Year: 2005

Last call

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 20, 2005

I’m off tomorrow into the wilds of the Ozarks, into that part of the state new to me. There will, of course, be photos when I return, but maybe code, too, as I like to work on code when I’m in a hotel room — gives me something familiar.

Today, though, I went to the Botanical for another chance to get photos of the water lilies. Last chance, really, as the summer is waning and you can see this in the richness of the trees, and the activity of the insects. Particularly the insects, as the garden was ripe with butterflies today; so with yet more water lily photos you’ll also be getting yet more butterfly pictures.

Next time: code, I swear. And pictures of something different, I hope.

newmonarch2

Still, I don’t think I can or ever will, get tired of being surrounded by butterflies and water lilies. It’s like you’re in the middle of a cartoon drawn by a young child with a new box of Crayolas. Everywhere you turn, you see another bright splash of color.

ringlily

In the Spring, the insects are lazy, shy, and elusive. Today, though, you could almost reach out and hold them they were that close. But they were moving, constantly, which made getting a photo a little challenging. Now is the last chance for the bees to get nectar for the hive; the butterflies to store up energy to finish the migration; the dragonflies to, well, I don’t know why the dragonflies were frantic.

Not just the bugs, the photographers were out in force today, even at the 7am opening of the garden. Of course, the weather was going to be hot, and the sun isn’t that good for photography, but I must have ran into a dozen photographers within one hour. Most had tripods, a few were like me — just winging it.

butterbee

Today’s bright and busy activity reminded me of years ago when I would go to a bar, and the bartender or band would announce last call. The lights would come up in the place, and people would scurry about, making good on the last few moments before having to head out into the night.

This girl would run up to her friends and whisper something into their ears and they would giggle and leave; that young man would be writing a phone number down in a match book. Of course now everyone carries pocket computers and cellphones and numbers would be jotted down into some kind of electronic device, but it’s not the same.

Friends would come together and split apart, some for home, others for another party somewhere, yet others to go to breakfast. And not just a small breakfast, either. I don’t know what happens now, in this Atkins Diet time, but back then, it was large, it had eggs, and it had potatoes and butter. Mega-cinnamon roll was optional.

There was one place in Seattle that was famous for the after hour breakfasts they’d make: huge plate size omelets covering a bed of crisp, perfectly done hash browns, served with good, hot coffee–all accompanied by thick, buttered toast and real preserves. The place was small, and people would be lined up for a block to get in, it was that popular. We’d sit there and laugh about the night, none of us wanting it to end–caught up in that perfect moment that’s not quite morning, but not evening either.

cobaltbluelilygreen

I remember a morning just like that in Salt Lake City, walking all night with friends, greeting the dawn with outstretched arms. The last of summer, and summer’s golden light.

This is a good time of year. The roses and other flowers have started to wilt, but in doing so they let out their richest scent. The leaves are at their darkest green, just before they begin to turn. Birds are everywhere, no longer bound to nests or to mating, and free to fly, and sing, just for the joy of it. It’s warm, but we’re starting to get a cool breeze now and again. And of course, all those butterflies.

I did like to walk among them today. They’re not shy of you at all, unless your shadow falls on them and then they take off into the air. As I walked by the rows of flowers, butterflies would leap into the air behind and around me, as if I were a June bride. My last chance to be a June bride, really, as I’m of an age with the summer.

newmonarch3

Photography Places

Blazing sunshine

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 20, 2005

A two day trip to the Ozarks can seem like a week, and I mean that in a good way.

Sunday I drove down I44 to 63 and then eventually to a series of back country roads where the only company I had was the ubiquitous white pickups and motorcycle riders. The recent rains have saved the Ozarks and by the rich green color, I think we’ll have a good fall, at least in the hills. And I didn’t kill one creature as I covered the windy, hilly roads, which we can count a good thing.

Sunday ended up being hot and like other Missourians impacted by the high gas prices, I kept the windows down the the air conditioner off. I developed a habit of driving one handed, the other resting on my door, which I think makes me look rather wordly, especially when the wind is blowing through my curls and I’m wearing my Big Sunglasses. Of course I ended up with a truck driver tan–one arm burned a deep brick red, while the other is a pale honey color. Or dead fish, if you prefer.

Fish. Fish was the operative word this weekend, as everywhere I went I talked with people who told me stories or who fished. Can you imagine a better weekend?

