13 September 2011
[web] Go Look: In 60 Seconds On the Internet… ‘694,445 Search Queries’
9 September 2011
[google] How Google Dominates Us … a profile of Google from James Gleick… ‘…your search history reveals plenty-as Levy says, “your health problems, your commercial interests, your hobbies, and your dreams.” Your response to advertising reveals even more, and with its advertising programs Google began tracking the behavior of individual users from one Internet site to the next. They observe our every click (where they can) and they measure in milliseconds how long it takes us to decide. If they didn’t, their results wouldn’t be so uncannily effective. They have no rival in the depth and breadth of their data mining. They make statistical models for everything they know, connecting the small scales with the large, from queries and clicks to trends in fashion and season, climate and disease. It’s for your own good-that is Google’s cherished belief.’
30 August 2011
[wordpress] Take 5 Minutes to Make WordPress 10 Times More Secure … If you’re running WordPress you probably should take the time to read this.
20 August 2011
[web] TinEye Reverse Image Search … this is a useful way of searching for images – especially if you want to credit the creator of an image you’ve found on the web … ‘TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.’
19 August 2011
[web] Google’s Official List of Bad Words … ‘boob, boobs, booobs, boooobs, booooobs, booooooobs, breasts’
9 August 2011
[web] DO NOT POWER DOWN!! … close up of a label on the first ever web server. [via Unreliably Witnessed]
8 August 2011
29 July 2011
[web] Internet protocols: Removing the internet’s Relics … On the long slow death of FTP … ‘The internet never throws anything away. Instead, engineers twiddle, update, and overhaul. The e-mail system in use today has a strong resemblance to that of 1971, just as transferring files between two machines in 2011 is, at heart, a 40-year-old relic…’
20 July 2011
[web] Panopticlick … How unique, identifiable and trackable is your web browser? ‘…web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies. Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits.’ [via Lifehacker]
1 June 2011
[web] How The Drudge Report Got Popular and Stayed on Top … ‘A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking…’
31 March 2011
[web] Fifteen Sites That Forbid You To Link To Them … ‘Here, in 2011, are 15 sites I’ve not featured before, all of which try to prevent you linking to them (usually restricting the “right” to link to just the homepage or else requiring written consent). YOU’RE ALL IDIOTS. I have, of course, linked to them…’ [via David McCandless]
23 February 2011
[internet] 7 Chrome Annoyances and How to Fix Them … some useful tips for Google Chrome.
21 June 2009
13 February 2009
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know … ‘I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy…’ [via Metafilter]
6 January 2009
[funny] The Great British Sandwich … there are some odd layers in that there sandwich! …‘Help build the world’s tallest sandwich’ [via Mondo a-go-go]
2 December 2008
[twitter] Tony Benn is on Twitter … ‘I have been waiting for my website to be updated for a while. I feel this could be a decent stop gap. It is a little like a blog.’
10 September 2008
[google] Useful Lifehack: Use Multiple Google Accounts Simultaneously in Google Chrome … This tip is also useful if you have multiple accounts on other services such as Delicious or eBay… ‘When you open a window in incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N), your cookies from the standard session are no longer available and you can easily log in to a new Google account.’
7 August 2008
[twitter] Nigel’s BBC Schedule Twitterbots … ‘What’s On Now’ Twitter Pages for every BBC Channel / Network.
30 July 2008
[comics] R. Stevens Steers Diesel Sweeties Back to Its Roots … Wired interviews R. Stevens on Why Diesel Sweeties is Going Web Only Again … ‘I did my taxes. I realized that I made less money than the last year that I wasn’t syndicated. It’s a hard business and it takes years and years to build up a client list and get paid. I just kinda thought to myself that I spent years and years learning how to make money off the internet. Why should I continue to injure myself, when I could just do what I’m good at? Get creative again, get excited again, change my business model and learn new things, rather than be constantly struggling with deadlines.’
29 July 2008
[web] Using your Browser URL History to Estimate Gender … I’m not sure how accurate this is but it guessed right for me … ‘Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 12%. Likelihood of you being MALE is 88%’
23 April 2008
[politics] Twitter / DowningStreet … Gordon Brown – the British Prime Minister – has a Twitter Feed (it seems to be produced by Civil Servants in his office) …
10 April 2008
[web] And the Web Moved On … Steve Bowbrick on Ted Nelson and Xanadu … ‘For Nelson, the whole messy ecosystem of the actual existing net and the web and those thousands of apps and millions of blogs and billions of users is just a big, ignorant snub to the totalising glory of Xanadu (which still isn’t finished). So, really, the whole thing was too sad. Xanadu and Nelson are perfect and unworldly. The web is imperfect and worldly. Xanadu can never ship because that would compromise its perfection…’
25 January 2008
Why I can’t use Facebook anymore — or rather, why using Facebook is like getting every annoying round-robin email from the last 10 years again … ‘1 how evil are you invitation’ [via Reddit]
20 January 2008
[life] RulesofThumb.org — a user-contributed collection of Rules of Thumb … ‘To estimate the length of time a person has been dead, take a rectal temperature. If it is above room temperature, subtract from 98. The answer is the number of hours since death.’ [via Lifehacker]
15 January 2008
[web] Oblique_Chirps — twitter feed of Oblique Strategies … ‘Remove a restriction’
4 November 2007
[torrents] Completetorrent — use Google Custom Search to find torrents across large number of BitTorrent sites.
