - it can create html documents, Word documents, zip files etc.
Online spell-checker.
Ability to easily share and publish your work.

This list can continue[5], as new "AJAX-powered" applications are created nearly every day.

AJAX provides the web developer the ability to create web applications that look and feel like applications that run on the desktop. It does this by solving the 'partial update' problem. AJAX makes it possible for a web application to request data from the server (usually in response to a button click or other java script 'event') and change a part of the current page to reflect the result of the query. Prior to AJAX, if the web developer wanted to retrieve any information from the server a full page update was required. This may mean a full page load when the user clicks a help icon, spell checks a document or performs a drag and drop operation that changes data on the server. AJAX solves this problem and opens the door for a host of AJAX-powered web applications
There were some unconventional solutions to this problem prior to AJAX. I have ignored them for the purpose of this article as they were hacky or relied on a feature in a particular browser

How does it work?
Ajax[7] is fundamentally the union of various technologies - not something new by itself:

The XMLHttpRequest

The Dom Object Model

XML and XSLT used for data interchange and manipulation

The magic is undoubtedly in the XMLHttpRequest object, originally invented by Microsoft as an ActiveX object and then made available as a standard Javascript class by Mozilla-based browsers. At least something which seems to be compatible with most browsers then.

A necessary step in any Javascript script using the XMLHttpRequest object would be something like:



if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ...

    http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();

} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE

    http_request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

}

In order to have an http_request object to use later on which is independent from the browser type.

Let's now examine an example of elementary Ajax application[10]. The following code is broken into different parts and commented, the uncommented source and a demo is available on degraeve.com[10].

For this simple example we need to create a simple server-side script which will be called by our Ajax application. The script can be in any language, this one is in Perl.



#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use CGI;



$query = new CGI;



$secretword = $query-param('w');

$remotehost = $query-remote_host();



print $query-header;

print "<p>The secret word is <b>$secretword</b> and your IP is <b>$remotehost</b>.

Basically it creates a new CGI object named $query, used to access the parameter which will be passed by our submission form, "w", and get the user's IP address.
The script will then print a the page header and a phrase containing the word entered in our form and the user's IP address.

And here's the simple Ajax application:



<html>

<head>

<title>Simple Ajax Example</title>



<script language="Javascript">

Comment: Just the first HTML tags of the page, and the beginning of the script



function xmlhttpPost(strURL) {

    var xmlHttpReq = false;

    var self = this;

    // Mozilla/Safari

    if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {

        self.xmlHttpReq = new XMLHttpRequest();

    }

    // IE

    else if (window.ActiveXObject) {

        self.xmlHttpReq = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

    }

Comment: First of all we create a function named xmlhttpPost, which takes the parameter strURL, i.e. the web address of the script we created earlier. In the first part of the function, we create the HTMLHttpRequest object independently of the browser, which in this case is called self.xmlHttpReq.



 

    self.xmlHttpReq.open('POST', strURL, true);



    self.xmlHttpReq.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');

Comment: with the method open we initialize the connection, specifying that we want to send a POST request to the page "strURL" and that the connection is asynchronous (true). The third parameter is actually true by default and could have been omitted in this case.
As we want to use the POST method, we need to set the content-type header for our request, in this case "application/x-www-form-urlencoded".



    self.xmlHttpReq.onreadystatechange = function() {

        if (self.xmlHttpReq.readyState == 4) {

            updatepage(self.xmlHttpReq.responseText);

        }

    }

    self.xmlHttpReq.send(getquerystring());

}

Comment: This is the crucial part, as we need to send the request and also define the behavior of our application once the response is received. The request is sent using the "send" method, which sends a properly formatted query string (see below), but before that we need to setup a "listener" to monitor what happens to our request.
The readyState variables is updated according to the status of the connection, and can assume the following values:

0 - Uninitialised

1 - Loading

2 - Loaded

3 - Interactive

4 - Completed

We want to update our page once we are sure that the connection with the script has been established, therefore we setup a listener (onreadystatechange) to update the page via the function update page defined below only if the connection's state is "Completed" (self.xmlHttpReq.readyState == 4). The self.xmlHttpReq.responseText variable which is sent to the update page function contains the response generated by our CGI script.



function getquerystring() {

    var form     = document.forms['f1'];

    var word = form.word.value;

    qstr = 'w=' + escape(word);  // NOTE: no '?' before querystring

    return qstr;

}

Comment: This function simply formats the parameter sent to the script as "w=typedword" where "typedword" is the word typed in the form of our application.



function updatepage(str){

    document.getElementById("result").innerHTML = str;

}

Comment: Finally, this function inserts the response we got from the CGI script into an HTML element with id=result, through the method innerHTML.



</script>

</head>



<form name="f1">

  <pword: <input name="word" type="text"  >

  <input value="Go" type="button" >onclick='JavaScript:xmlhttpPost("/cgi-bin/simple-ajax-example.cgi")'</p>

  <div id="result"></div>

</form>

</body>

</html>

Comment: This is the final part of the application, which defines our form containing a text field and a submit button. Note that our xmlhttpPost function is called once the button is clicked, through the on click attribute.

That's it.
The first reaction after reading so far would probably be "Ajax is not easy at all", well, I never said it was. To create a simple application which just prints something on the screen we had to go through a lot of code, and we could have done something similar with much less hassle. This was just a trivial example, very different from those large scale applications available online.

There's good news though, there are plenty of frameworks and toolkits which makes life easier for developers interested in using this programming technique. There are in particular various libraries built upon the Prototype[11] framework such as the already mentioned Script.aculo.us[1] and Rico[12] for examples, and various frameworks which integrate Ajax in some way in any server side language, like Ruby on Rails[13] or CakePHP[14], for example.

Conclusion
Undoubtedly Ajax can be used to create really powerful and innovative applications, but it shouldn't be abused or mis-used. There are a few things to keep in mind, when developing an Ajax application:

It requires Javascript to be enable on the client browser, and the developer obviously can't control that
The application may not compatible with all browsers, in particular older browsers will definitely not be able to access it.
It can be too much of a surprise for the user who never used an Ajax application before: it may experience delays in responses, some basic functionalities like the "Back" button might not work as expected etc.

There are actually many more things to consider [15] before even start planning to develop an application, and can basically be summarized as follows:

"Do not use Ajax in your web application unless you know what you're doing"

Luckily, there are a lot of articles and resources[16] out there, waiting for you.

