Offmessage

I’m going to Hack Day London, which is rather exciting. Given the number of applicants it’s rather flattering to have made it in to the chosen 500. Not that I’m feeling smug or anything. Oh no.

Not just an ad blocking Firefox extension, but an ad blocking Firefox extension that replaces ads with art. Nice.

Fascinating (stats below summarise the report):

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or…
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

Mike Arrington today mentioned the new feature on LinkedIn, allowing you to see who’s been viewing your profile.

Sadly I can name everyone who’s looked at mine…

For reasons close to my heart (sleevenotez and my old company) I’ve been watching the Radio 1 homepage for a while today. They have an SMS widget on the homepage, which shows the most commonly texted in words… When Tristan launched it back in October it was comments on the music. Now it’s MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. What does this mean? That everyone wants to be Lilly Allen or the Arctic Monkeys, that’s what. Gah!

Anyone watching the shit storm today will not be surprised to see there’s already a t-shirt available… Sharing is caring.

I’ve been wondering for a while about tracking comments on blogs…. There’s a group of us who have been in electronic contact for years and years. It started out as a mailing list, but over the past few years moved through IRC to the current network of blogs.

What I’ve been feeling the lack of with this move to blogging rather than mailing lists is the conversation. If I comment on a blog I have to remember to watch that post to see the replies and possibly comment again. The minute I post more than one or two comments to one or two blogs I find it impossible to track the conversations that I’m involved in. This has meant, so far, that I’ve been pretty taciturn when it comes to commenting on other people’s blogs.

I was muttering about this today prior to a planning session with a customer (so much so that my mutterings made in to a User Story) and thought that a) I can’t be the only person with this problem, b) it’s a very web2.0 problem, and c) someone must have built something to solve it already.

And indeed they have… I’m currently trialing both coComment and co.mments.com. Apologies in advance for the possible outpourings to come…. It’s all in the name of research, obviously.

Also, my apologies to Mark for not getting it (at all) when he suggested that we built almost exactly this type of system back last summer. To be fair, we built Sleevenotez instead, so it wasn’t an /awful/ mistake, but still…

OK. Doug‘s just pointed me at another feature of the new MultiMap site… Check out the hybrid mode (move your mouse over the map). Now that is really rather nice.

It’s a real problem. A real real problem. With the rebellion of Flickr users after the change to Yahoo! IDs the move to migrate upcoming.org to its new home at upcoming.yahoo.com and Yahoo! IDs is being a bit more sensitively handled. Still, there will no doubt be a furore and accusations of selling out.

Seriously though, what did people think was going to happen? Yahoo! just buys these things and doesn’t integrate them into its infrastructure and systems? Don’t be daft. Happy then should be happy now.

It does mean I might actually have to get a Yahoo! id after all though.

I can’t be the only person that’s starting to get really pissed off with all these popups leaping up all over every page I visit, can I? At least give me the option to turn it off, please. It is the <marquee> tag of 2007. Snap must die.