taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Weblogs: there’s been a few attempts to mine ‘trend’ data from del.icio.us:

• trendalicious, a ‘near real-time view of website popularity trends as reflected by the del.icio.us social bookmarking service’
• grafolicious, which is similar
• hublog: gatherers of the month lists the ‘trendsetters’ who link to popular sites first

However, none consider how many links a user generates. A user who links to every single page on the web would quickly gain a good ‘trendsetting’ rating, and would also skew the website trends upwards, without actually providing useful data to others.

A look at the hublog top posters does seem to indicate they’re linking prolifically to any old crap that looks likely to be popular, which is a more humanly-possible way to do that. ;)

However, populicious new links is quite cool — popular sites that are new in the last 24 hours. Especially handy to find out where one could download Daily Show torrents these days. ;)

There’s also the venerable Hot Links, which unfortunately tracks a very small population, but still gets interesting stuff.

Tags: hublog, icio, mine, month, popularity, service, trend, user, view, weblogs, website

Mail: GMail users, check your mail; if mine was anything to go by, you should have three new invites to give out.

Tags: anything, check, gmail, mail, mine

Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail’s spam filtering — sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:

… just today, in an email from Mrs. Nwakama Ani, the wife of the late James Ani, a farmer in ZImbabwe, asking me to please help her to export $50million dollars which her late husband amassed, Gmail’s Adsense very thoughtfully offered me ‘Cheap airline tickets from the USA to Zimbabwe’. You know, just in case I want to go over there and help her personally.

Anne’s spam weblog looks like good stuff — I’ve added it to the blogroll…

Tags: adsense, email, farmer, gmail, husband, mine, spam, today, wife, zimbabwe

Social: It’s a blogsplosion! (neologism, Creative Commons license, cheers.)

First off, we have Old Rottenhat, a fantastic group-weblog featuring several old mates of mine, musing on music (Eoghan), psychogeography (Delaney), quitting work (Dr.), and random comments (Krossie). It’s great reading.

Next, Tom has finally set us up the blog in the form of Linux and Goblins, ‘your home for neither of the above’, with some trademark Tom-style moaning, half-baked ideas, and pestering of some politician git called Phillip Boucher-Hayes.

Both are now firmly ensconced in the sidebar, and on my daily list… an RSS feed for Old Rottenhat can be found here, and I’ll be making one for Tom too when I get the chance.

Tags: blogsplosion, commons, creative, eoghan, license, mine, music, neologism, old, rottenhat, social