Ho John Lee’s Weblog

As 2005 comes to a close, a look back at some of the top posts this year based on page views, which seems to have been a mix of technology, business, travel, and random.

• A Reading List on PageRank and Search Algorithms
• Potter Puppet Pals
• Camping out at Singapore Changi Airport
• Personalization, Intent, and Modifying PageRank Calculations
• Mona Lisa at the Salle des Etats
• Tagging and Searching - How Transparent do you want to be?
• Follow the Money - Microsoft Windows Live, Google, and Web 2.0
• The Cambrian Age 2.0
• How (and where) to download your del.icio.us bookmarks
• Yahoo goes after more tagging assets, buys del.icio.us
• Five principles of user generated content - Trust, Attention, Relevance, Authority, and Intent
• Ungoogleable to #1 in six months
• United Red Carpet Club - Tokyo Narita Airport
• Blackdog Linux Personal Server
• Don’t cross those wires - Los Angeles power outage
• Building better personalized search, filtering spam blogs
• Korean Food at Myung Dong Tofu Cabin
• The Home Pages of this New Era
• Small steps versus theorizing, Reboot 7

• n-06-04.pdf (application/pdf Object)
  clarification memo from IRS regarding 409A option rules
  (tags: irs 409a startups venture capital vc finance accounting)
• Omnidrive
  online storage service startup (not launched yet), will have free and paid versions
  (tags: storage backup service web2.0 tools)
• Google Modules
  Listings of modules for Google home pages.
  (tags: google modules ajax widgets directory web2.0 tools)
• Main Page - GameCube-Linux
  Wiki on linux port to Nintendo GameCube
  (tags: nintendo gamecube linux hacking)
• English to Telugu converter
  online tool for converting english text to telegu
  (tags: language translation tools english telegu india)

• symfony - open-source PHP5 web framework
  Application framework for PHP5, an alternative to Rails.
  (tags: symfony php web application framework software tools development rails)
• symfony PHP5 framework » symfony advent calendar day twenty-one: Search engine
  A basic search application built on Symfony. Part of a series of examples using the Symfony framework.
  (tags: search symfony php software tools)
• AOL Search: Hot Searches
  Continuously updated list of top search queries from AOL users.
  (tags: search aol random zeitgeist)
• Domain Name Generator
  Find available short domain names, name generator, and related tools
  (tags: domain name tools)
• Php Object Generator (v1.5 rev3) - Open Source Object Relational Mapping PHP Code Generator
  Tool for generating object mappings to database layer.
  (tags: php programming database software tools)
• Will Price: Cap Table Hygiene
  Short discussion of share allocation and alignment issues for startup founders and investors
  (tags: vc angel startup investment finance)

