Remember when the yellow pages used to be big and floppy and there were two of them? A-Z now in one 1616 page volume.

Posted via email from everyday eri

Search for “Santorum” and the top result will land you on this page. I was just alerted to this long running campaign via a friend’s Facebook post. The details of it are documented on Wikipedia. Its part political activism against the US senator’s anti gay remarks, part organic google bomb. Organic in the sense that organic search terms are ones that rise to the top of search engine results pages without manipulation. The wikipedia entry of the campaign to create this neologism (a new word definition) included this account of the request to Google to address the matter. 

In September 2011 Santorum asked Google to intervene by altering the indexing of the content, saying, “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country…To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”^[4] In response to Santorum’s request, a Google spokesperson asserted that Google does not “remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”^[4]

This story strikes me as a kind of keyboard democracy. Its the popularity, interest and linking to this page that is resulting in the high search result. And perhaps some future business for reputation managers out there. 

Posted via email from everyday eri

Posted via email from everyday eri

Erietta: How’s the Daemon crew? All good I trust
Jason: Yeah we are going well. Daemon sent the team to Melbourne for cfobjective
Erietta: Was it good?
Jason: There were some good sessions, Geoff’s varnish talk was very popular
Jason: Varnish is a reverse proxy solution we now use
Erietta: oooh!
Jason: http://www.daemon.com.au/slides/varnish/index.html#slide1
Erietta: I am so dumb now, seriously, I don’t know what any of this stuff means any more. What has become of me?! Is this slide deck html 5?
Jason: Yeah
Erietta: Nice. I still need a dummies translation of what that all means though. I know it means “faster”, thats it. I’m too noob
Jason: Basically you put a server in front of your applications, which takes the request, sends the request on to the server, grabs the html it returns, and caches it locally in memory (can overflow to disk as well). Next request just pulls from the local cache, you can also break your page up into smaller caches each with their own timeouts and then it’s about all the exceptions and rules and varnish makes it easy its veerrrrry efficient, scales very well.
Erietta: OK, so it’s an intermediary server that gets the requests, has a cache of relevant html and serves that up to the next person who is asking for the same thing?
Jason: and all runs on the tiniest server, so bang for buck its stellar
Erietta: hmmmm
Jason: has added benefits like if your application server dies it keeps serving from local cache.
Erietta: So the request from the second person/user/visitor is basically just getting html only and not going to the app server at all.
Jason: yep
Erietta: aaah ok
Jason: Not only that if 10 people simultaneously request while its fetching a new request they either a) get queued behind first at proxy or b) get served old copy if available its really good if you have a 30k newsletter drop that kills your server.
Erietta: How does it differ to the caching engine you made for FarCry a couple of years ago. That had granular caching, if that’s a term I can use i.e. was able to serve new elements (updated content) while serving other cached content.
Jason: well FarCry cache relies on cf threads still. This stands in front dedicated and is waaaaay more efficient. Its written specifically to do this task.
Erietta: and technology agnostic obviously
Jason: it manages memory specifically for this task whereas java memory management is architected for a different purpose
Erietta: that being?
Jason: well objects in code
Erietta: as opposed to pages?
Jason: so in java some objects live longer than others which means the memory is subject to garbage collection a process you can’t directly control. Whereas dedicated caching objects in varnish live until they are told not to live anymore because they were replaced. Java has a machinery in the java virtual machine which is way more complex than straight caching needs to be so varnish memory management is directly allocated and deallocated: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes
Erietta: oh good you just linked me to a life story there. Give me the crib notes #lazyweb ! ;)
Jason: that last paragraph is the explanation, just highlights that the memory is written specifically for the task, not a framework that is flexible but with trade-offs, e.g java
Erietta: 

“Now imagine that another CPU wants to n_bar+++ at the same time, can it do that ? No. Caches operate not on bytes but on some “linesize” of bytes, typically from 8 to 128 bytes in each line. So since the first cpu was busy dealing with n_foo, the second CPU will be trying to grab the same cache-line, so it will have to wait, even through it is a different variable.”

