Category: Projects

Hope you’ve had a good holiday. I’ve been enjoying my family, pretending to watch football and more or less catching my breath after a busy year. As I was thinking about the past year, I wondered which of the articles on my blog were the most popular. So here are the Top 10 articles from 2005:

1. 275 Hours of MP3s tops the list, along with Part Deux and The Rest of the list. These three posts cataloged my MP3 collection, and generated a lot of traffic (not surprisingly) via Google search.
2. Google Takes Over Earth — an article about Google Earth — grabbed the number two slot. I love maps and can easily spend hours playing with this fabulous tool.
3. Converting a Sony DV Camera to a Webcam was also popular. DV cameras have become common, and the image quality is much better than any webcam. This article outlined my tests using a Sony DV camera as a webcam. And yes, it works great!
4. Windows Live Messenger Beta Debuts is still a hot topic, bringing in over 170 comments since December 14th. It seems like everyone and their brother wants to get their hands on an invitation to beta test WLM.
5. Flickr Screensaver described a neat little screensaver program that works great if you’re always online.
6. Sony DV and Webcam DV Revisited takes a second look at the Webcam DV software that enabled me to use my Sony DV camera hooked to my computer through a Firewire connection.
7. Collaborative Art describes an interesting project I participated in with the Squared Circle group on Flickr. I’ve got posters of the results waiting to be framed.
8. Friday Random Ten- The Day the Music Died Edition was a simple meme. Fire up your media player. Set it to “random play.” List the first 10 songs that show up.
9. Do you know the way to San Jose surprised me when it showed up in the top 10. This was a post from way back in 2003!
10. Open Your Mind was another blast from the past. This entry from 2004 warns against dogma.

Looking over these posts you catch a glimpse at what matters to me. Stuff that catches my attention. Tools that are worth sharing. I hope you’ll follow along in 2006, sharing your views and ideas as well.

Google has long driven the bulk of visitors to my flagship website, BigBlueBall.com. Recently, one of my moderators noticed BigBlueBall falling in rank on Google search results. Nothing alarming, but curious nonetheless. I did some digging around and found some interesting information.

First, I did a little keyword analysis and found BigBlueBall had dropped out of site on some strings, like msn messenger, where we come up as the 318th listing. Might as well not even be listed at that point.

Next I ran across a great post by skyhawk133 on The Admin Zone describing suspected penalties by Google for what is perceived as duplcate content. Supposedly, if Googlebot finds two pages with identical content on the same domain, both pages get dropped from the index. This makes sense if you want to discourage search engine tweakers from gaming the system to get higher ranking for their site. Unfortunately, skyhawk133 had inadvertently created an environment where two different URLs could lead to the same content. The culprit? Mod_rewrite.

Mod_rewrite is an Apache module that let’s you reformat an otherwise confusing URL, turning it into something mere mortals can comprehend. I used this for the forums at BigBlueBall with two goals in mind. I wanted to create user-friendly URLs that provided rich information about the link, and keyword-rich URLs that would improve the rank of those discussions in search results.

Here’s an example of how this works in practice. Every discussion in the forum is assinged an ID number, and normally the URL retrieives the discussion you want by passing that ID in the querystring, like this:

http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31754

This is functional, but it doesn’t provide any keywords nor any clue to the visitor who sees the link as to the nature of the topic. So I used mod_rewrite to create an alternate version that looks like this:

http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/t31754-pc-world-recommends-bigblueball.html

Granted, it’s not the prettiest URL you’ve seen, but it does provide both keywords and increased usability. I can look at the URL and get a pretty good idea what to expect when I click it.

The problem is that if both links are visible somewhere on the website, the Googlebot spider will find them and consider the two URLs duplicate links. I did some checking, running queries on the big three search engines to see how many pages they’ve each indexed at BigBlueBall.com. Interesting results:

• Google: ~77,000 pages
• Yahoo!: ~192,000 pages
• MSN: 977 pages

As you can see, Yahoo is good to us, Google not quite so. The real surprise was MSN Search, where we really lag behind.

The solution? I’m not 100% certain, but I’m testing some exclusion directives in the robots.txt file. This file, if it exists in your web root, tells well-behaved spiders like Googlebot what it may and may not index. By excluding URLs containing “showthread” I effectively eliiminate the possibility of the (perceived) duplicate URLs. With some luck, the next Google dance will prove this theory correct.

I can remember lying on my back on a grassy Indiana hill, interpreting the clouds as they drifted by. Did that cumulus formation resemble a white elephant or a red herring? It didn’t matter. It was an exercise for my imagination. I still like clouds of all kinds, including the decidedly Web 2.0 creation: the Tag Cloud.

So what exactly is a tag cloud?
A tag cloud is a visual representation of a weighted list. It represents the frequency of occurance of tagged material on a website. According to Wikipedia, the first tag cloud appeared on another favorite website of mine, Flickr. At Flickr, each photo can be have one or more tags. You can even tag other people’s photos. And so, I might tag a photo of my mom at the Golden Gate bridge with sanfrancisco, goldengate and mom. Later, I can search through all of my photos, say for all photos tagged “sanfrancisco” and get a list. I can even search across all public photos in Flickr using the same tag.

