taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Alex Payne writing about “Fever”, a new link-blog aggregator app:

Fever’s proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs.

Fever is commercial software, costing $30. Alternatively, I’ve been doing something very similar for the past few years using SpicyLinks, which is free (if a great deal less pretty on the UI end).

It’s nice to see the idea getting some polish, though. ;)

Alex does raise an interesting point towards the end:

Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I’d love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs — and, indeed, linking outside one’s own site — just aren’t as prevalent in those communities.

True.

Tags: aggregation, atom, blogs, feeds, fever, link-blogs, Links, rss, techmeme

This site offers a nifty utility for dealing with those annoying sites which offer only partial text content in their RSS and Atom feeds.

Given an RSS or Atom feed’s URL, the CGI will iterate through the posts in the feed, scrape the full text of each post from its HTML page, and re-generate a new RSS feed containing the full text.

The one thing it’s missing is a one-click bookmarklet version. So here it is:

Full-text RSS Bookmarklet

Drag that to your bookmarks menu, and next time you’re looking at a partial-text feed, click the bookmark to transform the viewed page into the full-text version. Enjoy!

Tags: atom, blogs, bookmarklet, feeds, full-text, fulltextrss, hacks, javascript, rss

The Irish Internet Association have a weblog at blog.iia.ie. Back on January 30, this had a Technorati rank of 587893, with 21 inbound links from 14 blogs. That’s about what you’d expect — comparable with Chris Horn’s blog, for instance.

However, fast forward to today, and in the intervening 3 months, it seems to have suddenly shot up to 23,322 inbound links from 550 blogs, giving it a Technorati rank of 6,870.

To put that in perspective, that puts it comfortably in the top 3 in the Irish Blogs Technorati Top 100 — beating Damien Mulley’s 7,859, but just short of Donncha O’Caoimh’s stellar 3,434 — and ahead of these other gods of the Irish blogosphere:

• Tom Raftery (14,800, 9,224 links)
• THE Graham Linehan (13,165)
• Slugger O’Toole (17,279, 2,941 links)
• Twenty Major (18,001)
• Nialler9 (24,286)

Pretty impressive ;)

I was curious, so I went investigating. Of those thousands of inbound links, here’s some samples of the most recent, pasted from the Technorati inbound links page:

barkingmoose

Atacand Free instant online credit report Application credit card Cheap Paxil Does your credit score Household bank credit card application Apr for credit cards Buy Cephalexin? Aciphex Cheap Feldene Zovirax Risperdal Buy Naprosyn, Propecia Credit score codes Poor credit score, Propecia Uk Canada credit card online application Motrin Business credit score Cheap Cialis Jelly 50 Cent Free Ringtones Celexa How to improve my credit score Buy Inderal

4 days ago in barkingmoose by barkingmoose · Authority: 3

The Peninsula’s Edge

Jc penny credit card application Credit cards 1.99 apr ny Affect credit score For credit score American express credit card application Freee credit report Instant fleet 0 apr credit card application? Hydrocodone For low credit scores, No credit instant approval credit cards Annual creditreport.com, Tramadol Credit reporting service Configuration VPN Cheap credit reports. Buy Premarin Carisoprodol Soma Propecia Generic

6 days ago in The Peninsula’s Edge by ricsmith510 · Authority: 9

The Incredible Blog

Prepaid credit card uk Phentrimine Cheap Zovirax: Calan Highest credit score Ambien Valtrex: Ultram 3 credit reporting agencies Credit cards online application Instant approval student credit cards, Apr balance transfer credit cards Free government credit report Transunion free credit report Credit card debt bankruptcy? Propecia Propecia Uk! Correcting credit reports Cialis Uk Credit rating report Buy Synthroid Instant capital one 0 interest credit card application

7 days ago in The Incredible Blog · Authority: 1

Quilters’ Blogs

Annualcreditreport Instantly instant free online credit report Credit cards instant approval Guaranteed instant approval credit cards Lexapro Get my credit score, Card consolidation credit debt financial internet Chevron credit card services. Risperdal Lower credit card debt VPN connection One credit card application Xanax Viagra! Vasotec Diazepam Fix my credit report Credit report bureau. Cialis Soft Tabs! Ativan? Secured loans to increase credit score Cheap Amaryl Cheap Prednisone Alprazolam! Cheap 7 days ago in Quilters’ Blogs · Authority: 5

TPN :: Martial Arts Explorer

Luvox Credit score of Plavix 50 Cent Free Ringtones, Cheap Elavil? Free consumer credit report: Famvir Improve credit score fast Phentermine Online Zovirax Cialis Soft Tabs Apr for credit cards! Ultram Zoloft Credit card deal 0 Deltasone! VPN: Cheap Cardura Credit score rankings! Annual credit report .com Interest rate credit score: Carisoprodol Flagyl ER Online Cialis Soft Tabs Enable VPN 0 apr credit card application Free business credit report Ambien Low 7 days ago in TPN :: Martial Arts Explorer · Authority: 56

Take a look at the ‘inbound links’ list — thousands more just like that.