I stopped first at Rockbridge Mill, arriving in the early afternoon under 90 degree sun. Few of the pictures came out but I got a couple: one of the mill, and one of a very lucky angler.

Rockbridge Mill

Success comes in wet packages

The water was low, which wasn’t surprising for this time of year and the drought we’ve had, but it was high enough for the trout to move, and as I got to the falls, a lady who was fishing had just pulled in what looked to be a monster fish. She was kind enough to pose for the picture, which was one of my favorite from the trip.

She said she’d gone out for a relaxing hour or two of fishing, but no sooner had she put her line in then a fish caught it, and she was finished in 10 minutes. She was pleased at catching the fish, but since the river is ‘catch and keep’, she had to stop at the point. I think she was disappointed at having success come too quickly. There are people who fish to catch fish; then there’s the lucky bastards.

From Rockbridge I followed more windy, hilly back country roads to Hodgson Mill. I had read it was under restoration, and was pleasantly surprised to see it fully restored. The sun, though, was just too bright and I really couldn’t get a good picture, and had to settle for a photo of the watercress growing along the spring.

Watercress and Waterfall

From Hodgson to Dawt, where the place was full of innertubers, but I had a monstrous headache by then, so I didn’t stay long, and headed to 160 to Branson.

I was lucky to have light traffic my entire trip, which was good because 160 is nothing but 35MPH corners, which can be fun to drive, but can also be exhausting at the same time. Happily Branson is odd enough and colorful enough to wake the dead, much less a tired driver.

What can I say about Branson? It is a town that is based on early tourism because of the nearby lakes, such as Table Rock lake. As it grew, though, it morphed into something really different: a town carved into the hillside above the lake, full of hotels and inns all decorated to a theme, full of shows. Each hotel, inn, store, has a videoscreen that displays bits of the shows currently playing. And neon lights, of course. It’s like Vegas, but without gambling.

I got lost twice, because I would be driving along, mouth open as I was blasted by all the videoscreens, and would miss a turn. When I finally got to the hotel where I was staying, Welk Resort, it was late afternoon and just starting to rain.

The hotel clerk was exceptionally nice, and when I told her I was out ‘milling’ she told me about the mill in use at the College of the Ozarks (more on this in a separate post sometime). As we talked, I could hear a tapping against the window and we were both surprised when we found ourselves in a monstrous storm. I quickly unpacked my car and in my room watched as we were hit with hail, and microbursts grabbed the poolside furniture and tossed them about. It was a really nice show.

I walked around downtown Branson for a little while, taking a few pictures. They don’t do the place justice. It is a one of kind place. I wish, though, I had grabbed a picture of the Peace Frogs Cafe. Next trip, it’s on my must see list.

I’ll cover the next day in a separate post.

Social Media

Update on the issue of links

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 18, 2005

Well, after my experiment of providing full feeds, I have found that Ice Rocket, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and Feedster are all picking up my links. Technorati has picked them haphazardly, and I’m not sure what BlogPulse looks for. Ditto with Clusty.

I had a couple of nice comments from folks at Feedster, and also a note from Blake Rhodes at IceRocket. I do hope that if these services look at one thing, it’s the importance of letting people know how to make sure they’re included in aggregation counts (as well as how to have their links picked up). A list is only as good as the data that feeds it. It would also be nice if they provide access to the data for our own interpretation. Even summary data would be helpful.

Personally, if I can get dynamic link counts from these services, I may try a run myself at randomly collecting static link counts, and try out my ‘popularity to influence’ ratio, just for grins and giggles.

Most importantly, I’ve heard from some of you about how happy you are that I’m providing full feeds. I hope that folks still continue to visit the site; otherwise, I won’t know who is reading any particular post. I especially hope that folks leave comments now and again. But I want my writing to be read, and if full feeds helps, then I’m for it. The full feeds stay.

Additionally, if you’re interested in knowing when I add photos to Flickr, you can access my photo syndication feed here. There’s also a RSS 2.0 syndication feed, and I’m assuming the Flickr folks are updating the Atom feed to the newly released 1.0 specification.

Well, that is until I release Eve 1.0. Then I’ll be using Eve 1.0 all the way.

update

Koan Brenner has been having an interesting time with Technorati and how links are accessed and valued. I think the introduction of tags into the discussion has clouded the issue, because as far as I know, tags have nothing to do with how links are accessed, stored, valued, or used in any ranking algorithm.