The tag cloud provides a list of all the tags (or the most popular, or most recent), but rather than simply listing them, it clearly shows the popularity of a tag by increasing the text size. At a glance, you know exactly what tags are most popular, and get a sense for what matters most to that community. Aside from Flickr, you can now find tag clouds at a lot of Web 2.0-ish websites, including del.icio.us, Technorati, Last.fm and now here at www.jeffhester.net.

I’ve gone through my entries and tagged them, and what you see in the right column on the main page is the resulting tag cloud. What do you learn from my own tag cloud? The top tags are bigblueball (no surprise), flickr, music, humor and googlemaps. Those who know me well will likely see a few other telltale tags that reveal my personal bent.

On a community level, this tagging is referred to as folksonomy (as opposed to taxonomy). It’s classification by-and-for the people. Democratic tagging. Punk rock tagging. And very possibly useful tagging.

Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy
Developing knowledge management and communities of practice at Fluor has taught me a great deal about ontology, taxonomy and vocabulary — probably more than you’ll want to hear. But one thing is clear — the average employee doesn’t have the personal bandwidth to care a wit about an overdesigned tagging schema. What’s meaningful to the enterprise may have little or no relevance to an employee on a personal level.

Can folkonomy and tag clouds help? Clay Shirky, speaking at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference earlier this year says ontology is overrated. Shirky pumps up folksonomy tags, but disregards the need for a flexible corporate ontology. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Folksonomy and taxonomy can co-exist, the latter serving the enterprise and the former the individual.

As for tag clouds, they are accessible and information-rich. How do they fare in the context an online community? Ph.D. student and researcher Danah Boyd shares some interesting observations on tag clouds. Much as my own tag cloud reveals something about my interests, a community’s tag cloud reflects the character of that community. Boyd sees a flaw — large “communities” such as Technorati may be too big and too diverse for the tag cloud to be truly meaningful. I see her point, though I’d argue that as large as Technorati is, it’s still narrowly targeted (techies and bloggers are still a niche).

As for me, I still love clouds. Add tag clouds to that list.

I’ve messed around with a few of the mapping options, including ClustrMaps and Frappr, but recently ran across a really nice little Google Maps mashup called Gvisit. This free service automatically plots your website visitors using Google Maps. You can get an RSS feed showing recent visitors. Good stuff.

There has been a lot of buzz around Web 2.0. The idea is that the old Internet companies (ostensibly Web 1.0) were built on a model that did not last. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, many of those companies could not adapt or survive. So what is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly describes Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that includes:

• The perpetual beta
• Software that gets better the more people use it
• Hackability (Google Maps)
• Participation, not publishing (blogs)
• Tagging, not taxonomy (del.icio.us; Flickr)
• Radical trust (Wikipedia)
• Emergent
• Rich user interface (AJAX)
• Small pieces loosely joined

So what does the Web 2.0 look like? I took screenshots from a series of websites consider part of the Web 2.0 crowd to look at their design in search of a common thread.

What did I find?

• Lots of white and grey. Most of the sites used a white background with little splashes of bright colors for some text.
• Lots of Arial. Most of the sites used Arial. Is it just me, or does Arial feel like 1970’s Helvetica signage?
• Very light on the images. Mainly text-based interfaces.
• Most advertising is text-based (i.e. Adsense)
• Greater emphasis on social interaction (sharing, syndication, comments, trackbacks, etc.)

When I contrast the design and function of these “next-generation” websites with my own, there’s a huge difference. Is it time for a network-wide refresh?

What do you like/dislike about this new breed of websites?

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

I’ve donned my propellerhead hat and am now in the midst of three days of total podcasting immersion, attending the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in Ontario.

What is podcasting? Think of it as a way of distributing audio shows over the Internet. It’s similar to a radio program, but with a publish and subscribe distribution model.

Podcasting is a Portmanteau derived from the ubiquitous iPod and the more familiar term ‘broadcasting.’ It was popularized by the idea that I can subscribe to shows that interest me and they’ll automatically be loaded on my iPod while I sleep. When I head for the gym in the morning, I’ve got fresh programs to choose from.

Of course, you don’t need an iPod or any other portable media to enjoy a podcast. You can listen to them right on your computer, and in fact, most people do just that.

What makes podcasting interesting? Well, first of all, it’s still pretty new. There are only about 15,000 podcasters out there, although that number is expected to jump exponentially in 2006. So it’s a good time to jump in if you’re interested in creating a podcast.

Secondly, the barriers to entry are reasonably low. Most PC and Mac owners already possess the basic tools needed to create a podcast. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or an audio engineer.

Have you listened to a podcast? I have a bunch I’d like to add to my subscription list, but there are several that I listen to now, including The Chris Pirillo Show and Mobility Today (formerly Dave’s iPAQ). Leave a comment and let me know what you think I should add to my playlist.

So where is this all going? I suspect you’ll see a podcast coming out of BigBlueBall very soon.

I’ve been thinking about podcasting lately, and considering taking a dip into the pool. The term itself is a bit of misnomer, borrowing liberally from the iPod player. I’d be interested to know what percentage of people actually use iPods to listen to podcasts. I suspect that it’s less than half.
Continue reading Pondering Podcasting