All of the affected blogs have been hacked to deliver these spam links. They run unpatched versions of Wordpress vulnerable to a major security hole. On a casual visit, their pages seem fine — but “View Source”, scroll to the bottom, and there are thousands of spam links for drugs, ringtones, cheap credit, etc. on each one, exactly as above, and as described by Kevin Burton in his description of the current epidemic of blog spam.

How did links to the IIA’s blog wind up in this collection?

It’s worth noting that the IIA’s blog does not display the same symptoms — the links aren’t present on their pages.

However, this post provided a good tip as to what has happened. Those infected blog pages point, in turn, to other infected blogs. Somewhere within the IIA’s blog setup, there’s a page inserted by a bad guy, collecting thousands of illicit links from thousands of other infected sites — and sure enough, Irish Web Watcher found it on the IIA’s site — here it is.

Looks like the IIA have a pretty major disinfection job on their hands, and urgently — there’s already a lot of spammy results appearing in the Google index from that site, and the next step after that is usually removal from the index once Google notice it.

Tags: blogs, iia, ireland, security, technorati, wordpress

Intriguing! Via Glynn Moody comes an interesting new site, Pulse of Open Source:

To highlight open source activity on Twitter, I have launched a new web application today called The Pulse of Open Source. This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter. You can follow this stream by simply bookmarking the site and visiting regularly or by adding the RSS feed to your feed reader. You can also create a Twitter account and add the individuals you’d like to follow to your own Twitter friends list if you’d prefer. There is also a mobile version of the site for on-the-go viewing.

I’m not entirely convinced it makes sense — the “open source community” is a pretty wide and amorphous concept, covering “enterprisey” types like Iona, to conference organisers, to web standards guys to GNOME developers. That’s a wide range.

However, that site links to the original, and a version which resonates better: PulseOfPDX.com, ‘the stream of Portland’s collective consciousness‘. Basically, this is a local syndication site, with microblogging from a community of local Twitterers. Similar to the “Planet” concept, which aggregates posts from multiple weblogs into a new ‘river of news’ combined feed, as seen on Planet Antispam, Planet Perl, Planet.journals.ie, but for off-the-cuff Twitter microblog comments. It’s a microplanet, to coin a phrase.

I think I might set up one of these for Ireland… what a great idea!

Update: Ted Leung posted about this today as well, I see, linking to this call for an “out-of-the-box” Twitter aggregator:

In theory, this whole pulse idea could be packaged up to be as easily deployable as “planet” sites. Here, “pulse” is the operational brand-name of aggregating Twitter accounts, where as “planet” is the tried and true operational brand-name of aggregating blogs.

I think I still prefer “microplanet” ;)

Update 2: check out IrishPulse!

Tags: blogs, communities, planet, syndication, twitter

For the benefit of other Technorati API users…

In a comment on this entry, Padraig Brady mentioned that his blog had mysteriously disappeared from the Irish Blogs Top 100 list.

I investigated, and found something odd — it seems Technorati has made a change to their bloginfo API, now listing weblogs with their ‘rank’, but without some of the important metadata, like ‘inboundblogs’, ‘inboundlinks’, and with a ‘lastupdate’ time set to the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT), in the API. Here’s an example:

<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN"
                 "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
    <result>
        <url>http://www.pixelbeat.org</url>
                    <weblog>
                <name>Pádraig Brady</name>
                <url>http://www.pixelbeat.org</url>
                <rssurl></rssurl>
                <atomurl></atomurl>
                <inboundblogs></inboundblogs>
                <inboundlinks></inboundlinks>
                <lastupdate>1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT</lastupdate>
                <rank>74830</rank>
            </weblog>
                            </result>
</document>
</tapi>

Compare that with this lookup result, on my own blog:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN"
                 "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
    <result>
        <url>http://taint.org</url>
                    <weblog>
                <name>taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog</name>
                <url>http://taint.org</url>
                <rssurl>http://taint.org/feed</rssurl>
                <atomurl>http://taint.org/feed/atom</atomurl>
                <inboundblogs>143</inboundblogs>
                <inboundlinks>227</inboundlinks>
                <lastupdate>2008-02-12 11:48:10 GMT</lastupdate>
                <rank>43404</rank>
            </weblog>
                            <inboundblogs>143</inboundblogs>
                            <inboundlinks>227</inboundlinks>
            </result>
</document>
</tapi>

This bug had caused a number of blogs to be dropped from the list, since I was using “inboundblogs and inboundlinks == 0″ as an indication that a blog was not registered with Technorati.

It’s now worked around in my code, although a side-effect is that blogs which have this set will appear with question-marks in the ‘inboundblogs’ and ‘inboundlinks’ columns, and will perform poorly in the ‘ranked by inbound link count’ table (unsurprisingly).

I’ve posted a query to the support forum — let’s see what the story is.