• Faults of PageRank / Something is Wrong with Google’s Mathematical Model (PDF)
  Hiller Tal-Ezer on ranking anomalies in original PageRank. Pages with inbound links and no outbound links get overweighted, which is the basis for some SEO techniques in the past.
  (tags: google pagerank search algorithms seo)
• The Mathematical Model of Google (PDF)
  Hillel Tal-Ezer’s overview of Google’s approach to search. See also Langville and Meyer’s “Deeper Inside PageRank”
  (tags: google search algorithms pagerank)
• Public Domain Movie Torrents with PDA versions
  Mostly old movies. Includes Plan 9 from Outer Space, perhaps the worst science fiction / horror movie ever made.
  (tags: movies streaming media bittorrent free)
• Wink
  Tag and bookmark your google search results. Can also import bookmarks from del.icio.us, and appears to have some wiki features as well.
  (tags: wink tagging bookmarking wiki search startups)
• Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors
  Todd Holloway, Miran Bozicevic, Katy Börner - Iintroduces a suite of measures and approaches to analyze and map the semantic structure of Wikipedia. Co-occurrences of categories within individual articles have a power-law distribution, and when mapped re
  (tags: wikipedia semantic data analysis algorithms visualization)
• Yankidank - View topic :: Pligg
  Forum thread discussing Pligg, an English translation of Meneame, a Spanish language Digg clone.
  (tags: digg clone meneame pligg socialsoftware)
• Pligg / published news
  Digg-like site based on Meneame, an open source Spanish language Digg clone.
  (tags: meneame pligg digg clone socialsoftware)
• Technocast » Blog Archive » Make Your Own Digg.com Like Site… The Easy Way!
  Another approach to implementing a Digg-like site using Wordpress and Owen Winkler’s Votio plugin.
  (tags: wordpress digg hacking socialsoftware)
• Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Site Content Copyright Protection
  uses Google API to search for duplicate copies of web pages specified by URL
  (tags: google search api plagiarism)
• Yahoo! Travel Web Services
  Web services API for access to published schedules, reservations, and other travel application services
  (tags: yahoo travel webservices api web2.0)
• 409ACommentLetter12_05.pdf (application/pdf Object)
  Open letter from National Venture Capital Association to IRS regarding the new 409A rules for option valuation, which are unworkable with respect to venture funded companies. Some fixes are proposed in the memo.
  (tags: vc venture capital irs finance startups nvca 409a accounting)
• LLRX — Best Legal Practices for Open Source Software
  Lawyer Dennis Kennedy’s ten tips for managing the use of open source software in businesses.
  (tags: opensource licensing business management legal)
• Now What? » How David Can Beat Goliath- Summary of Strategies
  Wrapup of a series of posts on taking advantage of smallness
  (tags: business strategy management startups)
• Linear Algebra Methods for Data Mining (Spring 2005)
  Helsinki University course outline and lecture slides. Includes discussion of application in clustering and web search.
  (tags: search algorithms math lecture notes)
• How to Make Wealth
  Paul Graham essay on startups and creating wealth vs money.
  (tags: startups business)
• brianstorms weblog
  A look at historical listing volume at eBay, which drops sharply the week before Christmas and spikes the week after.
  (tags: ebay ecommerce marketing volume graph business)
• The Vinyl Tourist
  Assorted notes on the care and feeding of vinyl record collection and related equipment.
  (tags: music vinyl record equipment care howto)

I tripped over a reference to an interesting paper on PageRank hacking while looking at some unrelated rumors at Ian McAllister’s blog. The undated paper is titled “Faults of PageRank / Something is Wrong with Google’s Mathematical Model”, by Hillel Tal-Ezer, a professor at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo.

It points out a fault in Google’s PageRank algorithm that causes ’sink’ pages that are not strongly connected to the main web graph to have an unrealistic importance. The author then goes on to explain a new algorithm with the same complexity of the original PageRank algorithm that solves this problem.

After a quick read through this, it appears to describe one of the techniques that had been popular among some search engine optimizers a while back, in which link farms would be constructed pointing at a single page with no outbound links, in an effort to artificially raise the target page’s search ranking.

• My Yahoo! feed API
  Niall Kennedy does a little reverse engineering and documents the current state of MyYahoo RSS feeds (not quite valid RSS, but then it’s not released for public use, either).
  (tags: yahoo rss development feed hacking web2.0)
• Tag formats: Can’t we all just get along? - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
  extended discussion on merits and issues of tag entry formats - spaces, commas, semicolons, quotes, etc as used on del.icio.us, flickr, and other tagging applications
  (tags: tagging tags folksonomy formats design web2.0)
• Yahoo! Open Shortcuts - Learn More
  Instructions for using the Yahoo shortcuts system, which appears to be a little like YubNub.
  (tags: yahoo yubnub search shortcuts personalization reference)
• Social Computing Group Home
  Microsoft Research social software projects on a range of topics including events, photos, collaboration, virtual worlds, etc.
  (tags: microsoft research socialsoftware)
• Google Research Publications - MapReduce
  Description of a programming language and implementation approach for describing and distributing parallellized tasks across commodity hardware, e.g. search analysis on the googleplex. PDF and HTML slides.
  (tags: google search parallel computing algorithms research)
• Google Research Publications - Sawzall
  Interpreting the Data: Scientific Programming with Sawzall - Rob Pike, et al. Sawzall is a scripting language built on MapReduce to provide parallel processing services on very large data sets such as telephone directories, server logs, or collections of
  (tags: google search programming scripting languages algorithms research computing)
• Web Search for a Planet : The Google Cluster Architecture (2003)(PDF)
  Luiz Barroso, Jeffrey Dean, and Urs Hoelzle paper in IEEE Micro describing the hardware and software implementation approach at Google
  (tags: google search architecture paper)
• The Term Vector Database: fast access to indexing terms for Web pages (2000)
  Raymie Stata, Krishna Bharat, Farzin Maghoul paper at WWW9 describing an approach for extracting relevant terms from web page content and generating a term vector which can be used by other applications instead of scanning the full page to determine topi
  (tags: search topic relevance metadata algorithms research google altavista)
• Porter Stemming Algorithm
  Official home page, by Martin Porter. Porter stemming is used to remove assorted endings and variations between English language words that are mostly the same, i.e. search, searching, searches.
  (tags: search algorithms programming)