Notes and Resources
[small]
[1] Script.aculo.us AJAX toolkit: http://www.script.aculo.us
[2] Gmail - Google's online webmail: http://mail.google.com/mail
[3] Kiko - Online calendar: http://www.kiko.com/
[4] Writely - Online word processor: http://www.writely.com/
[5] A venture forth Blog - Top 10 Ajax applications: http://www.aventureforth.com/?p=13
[6] HTTP - Webopedia entry: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HTTP.html
[7] AJAX - Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
[8] XMLHTTP Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHTTP

[9] Dom Object Model - Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model
[10] degraeve.com - Simple Ajax Example: http://www.degraeve.com/reference/simple-ajax-example.php
[11] Prototype Javascript Framework: http://prototype.conio.net/
[12] Rico open-source Javascript library: http://openrico.org/
[13] Ruby on Rails: http://www.rubyonrails.org
[14] CakePHP framework: http://www.cakephp.org
[15] Alex Bosworth's Weblog: Ajax Mistakes: http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html
[16] AjaxMatters.com: http://www.ajaxmatters.com/r/welcome
[/small]

CyberArmy Presents: Project WindStone

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 04:59:23 -0700

I think most of the people who currently use the Internet have tried Microsoft Hotmail[1] at least once. Many of you probably don't use it anymore because you found something better, but the point is that Hotmail has been around for a long time, and so has its authentication method, MSN Passport, which is a universal login system used not only for Hotmail but also for many other non-Microsoft websites and services.
If you don't like the idea of using Microsoft-owned technology as an authentication system, we have an alternative for you... Show me your Passport

"Create your sign-in credentials (e-mail and password) once, then use them everywhere on the Microsoft Passport Network. You can even set the site to remember your credentials for you!"

This is what the MSN Passport does, in a nutshell: it provides a universal login system so that members only need to remember their email address and one password in order to be authenticated on every site that uses the Passport technology. It has been adopted quite happily by some websites and portals[3], and particularly by merchant sites, who liked the idea of making life easier for their users. So far, so good.

Like nearly every Microsoft technology seems to at one point or another, the MSN Passport became an object of criticism and concern, as shown in a 2002 MIT document[4]. The main problem is this: among the data collected by Microsoft upon a user's registration is a significant amount of personal information (such as age, date of birth, and addresses) which is stored on the Microsoft servers. What if someone gains access to that information? Who guarantees that that information will not be used by third parties?

Aside from the privacy issues, some people are concerned about the system's internal security and by the fact that the system is entirely dependent on Microsoft servers to work:

"As more services and components depend on remote servers, functionality can grind to a halt if there is a failure on the centralized Passport system."[5]

People have concerns, but what has been done? Are there any alternatives? Well, yes and no. Apparently the Liberty Alliance Project[6] was created to offer a valid and perhaps more democratic alternative to the Microsoft Passport:

"The Liberty Alliance Project was formed in September 2001 to serve as the premier open standards organization for federated identity and identity-based services. The Alliance is delivering specifications and guidelines to enable a complete network identity infrastructure that will resolve many of the technology and business issues hindering the deployment of identity-based Web services."[7]

The project's founders (160 IT organizations, including Sun Microsystems and VeriSign) aim to create a distributed authentication system, as opposed to the centralized MSN Passport. This will undoubtedly solve some of the problems, but the system is still under development.

Introducing Project Windstone
CyberArmy[8] is obviously like neither Microsoft or Sun Microsystems; it's a community of volunteers whose aim is sharing their knowledge and making the Internet a better place. Volunteers don't get paid, but sometimes something gets done, and some projects are released to the general public. Among these is a system for (if you haven't guessed already)a system for universal user authentication, called Project Windstone[9].

Project Windstone was developed by SoundWave on behalf of Special Operations and Security[10] to provide a universal authentication system that is easy to use and deploy on websites and in applications. Furthermore, the Windstone protocol is language-independent and functions via HTTP POST transactions between clients and the Windstone server, so virtually any website coded in any language or any application able to communicate with a web server can implement it.

It seems great so far, but what can Windstone be used for? As previously said, it is a system to allow users to authenticate themselves with the same credentials on many different websites and share profiles and information between those websites at the same time. Furthermore, users can send each other private messages that can be retrieved on any website that implements Windstone, with the added benefit of all transactions taking place in a secure and private environment.

On second thought, Windstone features seem to lead to some perplexity, especially among users who are particularly concerned about their own privacy: apparently a single centralized server is involved, and users can share their profile and send messages with each other, so what warranties does Windstone offers as far as privacy/security goes? Here's something which should reassure most of us:

[list]

The information provided by users in their public profiles is entirely up to their discretion: in other words, it's up to the user if they want to list their credit card numbers on their profile or talk about their cat, as the Windstone server itself does not require any specific personal information in order to create a profile.

The username can be any valid email address submitted by the user.

User profiles are available only after authentication with the Windstone server, and only if the person requesting the profile already knows the email address used by another user for Windstone services. Currently, Windstone does not implement any form of listing of existing users among the standard commands.

The password chosen for user authentication is NEVER saved in any form; not within the client applications, not on the central server, and not in cookies.

Data sent from client to server and vice-versa is encrypted.

[/list]

Some more technical details
I am actually planning to implement the system on one of my sites, so I started reading the short but straightforward documentation[11] available on the Windstone site to learn more about how the system works, and it seems quite simple and able to do what it does in a logical way; the Windstone "standard" contains a bunch of commands[12] which are used by the clients (agents) and the server to request information exchange such as requests for initialization, possible server replies, and so on. Commands and data are sent using the following format (excerpt from the official documentation):

The format of this command string is as follows:

AAAA.*BBBBBBBBBB.*CCCC::DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD::EEEE::FFFFFFFFFF

A. This is the command. Commands tell us what kind of request or response is being made with the command string. It also lets us know how many elements of data to expect (see F).

B. This is the agent system identifier. Each website or IEP receives a unique alphanumeric ten (10) character identifier upon registration, which is used to identify this system within the network.

C. This is the protocol version number. Generally, the version number will not change much, if at all, but it must be present. The protocol version goes with all command strings to let other systems and the Windstone server know what version of the protocol you are using. If certain versions are incompatible with each other, or if there is an upgrade or change to the protocol you are using, the version number will be used to determine that.

D. This is the transaction identifier. Usually, this is not used, so the default information that should go here is six zeros ("000000"). The transaction identifier helps to link command strings into groups for processing and is most often used during the user login process.

E. This is the sequence number. The sequence number, in conjunction with the transaction identifier, is used to put grouped command strings into their logical order. The sequence numbers have no specified numbering sequence, default start value, or length limit: the only requirement is that a sequence number must be in order from lowest to highest. When not using a transaction identifier or sequence number, the default information that should go here is a simple "X" (note that when "X" is being used in a command string by itself, it should always be capitalized).

F. This is the data section. The data section is the heart of the command string. It is important to note that, at the minimum, all data sections need to be base-64 encoded prior to transmission - at no time should there be information in plain text format in the data section.

Obviously, command strings can be manipulated to access each section separately and the manipulation can be done with virtually any programming language used on the client side.

Normally, the client will send a command to the Windstone server to start the authentication process and then retrieve some information; the server will reply accordingly to the client's command strings with its own responses wrapped in command strings. Let's suppose a Windstone Agent is being used to perform the following actions:

- Initialize the system
- perform a login
- retrieve user profile from the Windstone server

In this simulation I will not use the actual command strings but just the codes for the various commands.