Tags: api, bloginfo, blogs, bugs, irishblogs, technorati

It appears a public relations firm, Edelman’s, recently performed a phone survey which concluded that bloggers are the “least trusted” group of authority figures source of information in Ireland. This has been widely reported:

on Edelman Dublin’s blog:

When we consider who we trust the most as a spokesperson in Ireland, the most trusted sources of information include, financial or industry analysts at 62%, followed by a doctor or healthcare specialist at 57%, an NGO representative at 57% and academics at 53%. Bloggers are the least trusted at 7%.

at Silicon Republic:

Bloggers have emerged as the “least trusted” group in the country.

and on ElectricNews.net:

“What has been interesting to note in this year’s findings is the apparent low standings of bloggers and social media in general,” said [Mark Cahalane, managing director of Edelman Dublin]. “One interpretation of the survey would be that bloggers have now entered the mainstream and people no longer distinguish between blogs and ordinary websites. This is also reflected by the fact that numerous high profile bloggers are widely quoted in the media.”

However, as Damien noted, Piaras Kelly raised a very significant point about this – ‘the people surveyed for the research had to fit a certain demographic, including having to be aged between 35-64.’ [...] ‘A Generational gap is evident.’ This press release corroborates that. Sure enough, most blog readers (and writers) would tend to be of the younger generation — a pretty key point, one would assume, but one that most of the non-blogger coverage has omitted ;)

(Update: the term “authority figure” wasn’t quite correct; replaced with what Edelman themselves use, “source of information”.)

Tags: age, blogging, blogs, crumblies, edelmans, generation-gap, ireland, surveys

Damien posted an interesting suggestion for the Irish Blogs Top 100 the other day — during discussion of which, it emerged that there were a few overlooked Irish blogs which hadn’t yet shown up on the planet.journals.ie Irish blogs aggregator, and therefore were not appearing in the Top 100. These were:

• Twenty Major (oops! a major omission, sorry Twenty — he’d moved from a Blogspot URL to his own domain)
• Linden Lifestyles, an Irish-based Second Life accessories blog
• John Handelaar’s blog
• and Donncha O’Caoimh’s InPhotos.org.

Anyway, they’re in now. When I first spun up the script and checked the results, though I was a bit shocked and had to do a bit of a double-take — at number 1, far beyond Damien’s number 2, was InPhotos.org, with a Technorati Rank of 1 and 102,857 inbound links from 88,772 blogs, compared to Damien’s Rank of 7946 with 1,606 links from 519 blogs.

Insane! I guess being in the default Wordpress install makes a bit of difference there ;)

Interestingly, InPhotos.org, with a Technorati Authority of 88,434, is far beyond the most popular blog listed on the Technorati Popular Blogs page. It seems that page is a hand-tweaked set of blogs, and not just a “Technorati global Top 100″, then, despite what one might naively assume…

PS: Damien’s original suggestion, btw, was to measure blog popularity using Google Reader and Feedburner’s audience stats. However, I can’t do that without a public API I’m allowed to scrape. Does anyone know of one?

Also worth noting that I recently added del.icio.us bookmarks as a metric of popularity, to go with the Technorati stuff. It’s interesting to see how those rankings differ — bloggers and bookmarkers don’t always agree, with bookmarkers preferring MP3s, Second Life, and politics I reckon.

Tags: blogs, damien-mulley, donncha-o-caoimh, inphotos.org, ireland, irishblogs, journals.ie, technorati, top100

The eagle-eyed may have spotted a change that took place a month or two ago in the taint.org configuration — I ditched the old weblog tagline.

Previously, this weblog was titled “taint.org: Happy Software Prole”. This title had been in place since around October 2003, when Daniel Lyons wrote a particularly idiotic article for Forbes entitled “Linux’s Hit Men”, which I took umbrage to:

Here we go again — the old ‘free software is communism’ line [...] The article goes on to bemoan how software companies who write proprietary extensions into GPL-licensed software, have to comply with the terms of the license. It’s all a bit of an obvious dig — but I am looking forward to the follow-up article — that’s the one where the author bemoans how commercial software companies send out their ‘enforcers’ to extort money from companies who don’t bother paying the royalties and runtime license fees their licenses require.

As an free/open-source-software guy, I happily adopted ‘happy software prole’ as an absurd tagline, in the spirit of detournement. Fast-forward to 3.5 years on, however, and I’d say most people can’t even remember the Forbes article, or that Daniel Lyons guy! So that tagline was a bit old and busted, really.

On top of this, I’d noticed something I do in my weblog reading — I’ve started renaming blogs in the feed reader from their fancy title, to simply the name of the author.

I’ve found that when reading blogs, I’m interested in who’s writing. When skimming through the feeds of a morning, having to spend 5 seconds to recall that “ByteSurgery.com” is Robin Blandford is just a wee bit superfluous, sorry Robin. ;)

As a favour for readers, I’ve saved them the trouble, and renamed the blog to be quite explicit about who’s writing; the taint.org tagline is now just “taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog”. Let’s face it — it’s a bit functional. Hopefully it’s helpful, though!

