Category: general comments

Jon Stewart is incredible I loved his statement earlier this week on the daily show “It’s like a pinata: Beat them hard enough with a stick and… sweet candy inside”.

Personal banking is an amazing example of an industry that is embracing the net for all it is worth. An in bank visit costs the bank about 100GBP, a telephone contact costs 10GBP and an online contact costs 0.01GBP.

The second interesting effect is switching costs. When you make the decision to join up with a bank the probability is that they will retain you as a customer for the rest of your life.

The one really obvious thing I haven’t seen is a bank really forming a kick arse facebook.com campaign. In the years when someone is first at university switching costs are much lower for their bank account. These students can switch, these students are using facebook tonnes and they are the most valuable demographic. Someone, somewhere get these banks to try it out.

So I sometimes don’t have the foggiest idea why some things happen on the net. I have the pleasure of having a top ten position for my randomdomainname.co.uk website for my graph showing skype users online (built using a little RSS webservice Skype open up to allow you to do this) for the keyword skype users online. Incredibly this is driving traffic to my site every day which is cool but surprising (esp. since I am only about 10th and the site is entitled Alex’s Tag Cloud Fun – del.icio.us & eBay). What was even more surprising is the screen dump below:

The blue ad at the top is someone paying for traffic to his site for essentially the same skype statistics that I have developed and placed on my site. This fella is definitely doing a great job (and luckily his graphs look exactly the same as mine) and is also making those graphs free but it totally blows me away that they want to pay for traffic, esp. with no adverts on their site. If anyone has any idea why you would want to pay for this traffic I’d love some suggestions.

Moving to the US was a big pain for me in one particular regard… the frequency and voltage of US electricity was not what my computer needed.

I then lived without my computer and in particular my hard drive for 8 months but earlier this week a colleague suggested that you can get an IDE to USB connector for your old harddrive. I searched for this on eBay and found the item I wanted.

It is up and running and quietly humming away on my desk… I now have my university music collection (2000 songs) and all my university photos again which has made me a very happy boy this evening! So if you move countries and find your computer isn’t working, don’t fear, you can always recover the harddrive content using a IDE to USB 2.0 external harddrive connection.

I am lucky in my current role to do a fair deal of travelling going away on work just shy of once a month at the moment. As I type I am on the 22nd floor of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Tallinn looking out over the port with a beautiful sunrise ahead of me.

This hotel offers free internet, provides a reasonable level of soap and toiletries and also delivers the three things that make my day in any hotel.

1. Tea, good english tea
2. An Iron and Ironing board
3. A power shower that practically acts as a masseuse

I don’t know how any other business travellers out there feel but give me those 3 things and I will forgive anything else.

This hotel is also forward thinking and offers free internet, which, in the city that programmes skype, must cut into their international telephone call revenues but at the same time delights me.

So I can heartily recommend the Radisson SAS hotel in Tallinn for a stay!

For those of you who don’t know tagging is a little bit of a phenomenon sweeping the web right now. The idea is that any content can be “tagged” with a series of words which will describe it and then you can reaccess that content through the words.

To my mind however tagging is a very old thing in terms of the web. Tagging is a way of attaching the most relevant keyword/keywords to a set of content. Effectively anchor text is just a form of “tagging” by webmasters and titles for webpages are just strings of tags the owners have put together.

Auction sites, classified sites and personal sites effectively receive thousands of tags a day. Self learning category structures could be created really powerfully from this stream of user generated tags. All this data is exposed to any API programmer and someone with the skills and interest could create a product search more powerful than any of the Kelkoo’s etc. out there right now with millions of small businesses and individuals automatically helping them with accuracy without even realizing it.

I suspect I may post more on this later since I am now planning to give it a go in a small category of listings on eBay.

I had a really interesting chat with one of my colleagues last night about keyword detection, keyword relevance algorithms and in general self learning computer systems for the web. These are growing more and more important in the web today.

The problem that is becoming evident at a low level is described in natural search circles as the rich get richer. Since links exist for ever older links may be less relevantly describing a site’s content than newer links and yet these links are still used heavily in determining keyword relevance for a page in Google.

In recommends services if I have browsed both good to great and built to last recently amazon will happily recommend the two together. What if a newer book has a stronger affinity with Good to Great and more people start visiting those two books in the same session… due to the massive weight that old affinity already has the more recent change could take months or years to appear.

A suggestion I have heard is to assign all data sets a relevance score and downweight that relevance logarithmically with time… I love that suggestion. Don’t be surprised if the internet back end needs another tweak within the next 2 yrs as the big sites begin to realize their clever technology isn’t quite as clever as it used to be and is getting a little bit too tied to past results and a little slow to pick up on present trends… interestingly close to a human being as they age really!

JSON is a really interesting new trend in webservices it stands for JavaScript Object Notation. For those of you who use AJAX you should know that the key call XMLHttpRequest will only work within the same domain and so you have to have an interface hosted on your server to call the XML output.

JSON is different since JSON returns a series of javascript arrays and elements in the same way as you would from a javascript include. This means a programmer doesn’t need to know the complicated XML Dom model processing in Javascript to do dynamic work but instead the programmer only needs to know how to handle variables.

JSON also gives bandwidth savings in the majority of cases since the JSON code sent contains fewer characters than XML.

So with this double upside a lot of companies are starting to offer JSON for example the excellent yahoo geocoding is now offering JSON. I feel however the strongest JSON offering is the eBay REST XSLT service which allows you to upload a stylesheet of your design to the eBay servers and have the response converted instantly into your favourite flavour using a stylesheet you design.

I am really excited to see how JSON expands and am throwing together a few tests myself.

The idea in publishing this blog is primarily to work on typepad widget development and see how I can make APIs interface effectively with Typepad blogs.

I intend to post code and suggestions and tips for what you can do with some of the more interesting APIs on the web today.

Thanks for visiting.