Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

If you're worried about what content of yours people are linking to out in the wider web, then rushing off and disabling pingbacks is not the thing to do - they're actually a mechanism used by some blog services to indicate that your content's been linked to by a post. A pingback simply is the URL of the post that's linked to you, sent to you by email or added to the comments of your originating post.

Just because they're part of the same code push that did something stupid, doesn't mean that they're bad too! Sadly LJ has failed to point out just why you might want to use them (along with the similar trackback).

Here's the Wikipedia entry on pingbacks.

(You can take my disapproving comments on the rest of the push as read, along with my "I'm not going to splurge out-of-context comments all over the social web" statement. I'd like to think you all know that I wouldn't be that stupid anyway!)

I've got Flickr set up to send me email when an image gets a comment or added to someone's favourite page. At some point on Saturday afternoon I started getting lots of messages - and the view count on one picture started going ballistic. From the few hundred views it had garnered over the last three years or so, it was suddenly gaining tens of thousands of views an hour.

Strange, I thought, and went back to looking for a decent pair of trousers in an outlet mall near Palm Springs.

By evening views and comments were still marching in, so I delved into the delights of the Flickr stats pages to find out just what had happened. As far as I can tell, at some point on Saturday morning, someone found the picture and posted a link to it on Reddit. That then led to it being added to Digg - and then for some reason people kept Digging it - over 2000 Diggs last time I looked. On a slow Saturday that was enough to get it on the front page, and that led to an explosion of traffic.

By Saturday night, Flickr was telling me that the picture had had over 60 thousand viewings. By the middle of Sunday, it had attracted well over 100 thousand viewings. I'd heard that Digg drove traffic, but I'd never seen it happen to anyone I'd known before.

To put the Digg Effect into perspective, my most popular Flickr image, which had been picked up by popular blogs (including Boing Boing, Engadget and Lifehacker) has only just past the 150 thousand view mark, and that's been over four or so years. The Digg front page has driven around 140 thousand separate people to that image in just over 48 hours - and almost 100 thousand of them came in one 24 hour period.

It's late on Monday now, and things are winding down at last. Something else has caught the attention of the Diggerati, and my picture is slowly falling off the zeitgeist radar. It's been an interesting ride to watch.

The picture?

It's actually kind of apt. No one would have seen that picture if it hadn't been for the machine I'd photographed all those years ago, in an acrylic case in a museum at a scientific research establishment on the Swiss-French border.



The place was CERN, and the computer I'd photographed was Tim Berners Lee's NeXT Cube, the first ever web server. Neither Flickr, nor Digg (nor this blog) would be here if it hadn't been for that machine and the server it hosted.

What comes around, goes around.

I always dreamed of owning a Whole Earth Catalog. Back on Jersey in the 70s and 80s they were the stuff of legend, only noted by reference.

When I found I could subscribe to the Whole Earth Review, thanks to a Bruce Sterling column in one of the first news-stand Interzones, I signed on the dotted line quicker than anything - that email to a WELL address was one of my first ecommerce transactions. I still wanted the catalogues, and I scoured Hay-on-Wye, and got bookseller friends to order me copies of the in-print editions, along with the Sterling-edited Signal, which introduced me to a wider electronic world than the walled garden of JANET. But perhaps the most influential piece of the Whole Earth philosophy was its simple slogan:

"Access to tools and ideas".

Such a simple concept, and such a world changer for someone from an island where 6 miles was a long way, and the single town somewhere you only went when you really really had to (and only then if you were going to be there all day).

So why am I thinking of it today?

There's a line in Cory Doctorow's seasonal email that I'm sure he won't mind me quoting:

"But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they’ve ever been."

It made me realise that we're living with the greatest edition of the Whole Earth Catalog ever, and it's constantly being updated.

This blog is just one page in it, along with yours and the many millions of other pieces of content that are added to the ever-growing web every day. The tutorials I write, the articles and the columns are another set of pages, along with photos that document my life and my friends. Then there are the ever-growing wikis, and the search engines that link them together. It's not just in a box in the office, or on a bookshelf - it goes everywhere we go, and fits in our pockets and on our TV screens.

The connections made by the web mean that the world is a smaller one and a better one. It's worth remembering that the connections we make are the ones that will help us through the years to come - whether they're hard or difficult.

What connections will you make, and what tools and ideas will you share with the world in 2009?

Google has just opened up access to the development builds from the updater tools inside the Chrome browser (you could download always download dev builds from the Chrome site, or build your own copy of Chromium...). You can download a small tool, the Chrome Channel Chooser, to define which branch of the Chrome development tree the built-in updater uses - the slow but stable beta branch, and the fast, but risky, dev channel.