(And finally, it gives me the edge in the ongoing Google war against the non-me “Justin Masons” out there… and against a heart surgeon and a Texan basketball player, I need it. ;)

Tags: blogging, blogs, meta, tagline, taint.org, weblog

Well, that was fun! Taint.org didn’t make the shortlists, but I went along anyway just to hang out — and lots of chat was had accordingly. Got to finally meet up with a few people I’d chatted with online, like Nialler9 — and with a few old friends I don’t get to see often enough: Antoin, Elana, Brendan, Clare Dillon (ex-Iona!), and another ex-Ionian, Aisling Mackey. A good laugh.

Have to say though, it seems a vote from me was the kiss of death in many of the categories: Sarah Carey, Blogorrah, Ireland from a Polish perspective, and (the late lamented) TCAL all got my thumbs-up in the shortlist voting, and all wound up missing out on the chunk’o'lucite. Sorry about that guys. ;)

Thanks again to Damien for organising the whole do! It’s great to have an event like this to bring each of our disparate blogs physically together for a bit of community.

By the way I’d like to point out that, in contrast to the Blogorrah Bock the Robber mafiosi, I had a real moustache… ;)

Tags: blogging, blogs, dublin, iba2007, ireland, irishblogawards

A quick note; the Irish Blog Awards shortlisting votes are about to end later today. I’ve been nominated in the long list (thanks!), for best technology blog — feel free to vote for me if you like ;)

Update: boo, no shortlisting. Still, probably my own fault, I was a bit too wishy-washy with the vote hustling! Maybe next year…

Tags: awards, blogging, blogs, irish-blog-awards, irishblogs, meta

Over on the Technorati Top 100 of Irish Blogs list, I’ve noticed something; quite a few of the listings have stopped publishing, such as number 5, Tom Murphy’s Natterjackpr.com.

I’m wondering — should no-longer-publishing blogs be listed? Technorati still keeps their ranking high — clearly old data is not expired from the Technorati database for at least a year. But maybe my scripts should use last-post-published time, from planet.journals.ie where available, and discard blogs that haven’t put anything up in something like 4 months.

What do you think?

Tags: blogs, irishblogs, technorati, top-100

The previous post was pretty popular, and one of the requests was for a regularly-updated listing. So here it is: http://taint.org/technorati/

Since Technorati limit daily queries to about 500 per day (iirc), and there are quite a few more blogs in the Irish blogs list, I plan to update it on a nightly basis, with each set of blogs updating on different days. This should result in the figures staying more-or-less up to date without hammering T’rati too much.

Tags: blogging, blogs, hacks, ireland, top100

So, I was thinking about the various Irish blog aggregators, Planet.journals.ie, IrishBlogs.ie, and IrishBlogs.info. Michele’s Irishblogs.info attempts to “rank” the blogs by hits, but many of the Irish webloggers don’t include that hit-counting HTML snippet in their web pages, so quite a few are probably missing; on top of that, RSS readers don’t count. It lists me as #3, which I knew was definitely wrong, anyway ;)

However, it occurred to me that an alternative way to compute a “top 100″ would be to use the Technorati rank of each blog, and make a table based on that; that’d measure the blogs by Technorati’s readership-estimation algorithm, which may still be faulty, of course, but worth a try… I was curious, so I gave it a go, and here’s the results. Enjoy!

Update: This table is no longer up-to-date — a much fresher version is now available over here, and will be updated regularly.

• Top 100 by rank / inbound blog links
• Top 100 by inbound links

Top 100 by rank / inbound blog links:

