Montecito Tea Fire links - Nov '08

I grew up in Montecito and my parents still live there. Their home is safely outside the optional evacuation point, though the fire is burning only 2 miles from their home.

I found this post on Wildfire Today that has some news updates and links to Google maps.

Here is the closeup link with an updating fire map.



Technorati Tags:

TeaFire, Montecito Fire, Santa Barbara Fire,

Technorati VP of Engineering talks with ZDNet

At the tail end of October, I had a chance to speak with Sumi Das over at ZDNet to talk about Technorati as part of their CIO Sessions.

We spoke for longer than the interview play time, but they did a great job editing it to keep it relevant to the series.

It was pretty cool to be able to look back on what we have accomplished in the 4 years I have been with Technorati and to be able share a little insight with those who might be interested.

I haven't seen myself on video in a long time and it was a bit freaky how much my body language made me feel like I was watching my own brother.

It's a quick watch, so if you'd like to know a little about the evolution of Technorati, give it a try.

CIO Sessions: Technorati VP of engineering: Dorion Carroll

In this episode of CIO Sessions, Dorion Carroll, vice president of engineering for Technorati, talks to ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das about the challenges with scaling operations as the blogosphere continues to grow. He also discusses how they’re able to index millions of blog posts in near real time, surviving the economic downturn and what differentiates the company from its biggest competitor, Google.

Technorati Tags:

CIO Sessions,
Sumi Das,
Scalability

Wordle word cloud: United States Constitution

Wordle.net has a fun new style of word cloud. It's really easy. I just created one for the United States Constitution.

Technorati Tags:

Wordle, USConstitution, Constitution

Google Blogger hosts 2% of web's malware, says Sophos

Google has created the perfect storm for malware and other malicious content with Blogger as a free content system, AdSense for quick monetization, and their search engine to deliver it all rapidly to the entire web.

read more | digg story

First read on PC Pro

Technorati Tags:

Malware, Blogger

Synopsis of the OMMA Behavioral panel I just spoken on

This was a nice little surprise from Pingie when I got back from the OMMA panel on BT



OMMA Behavioral Panel: Out of the Black Box: BT’s Next Practices

From the agenda: The classic ‘black box’ of BT tags and tracks user content consumption across the Web to target them later with relevant messages. But, how can marketers realize similar targeting efficiencies outside of the typical online ad network, in RSS feeds, email, mobile and widgets? As your content and marketing becomes more portable and customizable by the user, what targeting techniques are available now and on the way? Moderator: Roman Bukary, Truviso. Speakers: Bill Flitter, Pheedo; Eddie Smith, SocialMedia Networks; Dorion Carroll, Technorati; Elgin Kim, Nokia Interactive; Dave Martin, Ignited Media.

Not really a transcription, but got the gist of most of what was being said.

Being at the conference and on such a great panel really got me thinking about the future of advertising and content. I'd really like to see how we navigate the issues between privacy and utility. Clearly, the more an ad network knows about you, the better they can target ads, but, the riskier it will be that someone crosses the privacy line. Right now, I think it is safer to target the behavior profile rather than the individual profile and, more importantly, to be able to filter by context and end user initiated engagement.

Technorati Tags:

BehavioralTargeting, OMMA

Peter Hirshberg interviews Lawrence Lessig about Revolution

At the Aspen Ideas Festival,

Peter Hirshberg interviewed Lawrence Lessig about how his ideas have expanded beyond copyright policy and into the realm of a much needed revolution.

The U.S. Congress is broken. Stanford Law Professor and cyber visionary Lessig has set out on a simple mission: fix it.

The 3 minute interview covers some of Lessig's thinking about revolution in governance. In this instance, he is using the word, revolution, as in the revolution of the hands of a clock. They return to where they started. He is suggesting we need to return to founding ideals rather than requiring a radical change. This, in fact, is really what the American Revolution was about, though it also resulted in a radical change.

The basic premise in Lessig's view is, if our representatives were free of the dependency on campaign fund raising, they would be able to spend more time on addressing the issues of their constituency.

Thanks to Sarah Kennon from FORA.tv for pointing this out to me. Worth a listen.

Technorati Tags:

PeterHirshberg
LawrenceLessig
AspenIdeas

The Iron Man cometh

/film has a video clip of Tony Stark testing his flight controls. Pretty sweet. Should be a summer of good flicks, but I'm pyched about this one. I've always been an Iron Man fan.

1426700227

Speed and stability can make a huge difference

Over at Perry Web (Technorati? OK, Maybe I Do Care.) they noticed some of the improvements we've made in performance and stability on Technorati.

We've put a lot of effort into our search infrastructure over the last 3 quarters and I am extremely proud of our Operations team. Not only is our back end performance under 1 second almost all the time, the team was able to achieve this with very little additional expense.

I'm very excited to see someone posting good news since I suspect there a lot of others who have noticed but not thought to blog about it.

Finally, the other obvious thing that makes a huge difference is great people. That's what we have and we are looking to grow our team. Check out the job listings.

Technorati Tags:

Technorati,
Performance,
Perry Web

Update:

Case in point, here's a snapshot of my blog page on Technorati that shows it took 49 seconds between me hitting the Publish Post button and the post being available in the Technorati index.

Great suggestions on fighting scrapers, reposters and sploggers

Miriam Schwab raises a very important issue about scrapers, reposters, and sploggers ripping off her content in WordPressGarage is being scraped! I want to stop them…now!.

The comments are very informative and I recommend reading through them all.

The basic problem is, you find your content being republished on some other site without your permission and want to stop them. Some of the suggestions are:

• Alyk starts with the soft approach suggesting that you email them and ask them nicely to stop. This might actually work now and then, but for the hard core sploggers, you'll never find an email address and emailing may just tell them to add a live email address to their email spam lists. Yikes!
  


• Jennifer suggests filing a TOS complaint with their hosting provider. She also suggests reading:
  
  http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/09/05/autodiscovery-and-rss-scraping/#more-623
  


• Jonathan Bailey suggests filing a DMCA with their hosting provider or file a complaint with their advertisers.
  
  Jonathan seems to have some solid background on this problem. You might just want to check out his blog, Plagiarism Today.
  


• Israel Jobs suggests:
  report them as spam to Google here:
  
  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en
  
  Harder: submit a dmca complaint to Google:
  
  http://www.google.com/dmca.html
  

Having fought spam for many years, the best way to deal with this is to go after their pocket book. Track down an AdSense ID, file a complaint with Google or their other advertisers. If they can't make money easily, they'll look for other prey.

Technorati Tags: Scrapers, Reposters, Sploggers, Blogging, Fighting Back

Must read post about blogger stats by Josh Bancroft

Josh Bancroft over at TinyScreenfuls puts together a great roundup of stats that matter to bloggers with Google Analytics screen shots and meaningful context. The comments are helpful too.

Highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: Stats,
Bloggers,
Blogging