Warren Seen

I mentioned Morfik a while back, the little Tassie company that was taking on Google with a number of patents.

Today they were featured on Qik, interviewed by Scoble himself. Check it out.

This is the second part of a series of posts covering the development of my web spider in Ruby. You can read about the initial idea here, and the architecture in Part 0: Concept.

You may also recognise some of the code in Scheduler#run from a short post I made to check that the syntax highlighting was working

First I want to recap the goal of the scheduler before getting into the code itself. Simply put, the scheduler exists to mangage the list of URIs (web pages, RSS feeds) that need to be spidered, and to manage the spiders themselves. In particular, we want to be able to limit the number of spiders working at any one time, out of politeness if nothing else.

I’m not going to make this a tutorial in Ruby syntax by explaining things line by line, if you haven’t used Ruby before and find something you don’t understand, the PragProg book, Programming in Ruby is the place to go look.

So let’s take a peek at some code!

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(I should probably mention that I have never written a spider or worked on a search engine before, so this is a learning process… I don’t pretend to be an expert on this - I picked this partly because it is far enough from my “day” job that I’m not going to inadvertently end up in a conflict of interest. The closest I’ve come in the past was working on a natural language interface to search engine queries, way back in 2001 while I was in my final year at UTas.)

So how did I start?

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I mentioned before that I’ve been busy this last week, one of the things I’ve been working on in my own time is a web spider (written in Ruby) that can trawl both HTML pages and RSS feeds. I won’t say much about what I’m using it for, other than to say I’m testing some ideas out right now

Anyway, I’m almost at a point where I’m happy to share this code (probably under GPL) as it’s not exactly rocket science (and I’ve only invested a week or so of evenings into it), but it has a couple of neat tricks that made it a good exercise in Ruby. A short laundry list of features:

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Noticed Blogcode last week, signed up and had a play, but haven’t really collected my thoughts on this one. I’ve been flat out with “real” work, etc., so have neglected to write anything this last week.

Anyway, precis on BlogCode is fairly straight forward, drop the name and url (not the feed tho) of the blog you want to code into the UI, then score the blog on a range of sliding scales covering content, tone, etc.

Neat, but essentially useless in and of itself.

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Quick follow up to the previous post - I wanted to get my thoughts out before I was influenced by anyone else’s thoughts

• Steve Rubel takes the classic high school debate approach of defining the word and building an argument from there. Conclusion - yes, it’s not authority, it’s popularity, people.
• Data mining agrees with Steve, “name things for what they are, not for what they are used for”. That is quite obviously right out of Usability 101.
• Jack Krupansky leaves an excellent comment on Scobelizer: “to Technorati, “authority” is simply popularity. That makes *no* sense.“

Consensus seems to be that tracking popularity but calling it “authority” muddies the waters… There is nothing wrong with the feature itself, it’s just the name that’s misleading.

It’s been a busy few days for me, but I’m back in time to notice this:

Technorati has just added ‘authority’ filtering to their search (see Scoble, TechCrunch, Dave Sifry, et cetera).

My issue with this is simple - the number of inbound links does NOT necessarily qualify the source as being an “authority” on anything. This is nothing more than a popularity contest.

Ben Barren hits the nail on the head here.

So its very hard to determine relative popularity, on a regional basis

Before pointing to this New York Metro quote:

In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Popularity, that’s all it is. And that’s sad, because some of the people who deserve to be held as authorities in their field are lost amongst the noise, while the “blogosphere” (gack, I HATE that “word”) becomes more and more like a conversation between a panel of “A-list” bloggers with everyone else on the sideline. Then you’ve flipped from being “citizen” media to just media.

Disparate thoughts to follow…

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you might actually find a blog for Michael @ Zingee, linked from TechCrunch. I also should probably read smh.com.au in future, not just The Age site.

Seems they travelled a similar path to one of my previous employers, via the ANZATech conference. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which company that was. Hope it works out better after Demo than it did for the guys from Foursticks
Nice work guys, keen to see the video when it’s up on the Demo website.

Why have I not heard of Zingee before? Apparently, they’re Australian and doing the whole online “storage” thing, but with a nice twist in that they don’t actually store the files (?) I guess it’s more like mediated file transfer than true online storage? As eg Hamachi is as opposed to a true VPN.

Zingee - an Australian-based company, who claims they’ve traveled the furthest to get to Demo.  They allow you to share files from your computer, without any uploads.  A neat way to preserve your privacy!

Not just me though, apparently Michael Arrington at TechCrunch hadn’t heard of them last week.

I finally got a look at newcomer storage service Zingee, which would have been included on my “Online Storage Gang” post if they had been around.

Trying to find out a bit more, but all I can see is a couple of phone numbers on their site (only one in Sydney), and their profile on the Demo site, which actually lists Singapore contact details.

This is not really surprising, Singapore is a better place to build to flip than Australia according to some accounting folks I’ve worked with.

In any case, this may be another local outfit to watch.

I had to have a bit of a laugh at the expense of MSNBC’s fawing over ol’ Rupert Murdoch, as though he is some latter day messiah and diviner of Internet futures.

Keith Rupert Murdoch may be 74 years old, but the way he sees it, he’s got a young man’s fingertips for what’s cool. Last year the News Corp. chairman acquired MySpace.com, the wildly popular social-networking site, for $580 million. He then spent almost $1 billion to snap up two more Internet businesses for college sports and videogaming.

Oh please, spare me.

Isn’t this the same News Corp. that with a few minor exceptions, missed the boat completely on Web 1.0? Buying their way into the game after they turned up late? Hardly the hallmarks of a well thought out plan of attack, no?