Position	Rank	Inbound blogs	Inbound links	Blog
1	2940	638	1931	http://www.tomrafteryit.net/
2	6636	371	1280	http://www.mulley.net/
3	8231	315	625	http://twentymajor.blogspot.com/
4	10984	249	512	http://www.natterjackpr.com/
5	15720	181	409	http://www.avalon5.com/
6	18897	151	315	http://irish.typepad.com/irisheyes/
7	19364	148	472	http://www.gavinsblog.com/
8	21214	136	385	http://www.blather.net/
9	21715	133	968	http://ocaoimh.ie/
10	22210	132	399	http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/
11	22258	130	323	http://thetorturegarden.blogspot.com/
12	23921	122	351	http://www.dehora.net/journal/
13	24143	121	199	http://www.atlanticblog.com/
14	24828	118	174	http://freestater.blogspot.com/
15	25570	115	260	http://arseblog.com/WP
16	25570	115	246	http://tcal.net/
17	27174	109	252	http://www.digitalrights.ie/
18	27189	110	169	http://cork2toronto.blogspot.com/
19	28004	106	731	http://taint.org/
20	29008	103	286	http://unitedirelander.blogspot.com/
21	29008	103	232	http://www.nialler9.com/blog
22	29008	103	175	http://clickhere.blogs.ie/
23	29978	100	270	http://www.mneylon.com/blog
24	31954	95	901	http://www.irishelection.com/
25	33397	91	231	http://memex.naughtons.org/
26	34121	89	370	http://siciliannotes.blogspot.com/
27	35022	86	285	http://www.sineadgleeson.com/blog
28	35022	86	146	http://www.cfdan.com/
29	35858	84	904	http://www.pkellypr.com/blog
30	36223	84	255	http://www.thinkingoutloud.biz/
31	37735	80	175	http://www.dervala.net/
32	39719	76	207	http://backseatdrivers.blogspot.com/
33	40078	76	229	http://fdelondras.blogspot.com/
34	40276	75	203	http://www.mediangler.com/
35	40821	74	128	http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com/blog
36	44148	69	122	http://outofambit.blogspot.com/
37	45075	67	147	http://www.podleaders.com/
38	45075	67	87	http://www.aidanf.net/
39	45729	66	238	http://www.argolon.com/
40	46477	65	201	http://www.sarahcarey.ie/
41	46477	65	191	http://disillusionedlefty.blogspot.com/
42	47586	64	141	http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog
43	48011	63	66	http://www.branedy.net/
44	52278	58	398	http://dossing.blogspot.com/
45	54710	56	155	http://redmum.blogspot.com/
46	55758	55	103	http://richarddelevan.blogspot.com/
47	56390	54	148	http://donal.wordpress.com/
48	56390	54	129	http://prettycunning.net/blog
49	57527	53	104	http://www.dublinblog.ie/
50	58724	52	167	http://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog
51	58724	52	102	http://www.inter-actions.biz/blog/
52	59920	51	101	http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/
53	60315	51	76	http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/
54	62483	49	112	http://www.infactah.com/
55	62885	49	118	http://mamanpoulet.blogspot.com/
56	63869	48	229	http://icecreamireland.com/
57	68503	45	93	http://www.web2ireland.org/
58	68503	45	75	http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/
59	68503	45	73	http://vipglamour.net/
60	68824	45	193	http://imeall.blogspot.com/
61	72248	43	81	http://planetpotato.blogs.com/planet_potato_an_irish_bl/
62	73843	42	149	http://lettertoamerica.blogs.com/
63	73843	42	119	http://www.kenmc.com/
64	73843	42	102	http://www.pmooney.net/blogsphe.nsf
65	73843	42	70	http://bohanna.typepad.com/pureplay/
66	75725	41	107	http://bonhom.ie/
67	75725	41	93	http://www.bibliocook.com/
68	75725	41	78	http://shittyfirstdraft.blogspot.com/
69	77680	40	225	http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/
70	77680	40	134	http://www.stdlib.net/%7Ecolmmacc
71	77957	40	82	http://davesrants.com/
72	79732	39	103	http://ricksbreakfastblog.blogspot.com/
73	80012	39	92	http://manuel-estimulo.blogspot.com/
74	81970	38	91	http://gingerpixel.com/
75	82240	38	248	http://www.linksheaven.com/
76	84304	37	726	http://thelimerick.blogspot.com/
77	84304	37	127	http://www.ryderdiary.com/
78	84304	37	83	http://morgspace.net/
79	84304	37	64	http://talideon.com/weblog/
80	86729	36	140	http://www.damienblake.com/
81	86729	36	124	http://irisheagle.blogspot.com/
82	86729	36	102	http://blog.rymus.net/
83	86729	36	65	http://www.adammaguire.com/blog
84	87068	36	272	http://progressiveireland.blogspot.com/
85	89814	35	145	http://www.windsandbreezes.org/
86	92646	34	43	http://football-corner.blogspot.com/
87	95258	33	207	http://www.fustar.org/
88	95258	33	171	http://www.iced-coffee.com/
89	95258	33	82	http://www.bytesurgery.com/gearedup
90	101881	31	90	http://phoblacht.blogspot.com/
91	101881	31	70	http://counago-and-spaves.blogspot.com/
92	101881	31	58	http://www.firstpartners.net/blog
93	105668	30	82	http://realitycheckdotie.blogspot.com/
94	109643	29	142	http://bifsniff.com/cartoons/
95	109643	29	75	http://dave.antidisinformation.com/
96	109643	29	60	http://conoroneill.com/
97	109643	29	55	http://www.minds.may.ie/%7Edez/serendipity/
98	109643	29	51	http://dublin.metblogs.com/
99	110005	29	78	http://www.janinedalton.com/blog
100	110005	29	54	http://www.runningwithbulls.com/blog

List by inbound links:

Position	Rank	Inbound blogs	Inbound links	Blog
1	2940	638	1931	http://www.tomrafteryit.net/
2	6636	371	1280	http://www.mulley.net/
3	21715	133	968	http://ocaoimh.ie/
4	35858	84	904	http://www.pkellypr.com/blog
5	31954	95	901	http://www.irishelection.com/
6	28004	106	731	http://taint.org/
7	84304	37	726	http://thelimerick.blogspot.com/
8	8231	315	625	http://twentymajor.blogspot.com/
9	258886	13	519	http://newswire99.blogspot.com/
10	10984	249	512	http://www.natterjackpr.com/
11	19364	148	472	http://www.gavinsblog.com/
12	164780	20	451	http://inao.blogspot.com/
13	15720	181	409	http://www.avalon5.com/
14	22210	132	399	http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/
15	52278	58	398	http://dossing.blogspot.com/
16	21214	136	385	http://www.blather.net/
17	34121	89	370	http://siciliannotes.blogspot.com/
18	23921	122	351	http://www.dehora.net/journal/
19	156276	21	336	http://www.ebbybrett.co.uk/blog
20	22258	130	323	http://thetorturegarden.blogspot.com/
21	18897	151	315	http://irish.typepad.com/irisheyes/
22	29008	103	286	http://unitedirelander.blogspot.com/
23	35022	86	285	http://www.sineadgleeson.com/blog
24	87068	36	272	http://progressiveireland.blogspot.com/
25	239963	14	271	http://www.thehealthtechblog.com/
26	29978	100	270	http://www.mneylon.com/blog
27	25570	115	260	http://arseblog.com/WP
28	36223	84	255	http://www.thinkingoutloud.biz/
29	27174	109	252	http://www.digitalrights.ie/
30	82240	38	248	http://www.linksheaven.com/
31	977738	3	248	http://www.tomgriffin.org/the_green_ribbon/
32	25570	115	246	http://tcal.net/
33	45729	66	238	http://www.argolon.com/
34	29008	103	232	http://www.nialler9.com/blog
35	33397	91	231	http://memex.naughtons.org/
36	40078	76	229	http://fdelondras.blogspot.com/
37	63869	48	229	http://icecreamireland.com/
38	77680	40	225	http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/
39	208904	16	210	http://www.anlionra.com/
40	471327	7	208	http://www.ravenfamily.org/sam/
41	39719	76	207	http://backseatdrivers.blogspot.com/
42	95258	33	207	http://www.fustar.org/
43	40276	75	203	http://www.mediangler.com/
44	46477	65	201	http://www.sarahcarey.ie/
45	637233	5	200	http://armchaircelts.co.uk/
46	24143	121	199	http://www.atlanticblog.com/
47	280786	12	199	http://conann.com/
48	68824	45	193	http://imeall.blogspot.com/
49	46477	65	191	http://disillusionedlefty.blogspot.com/
50	637233	5	182	http://www.everysecondpaycheck.com/blog
51	164524	20	181	http://irishlinks.blogspot.com/
52	542250	6	176	http://www.dublinka.com/
53	29008	103	175	http://clickhere.blogs.ie/
54	37735	80	175	http://www.dervala.net/
55	24828	118	174	http://freestater.blogspot.com/
56	155943	21	172	http://www.jamesgalvin.com/
57	95258	33	171	http://www.iced-coffee.com/
58	164524	20	171	http://irishcraftworker.typepad.com/an_irish_craftworkers_goo/
59	27189	110	169	http://cork2toronto.blogspot.com/
60	58724	52	167	http://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog
61	141242	23	164	http://atp.datagate.net.uk/blog
62	148304	22	159	http://www.lifewithouttoast.com/
63	184241	18	158	http://funferal.org/
64	54710	56	155	http://redmum.blogspot.com/
65	73843	42	149	http://lettertoamerica.blogs.com/
66	56390	54	148	http://donal.wordpress.com/
67	45075	67	147	http://www.podleaders.com/
68	155943	21	147	http://dublinopinion.com/
69	35022	86	146	http://www.cfdan.com/
70	89814	35	145	http://www.windsandbreezes.org/
71	109643	29	142	http://bifsniff.com/cartoons/
72	195745	17	142	http://podcasting.ie/podcast
73	47586	64	141	http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog
74	86729	36	140	http://www.damienblake.com/
75	223280	15	137	http://thegurrier.com/
76	77680	40	134	http://www.stdlib.net/%7Ecolmmacc
77	980795	3	131	http://www.sineadcochrane.com/
78	56390	54	129	http://prettycunning.net/blog
79	40821	74	128	http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com/blog
80	84304	37	127	http://www.ryderdiary.com/
81	86729	36	124	http://irisheagle.blogspot.com/
82	44148	69	122	http://outofambit.blogspot.com/
83	73843	42	119	http://www.kenmc.com/
84	62885	49	118	http://mamanpoulet.blogspot.com/
85	135121	24	117	http://nellysgarden.blogspot.com/
86	195745	17	115	http://blog.infurious.com/
87	542250	6	114	http://ainelivia.typepad.com/aine_livia_at_the_midnigh/
88	62483	49	112	http://www.infactah.com/
89	75725	41	107	http://bonhom.ie/
90	57527	53	104	http://www.dublinblog.ie/
91	55758	55	103	http://richarddelevan.blogspot.com/
92	79732	39	103	http://ricksbreakfastblog.blogspot.com/
93	58724	52	102	http://www.inter-actions.biz/blog/
94	73843	42	102	http://www.pmooney.net/blogsphe.nsf
95	86729	36	102	http://blog.rymus.net/
96	59920	51	101	http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/
97	173857	19	99	http://www.ofoghlu.net/log/
98	118678	27	96	http://irishkc.com/
99	68503	45	93	http://www.web2ireland.org/
100	75725	41	93	http://www.bibliocook.com/

Update: Here’s a full list of all 569 tested blogs. Also, there’s been a minor change to the rankings here; I’ve just realised that there was a bug in how the script handled evenly-matched blogs, so (for example) #15 and #16 were reversed in order; that’s now fixed.