Agent: 0000 :: SETUP_INITIALIZE - The Windstone agent sends a request to the server to initialize the authentication process, supplying the software identifier, the software type ("PC-Based" or "Web-Based"), the command landing URL and the URL to redirect logins to.

Server: 0002 :: SETUP_COMPLETE - Everything looks good to the server, which replies with the following information: Unique agent identifier, primary authentication token, secondary authentication token, activation key, security code, shared encryption key (255 random characters, non-binary), registration completion date and time (epoch). These parameters will be used by the agent afterwards and are necessary to identify the agent on the Windstone server.

Agent: 1102 :: USER_LOGIN_REDIRECT - The agent requests to start the authentication process and sends the email address of the user to the server along with the URL where the user's password will be entered.

Server: 1105 :: USER_AUTH_SAVE - User credentials are checked by the Windstone server. Everything is fine, so the server sends this response to the agent. The response contains the authentication token which will be used to authenticate the user during the session, as well as the user's display name.

Agent: 1107 :: USER_INFO - The agent can now request the user's profile from the Windstone Server.

Server: 1108 :: USER_PROFILE - After checking the user's authentication token, the server can now send the following information to the agent: Email address, display name, user "About Me" text, last login date and time, account created date and time, online status.

This is just a simple example of how the Windstone protocol can be used; as mentioned earlier, there are various other commands[12] which can be used to perform various actions.

Development and deployment
The Windstone protocol is fully operational and can be implemented on any website or application able to communicate with a web server. The developer made a very basic PHP-based example of an Agent system available online[13]; it may not be a masterpiece of PHP coding (as the developer himself pointed out), but it can be useful in understanding how to develop a Windstone Agent System.

If you'd like to start developing your own Agent System or you just want to create a Windstone account, it can be done on the Windstone registration page[14]: you'll be asked to provide an email address, a display name and a profile (the last two can be modified afterwards). Then the system will prompt you for a password, and an email will be sent to the address you provided to confirm and activate your account. Once you have an account, you can login to any website or application implementing the Windstone protocol, such as the Windstone website itself[15].

Windstone is certainly not yet comparable to the MSN Passport technology - it's not used by a lot of important sites, and it's much simpler and offers fewer services, but it's undoubtedly an interesting approach to a free to use, secure and private system of universal user authentication.
Check it out![9]

Notes and Resources
[1] Microsoft Hotmail Service, http://www.hotmail.com
[2] MSN Passport Network: https://accountservices.passport.net/ppnetworkhome.srf?vv=320&lc=1033
[3] List of sites using MSN Passport, Passport@everything2: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=passport
[4] "Microsoft .NET Passport and Wallet: Approach with Caution!", http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v17/n04/170408.html
[5] "Microsoft Hailstorm and Passport", go-mono.com, http://www.go-mono.com/passport.html
[6] Liberty Alliance Project, Official Page, http://www.projectliberty.org/index.php
[7] Liberty Alliance Project, FAQs, http://www.projectliberty.org/about/faq.php
[8] CyberArmy, Official Page, http://www.cyberarmy.net/
[9] Project Windstone, Official Page, http://windstone.x-mirror.com/v2/
[10] Special Operations and Security, official website, http://sos.x-mirror.com/
[11] Windstone Communications Protocol, Development Whitepaper, http://windstone.x-mirror.com/v2/development.php
[12] Windstone Protocol Commands, http://windstone.x-mirror.com/v2/commands.php
[13] Example of PHP Agent System (ZIP file), http://windstone.x-mirror.com/v2/ws-testbed.zip
[14] Windstone Registration, http://windstone.x-mirror.com/v2/register.php
[15] Windstone Login Page, http://windstone.x-mirror.com/v2/login.php

Understanding Boolean Search

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 04:57:16 -0700

These days, it is necessary to use a search engines to find the information you want. When the World Wide Web was smaller, search engines weren't an essential websurfing tool, but once the Web started growing exponentially, and hosting literally billions of documents and files, even normal searches aren't enough to find important information, especially when it is not readily available. So, I'm going to show you a more powerful way to search.Learning how to search

Imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who has never used the Internet before. That's pretty rare nowadays, but it does happen. Take my dad, for example, who recently asked me something like "Where can I find a map of the Internet?". I explained that there wasn't any such thing because the Web is too dynamic to be mappable, and that's why we use search engines.

I introduced him to Google [1], and he has since started to use search engines regularly. He didn't have much luck on his first few tries, but eventually he learned how to search properly.

Searching the web is easy (just type in a word and hit enter), but finding stuff can be tricky, especially if you don't know enough about a subject to narrow your search down. Most people (including myself) tend to find what they're looking for only after multiple searches: we start with a general item, check the results, and restrict the next search based on what we learned from the previous one. While this is generally successful, every once in a while you will find yourself oging in circles.

Let's look at a sample situation: I want to learn Ruby on Rails [2] and I want a free host to try it out. So, I go on Google and type something like:

ruby on rails free hosting

I immediately find various blog entries referring to a project that aims to offer free hosting to try out the Ruby-based framework "Rails Playground". [3] It seems to be the perfect solution - they offer, completely free, enough space to try out Rails. It's a pity they recently decided to close new account registration, so now the whole thing is useless.

Variants of the search query mentioned above bring up stuff related to Rails Playground. The project became so well-known that almost every Rails-related blog mentioned it at some point as the only place offering free hosting supporting Rails. Since it is useless now, is there a way to prevent Google (or other search engines) from displaying Rails Playground related results? Yes!

You would need something like this:

rails free hosting -playground -railsplayground

In this new query I excluded the words "playground" and "railsplayground" using a minus sign before them so I would find other results that didn't refer to the project. In the end, I didn't actually find any other free hosting that supported rails, but I did find the following:

- a company which offers free rails hosting for testing purposes (until they officially launch their service)
- a guy who offered some space on his private server for testing rails (no longer available)

Although I didn't find anything equivalent to Rails Playground, I didn't waste time either going in circles or scrolling through tons of pages trying to find something else. Actually, most people know how to exclude (or include) words in Google searches but they rarely do it. Furthermorte, most people don't know that there are many more search functions available on almost all the popular search engines. These functions, like the minus sign, are called Boolean operators.

A few words about Boolean algebra:

Boolean searches get their name from George Bool[4], the inventor of Boolean algebra[5], which is a particular algebraic structure involving three fundamental operators: AND, OR and NOT. If you attended any math class or course you should be already familiar with it. If not, here is a short summary of some of the concepts I will discuss in upcoming sections.

Using Boolean searches (rather than Boolean algebra), the expressions A, B, C, etc. can be considered words, and "A <Boolean operator B" can be considered search queries.