• Google free proxy!
  How to use Google translation service to access locally blocked web sites. Includes text only, no images, for obvious reasons. Also useful for testing access to web sites from different network address, i.e. Google data center, rather than the local netwo
  (tags: google proxy network hacking howto)

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a working turntable at home. This evening I suddenly have lots of new old stuff to listen to.

There’s a divide in the music I’ve been listening to for the past ten years or so. I packed away the records and turntable around the time our daughter was born, thinking that I’d put it back together when she was old enough not to destroy the records. So, ten years later, I have a fairly large collection of digital music, and a large collection of analog recordings which don’t overlap much, but which have languishing in storage.

I’m happy to find that the turntable still works. Modern stereos don’t have phono inputs, so I ended up rummaging in the garage to dig up an old amplifier, which makes for a large but serviceable preamp. Right now I’m listening to Brian Eno’s Music For Airports.

In case you were wondering where the site went, the past 24 hours or so has been a day of random issues with Dreamhost.

Yesterday afternoon they were having connectivity problems, which took all their customers offline for a few hours.

This morning, I discovered that this site was running, but all Dreamhost sites were unreachable via SBC/PacBell here in the Bay Area. From the logs it looks like Comcast and a variety of overseas networks were still able to connect. The Google proxy hack mentioned this morning on O’Reilly provided another quick path for looking at the web site from a different network to verify that connectivity was still working, at least from the Google data center.

A couple of hours ago I got what I thought was a response to my e-mail regarding the network connectivity problem, but which turned out to be one of the CPU utilization warning letters that have been going out lately:

More business comics - the latest installment of Googlepark is up at Channel 9 (via Google Blogoscoped)

If you haven’t seen the previous episodes of Googlepark, here are links to the other installments: Googlepark.

• Learning Similarity Measures in Non-orthogonal Space (CIKM2004-p286.pdf)
  Ning Liu, Benyu Zhang, Jun Yan, Qiang Yang, Shuicheng Yan, Zheng Chen, Fengshan Bai, Wei-Ying Ma - Microsoft Research (China) paper on an alternative to cosine similarity or latent semantic indexing metrics for text relevance and document clustering. Some
  (tags: search algorithms similarity clustering microsoft research)
• Exclusive: TypePad outage update and details
  Anil Dash chats with Niall Kennedy about this week’s outage at Typepad, system scalability, and communicating with their subscribers.
  (tags: typepad marketing pr web2.0 webservices scaling startups)
• Yahoo! Developer Network - JavaScript Developer Center
  All the Yahoo web APIs through Javascript object model interfaces.
  (tags: yahoo javascript ajax json webservices development api reference)

• The Honest Hypocrite: The medium (of the universe) is the message
  speculation on up to 100,000 bits of information encoded in the background noise of the universe
  (tags: random cosmology science hacking)
• Message in the Sky (PDF)
  S. Hsu, A. Zee. A look at how a hypothetical creator of the universe might encode a message in the cosmic background radiation.
  (tags: random cosmology science hacking)
• menéame / noticias publicadas
  open source Digg clone, in spanish
  (tags: digg meneame opensource social collaboration software)
• Spanish Digg Meneame Installation Instructions
  English language instructions for installing meneame (which is in spanish)
  (tags: digg opensource meneame howto)
• Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Searching for a fresher taste
  The Guardian (UK newspaper)’s view on del.icio.us and Yahoo’s moves in social software so far.
  (tags: yahoo del.icio.us flickr socialsoftware)

Dilbert meets Vijay, the world’s most desperate venture capitalist.

