Happy Valentine’s to everyone. So far this morning it’s looking to be a nice day (yet here I am stuck at work…), so here’s hoping it’s nice for everybody.
And if you’re looking for something a little bit different today, I wrote up some Beer Valentines ideas over on The Brew Site blog. Enjoy!
I’ve been playing around with Amazon‘s web services because in my quest to make money off my blogs (quixotic? I don’t know yet), I thought it would be interesting to implement book recommendations based on keywords pulled from individual blog entries.
What got me thinking about this is that my Amazon associate links have already generated three orders from books I’ve linked to (two from The Brew Site and one from here), which kind of surprised me since I haven’t had the Amazon affiliation for very long. But I don’t really want to spend all my time writing about books just to generate clickthroughs—seems to go too far on the “shill” side of things—so I figured I go more the route of the Google AdSense ads: automatically generating results from content.
The web services are pretty straightforward, though I have to wonder why the PDF documention you can download is over 400 pages long. Holy crap! Instead, I did a quick read through the HTML version they have and picked up enough in a half hour to get started.
So, you might start seeing Amazon recommendations appearing on the individual entry pages. It’ll be an experiment; if I don’t like how they work, I’ll pull them.
It’s kind of hard to imagine what Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot looks like until you actually see it. What’s crazy is that it was created sometime during the ’30s…
Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words. Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
I don’t know, but it kind of reminds me of the robot from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Weird.
I’m not sure if people are stupid, ignorant, lacking in a proper education or some combination of those, but the following example should illustrate my point. At work today I was talking with a co-worker about education (her son is in second grade and learning history) and the name Susan B. Anthony came up. I asked, “You know who she was, right?”
“Uh, someone famous—I know she was on a coin,” was the reply.
Pretty bad. I’m always highly disappointed when I run into this type of thing at work… I should know better by now.
What’s worse, though, is when I asked another (female) co-worker the same question:
“I know she’s on a coin.”
Ug.
Well, I posted too soon. Tonight’s blogger get-together has been cancelled, too many people had something come up. Hopefully we can convene next week or something.
Unless plans changed when I wasn’t looking, the Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together again tomorrow, Tuesday the 8th. It’s at the Cascade Lakes Brewery Lodge (upstairs!) on Bend’s westside, starting at 7pm. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I know a bunch of the others will. Cheers!
A bit over a year ago I blogged about the PHP Cruise. Well, this year there’s another PHP conference organized by the folks at php|architect, though it’s not a cruise this time: php|tropics!
It’s in Cancun, Mexico, from May 11 through 15. Now, if I only had a few grand lying around and could convince work that it’s a business trip…
According to this article in the Bulletin, a woman in Prineville gave birth to a 14 pound, 1 ounce baby. Holy c-section, Batman! Still, as big as that is, it doesn’t quite beat the 16.7 pound baby born last month. And then for some bogglers check out these Guinness World Record entries for heaviest births.
Watching the various debate about Google’s nofollow initiative has been enlightening. Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a way to fight comment spam on weblogs, but predictably it took no time at all for people to figure out how to game the system. Also predictably, anti-nofollow support launched equally quickly.
I won’t use it. At all. Why? Mostly because it’s such a non-issue (it won’t do a thing to comment spam), but a large part of the reasoning is that I won’t be held hostage to what I can write and link to by any one search engine or technology. Nor am I going to let the ranking alorithm of one search engine make me do its work for it, especially if PageRank is broken like some people believe.
It’s a misnamed attribute, actually. Google says links with it “won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results,” but the “nofollow” label makes it appear that Google won’t actually follow the link itself. Not so. Google will follow the link, it just will not confer ranking.
More bothersome is the fact that other search engines (Yahoo and MSN, notably) have signed on to this. Why bothersome? Well, because Google’s PageRank algorithm is supposed to be a Trade Secret, and theoretically other search engines’ technologies are Trade Secrets also, so who knows how the others will actually implement processing of this attribute? Will they choose to actually not follow such links, allowing sites to potentially drop out of their indices? There’s no guarantees. But if they’re all similar to PageRank, and PageRank is broken, then they may all be broken and this won’t fix things.
Oh well. My various megalomaniacal rantings won’t change things in the world at large, so I’ll stick to what I can do on my own site. :)