- A AND B: pages must contain both words A and B.
- A OR B: pages must contain either the word A or the word B
- NOT A: pages must not contain the word A

Trivial. Now let's see some more examples:

- (A OR B) AND (NOT C): here I used brackets to create nesting, which causes expressions within brackets to be carried out before the rest, so the query means: "search for pages containing either A or B but which do not contain C".

- (A OR (C AND D)) AND (NOT (F OR G)): similar but more complex than the previous: "search for pages containing either A or both C and D. Additionally, only F or G can be present, or neither of them".

In some applications, like electrical circuits, NOR, NAND and XOR operators are also used to express Not OR, Not AND and eXclusive OR. As for search engines, only some of them support the XOR operator. A XOR B means that pages can contain either A but not B or B but not B.

Boolean search and Google

After reading this you might want to try typing Boolean expressions like "(food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds)" into a search engine, but that won't work. A Boolean expression typed "as is" rarely works on a search engine (it isn't supported because it's considered to be not user friendly enough). Google in particular adopted a more intuitive way[6] of performing Boolean searches.

For starters, you almost always perform a Boolean search when searching something on Google simply because they decided (like most major search engines have) to automatically include the AND operator unless OR is specified.

Searching the phrase "food for dogs" actually corresponds to "food AND for AND dogs" (using the proper Boolean expression). Presumably, this was done to prevent the search engine from delivering too many (and usually inconsistent) results. The other possibility (the default in MySQL's FULLTEXT boolean search[7]) would be to use the OR operator by default. Thus, searching for "food for dogs" might deliver results about food for cats, other pets, or even food in general.

To improve the precision of their searches, Google also implements automatic exclusion for common words (like "for" in the example below). However, on occasion, a common word needs to be included in a search. To be fair,usually you will find what you are looking for, even with common words excluded. Nevertheless, to force Google to include a word, just add a plus symbol before it, like "+for".

Similarly, a minus in front of a word (rails free hosting -playground -railsplayground) forces Google to exclude a word from the search query: in other words, the minus sign is Google's version of the Boolean NOT operator.
In order to transform the Boolean expression that I used at the start of this chapter - (food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds) - into a proper query accepted by Google, I have to write: "food for" "cats OR dogs" -birds. The OR operator must be specified, and anything in parentheses roughly corresponds to quotation marks because Google searches for the exact phrase enclosed in the quotation marks (also evaluating an OR operator, if present).

The biggest limitation of Google when it comes to Boolean searches is the lack of support for nested expressions. Something like (food AND (NOT for)) AND (cats OR dogs) AND (NOT birds) cannot be translated into something like "food -for" "cats OR dogs" -birds because Google will not evaluate the "-" operator if it is enclosed in quotation marks. Something more complex like:

((food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds)) OR ((stuff AND for) AND (goats OR horses) AND (NOT (cows OR bulls)))

cannot be translated into a Google-friendly query. Normal people probably won't ever do that complicated a search, but you never know...

All the other search engines, strategies and conclusions

There are various articles (see [8][9][10]) about how Boolean search has been implemented in various major search engines and AltaVista[11], AlltheWeb[12] and MSN Search[13] seem to support Boolean search features better than Google. All of them support the standard Boolean operators, as well as the "+" and "-" symbols, but apparently only MSN Search[13] seems to support full Boolean search queries with nesting: I actually managed to execute my previous complex example:

((food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds)) OR ((stuff AND for) AND (goats OR horses) AND (NOT (cows OR bulls)))

and I got some decent results. The only (understandable) exception is that I had to specify +for to have the word "for" included.

Although Boolean search is useful, it is not the only way to get relevant results as quickly as possible. Additional thinking is required to prepare a query properly. In everyday life, you won't really use heavily nested queries, simply because other methods are more effective. If you're interested in learning how to search I'd recommend a very informative article available at Waikato University[14].

I found out that a mix between making multiple search attempts and using basic Boolean queries (word exclusion in particular) can deliver pertinent results fairly readily. Suppose you've heard something regarding a person named Halley who contributes to an IT-related community and that someone mentioned the word "kernel" when talking about him, and you remember that it wasn't referring to Linux. You could come up with something like:

Halley kernel -Linux

Et voila': Halley's CyberArmy Profile[15] appears as the first search result in Google! If you typed just Halley you wouldn't have found the right one right away; you would probably get more information about the Halley's Comet or the astronomer Sir Edmund Halley. If you typed kernel Halley you'd have found something about Kernel Halley on zZine first and then on CyberArmy lower down in the search results.

Boolean search can be useful, but it must not be abused. Google's decision to implement only partial Boolean support without standard Boolean operation was probably the best choice to achieve both pertinent results and user-friendliness.

Notes and further resources
[1] Google Inc.: http://www.google.com/
[2] Ruby on Rails framework: http://www.rubyonrails.org/
[3] Ruby Playground: http://www.railsplayground.com/
[4] George Bool, Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole
[5] Boolean Algebra, Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra
[6] Google Help on Advanced Search: http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html
[7] MySQL FULLTEXT boolean search: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/fulltext-boolean.html
[8] Search engines that implement boolean search (outdated): http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/article.php/2155991
[9] Boolean Searching on the Internet: http://library.albany.edu/internet/boolean.html
[10] How to choose a search engine or directory: http://library.albany.edu/internet/choose.html#logic
[11] AltaVista Special Search Terms: http://www.altavista.com/help/search/syntax
[12] AlltheWeb Query Language: http://alltheweb.com/help/faqs/query_language#2
[13] MSN Search: http://search.msn.com/
[14] "The Assignment Process: Search Strategies": http://www.waikato.ac.nz/library/learning/g_strategies.shtml
[15] Halley's CyberArmy Profile: [/url]http://www.cyberarmy.net/~Halley/[/url]

Project Gutenberg: The What, When and Why

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 04:55:28 -0700

I always liked reading Shakespeare, and I always wanted to have a copy of every one of his plays, tragedies and sonnets on my bookshelf ready for consultation, but such things always seemed unrealistic because I had neither the space for them nor the time to find them all nor the money to spend on them when I did find them.
Now I can store the complete works of William Shakespeare directly on my mobile phone, and they take up as little as 1.4 MB compressed...
Origins

Even if you never heard the word ?e-book?[1] before, you can probably guess its meaning: electronic book, or a book in digital format. What you probably don't knoe is that people started copying books into digital format nearly as soon as computers were available to the public, and maybe even before: the first e-book was created in 1971.

That year, a student at the University of Illinois named Michael Hart was given the equivalent of $100,000,000 (or $100,000, or $1,000,000 - there is no official estimation) in computer time. Basically, since he was friends with some of the operators at the Materials Research Lab, he was given an operator account on the Xerox Sigma V mainframe, which later became one of the 15 nodes that developed into the global network that eventually became the Internet. At that time, having that much computer time at your disposal was indeed a great privilege, and Hart felt that he had to use that time for something useful that could in theory generate a profit - not an easy task when you consider that only a limited amount of people in the world had access to a computer, and that those computers weren?t even connected together.

