Wizard's Blog

I heard about this new meme from Jure – you use Tweetdumpr to generate a CSV file of your most recent 3200 tweets and then use Wordle to turn it into a picture.  Here’s mine:

Wordle of my tweets

It’s a bit similar to what I did when I originally posted about Wordle.

If you wanted to clean it up a bit you could go through the CSV file and remove any words you want to ignore.  For example I have Raptr set up to tweet whenever I play a game on the Xbox 360, so my first attempt at the Wordle was dominated by “just started playing” and “http://raptr.com/ghosttie“.  As it is, I’ve left the names of the games in, and “Battlefield: Bad Company” and “Call of Duty: World at War” are fairly noticeable.

I also recognize “New blog post” from every time I tweet about a blog post and “Prediction” from when I had Hubdub automatically tweeting my predictions.  I suppose it shows that most of my tweets are automated – that can’t be good.

This issue is being covered in depth by newspapers, blogs and #amazonfail on Twitter so I won’t echo the coverage too much, but apparently Amazon has “de-ranked” books with “adult content”.  This seems to mean that the books don’t show up in bestseller lists or even searches.

While at first glance this seems like a well intentioned “won’t someone think of the children?” move, the de-ranking seems to have been implemented extremely unevenly.  Award winning books and romance novels are gone but Playboy is still there.  Gay people seem to be taking it personally, as apparently the first three results for “homosexuality” on Amazon.co.uk are all anti-gay.

While I don’t tend to read romance novels or gay literature, literary censorship of any kind needs to be carefully examined – “they came for the gays and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t gay” etc.

Image via Wikipedia

Assuming Amazon’s motives are pure, it was a very clumsy move – there are much less controversial ways of achieving the goal, for example a Google style op-in/out safe search.

An interesting effect of this is the cyberactivism backlash that immediately took effect – there was talk of a boycott, and then a Google Bomb of the phrase Amazon Rank.

I think Amazon needs to realize that like Google they’re so big that everything they do gets scrutinized, and take steps to avoid being painted as the bad guy.  Maybe it was just a PR failure more than anything else – I expect them to make a very public U-turn very soon.

To be honest I’m very surprised at how long it took them to make a statement about this – apparently they’re blaming it on a glitch.

EDIT: And finally an official response:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

EDIT: Some people are now saying that it was actually caused by a hacker…

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Plinky logo

Plinky is a relatively new website that helps inspire you to create content.

Every day Plinky “prompts” you – asks you a question.  In answering the question you end up with an idea for a blog post.

For example the prompt for yesterday was:

Write a haiku about the last movie you saw.

Plinky also has some social networking features – you can follow your friends on Plinky and see their answers to the daily prompts.  The prompts are so random that you’ll end up finding out unusual and interesting things about your friends.

Plinky can also connect to other services, so your answers to the prompts can get automatically posted to your blog.

What keeps me from using Plinky regularly is a nagging feeling every time I answer a prompt that I’m putting a bit too much personal information on the Internet…

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The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die

Last month The Prodigy released their fifth album – Invaders Must Die.

I’ve been a fan of The Prodigy for a long time – not since the beginning, but a long time.

I really enjoyed their previous album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned.  It was different from their previous albums in that only Liam Howlett was involved from the original group - only guest vocalist were used.

In Invaders Must Die, Keith Flint and Maxim Reality are back doing the vocals on most of the tracks, and it’s at least as good as Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned was.

Invaders Must Die is identifiably Prodigy, which means it sounds a bit 90′s.  I can see why some people wouldn’t like that, but it has progressed and grown since then and it’s exactly my style.

Here’s the music video for my favourite track on the album – the single Invaders Must Die:

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Pixazza logo

Pixazza is an interesting service that Google recently invested in.  It’s similar to AdSense in that it lets you make money from your site by automatically adding contextual ads to your content.

Unlike Adsense, instead of adding text ads to text webpages it hyperlinks products in your pictures.  Since image recognition technology is in its infancy, the hyperlinks are created by people working for Pixazza.

Pixazza sample

I’m not sure I’d actually get much use out of Pixazza.  I don’t usually post a lot of pictures, and the ones I post are intended to support the blog post they’re on.  They therefore don’t tend to contain a lot of products or they only reference a blog post I’ve already written about.

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TinEye logo

Image search is hard.  Web pages are full of text, links and metadata that tell you about them – they lend themselves to being searched.  Images on the other hand mostly just come with a filename and if you’re lucky a caption – that isn’t a lot information to go by.  As for the image itself, getting a computer to understand a page full of text is a lot harder than getting it to understand a picture – image recognition is still in its infancy.

So along comes TinEye with a different way of looking at image search – instead of entering text that describes the picture you’re looking for, you give it a picture to look for.  Now obviously this isn’t much use unless you already know what you’re looking for, but it’s fantastic if you’re trying to find the original source of an unattributed picture.

