Month: May 2005

I use StatCounter to track the visits to a few of my Web sites. Lately I have discovered a number of visitors that are logged as coming from Private IP Space addresses (10.0.0.0/8, etc.).
I know what’s happening here. These folks are behind proxy servers. When they request the StatCounter object, it is actually requested from the proxy server, which then logs their Private IP address, not the one on the external interface of their proxy server.
I also examine my Apache logs and can easily correlate these visitors to their external IP addresses.
A weird “feature”, but kind of cool, except if you are the security admin for these networks.

The Dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences at Indiana University, Blaise Cronin, maintains an open mind about blogging. [here]

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.

Books are great. I still love to handle a book or magazine. But almost everything I have learned in the last 2 years has come from the Web. I have learned more about Sales and Marketing through blogs than any MBA program. I have learned how to quickly and clearly communicate complex ideas by putting my ideas on the Web for commentary.
Libraries will always exist; attitudes like Dr. Cronin’s will not.
Via Kevin Briody

Gee, want to make those searches even more powerful? How about we track exactly where every person on the Web is going by tracking them using a piece of software that they install on their own computers?
Google Web Accelerator. The latest from Big Brother those folks at Google.
This also explains why Google wanted to buy up all of that dark fiber. You have to plug your proxy servers into something
Doesn’t mean I am not going to try it…
Via Micro Persuasion
O’Reilly Radar has the same paranoid delusions privacy concerns that I do over this product. [here]
John Battelle notes the salient feature of the Google Accelerator at the end of his article.

However, you do start to run all your web surfing habits over Google’s servers, and that, of course, makes Google something of a proxy ISP, with access to all the aggregate data that an ISP like AOL or Comcast has on you. Is that a good thing? Well, yes and no. But net net, it has implications down the road. Very soon, Google will know an awful lot about the world’s surfing habits, well beyond search. Hmmm.

Search Engine Watch has a straight-forward list of the features — limited commentary. [here]
Great comments from Techdirt.[here]
More from TechDirt, pointing to a great post by Tristan Louis.
The usually paranoid TDavid seems to be addicted to the revving icon. [here]
Lifehacker comments.
Google Blog Comments.
Darren Rowse hits for six with this quote from Mike Lambert:

Instead of using a random surfer model, Google can use a real surfer model, based on the aggregate web traffic of the people using their Web Accelerator. They can discover /exactly/ how the Google Juice should flow in the real world.

C|Net’s party-line, facts-only commentary. [here]
Silicon Valley Watcher is prescient enough to mention that “your browsing history might be just a subpoena away from the nearest FBI office”. [here]
More Google Web Accelerator anti-love from Carson McComas. [here]

Rick Segal compares the Microsoft advertising approach to the Marriott advertising approach — Dinosaurs v. blogging/podcasting. [here]
I am not sure why Microsoft is still running this hideous ad campaign. A few thousand copies of Purple Cow need to end up in the Microsoft marketing department.

I miss out on all the cool conferences, like Location Intelligence.
Now, I am not much into GIS, but I have a side-interest in IP to location mapping (the now defunct GrabIP project, as an example), and have been working giving feedback on a project that someone has been building using the type of basic geographic information I gather in the IP database I created.
Now Radar is trying to develop a little buzz for PostgreSQL by discussing how many of the GIS firms use it.
I agree that Postgres is far more advanced than MySQL, but for most Web development, the level of transactional complexity that is available in Postgres is far beyond what is needed.
For example, using Postgres for anything that I do is like using an elephant to open a can of sardines. But using MySQL to manage a complex GIS system would be like an orange trying to drive a Porsche.
Each system has its place in the open source world.

I don’t get the blog fuss that is being raised over Backpack.
Seth is likely bouncing off walls watching this IdeaVirus lift off. This has got early adopter pid IdeaVirus bzzzzzz-agent written all over it.
People…it’s a freakin’ to do list. Get a Hipster PDA and be done with it.
For what it’s worth…more on BackPack here and here and here and here and here and here

Google drops price for Urchin Web Analytics. [here and here and here and here]
StatCounter gives me what I need, thanks.

Chris Selland linked to an article about Steve Jobs that is in the WSJ. [here]
Chris: See my previous post. The subscription model at the WSJ has foiled your attempt to share this with the rest of us.

Business 2.0 is asking how much you would pay to read the NY Times online. [here]
My response: why? I don’t read newspapers anymore. I would pay nothing to read this online, when I can get news free from Reuters, BBC and Yahoo!, and commentary from blogs.
MSM just does not understand. Their model is broken. It is 300 years old, and it is finally succumbing to it’s own dead weight.
The forests of the world are breathing a sigh of relief.
BusinessWeek, trying to support its brethern through it’s lame attempt to “blog”. [here]