Foreseeing an era where computers where interconnected and regular people had access to them, Michael Hart thought that virtually all texts and books could be made available in digital format, for free, to anyone who wanted to read them. Certainly, such a project seemed quite unrealistic and excessively time consuming at the time; nevertheless, he decided to start copying the first book himself, the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which he was carrying in his backpack.

Project Gutenberg[2] was born with that one single text, and it has grown through the years. Today, there are more than 16,000 e-books available to download and read.

What is Project Gutenberg?

By that name, Michael Hart probably wanted to define the project?s scope and vision: an idea as revolutionary for the diffusion of literature as the invention of moveable type printing[3] in the 1450s.

The mission of the project can be summarized as follows[4]:

[center] "To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
[/center]

In order to achieve this, Project Gutenberg is set up such that anyone can contribute to it, in many different ways. It is run completely by volunteers, hundreds of people around the world who share the same ideals and believe that literature should be freely available to everyone at virtually no cost.

The Internet serves this purpose magnificently: it is possible to download all of the over 16,000 free e-books from the Project Gutenberg website[5] in different formats and many different languages[6]!

However, having such a large amount of books available within a few clicks can make people forget about how time consuming the process of making one single e-book is: originally, after acquiring a paper copy of the book, Gutenberg?s volunteers had to transcribe it themselves, typing every word from the beginning to the end. Then the book had to be checked for mistakes before it was accepted into the Project.

Producing a single e-book can therefore take many people and many hours from beginning to end, and presumably this was one of the reasons why Project Gutenberg was criticized for being more of an utopian ideal than a tangible reality: every year since its creation people have doubted the project, accusing Hart of pursuing an impossible dream, and prophesying that fewer and fewer people would join the team and that there was no future for Project Gutenberg.

Oddly enough, they were all wrong: not only is the Project still active today, but the number of books released every year has grown consistently over time, from a few dozen in the early days to thousands per year now.

More and more people became involved, partially because they share the same ideals and partially because it has always been easy to get involved[7]: Project Gutenberg strives to remove all the institutional barriers which could potentially interfere with members? motivation; they try not to impose any restrictions, and they don't support perfectionism. It is believed[8] that there shouldn?t be any proper or standard way to release e-books, but instead many different ways, to appeal to many tastes: the Project doesn?t support any particular standard for releasing ebooks, although it normally takes the simplest path. Therefore, the majority of the books are available in Plain Vanilla ASCII, i.e., texts are written using only ASCII characters, and bold, italicized or underlined words are capitalized instead. While this format has the most limitations, it is also the most portable.

At this point, you might wonder why they don't just scan the original books, and make them available as image files or PDF files. While it would be much faster, it also has disadvantages, such as large file size and an inability to be displayed at particular resolutions; a scanned book probably wouldn't be readable on a PDA, mobile phone, or other equally small device.

Nonetheless, scanners do play an important part nowadays in the process of making an e-book: texts are no longer copied manually if a printed edition already exists. Instead, they are scanned with OCR[9] and then proofread twice before being accepted. The (un)official procedure recommends scanning at least one page a day, having it proofread once by someone in charge of doing so (a ?junior? proofread), and then again by a more experienced member. This has undoubtedly sped up the process.

Not All Books Are Equal (for now)

By looking at some of the titles available on Project Gutenberg, you?ll notice that most of them are classics or relatively old works: for example, you won?t find the latest Harry Potter[10] available for download.

Since all of the books at Project Gutenberg are free to download (more details of the license will be given later on), and therefore not subject to fees or copyrights, only books in the public domain[11] can generally be included in the Project.

Public domain includes all those works of art whose intellectual property cannot be legally claimed or exploited by any person, institution or legal entity, and therefore belong to all mankind. In the case of books, copyright can expire only if some particular conditions subsist:

The work was created and first published before January 1, 1923, or at least 95 years before January 1 of the current year, whichever is later.
The last surviving author died at least 70 years before January 1 of the current year.
Neither a

perpetual copyright

Now we can see why there are not very many new publications available in the project, and that?s really frustrating for Michael Hart and other volunteers:

"In the USA, no copyrights will expire from now to 2019!!! It is even much worse in many other countries, where they actually removed 20 years from the public domain. Books that had been legal to publish all of a sudden were not. Friends told me that in Italy, for example, all the great Italian operas that had entered the public domain are no longer there... Same goes for the United Kingdom. Germany increased their copyright term to more than 70 years back in the 1960's. It is a domino effect. Australia is the only country I know of that has officially stated they will not extend the copyright term by 20 years to more than 70."[12]

After all these considerations, we can take a closer look at Gutenberg?s license[13] which comes in two different versions: informative and normative (?legalese?, as they call it), the latter of which is the real document. Luckily, the non-legalese version is simple and complete enough: basically PG releases books which are either in the public domain or ? if copyrighted ? the author gave express permission to re-distribute them. The difference lies in the fact that if you remove PG?s trademark and license from a book which is in the public domain, you can re-distribute it freely on your own, but if the book is copyrighted and permission to distribute was given only to PG, you?ll have to contact the author to obtain permission.

Furthermore, anybody can use the PG trademark when distributing verbatim copies of a book, with no changes (re-formatting is allowed); if you want to charge money for the copies you distribute, you have to pay royalties to PG.

Satellite Sites and Similar Projects

Michael Hart was ? and still is ? an authentic pioneer in his field: he had the idea to create the largest free library on the Internet to ?Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy?. A lot of people thought he wouldn?t achieve anything, but his dedication and perseverance were simply so exemplary that more and more people got involved, a few satellite sites were created and similar projects were started in all over the world sharing the same goals.

Hart is obviously aware of the fact that there are also some sites selling e-books, but he explains that neither those sites nor any other free online library should be considered a competitor to Project Gutenberg: they all contribute to the diffusion of e-books.

One of the most important satellite site of PG is ?Distributed Proofreading?[14] which is now considered the main source of PG books: every month more than 100 books are proofread by hundreds of volunteers who can register on the site for free and then get added to the project. The key concept of this parallel organization is that a single book can be proofread by more than one person at the same time, and thereby speeding up a project which would be otherwise very difficult to coordinate.

Another site which helps the main project is HWG, the HTML Writers Guild[15]. It aims to convert PG?s plain text ebooks into more feature-rich HTML documents: by using a mark-up language it is possible to add footnotes and it can be analyzed easily by automatic tools.

Although Project Gutenberg releases well-known books in many languages, a few sites officially affiliated with the project were created to focus particularly on their regional literature and works. That?s the case for both Australia[16] and Germany[17], for example; they both focus on their own national heritage. Regarding the latter, they recently claimed their own copyright for their e-books, and thus a new foundation is in the process of being created: Project Gutenberg Europe[18] which aims, among other things, to address the myriad copyright issues and laws of the EU.

