BurningbirdInteresting. Dave has dropped the Google box from Scripting News, and Edd Dumbill from O’Reilly Network has come out with a short, sweet, succinct response to the Google API:
The frenzy over Google’s new SOAP API is just plain silly.
Hmmm. This sounds familiar. I wonder where I’ve heard something like this before?
Techie Woman rules.
You may or may not have heard about the hijacking of the www.hoopla.com domain from Leslie Harpold. If you haven’t, you can read more on the story at Textism, Time is Tight, MetaFilter, and diveintomark.
What’s funny is that I received an email last week “warning” me that burningbird.org and other variations of “burningbird.xxx” were being scooped up and that I was at risk of losing my online identity. Considering that another company had burningbird.com before I ever signed up for burningbird.net, and that searching on Google for “burningbird” always returns my web sites (yes, Google is very good for this type of search), I’m not worried over much about it. Besides, I’ll always have “yasd” and “shelley powers”, as well as me when I look in the mirror, thank you very much.
Take more than a domain name theft to steal me.
And for those who are looking for traces of Leslie Harpold, or a souvenir as Mark would put it, don’t forget the Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource for finding “lost” web material.
I just can’t see any usefulness of the Google API for weblogging.
So you can use it for lookups. To lookup what? We’ve all seem how useful Google lookups are. I still get hits for add morpheus node. And this buys me…what?
Weblogs aren’t “resources”. People use Google to find “resources”. Google lookups work extremely well for persistent resources such as tutorials for CSS or articles on the Giant Squid or such (as I get for my other web sites). They don’t work especially well for weblogs unless the weblog is created for a specific purpose and to be a resource.
Most of us just want to have fun…
The only accurate Google lookups I’ve had are for “burningbird”, “shelley powers”, and “single childless women in their 40’s do any of them feel positive about their situation”. And why would I want to put this as an embedded web services call within my weblog page? I would assume that people could use these phrases in Google to get to my page — they wouldn’t need to use it once they’re at my page.
Embedding a Google SOAP call into my weblog page is only going to add more CPU use every time the page is loaded as well as slow access to the page itself as it waits for the SOAP call to finish processing at Google. If I want to slow up page loading, I can easily add another photograph. I bet my friends who access my weblog via modem would just love me to add yet more bandwidth hogging content.
If I wanted to add searching capability within my weblog, the easiest, most efficient thing for me to do would be just embed a link to Google and attach the phrase to the URL. Then if people want to read more about me, they can, without penalty to the rest.
I am a technologist. I love technology. But there’s nothing that irritates me more than the use of Technology just to use it. Tinkering — that’s cool, and a great learning exercise. Talking about technology because you think it’s neat, or fun, or because it’s something you love, or you use technology in your job — that’s cool, too. Go for it! Have fun! Thanks for sharing! But to get caught up in technology because someone has convinced you that it’s the “geek” thing to do or because you want to get mentioned at Scripting News — phhhut!
I have to ask you all something, what’s more important to you: that you get hits or that people come to your weblog to read what you have to say.
I keep hearing from you all that you’re really only concerned about attracting readers who come to the weblog to read what you say. Yet we’re inundated, drowned, overwhelmed, and suffocated by all of the technological gimmicks that we absolutely must have at our weblogs or perish!
If you want people to come to your weblog and hang around for what you say, then say something interesting, unique, funny, controversial, informative, silly, cute, beautiful, smart, witty, sexy, or any of the above.
We need more sex in weblogging and less technology. There. My pronouncement for the day.
If the fight for freedom of the Internet has a center, that center would be in Australia. I’ve long found that the difficulties inherent with trying to enforce censorship and copyright laws, as well as other related legislation, seem to get tested, first, in this country.
I wrote on the possible effects of South Australian proposed legislation and it’s impact with P2P technologies for O’Reilly in a piece titled Australian Censorship Bill could Impact P2P. To read more about Australian legislation and associated impacts on online civil liberties, check with Electronic Frontiers Australia.
All that discussion about weblog statistic programs and Perl and Python in the last posting. I’m finding this incredible urge to tweak coming over me. The last time this happened, I hit FreeBSD Ports with a vengence and almost maxed my server installing goodies. And play, play, play, play!
I am Techie Woman! Hear me Code!
Playtime for Burningbird today consists of:
— playing with Redland the RDF Application Framework with APIs written in Python, Perl, Tcl, and Java
— Snooping around my server using SAINT to sniff out my network weaknesses, being very careful not to _accidentally_ sniff around any other network as this could be considered a violation of anti-hacking laws
— working on my RDF content management system, making the move to Tomcat and JSP using Jena (nummy)
All of the above necessary work to do for my books.
Don’t you love it when the work you should be doing and the work you want to be doing all come together at the exact same time?