If you find a blog missing, it’s possible that (a) it’s not pinging Planet.journals.ie or (b) is not registered with Technorati; this method requires both of those. Most Irish blogs do, but some (Old Rotten Hat, for example) don’t…

Methodology

I found this more-or-less full list of Irish weblogs at Planet.journals.ie, and selected the blogs that had pinged their site in the past 6 months, then cut that down to just the blog main-page URLs, removing duplicates.

Given that list, I then looked up each blog URL using the Technorati API, and got its rank, inbound link count, and inbound linking blogs count.

top100code.tgz is a tarball of the perl code I wrote to do this, if you fancy doing it yourself on whichever set of blogs you fancy…

Tags: blogging, blogs, hacks, ireland, top100

Five years ago, on 15 May 2001, I started writing this weblog.

Subject matter started with a forward of something odd from the Forteana list – ‘Why Finns are sick of illnesses named after them’. In terms of subject matter, I started the weblog to reduce the amount of forwards I was passing on by email to other groups — hence the preponderance of forteana posts early on.

Nowadays, by contrast, I try to write original ramblings^Wresearch for the main part of the site, and the occasional “fresh bits” I unearth elsewhere are kept separate, posted to the link-blog at del.icio.us/jm.

However, the real reason I started the thing was to act as an experiment in using WebMake as a blog platform — at least, that was the excuse. It worked quite successfully, for what it’s worth — but in mid-August 2005, I eventually accepted that there weren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a weblogging CMS, and its templates, as well as everything else, and that I didn’t really need to test WebMake’s abilities any more, and switched to WordPress. I’m glad I did; WP is a great piece of software.

So what’s been the biggest hit on taint.org, by far? Here it is: http://taint.org/xfer/2004/kittens.jpg . Lots and lots of Google Image referrers, MySpace hotlinkers, etc. etc. ;) It’s a top hit for a GIS search for [kittens], I think.

Random stats, based on April’s logs:

• About 81247 hits were received during April to the RSS 2.0 feed (the default), 9921 to the Atom feed, and 7795 for the RSS 1.0 rendering. That indicates that format-wars-wise, people just use the default. ;)
• Assuming the RSS reader apps average out to 1 HTTP GET every 30 mins (as Bloglines and Apple’s reader do), that means there are somewhere around (98963 / (30 * 24 * 2)) = 68 subscribers.
• In terms of the old style browser-using readership — there were 44926 hits on the front page using web browsers.
• AWStats claims 2700 visits per day, from around 33000 visitors per month. I find the latter figure hard to believe.

After the front page and the feeds, the scraped RSS feeds at http://taint.org/scraped/ come second, Threadless beating out Perry Bible Fellowship by a little bit.

Top stories last month, based on hits:

• http://taint.org/2006/04/29/230814a.html — Single-Letter Google Hits
• http://taint.org/2006/01/20/220239a.html — the SweetheartsConnection.com Scam (still attracting comments from scammees!)
• http://taint.org/2004/04/15/033025a.html — really outdated stats on GMail’s spam filtering accuracy
• http://taint.org/2006/04/20/213624a.html — Automatically Invoking screen(1) on Remote Logins
• http://taint.org/2006/04/15/134751a.html — Google Calendar
• http://taint.org/2006/04/03/121837a.html — A Gotcha With perl’s “each()”
• http://taint.org/2005/08/06/024026a.html — The Life of a SpamAssassin Rule
• http://taint.org/2006/04/21/133432a.html — Phishing and Inept Banks
• http://taint.org/2006/04/06/210519a.html — RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin
• http://taint.org/2006/04/13/140841a.html — BT DSL’s Daily Disconnects

Technorati says there are 514 links from 105 sites. I still don’t know what the hell that means. ;)

Update: I’ve remembered that, before I started blogging at taint.org, I kept a diary at Advogato, which dates all the way back to March 2000!

Also, here are some pretty graphs from the graph-top-referers script:

• Most popular stories, 2003-11 to 2005-03
• Most popular stories, 2005-03 to 2006-05
• Most popular URLs in general, 2003-11 to 2005-03
• Most popular URLs in general, 2005-03 to 2006-05

The several slashdottings and a Boing Boinging are quite clear ;)

Tags: anniversary, blogging, blogs, forteana, meta, taint.org, webmake

Privacy: after reading Adam Shostack’s weblog posting about private/anonymous blogging, I’ve been driven to think about that, and would up writing up a case study of Cogair, which was an influential anonymously-published proto-weblog in Ireland in the ’90s.