If they are used, then yes, Technorati has some flaws in its reasoning.

Bluntly, to folks who run these services: time to come out and tell us how outbound links are accessed and stored, and what factors could prevent them from being recorded. More, it’s time to think about full disclosure on ranking schemes. Dropping hints and tidbits in this post or another is just going to create that much more animosity.

If you are degrading links based on time, or other factors influenced by the tech people use, it’s critical that this information be disseminated. You’re basically penalizing people for not using technology in a way that you assume it should be used, and that’s a sucky way of determining ‘popularity’, ‘influence’, and, especially, ‘authority’.

As for disclosure of techniques and spamming — I’m not sure this is the same issue with weblog-related lists as it is with Google. It’s an issue, I’m just not sure it’s the same issue. This one could definitely use some more discussion.

Weblogging

Links not wanted

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 18, 2005

Feedster released its own version of a link ranking system, Feedster 500. It matches previous lists, but also has a number of surprises.

Unlike other lists, or even link aggregators, Feedster has been very forthcoming about how it derives its list and, more importantly, how it finds the incoming links it uses as the key component of its list: it finds them in syndication feeds. This will explain why there are some unexpected results in this list. First, blogrolls are left out of the calculation, as they are not part of syndication feeds, or at least, not traditionally part of syndication feeds. Second, and this is the kicker, if you publish a syndication feed that doesn’t provide full content, then your links are not being picked up by the service and used in its calculations.

My links weren’t picked up. In fact, when working with my Linkers tool, and the more sophisticated Talkdigger, I have found that none of my links to other sites are being picked up by any of the services. And when I went looking for how the services work, none of the tools, other than Feedster, publishes its process to find links and/or other searchable material.

This is frustrating because if I don’t care about lists and ranks, I do care about letting people know that I’ve written something about their posts. Since I don’t support trackback anymore, the only way another weblogger will know I’ve made comments on their work is if they read my weblog regularly, someone else tells them about my post, I put a link into their comments, or they see my URL show up in their referrer logs. And with abuse of referrers, these are less than useful nowadays, or even unavailable for some webloggers.

Besides, I don’t want just the weblogger to know I’ve written about their posts–I want others to know, too.

Now I know how Feedster works and that if I want links to show up in that service I have to provide full content. I don’t want to do this, I’ve never wanted to do this but either I decide to blow off inter-weblog communication, or I provide full feeds. The question then becomes: what about the other services?

Supposedly Technorati uses the syndication feed if this provides full content; otherwise it grabs the the main page and scrapes the data. By accessing only the front page, if I use the -more- link to split a larger post into a beginning excerpt with a link to the individual page, the links in this split apart page are then not included. If I then want to have my links picked up from a post, I either have to make sure they show in the very first part of the post, or not use the -more- capability.

Even when I don’t use -more- capability, my links are not showing up in Technorati. Nor in IceRocket, nor in Bloglines, nor in any of the other services as far as I can see. Now, I’m beginning to suspect that most services now use only the syndication feeds, which means I’ll have to use full content for them, also. As a test, I’ve set my site to provide full feed for now, and I’m linking to several sites in and at the end of this post to see which service, if any, picks up the links.

Other factors that could influence the feed being picked up include me repeating my permanent link to a post in the title and at the bottom of a post; publishing links to weblogger’s URLs in my comments (which could trigger spam filters); not pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs; perhaps even the fact that I only support one feed type (RDF/RSS). Without knowing how each of the services process links, your guess is as good as mine.

If I’m frustrated with the services, I also know how difficult it is to collect ‘good’ data from a site, as separated from ‘bad’; how to determine which links are coming from the outside (a commenter’s URL) versus ones from the site author; and a static link (blogroll) from a dynamic one (one included in a page). I can respect the challenge involved even as I am critical of the results.

What would I do if I were creating a service like this?

First, I wouldn’t scrape weblogs off of the global services, such as weblogs.com. These are mined by spammers so badly now as to make them useless. What I would do is provide a ping service that a person could trigger manually, or through their tool if it provides this facility.

I would access the syndication feed, and if full content is provided, I would process this for data and URLS. Otherwise, I would access these URLs directly to pick up links. By doing this, I’ll also be accessing URLs in comments and anything in the sidebars, which is why most services don’t want to access the individual entries — but I’d rather be more liberal than not when it comes to gathering data.