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I’ve been using the WP Super Cache plug-in on my blog for a while.  I’m quite happy with it, although I doubt my website gets enough traffic to really need it.

WP Super Cache does have one drawback – it only caches a page after it has been accessed the first time, so if a lot of pages are accessed just once (for example when a search engine crawls your website) you get no benefit from the caching.  This is understandable considering WP Super Cache was designed to help when a single page is accessed a lot of times (e.g. the digg effect).

I recently found out about DB Cache (I don’t remember where from), which is a similar plug-in in that it’s intended to speed up your website and reduce the load on the server.  However it works differently from WP Super Cache in that instead of caching pages it caches database queries.

This means that DB Cache provides less of an improvement when a single page gets a lot of hits, because PHP still runs for every hit – only the database queries are sped up.  In this case WP Super Cache would be faster because PHP only needs to run on the first hit, and from then on it’s serving static HTML.

The case where DB Cache provides more of an improvement over WP Super Cache is when lots of different pages get hits around the same time (e.g. when a search engine crawls your website).  In this case WP Super Cache never gets to serve static pages, so it doesn’t provide any improvement.  However because hits on different pages will use a lot of the same database queries, DB Cache will be able to speed this up.

I’m currently using both DB Cache and WP Super Cache at the same time, and they seem to co-exist without any problems.  This way I get the best of both worlds – either a page is already in WP Super Cache and a static page gets served, or the page is being accessed for the first time and so the database queries get cached by DB Cache.

Unlike most of the other plug-ins I use, the author of the DB Cache plug-in isn’t a native English speaker (he’s Ukrainian) so help and support seem to be more of a challenge than usual.

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gooseGrade logo

ReadWriteWeb recently did an article on gooseGrade, so I thought I’d try it out.

GooseGrade is a website that lets you suggest corrections for spelling errors, factual errors etc. on websites.  Your suggestions are then reviewed by the owner of the website and then either applied or discarded, depending on whether your suggestion was correct.

Apparently it works with pretty much any website just by inserting some HTML, but they also have plugins for popular blogging platforms like their WordPress plugin.  I’ve installed it here but I haven’t been able to get it working yet.

You can learn a bit more about it by watching this video:

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I’ve posted a couple times before about my desire for a wearable camera – something you just wear all day that records everything that happens to you.  You can then publish the resulting video/pictures, keep them for later, use them to remember things or just delete them if nothing interesting happened.  Photo albums used to be the way to loo back at your life, and then home videos – I can see this as eventually being the next thing.

In any case I never found a gadget that fit my requirements – some were still theoretical, some not for sale, some not adequate.

Backpacker's Diary

Yanko design is an excellent website with lots of interesting design ideas.  A couple months ago they did a mockup of a very interesting gadget called the Backpacker’s Diary for tourist/trekker types.  It’s not exactly what I was looking for – it’s not just a camera, it’s also a laptop, solar panel and light.

It’s purely a concept and will probably never get made, but it’s very cool.

VIEVU PVR-PRO

Another gadget I found is a lot more like the wearable camera that I want – the VIEVU PVR.  In a lot of ways it’s perfect – a small, wearable video camera with a built-in battery.

But this is where we run into the limitations of current technology – it only has space for one hour of video, so my dream of capturing a whole day is right out.  The other way it’s limited by current technology is that it costs $299.95.

Those figures are for the VIEVU PVR-PRO – they also sell a VIEVU PVR-PRO 2, which has space for four hours of video but costs $399.95.

I suppose if this sort of thing ever hit the mainstream the cost would come down and the performance would go up, but I can’t see that happening for a long time.  At least someone out there is actually making and selling the things, which is more than I’ve seen up till now.

I thought it was interesting that wearable cameras got a mention in Cory Doctorow‘s excellent short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away as a “lifelogger”, although the ones in the story do a lot more than just record video.

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Stimator logo

Stimator is a bit like Website Grader in that it analyzes your website, incoming links etc. and gives you a score.  Where it’s different is that instead of being a percentage like Website Grader gives you, Stimator gives you a value in US Dollars.

The number isn’t just arbitrary – it’s based on how much actual money real websites have sold for and how your website compares to those sites.  For example Stimator estimates that google.com is worth about $940 million.

As of today, Stimator thinks my website is worth $747, which isn’t a huge amount but at least it’s more than I’ve spent on the website over the years.  They provide a bit of html to include in your site to show off your estimated worth (similar to Website Grader), but it didn’t work when I tried to include it in this post.

I originallydiscoeverd Stimator via someone’s tweet, but I don’t remember who it was from.  When I later decided to revisit Stimator and couldn’t remember its name I found a lot of other website valuation web apps out there, but Stimator seemed to be the best.  They seem to have put a lot of thought into it, especially the concept of linking the valuations to the financial markets.

I don’t think any of this should be taken too seriously, but it’s a fun thing to run ever so often to see whether your website is getting better or worse.

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