Now, quinn at ambiguous.org quotes a review of EFF’s recent ‘anonymous blogging’ guidelines, which largely comes up with one conclusion: it’s a usability nightmare. The problem is, the EFF report recommends using invisiblog.com, which in turns uses the Mixmaster remailers. Those things are awful, and I doubt anyone but their authors could possibly know how to use them ;)

Here’s an easier way to blog anonymously. I haven’t tried it (honest ;) but from keeping up on this stuff, it should work…

Firefox

• First off, install Firefox. No point giving your identity away through an MSIE security hole. Clear out all cookies in Preferences:Privacy:Cookies (or better still — start a new Firefox profile from scratch).
• Visit IPID and note down the IP address noted (this is your own, traceable, IP address).

Tor

• Next, install Tor, EFF’s ‘Onion routing’ anonymizer system. This also means installing privoxy as directed in the Tor install guide.
• Set up Tor on your machine, so that Firefox will browse via that software.
• Using Tor, visit IPID and make sure it doesn’t give you the same traceable IP address. This is to make sure you’re browsing securely.

Hushmail

• visit Hushmail and create a new free email account. Obviously, don’t use usernames and passwords that map in any way to your existing ones, and avoid words that may show up under your interests (especially if they’re googleable)…

Blogger

• Using that Hushmail account as the email address, go to Blogger.com and create yourself a blog, then get publishing.
• Hey presto — anonymous blogging the easy way!
• For safety, don’t use the Firefox anonymous-blogging profile for any sites other than Hushmail and Blogger.com’s publishing end. (A future Firefox vulnerability could expose personal info directly from Firefox itself.)

This is essentially the ‘TOR to blog server’ method described at the privateblogging wiki.

Now, note that along that chain we have 3 levels of identity — the IP address (hidden by Tor), the email address (traceable to Hushmail, who could conceivably give up the Tor router’s IP), and the Blogger.com weblog site (traceable to Blogger, who could give up the Hushmail address and the Tor router’s IP).

As long as you don’t give it away in your writings on that weblog — and as long as Tor remains safe — your own identity in turn is safe, too; and Tor has proved safe, so far.

There are still problems:

• The weblog site itself could still get taken down, e.g. via a DMCA takedown notice. This could be an issue, depending on what’s being published.
• Tor traffic is identifiable as such as it traverses the internet. For bloggers in countries with a pervasive internet surveillance regime at the local ISP end, the watchers will be able to tell that Tor is in use, and tell who is the person using Tor. (They won’t be able to tell what it’s being used for, just that it’s being used.)

PS, for the future: the guys behind Tor are working on a replacement for Mixmaster anonymous remailer software, called Mixminion. There’s also a wiki for discussion of ‘private blogging’ here.

Tags: anonymity, blogger, blogging, blogs, cogair, eff, hushmail, paranoia, security, tor

Blogs: Just to expand on a linkblog posting I made yesterday, Google’s search team have announced support for a new piece of Google functionality; they’ll fix their crawlers to ignore links with a rel="nofollow" attribute, for PageRank calculations, the idea being that spammers will stop blog-spamming once they can’t get PageRank out of it.

The blog world has been all aflutter:

• Google Blog
• MSN Search
• SixApart
• Dave Winer
• Robert Scoble: ‘now we can link to things without raising their search engine whuffie’
• burningbird: ‘I remember something like this being discussed before’

BurningBird is right, to a degree. In fact, it’s been solved before.

Here’s a taint.org posting from November 2003 where I point out that by using a trivial Javascript URL one can link to another page without conferring PageRank. The format is:

javascript:document.location=target

The result looks like this, and work in any browser with a basic JS engine, from IE 3.02 and Netscape Navigator 2 onwards. I’ve been using it for my referrer logs, among other things, for over a year. I wrote a patch that implemented it for external links in the Moin Moin wiki software.

Amazingly, despite my plugging this idea at virtually every opportunity, it seems nobody noticed! At least, nobody among the people who (it would seem) should be looking into comment spam, thinking about how to deal with it, etc.

Disappointing — the echo chamber keeps talking to itself, once again. Maybe I’ll stick with dealing with email spam instead ;)

Ah, whatever. Anyway, this is a nicer fix; relying on JS isn’t a good thing. So nice work, Google.

(PS: worth noting that while this is a good plan, comment spam won’t be going away any time soon, as Mark Pilgrim noted. Still, here’s hoping it’ll help in the long term…)

Tags: blogs, burningbird, engine, google, idea, javascript, moin, nofollow, pagerank, search, spam

Blogs: Mimi Smartypants, very funny woman that she is, has become a very funny doting mother:

Similarly, recently she finally fell asleep in my arms and I soon caught the faint scent of urine, but I stuffed that thought way down deep into my brain, where the Syrup Of Denial runs thick and sticky, because I just could not deal with the possibility of waking her up during the diaper change. So my daughter slept in her own urine all night, or at least she slept through the bit that was not sucked up by the scarily absorbent diapers they make nowdays. (Seriously, what the hell is in there? I keep having nightmares that the superabsorbent gel will actually start to absorb moisture out of the baby itself and there will just be a dried-up husk in the crib in the morning.)

Tags: blogs, brain, denial, mimi, mother, scent, smartypants, syrup, urine, way, woman