5 September 2007
[search] Chipwrapper — a search engine for UK newspapers (and BBC and Sky News). [via Pete Ashton]
2 September 2007
[wikipedia] Wikirage … ‘This site lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitor this social phenomenon.’ [via Daring Fireball]
22 August 2007
[web] Terraminds Micro Search — useful Twitter search for the web-stalker in all of us.
27 July 2007
[web] Blackle — try some energy saving Google searches … ‘In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine.’ [via Blackbeltjones]
19 July 2007
[web] Wikiclock … ‘This is the Wiki Clock — a clock that runs on Wiki technology! Please update this page with the correct current time (UTC).’
3 July 2007
[uÊopÇpısdn] dı1ÉŸ — .sʇɹnÉ¥ pÉÇÉ¥ ʎɯ .uÊop Çpısdn ʇxÇʇ dı1ÉŸ oʇ 1ooʇ qÇÊ :)
12 June 2007
[books] TwitterLit — neat idea – twittering the first lines of books … ‘Albert Einstein was born in 1879, in Ulm, Germany, with a head shaped like a lopsided medicine ball.’
11 June 2007
[interview] Stephen Fry on the Internet — great video interview with Stephen Fry – he comes over as really loving the internet.
8 May 2007
[web] YouTube: Everyone Knows Your Name … Just Remember – Think Before You Post.
9 April 2007
[london] Google thwarts al-Qaeda kamikaze strike on US embassy … ‘Quite what the Post Office boys down on Rathbone Place will make of Google’s fingering of their building as a decoy target is anyone’s guess…’
26 March 2007
1 March 2007
[censorship] The Great Firewall of China — test any website to see if it is censored by the China’s firewall. [via Metafilter]
16 February 2007
[web] Geek to Live: Create your master feed with Yahoo! Pipes — interesting idea for Yahoo! Pipes from Lifehacker … ‘As a prolific netizen, you generate lots of web-based feeds: your Flickr photos, your del.icio.us bookmarks, your weblog posts and your Lifehacker comments, to name a few. Instead of going here there and everywhere to see all the content you create on the web, combine it all into one master feed using with the newly-launched Yahoo! Pipes…’
4 February 2007
[web] Senduit — another one of those useful websites that allow you share large files for short periods of time. [via Lifehacker]
4 December 2006
[google] How Google handles hacked sites — interesting post from the head of anti-webspam at Google on why a website got de-listed from their index and how Google deals with the problem … ‘So talkorigins.org has these porn words and spammy links, and it’s all hidden via sneaky JavaScript. We have pretty good reason to believe that this site was hacked, but it’s still causing problems for regular users, so Google has to take action…’ [via Scobleizer]
29 November 2006
[myspace] Murder”‰on”‰MySpace — Wired documents another murder involving MySpace … ‘In many murders, victims and their killers are acquainted: wife shoots husband, crack dealer stabs customer, pimp strangles streetwalker. So you would expect some interaction among the friends and relatives of the perpetrator and the victim. In fact, typically there’s little. Even after intra-family crimes, relatives tend to choose sides and stay on them. “People distance themselves,” says Charles Figley, head of Florida State University’s Traumatology Institute. “The ties that bind people – births, marriages – split apart because of a catastrophe.” On social network sites, those sides interact. Victims’ buddies can howl at killers’ cousins, and the cousins can scream back. “All the old social relationship models and theories don’t apply anymore,” Figley adds. “We’re rewriting textbooks here.”‘
6 November 2006
[net] The Guardian’s Web 2.0 Feature — an article and interviews covering Web 2.0 (the interviews are with people like Matt Mullenweg, Evan Williams and Joshua Schachter) … ‘Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have “friends”, which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them. This is our first glimpse of what people who grow up with the net will want from the net.’
3 October 2006
[search] i feel better after i type to you — a book reporting the 254 page search history of one AOL user in May 2006 … ‘The text in this book is pseudo-anonymous autobiography stored as proprietary corporate data which was de facto released into the public domain.’ [via As Above]
15 September 2006
[vids] Viral Video Chart … ‘The world’s most talked about videos…currently tracking YouTube, MySpace and Google Video’ [via Waxy’s Links]
3 September 2006
[storage] Box.net/Lite — useful website for storing files up to 10MB for downloading or displaying on your site.
3 August 2006
[wtf] The Daily Mail uses Del.icio.us … ‘Square-shaped watermelons created for easy storage are to hit stores in the UK.’ [via qwghlm.co.uk]
25 May 2006
[internet] Rumors Rife on Internet Mergers … ‘Speculation is rife on Wall Street that a big internet deal or alliance is in the works, with Google, Yahoo, eBay or Microsoft as possible partners — and a Yahoo-eBay partnership seen as most likely…’
18 May 2006
[radio] BBC Radio Streams … nice, simple lists of the BBC’s Radio output for the last week-or-so.
9 May 2006
[ebay] A beginner’s guide to eBay: Confessions from an eBay store worker — many useful tips (especially if you’ve just starting eBaying). ‘…always remember these key facts: Items closing on Sunday do better, and items closing in the evening do better. Be sure to close your auction at a time when people get home from work, or are done eating dinner.’ [via Lifehacker]