Me?

I'm going for dev. I kind of fancy the ride.

Here, have a 3D tarantula to play with....



It's an interesting Flash 3D demo, and someone's put a lot of work into building an interactive model of a spider.

It seems to make a good cat toy on a multi-monitor set up - and it's the first application I've seen the cats here pay attention to!

Managing a large digital music library can be tricky. Often the album art is missing - and it can be hard to track it down and drop the right image in to your music management tool of chouice. Some, like iTunes, will download images from their associated stores - but they're by their very nature limited to what's in stock. The result is a significant proportion of the library without any cover art.

This afternoon I found a useful tool in the shape of AlbumArt. It's a very basic service that's nothing more than an album art search engine. It's generally accurate, and very easy to use. The only things it's had trouble with so far have been self-issued albums by bands like Marillion, magazine cover CDs, and some compilation albums (which is probably more down to my initial data entry than anything else!).

Recommended.

First there was The Register, then came The Inquirer. Now Mike Magee is back with a new experiment in online IT journalism, The IT Examiner.

The first cut of the site is up, and it's looking interesting - especially as it blends western and eastern news in one place, with journalists based in Bangalore doing much of the writing. I suspect the outsourcing section of the site will be worth following. The site only went live yesterday, so there's not much there yet, but as with all online writing the value is in the corpus, and things should grow pretty rapidly now.

Bit of a theme going on with the site names, Mike!

Once of the reasons I've not been blogging much over the last few days is that I've been getting my head around building Silverlight Deep Zoom applications. It's a surprisingly easy to use technology, and the Deep Zoom Composer tool makes it relatively easy to create the image tiles and pyramids you need to create a smooth zooming experience. It's what the Hard Rock Café has used for its absorbing Memorabilia site.

The only real problem is that Silverlight 2 currently only supports a limited set of mouse actions - and the mouse wheel isn't there. Luckily I found some code from one the Expression team that solved my problem (though I did manage to learn about using C# anonymous delegates as event handlers along the way...). That's what really took the time, but it's given me an application that doesn't need a key press - just a mouse. Click and drag to move around, and scroll to zoom in and out.

[Edit: I've added code to zoom in on a mouse click and to zoom out on shift-click]

So what did I do with what I learnt (apart from writing 3,300 words of magazine tutorial)? As it happens I have a pile of images from a trip down into the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. A collage stitch of my images of the ATLAS detector, down in its cathedral-sized cave, comes in at a hefty 28 megapixels - a little large for Flickr or any other photohosting site. However that's ideal for building a Deep Zoom.

Here's the application I built.

Zoom in and you'll see the engineers at work, and read the text on the eight superconducting magnets that surround the detector core. I've seen things in there I didn't realise were there at first!

While researching a piece on Apollo I came across Adobe's Kuler.

Built to demonstrate the capabilities of the latest versions of Flash and Flex, it's a web-based version of the extremely useful colour space explorer tools in Illustrator CS3 - with an added dose of community. Use the colour space explorer to choose a set of colours, then use rules to find complementary sets, or the appropriate colour triads, or even related shades to a base colour. It's an excellent tool for building colour maps that you can use in your web sites or desktop applications - you can take the RGB values of the colours you choose, or the hex.

What's even neater though, is the community, where people are sharing the colour sets and themes they've defined. A voting system lets you say which themes you liked the most - I'm particularly fond of Japanese Garden...

There are also RSS feeds of the most popular colour themes - so you can stay updated without having to visit the site every day - and OS X users get a Kuler dashboard widget.

An excellent tool for web and graphic designers.

I missed yesterday's news of Cisco's purchase of WebEx. When I came across it on various news sites this morning it gave me something to think about - something I turned into quite a long piece over at IT Pro.

This week has seen duelling green policies from both sides of the political spectrum. One thing they all seem to agree on: air travel is a bad thing, and it needs to become more expensive. Putting the rights and the wrongs of the argument to one side, it's likely we'll see a significant increase in the cost of business travel over the next few years.

So how are we going to cope?

The answer's been with us for a while, and Cisco is now putting its money on the table to link the solution's market leader with its networking equipment. Web conferencing has been around a good few years now, and WebEx and its competitors (like Adobe Connect and Microsoft's Live Meeting) have grown by offering tools to help businesses share information over the Internet. WebEx's investment in what it calls its MediaTone network has been considerable, giving it a hefty private backbone for bandwidth-intensive services - and a hefty advantage over its competition.

Read the rest here.