Last but not least, there?s an interesting discussion[19] about similarities and differences between Project Gutenberg and Wikisource[20] a Wikipedia[21]?s sister project aiming to create a free repository of texts which are either in the public domain or licensed under the GFDL[22].

Wikisource people obviously noticed that their project was quite similar to PG, but with an important difference: their texts were formatted and freely editable by any user who was able to spot a mistake or inaccuracy; PG doesn?t offer this. In this context, Project Gutenberg was sometimes blamed for allowing inaccurate material to be included in the project: this was due to the fact that even if PG uses Distributed Proofreading website to proofread e-books, this is often not comparable to a wiki system. However, in PG's defense, wiki articles, being much more open, are subject to much more vandalism, and therefore must be more closely watched. One can imagine a high school student changing Hamlet to read "To be or not to be, who gives a crap."

However, the members of Project Gutenberg have proposed a sort of mutual cooperation between PG and wikisource: wikisource should maintain a broader scope, focusing not only on literary works but also on quotations and other kind of texts, and at the same time provide some revised edition of some book to Project Gutenberg.

The Future of Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg demonstrated the ability to grow considerably during its over 30-year existence. During that same time, copyright laws were extended, and some new technologies tried to intimidate the Project, which seems to remain relatively unchanged. However, last year a long-awaited DVD containing all the Project's e-books was released, showing the world that PG can keep up with the progress of technology to a certain extent.

One aspect that makes PG a successful project even today is its ability to adapt: CD-ROMs and a DVD were released, OCR was almost immediately taken into consideration, and since last year, all e-books have been released in both plain text and HTML format: there are still no fixed standards or rigid guidelines, but common sense seems to prevail over chaos, and for now, the system works.

So far, Michael Hart showed the entire world that a single person can do a lot when pursuing a noble goal. Call him an idealist, call him a dreamer, but he surely created something able to gratify and motivate him and his fellow volunteers forever:

?I can't think of anything more rewarding to do as a career than Project Gutenberg. It is something that will reach more people than any other project in all of history. It is as powerful as The Bomb, but everyone can benefit from it.?[12]

Notes & Further Readings

[1] Ebook, Wikipedia page ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebook
[2] Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg
[3] Movable type, Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
[4] Project Gutenberg FAQ0 - http://www.gutenberg.org/about/faq0
[5] Project Gutenberg Official Website - http://www.gutenberg.org
[6] Project Gutenberg?s catalog - http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
[7] Project Gutenberg?s volunteering page - http://www.gutenberg.org/info/volunteer
[8] Project Gutenberg FAQ3 ? http://www.gutenberg.org/about/faq3
[9] Optical Character Recognition, Wikipedia Page ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
[10] ?Harry Potter and the half-blood prince?, Scholastic Inc. website - http://www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/prince/index.htm
[11] Public Domain, Wikipedia Page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain
[12] ?The Second Gutenberg Interview with Michael Hart?, Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb29.html
[13] Gutenberg Project license ? http://www.gutenberg.org/license
[14] Project Gutenberg?s Distributed Proofreading - http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php "> http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php
[15] HTML Writers Guild Project Gutenberg ? http://gutenberg.hwg.org/
[16] Project Gutenberg Australia ? http://gutenberg.net.au/
[17] Project Gutenberg Germany ? http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/
[18] Project Gutenberg Europe ? http://gutenberg.nl/
[19] Wikisource and Project Gutenberg, Wikisource page ? http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Wikisource_and_Project_Gutenberg
[20] Wikisource main page ? http://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page
[21] Wikipedia main page ? http://www.wikipedia.org/
[22] GNU Free Documentation License ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License "> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Zero-cost website promotion - Part I

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:08:27 -0700

Everybody from magazines to canned pasta sellers wants a website to promote their business, but you need to promote your site before you promote your products or services through it. In Part 1 of this article, I will explain some of the basics of promoting a website, and show you how to implement a cost-free strategy to get the search engine placement you need to promote your website.The Necessity of Website Promotion
As the World Wide Web kept growing over the years, people soon realised that keeping updated lists of all the available pages on the Net was an impossible and pointless job. It became necessary to develop a new way to easily find and access the massive amount of content on the Web, and that is when search engines became a reality.

Everyone should know the legend of the two lads from Stanford University who became multi-millionaires in a few years after developing and successfully marketing their easy-to-use, ultra-powerful search engine called Google.

After it became clear that the Web was going to be (quite literally) dominated by search engines, IT professionals started developing strategies to cause their site to appearon the first page of search results. These strategies and techniques soon became known as Search Engine Optimizations (SEO). Call it ?science?, ?magic? or simply a way to make money, SEO is a business, and so-called "SEO experts" often do get a lot of cash just to take care of your website.

Whether you like it or not, any website must be promoted in order to get visitors; some sort of marketing strategy is necessary if you want to stand out from the crowd, and even if you just want someone to find your page.

Now let's assume that you don't want to spend a penny marketing your site, but you still want to be known and noticed among either competitors or friends and get some visitors to your new, exceptional (for you) and extremely innovative (to your eyes) website. Is it possible to do this, or do you need to shell out some money to an SEO expert'

I think that a zero-cost marketing strategy does exist, and I tried to put one into practice myself. I achieved relatively good results without spending anything but time. Patience and dedication are the keys to success in a zero-cost method: if you don't have those two qualities, you either need to start working on them or find a job to make money to spend for a proper (but sometimes risky) marketing campaign.

1. Plan your website

Don't skip this part, because it's the most important step in the whole process: you have to come up with some clever ideas to make your site look unique and original!

2. Have a look around

?Well, if I were able to do that I wouldn't need to promote my site at all, and I wouldn't be reading this article?

This is true to some extent - coming up with an original idea nowadays is difficult if not impossible. Offering something different or presenting it in a different way can be done, as can offering the same thing but better (that's what Google did). Once again, you need patience, dedication, and the belief that it is worth it.

The best way to decide if it's worth creating a new website is to study your potential competitors, i.e. any other website that deals with the same stuff. Study the way these websites are created, list their weaknesses and strengths, and after comparing a few of them, start thinking about what you can do to create a better website.

Then, objectively evaluate your idea and decide if you have the ability to do it, what risks are involved, and how long it would take to create. After all this brainstorming, if you still want to spend time on your project, you can go on; if not, this is your last chance to stop and think about something completely different - it doesn't mean you?re a coward, it just means you are capable of understanding your limits, which is something many people have trouble doing these days.

4. Create an identity
Now it's time to think about a proper identity for your site, and this involves the following steps:

Define your objectives and purposes
Define the audience of your site
Think about a good name for your site
Create some graphics and a logo
Create slogans and descriptions

Of course, defining the objectives and purposes of your site is the most important thing on that entire list. Again, you have to be honest with yourself and not be afraid to admit your limitations: if you find you can't do something you?d like to, try to imagine your site without that particular feature, and if there?s still a hope of success, go ahead. If not, try looking at your ideas from a different point of view.