Jason: think Farcry is a framework which makes it easy to build apps but that framework means the trade-off is performance if you built every single page on a website from scratch with a view to optimising that page you’d be 1000x more efficient than using a framework
Erietta: got it. So what other performance improvements have been made
to the FarCry framework while I haven’t been watching?
Jason: we rewrote caching :P testing it as we speak. Uses a new algorithm which is dynamic replacement cache. It also factors in memory used into the caching mechanism
Erietta: dude, that page is hard core. WHAT DOES IT MEAN!
Jason: hehe ok so previously in FarCry the way we cached was using a number we made up per content type of objects cached e.g. 1000 for html. Now we have 1 single cache which does both objects and html snippets and it dynamically resizes itself depending on what’s going on so it checks the oldgen part of memory in the jvm to see if we are at 70%. Additionally its clever in the way it chooses what objects to evict in that it will be optimised so pages like homepage and news landing page etc aren’t ever evicted before a news article from 2006 so what you see on that dump is the resizes and the memory stats and hits vs evicts. 81452 hits vs 6743 misses is an awesome hit ratio. 8% miss rate which means only 8% of those object requests needed to go to the db (or if a webskin had to be rebuilt)
Erietta: Sweet. That’s cool. What about performance of the site tree in FarCry? Has that improved? From memory it was using its own JS library?
Jason: haha nope still same tree. We are using twitter bootstrap for our forms now on some of our projects. Additionally Matt’s refactored permissions so anyone can do them not just a dev, like we could hand over the webtop to a producer to configure for the client.

Good to see a government department engage in a relevant medium.

www.thecommitmentproject.net

See the full gallery on Posterous

Not that I’m against it. In fact I’m curious. It’s not just the notices — app updates form a compelling notice too, so take note developers, bug fixes just may be an opportunity for advertising.

So today I hear that HP, faced with mounting competition and a more focussed business strategy are bowing out of consumer electronics.  Obviously the competition is too fierce and their efforts not enough. While their electronics generate the most revenue they reap the least profit. I must admit that between an iPad and a netbook I may choose the former, but I am so glad I have the latter for now.

Its a sad day really – I see HP as a company that makes a real effort to the complete design experience from visual design to the software experience and industrial design of their machines. I haven’t experienced HP Synergy, an OS that reportedly:

populates the tablet with emails, calendar entries, contacts, photos and other information pulled from the user’s web accounts including Google, Facebook, Twitter, MobileMe, LinkedIn, Photobucket, Dropbox and others. This saves the user from having to open up separate apps for each service.

It just seems that for now users are happy to jump in and out of apps and that a seamless data experience is not compelling enough to make a dent in the mass market. There is also the comparison that users make with well established app stores of Android and Apple and the beautiful industrial design of Apple. And the “it” factor. Who can compete with cool?

See the full gallery on Posterous

Many people have questioned and blogged about the very generous and encouraging web statistics produced by Posterous analytics versus Google stats. I have Google Analytics on my posterous blog and of course noticed the discrepency. I always thought the stats were most probably counting bot visits. Whatever those numbers were measuring it seems the fault has been rectified and my Posterous page views have been sober for a fair while now with pages recording realistic numbers since May 2011.

My post “They keep Painting We keep Painting” recorded:

• 15 views on Posterous
• 2 on Google Analytics

My post kikki-k notebooks recorded:

• 483 views on Posterous
• 1 on Google Analytics

I love the Posterous service and I know the developers work hard on the product. I have received next day emails from the founders answering bug tickets. Unfortunately the guys, usually quick to respond on so many other issues have been quiet on this one.

This is no big news, but I just thought that that I should post some content to counter the blog posts on the subject that are now outdated.

Banner image on Snoop Dogg's Facebook Shop

At a FED event in April, I asked Dean McEvoy co founder of group buying site Spreets a question about the deals function. What was the point of  quotas for deals considering that Spreets is so popular, it is inevitable that all deals go ahead? He replied and said “watch this space”. Well, nothing has happened so far in terms of innovations on Spreets or any other group buying site. But something has happened on Facebook. With Snoop Dogg.

Dealing and sharing on Spreets

Last week blogger OMG with Emily on FBi radio’s Up for it program, was talking about Snoop’s latest entrepreneurial venture. If you shop on Snoop, the more likes a product gets the bigger the discount. So you can get a $7.99 fragrance with 300 likes for $5.99. Bargain!

Volume discount via liking on Snoop's Facebook shop

The Spreets deal quota had a function when Spreets launched. The mechanism motivated people to share a deal they wanted tipped. Of course it still serves a purpose in a sense. It’s a visual sign that there are conditions and a time limit to the offer. But if Spreets is relying on people getting paid to refer friends, the original sharing imperative is most probably waning. Clearly Snoop’s is a different proposition. People don’t have to commit to a deal to influence the price. Somehow I suspect that more Like notifications would be appearing for Snoop’s shop. Snoop Dogg may just be the most innovative playa in the social shopping group buying space right now. It will be interesting to see if any of his ideas are appropriated.

Thank you to Emily Copland for sharing this and other pop culture gems. Check out her blog: http://www.omgwithemily.com/