Inside View from Ireland

Blinkx Online

I SAW TWO USERS arrive yesterday here after using the online version of Blinkx. This search engine is way-Alpha--few bells and whistles but a nice clean look and feel. Plus this: blinkx caches lots of pages of results and presents them to you in groups of 10 with simple rollovers of numbers on top of the results screen.

Public e-voting failure

EFF -- "In news at once frightening and reassuring, a Sequoia electronic voting machine suffered a very public failure last week during a live demo. The machine worked fine with an English-language ballot, but failed to record votes with the Spanish-language ballot."

FOAF Galway

EIREPRENEUR -- James Corbett points to information about Marc Canter's visit to the Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web being held in NUIG on the first two days of September.

Comment spam round 7

TYPEPAD -- I attract fewer than 10 comment spammers a week while serving a minimum of 1000 page views a day here. That's bad news for other people who don't have industry-strength comment spam controls. With fragile defenses, they're getting to service my previous (around 15 a day) spam burden.

Inside We the Media

OREILLY -- The most unexpected item in We the Media is seeing my name on a page. It's a casual citation but significant to me since it's the first time I've appeared with name spelled correctly in a hardback book. There are many compelling reasons to read this book. And if you're involved in microcontent publishing, you need to get the book.

RSS Calendar

RSS CALENDAR -- I must integrate the totally excellent RSS calendar to my blog because I'm using the blog more like a Control Panel or public planning conference anyway.

Representations of digital identity

ACM -- At the Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference in Chicago (6-10 Nov 04), danah boyd, Michele Chang and Liz Goodman have a workshop called “Representations of Digital Identity” that brings together interesting people working on how people represent and manage identity in a digital environment. They are looking for designers, technologists, theorists and other invested individuals.

Come to blogs for answers

USEIT -- Jakob Nielsen identifies how targeted information placed into weblogs is changing the Web experience. "A major change over the years has been a declining emphasis on using search to identify good sites as such. Rather than hunt for sites to explore and use in depth, users now hunt for specific answers. The Web as a whole has thus become one agglomerated resource for people who use search engines to dredge up specific pages related to specific needs, without caring which sites supply the pages."

Money from e-books

GULKER -- The longest running electronic publication on the Internet is The Irish Emigrant. The second-longest running e-publication is TidBits. These are successful examples of extreme publishing, as Chris Gulker explains.

Red cards to government websites

THE POST -- Adrian Weckler thinks many State-funded websites need spruced up and he names the losers. What he does not mention is many of the pop-up-happy government sites will lose viewers who have patched their Windows XP operating system. Unless you watch the thin sliver of space below your address bar, you won't see that your browser is blocking a required pop-up. I don't think the average user is smart enough to see this happening. They will quickly bore at the lack of navigation and click off to somewhere else. So the people on Weckler's hit list should take note.