A different point of view could mean a different audience: if you see that there?s absolutely no chance of selling canned pasta to Italians,you might have better luck with the English. Audience is extremely important: it's a factor which influences both the content and the design of your site, as well as the features offered. Doing something the way you like it doesn't mean other people are going to like it, and for people to want to come to your site, they have to like it!

Now, think about a good name for your site: it must be easy to remember, be somehow related to what you do, and most importantly, the domain must be available. Check on that before you commit to a particular name, or you might be in for a shock. There are plenty of places on the Net that can tell you if a particular domain with a particular TLD is available[1].

Next, I think you should come up with a logo, though some people say it's premature to think about graphics at this stage. It's probably true, but I find that having a visual representation of your goal can often be a morale booster that will help you to keep going.

The last step is a slogan or a description. This is an important part of creating your site's identity. It should be honest, yet promising: it has to stick in the consumer's mind. How you do this is entirely up to you, and it can also be the most time-consuming step of the process - it will probably take you a few tries to come up with something you really like.

4. Features, Services and Architecture

Now it's time to do something less idealistic and slightly more practical: you should start listing the features and services your site will offer, and start thinking about how to present them. Don't plan on doing too many things or implementing unnecesssary features on your site - having a forum, a newsletter and a blog on CannedPasta.com could be a bit too much, whereas having a gallery and a Testimonials area could be a much better use of resources. In short, add features because they can be useful, not because it's trendy to offer them.

After you decide on your features, you have to think about the architecture of your site, or how people are going to find the services you offer on your site. Menus and navigation bars are a must, but keep them relatively uncluttered and easy to use: you must be able to grab the visitor?s attention and communicate what you do in the first 10 seconds; then, if the visitor remains on the site for another minute or two, he must be convinced by then that you are selling the best canned pasta he?s ever tried and cheaper than anyone else. This is accomplished mainly by putting links to relevant pages in at the right places: if a visitor can't find your content, he?ll never be persuaded to try your product!

Site Development

It's now time to start coding your site. Whether you do it yourself or have someone do it for you, the web developer should follow some important guidelines when coding the site. I will only touch on them very briefly.

Make it simple -don't do something unless you have to. The layout of your site must be decided according to the site?s purpose - that's why movie sites have a lot of graphics, Flash[3] and other eye-catching things, and why forums and news sites don't need that stuff at all. Show your products and describe them with the minimum amount of content; people who want to buy canned pasta normally don't want to know the history of it: they just want to see if it's worth buying it.

Cleaner is better -the code of your site should be clean,support web standards, and contain no errors. Although code validation[4] is not critical to acquire good placement in search engines, it can help to a certain extent.

For the sake of code clarity, I normally recommend not using deprecated tags or and its attributes. Avoiding using tags attributes altogether, if possible: CSS[5] was created for a reason, and that's for making your life easier. A discussion of CSS is beyond the scope of this article, but I have included a reference link[6] for you to learn more about it.

Fundamentals of an SEO Strategy

Always provide an ALT attribute for your image

Always provide a relevant TITLE attribute to your links
Always use properly formatted h1, h2, etc. tags for your titles.
The tag in the of every page should be different each time and either reflect the page?s content or provide a proper title for it. It should also be one of the first tags on the page.
Always remember to provide an icon for your site

Don't forget a valid robots.txt

Meta Tags
Although Google doesn't seem to care about them any more, you should always include some meta tags in every page, particularly for keywords and the site description. Ideally, these should vary according to the page's content, contain not more than 10-15 relevant keywords, and give a brief yet complete description of the page.

Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs
Even though all the major search engines can process dynamic URLs correctly, a URL like http://www.cannedpasta/products/spaghetti.php is much better than something like http://www.cannedpasta.com/index.php?a=show&cat=1256&id=234. The first one will not only be crawled by ANY search engine with no problems at all, but more importantly, users will remember it. If your site is dynamic (as are the majority of websites these days) and your pages are therefore automatically generated, you could try using mod_rewrite to transform complicated URLs into their simplified but more effective counterparts[10].

That's all for this part of the article. Next time I?ll discuss the final phases of your site?s zero-cost promotion campaign: website promotion, website maintenance, and what to do once you get things going.

Notes, related links, and further reading:

[1]You can do so here, for example: http://www.mydomain.com
[2]The domain is fictitious and used as an example
[3]Macromedia Flash: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/[/url]
[4]W3C validator: http://validator.w3.org/ "> http://validator.w3.org/
[5]CSS: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ "> http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
[6]Official CSS tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp "> http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
[7]Web crawler, Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler[/url]
[8]Favicon, Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon[/url]
[9]Robot.txt tutorial: http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm[/url]
[10]Apache mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html "> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

The Green Bar

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:03:54 -0700

Since 1998 SEO experts, webmasters, and even casual users spent ages trying to figure out the magic within that small green bar... but what's really behind Google's most famous invention?If you never experienced the sensation of looking at such a green bar before, then maybe you don't know what I'm referring to; I suggest downloading and installing the Google Toolbar[1]. This IE add-on (now available for the Firefox browser) was developed by Google years ago and still remains the most common way to view a website's PageRank through a simple bar with a variable length, according to a 10 point scale.

I quietly mentioned the infamous word PageRank earlier, but what is it?
Some people think the idea of the word might come from a pun involving one of Google's co-founders (Larry Page), while others simply think it was the most obvious choice for a system which was supposed to rank pages according to importance and popularity. Anyhow, the only certain thing is that two (insert appropriate adjective here) students of Stanford University wrote a paper, in 1998, called "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"[3], in which, they discussed some interesting ideas for developing a large scale search engine using a particular algorithm they invented, which was supposed to help delivering the most relevant results for any search query provided by a user of the service.

It is also certain that these two guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, eventually made an awful lot of money in the following years, developing and expanding an initially simple-looking website/web application with a funny name[4] and turning it into one of the biggest and most profitable businesses in the history of Computer Science. But let's now examine how PageRank works.

Deus ex machina
Google's co-founders kindly provided a short text summing up their innovative (and perhaps secret) technology[5]. In particular, one paragraph seems to offer a brief and simple explanation of how PageRank works:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important", weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

The first time I read this paragraph, I really experienced a feeling of admiration and ecstasy for these two enlightened minds who decided to bestow their priceless gift on the World Wide Web: a system which gives every page the due importance through a democratic system. Isn't it wonderful?

Of course there's (much) more to it than a short paragraph, and obviously this explanation wasn?t enough for those people (webmasters, SEO experts, kids creating their online family albums, etc.), who gradually became more and more interested in knowing further details about the system, hoping that it would have improved their placement in Google's search results.