See also: VC Comic Strips, GooglePark

David Hornik asks: Where’s the Money in the Long Tail?

It is certainly the case that in the aggregate, Long Tail content is extraordinarily valuable. The question for VCs and entrepreneurs is “for whom?”
…
The real money is in aggregation and filtering and those will continue to be interesting businesses for the foreseeable future.

He points out that aggregators are building convenient one-stop shopping for people looking for topically-focused content, and derive economic value even when the content publishers do not.

David Beisel follows the money a little further:

…in the long run, the value of the network is not only determined by the number of nodes in it, but in the ability for the network to monetize those nodes.
…in calculating the value of a network, any equation describing it should contain a variable with the monetization rate (or proxied by the value to the user which can be monetized in the future). So while the number of nodes in a network surely is a fundamental (if not the majority, in many cases) driver of value, the value of the network itself to the user is also a very important component to the overall total.

Greenfuel Technologies creates bio-fuels or bio-diesel from the emissions of power plants and industrial facilities. The company’s system is being tested at MIT’s 20-megawatt power plant and it has an open invitation to other power plants. Its system produces raw oil stock from smokestack gases, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 40% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 86%.

The system works by passing the smokestack emssions through an algae cultivation system which captures the carbon dioxide and also break down NOx. The algae can eventually be processed into biodiesel fuel.

via alarm:clock

See also: How Algae Clean the Air (Business 2.0, October 2005), Is Algae in your future? (Boston Museum of Science)

• Royalty Free Music by UniqueTracks
  Pay-once music for podcasts, presentation soundtracks, multimedia, etc.
  (tags: audio music)

Wow! Although the basic idea is straightforward, crawling and indexing for a general purpose search engine requires huge resources. Web crawlers are effectively downloading copies of the entire internet over and over, turning them over to indexing applications which scan the contents for structure and meaning.

The sheer scale of the task is a substantial barrier to entry for anyone wanting to develop a new indexing or retrieval application. Some projects have narrowed the problem domain, which can reduce the problem scope to a manageable level, but this announcement from Alexa looks like it may offer an exciting alternative for building new search applications.

John Batelle writes:

• Protopage v2 released - free AJAX start pages now with RSS news feeds, sticky notes and bookmarks
  Interesting hosted AJAX personal home pages with sticky notes, newsfeed display boxes, search box, browser based rich text editor.
  (tags: ajax rss aggregator web2.0 demo)
• Opinmind
  Blog search engine aimed at measuring user sentiment or opinion. Search results are divided into positive and negative sentiment along with an overall rating.
  (tags: blog search tools marketing)
• USPS - USPS Web Tools
  Web service APIs from the US Postal Service - Address info verification, delivery time and status, rate calculators, shipping label generator, carrier pickup request.
  (tags: web api webservices web2.0 usps postal service)
• How To Make Your Own Web Mashup
  ProgrammableWeb’s introduction to building web service applications with a list of some commonly used web services.
  (tags: web2.0 webservices software development programming howto tutorial)

Looks like Bangalore is in line for an official renaming to either “Bengaluru” or “Bengalooru”. Times of India:

Chief minister N Dharam Singh told reporters in Gulbarga on Sunday: “We will rename Bangalore as Bengaluru on November 1, 2006, to mark the launch of Karnataka’s Golden Jubilee year - Suvarna Karnataka - on that day. I have issued a directive to chief secretary B K Das in this regard.”

The name, however, may undergo another change, for Ananthamurthy told The Times of India: “The name should be Bengal-oo-ru.” The CM spelt it out as Bengal-u-ru.

See also: Bangalore boom, traffic congestion