Sifry’s Alerts

Below is the text of the Linux Journal cover story that Doc Searls and I wrote for the February issue.
Click on the MORE link to read the entire article.

Below is the text of the Linux Journal sidebar on Technorati that I wrote for the February issue.
Click on the MORE link to read the entire article.

Doc and Dave are at it again.  The dynamic duo, half of the Cluetrain Manifesto authorship, have put up a new site called World of Ends, and it is a must-read for anyone who wants a clue about what the Internet is all about.  In much the same way as they espoused in Cluetrain that markets are conversations, here the fundamental premise is that the Internet isn’t a thing, nor is it really a place, but it is an agreement – an agreement to pass information between networks that cooperate.  And from that flow the big 3 properties of the net, abbreviated as NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anyone can improve it.

Cool.  Technorati has broken the 100,000 blog barrier.  We are now actively tracking over 100,000 blogs, in near real-time, meaning that new blog entries show up in Technorati in under an hour after they are posted.



The Interesting Recent Blogs and Interesting Newcomers lists have proven fruitful as well – I found a few interesting new blogs today – one of them is a news service offered by the Mainichi Shimbun called "Wai Wai", which is a selection of wacky news from the Japanese press, translated by the Mainichi.  I always loved the Japanese weeklies, they add a whole new meaning to the term "tabloid", and they’re always full of interesting opinion on the underside of the Japanese culture.  Some interesting recent links:  "Moral decline sees increase in child abuse, mothers sleeping with sons", "Masturbation diddling with Married Life", and the ever-popular "Dominatrix whips up donations for refugees".  Great stuff.

I had a few minutes tonight to put up the auto-generated RSS feeds for three of Technorati‘s favorites:



Technorati Top 100: The blogging A-List, based on a linear ranking of the number of incoming links from other blogs.  I recently removed a bunch of sites that really aren’t weblogs themselves, like CNN, Google, and AltaVista, and blogging software sites like Blogger, Movable Type, Userland, and Blog*Spot.  Of course you can still see the Link Cosmoses for these sites, but I felt that they weren’t really blogs or they didn’t provide significant interesting information to bloggers.  I decided to leave in the blogging news sites, like Daypop, Popdex, Blogdex, and Technorati.  OK, so call me biased, but I felt that those sites, even though they are largely automated, provide a significant source of content to bloggers by aggregating blogs.  Hey, if you don’t like it, leave a comment and an argument for why some site should (or shouldn’t) be in the Top 100.



Interesting Recent Blogs: A list of blogs that people have been talking about for the last 48 hours.  The Blogging A-List is eligible to be on this list, but it is based on the ratio of new links to existing links, so you’ve got to do something to significantly increase your flow to get on this list.



Interesting Newcomers: A list that is similar to the Interesting Recent Blogs list above, but does not include the A-List bloggers, and has a lower threshold so that bloggers who haven’t been around for as long or who are "up-and-comers" can get more easily noticed.

I’m here at the very interesting Spectrum Policy Conference.  The discussions are very very interesting.  Unfortunately, for the first 90 minutes, I couldn’t really listen to the speakers (thank goodness they’re archiving the feeds) because I was setting up an emergency Sputnik Network using the beta Sputnik-powered Access Point I brought.  I admit, I sort of figured that there would be some problems with Stanford’s Cisco-based WiFi network, based on MAC address filtering.  Basically, to get a MAC address-based network to work well, you’ve got to have everyone at the conference pre-register their MAC address with the IT department.  Of course, this doesn’t scale.  Some people will miss the preregistration email, some won’t bring the WiFi card they registered, some will make errors in their reporting, perhaps even the IT staff will finger-slip a few of the addresses on the list (after all it is a gobbeldygook of 17 pseudorandom characters) or some people will register at the door, and thus won’t be able to get access to the network.



Anyway, because of this, I pulled out my handy-dandy Sputnik-powered AP, grabbed a hub from one of the organizers, and within minutes had a custom captive portal set up for the conference.  A bunch of people are using the network or have written about it: Dan Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, David Isenberg, Dave Winer, and others. 



Now that the network is working and handling the load, I can get back to sitting back and grokking the conference. More to come.