I would also like to send a bot once a day to access the main page, just to make sure updates haven’t happened that haven’t been reflected in the feed, and to access the blogroll and other more static data.

At this point in time, we have a lot of data. Pulling blogrolls and other static links out of content isn’t that hard if you have the storage to maintain history and can compare if a link provided today was also provided yesterday. About the only time I would refresh this in the database is if the link changed in some way– it was there one day, not the next. Or the content in which it occurred changed (and this could require a way of annotating context of a link, which could be pricey in storage and computation).

One interesting way of looking at this is to remove duplicate links when it comes to aggregation for lists, but to refresh the item in the most recently updated queue if it shows in fresh content at the site being scanned. With this you don’t need to have much context, and if a person is interested in finding out who is talking about a specific post, these top-level links won’t show.

As for links for comments — here is where the vulnerability to spam enters, but using an algorithm to find and discard multiple repeated URLs could help to eliminate these. Looking for domains that have been determined to be spamming is also another approach. Sometimes, though, we have to accept that some crap gets through. I’d rather let a little crap through than to discard ‘good’ stuff–just because I feel I’m in some kind of war with the spammers.

It could help to annotate links for blogrolls and links for comment URLs and so on. Not that abysmal ‘nofollow’, but with something meaningful, like ‘commenter URL’ or ‘blogroll link’ or something of that nature. We do something like this with tags, and though I don’t care much for tags in weblog post, I don’t agree with Bloglines’ Mark Fletcher that tags generally suck–especially when it comes to effective uses of microformatting to annotate links.

(Speaking of which, what kind of a post is: I was going to blog something about how tags are bad, evil horrible bad, and highlight the failure of existing search technology, but I couldn’t muster the energy. High level message: tags suck and are unnecessary except in cases where no other textual data exists (like photos, audio or video). Discuss amongst yourselves.. How’s this: Bloglines is indulging in evil censorship of my communication because it doesn’t pick up the links from my posts. Discuss among yourselves.)

Unfortunately, microformats generally require some technical expertise on the part of the person using them, and to base any kind of measurement on this is irresponsible.

Once I have data that is reasonably clean and fresh, if I were to create a list, I would do one based on popularity versus influence, and I would differentiate these by the number of blogroll links for a site, as compared to the number of dynamic links. A person that has a large number of dynamic links compared to static blogroll-like links to me would be a more influential person (hi Karl) than one who has a fairly even ratio between the two. I wouldn’t mind seeing this ratio in a list rather than the counts — we could then find who is influential within groups, even if the groups are smaller. Regardless, I would also provide the raw data to others, and let them derive their own lists if they want.

Why give away precious data? Because by keeping the source of the data and algorithms open, I establish credibility. In addition, flaws will be found and smart people will provide suggestions for improvement. Most importantly, I give those who would be critical of any of my processes nothing to hook on to — the algorithms are public, and mutable; the data is available to all. I have, in effect, teflon coated myself with Open Source. I agree with Mary Hodder a hundred percent on the advantages of openness when it comes to data gathering techniques and processing, and providing access to raw data–but not just for ranking.

As for business model, well knowing the algorithms and having access to the data is one thing; being able to use these effectively, consistently, and in a manner that scales is the bread and butter of this type of technology. Google never would have been Google if it was slow.

Additional links:

Joseph Duemer is teaching a class in weblogging today. Welcome to weblogging, Joe’s colleagues. Just as an FYI, I’m on the Feedster 500 list, which makes me a weblogging princess. If I were in the top 100, I would be queen. If I were in the top 10, well, I would be a lot wealthier than I am now.

Someone who is in the top 100 is the Knitty Blog. Now, this site ably demonstrates the nature of influence over popularity — it’s not that it’s linked statically by a lot of sites; but it is referenced in a large number of posts. That, to me, is influence.

Dare Obasanjo just uploaded 50 photos from his recent trip home to Nigeria. What I want to know, Dare, is why you took so many photos of billboards?

Fulton Chain carries the best b-link bar there is: with links to stories that cover a range of topics, such as a praying mantis eating a hummingbird, and how to build your own homemade flamethrower. Then there’s the Ode to Rednecks. Come on down and visit me in the Ozarks. Hear?

And that’s about enough about linking.