Indeed, PageRank contributed to label some sites as important and gradually the number of ?PageRank 10? websites[6] began to rise, but generally remaining a prerogative of important names of the IT industry (Microsoft, Apple and obviously Google itself, for example). But how did such sites achieve that? How did the green toolbar grow so much for them and not as much for your grandma's personal webpage?

Soon enough, theories and speculations produced an approximation of the algorithm[7], which is generally thought to be an acceptable model to understand how the system works.

Take the following equation:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Where:

PR(A) - The PageRank value of a certain page
PR(Tn) - The PageRank value of all pages linking to A
C(Tn) - The number of links present on page Tn
d(... - "damp factor", thought to be 0.85

It now appears clear that the PageRank of page A depends on the number of pages linking to it. Furthermore, important factors taken into consideration are the quality of such pages (i.e. whether they have a high PageRank themselves or not) and the number of links present on each page, which causes the vote to be divided equally among them.

This is, in a nutshell, how PageRank is supposed to work. This is obviously a simple model, and there's actually a more mathematical/probabilistic approach[8] which goes beyond the scope of this article and requires some notions of probability theory.

Considerations and opinions
With this model in mind, it's now possible to understand how (in a very simplified way) Google works: each month Google spiders search the web, and follow links from a page to another, keeping track of the "votes". PageRank is then calculated for every page and updated. This process normally takes a lot of time and, as a matter of fact, PageRank seems to be updated only every 4 months nowadays: these trimester updates normally causes a page to increase its rank by one (or more if you're lucky) level on the bar, or in some cases, lower it in the same way.

By taking a closer look at the formula proposed above, you'll notice that the maximum value of PR(A) is by no means equal to 10, as it depends on how many pages link to A and how many outbound links there are on such pages. As a matter of fact, people started speculating on the nature of the scale used for PageRank: on the toolbar it ranges from 0 to 10, while in reality a PageRank 10 (take Microsoft.com for example) should correspond to some millions in practice.

The most accredited theory is that the PageRank displayed on the green bar is the result of a sort of correspondence between real values and such 0 to 10 scale. Also, people suggested that such scale is in fact a base 5 (or 6) logarithmic scale. This would explain for example why it takes much longer to acquire PageRank 7 from PageRank 6 than acquiring PageRank 3 from PageRank 2.
For the non-mathematical minds, a logarithmic scale is a succession of numbers NOT incremented by "1" or a fixed quantity, but by an always-growing exponential factor: taking a base-10 logarithmic scale, values of 1,2,3 would correspond respectively to 10^1, 10^2 and 10^3 (10, 100, 1000).

For a long time Google seemed to use PageRank as an important factor for getting first places in search results, and it's still partly true: if you search for the keyword "Italy" you're likely to find some high PR sites as first results.

This resulted in all the possible forms of speculations: webmasters started asking money for publishing links on high PR pages, and similarly SEO experts started adopting various infamous tactics to obtain a high PageRank for their customers: this includes, for example, link farms[9].

It's now clear that what is was believed to be a solution relying on the uniquely democratic nature of the web turned out to be a complete failure in that sense, because the very basis of the concept is wrong. Sad, but true, the WWW is by no means democratic at all.

Another complaint against PageRank was that new sites took ages to acquire respectable PageRank and therefore appear on the top of search results, no matter how wonderfully they were written. This is still partly true, as anyone can notice by searching Google, but the algorithm itself is continuously being tweaked both for stopping spammers and link farms, and also to favour those sites which provide relevant and appropriate content and are not up to some dodgy trick; I must admit that the situation is gradually getting better.

Case Study: ItalySimply.com and h3raLd.com
I'm now going to discuss my own personal experience with PageRank applied to my two websites, ItalySimply[10] and h3raLd Labs[11]. While the second one is not currently advertised or promoted, because at the moment I don't have enough time for other web developing projects, with the first one I tried to follow a SEO Strategy trying to acquire PageRank and good placement in search engines.
You can see the result yourself: ItalySimply acquired PageRank 5 and h3raLd PageRank 4: not bad at all considering they are both two relatively new websites, ItalySimply being officially born in August 2004 and h3raLd Labs actually had some serious content from April 2005 on.

For ItalySimply, I even experienced a period of PageRank 0 which lasted about 2 months: although according to Google all websites should have at least PR1, PR0 is used to penalize some unusual behaviour which in my case was a 302 - Temporarily Moved redirect which was necessary to redirect users to a subfolder of the server. Later on I learned how this can be interpreted as a dodgy redirection by search engines[12], and why I was penalized by Google for this with a PR0. After noticing the mistakes, I immediately started a strategic link campaign; obtaining links from some good sites (also with high PR) related to mine, and PageRank for ItalySimply began to grow, from 0 to 3, then 4, and just recently 5.

At the same time, I re-designed h3raLd.com and noticed that it acquired PR1, because it was already listed in Google and didn't get any vote from other sites. I then decided to put a link to h3raLd Labs on every page of ItalySimply, which are now ranging from PR5 to PR2.

The result was an immediate growth of h3raLd.com in terms of PR, which reached an acceptable 4 without any link swapped, banner displayed on behalf of other sites, or anything as such.

The difference between the two sites though is much bigger than 1 point on PR, in terms of placement in search results: ItalySimply has some relatively interesting content and various pages, and it ranks good enough on MSN and Yahoo, and even Google, to an extent; h3raLd.com has just 4 pages and doesn't seem to appear at all in search engines, unless you search for something like "h3raLd". Again, this is a proof that nowadays PR doesn't mean immediate placement on the top of search results.

Final Considerations
Although PR is by no means the unique factor to determine search engine placements, it's still certainly important as a co-factor. As I said, it's still extremely difficult for a new page with low PageRank to place before a high-ranked one. Surely, if I decided to put something more interesting on h3raLd.com I would get better results than buying a new domain and creating a new site: old sites with high PR are still naturally inclined to rank better than new ones. Got that? Now, all you need to do is buy a really stupid domain name and create some pages for it, then think about it like a bottle of whisky; let it age for a while making it get some respectable rank: when you have a clever idea you'll have your ready-made place to promote it!

In Google we trust!

Sources and related links:

[1] Google Toolbar, http://toolbar.google.com/
[2] Stanford University, http://www.stanford.edu/
[3] Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Science Department, Stanford University, http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
[4] Google, http://www.google.com/
[5] Google Technology, http://www.google.com/technology/
[6] List of PageRank 10 sites, http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pagerank-10-sites.htm
[7] Ian Rogers, "The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works", IPR Computing Ltd. http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/index.html
[8] Pagerank, Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagerank
[9] Link Farm, Wikipedia Page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
[10] ItalySimply - Italy Real Estate Services and Relocation Help, http://www.italysimply.com/
[11] h3raLd Labs - Freelance Web Development, http://www.h3rald.com/
[12] "The Rundown on 301 and 302 redirects", September 10th, 2004,
http://www.rankforsales.com/seo-articles/301-and-302-domain-name-redirects.html