Archives: August 2001
Thursday, 30 August 2001I propose a new word.How do I know it's new? As of this moment, it is not in Google's vocabulary. It probably will be shortly since their web-indexing speed seems to be improving by leaps and bounds and they should be by again any day now. So, last night I was looking over my referrers for the first time in two months, and noted with surprise the vast number of different searches that brought people to my site from Google. Apparently I show up in the first page of results on searches as different as "dave mckean graduated", "turn off SDI in word 2000", and "prevent deep linking". (...not that my pages are necessarily useful results for the above queries, but I do show up in the first page of them today.) And looking over the list, the sentence popped into my head: I seem to be highly googular. Meaning: this site seems to have noticeable weight in Google's index, which I understand comes from many folks linking to me who are themselves linked by many. From Google's Technology page: Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes [links] a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search.So, I propose that googularity refer to the importance or popularity of a page or site in Google's page-ranking system, i.e. the probability that it will appear high in the list of results for a given search phrase and the consequent contribution of additional googularity that a highly-ranked site gives in turn to any page it links to. Googularity is probably not quantifiable in any useful way by anyone outside Google; it's more of a comparative term. Examples:
I find the word useful; perhaps you will too. And thanks to everyone who's been linking to me all these years for getting me where I am...  Just the other day I was wondering aloud whatever happened to AltaVista; I never see it come up in online discussions any more, and I certainly never hear its name in conversation. Turns out I'm not alone: PC World checked it out and found it a bit behind on its indexing:
Then there was HotBot, which was better at some things (like finding people by name), then Google came along and fairly quickly became the best at everything I need a search engine for. It even took over first place in category searching from Yahoo. And it remains free to use. All this to say: Google rules, AltaVista's comparative toast. If Google sold a black or white t-shirt that didn't say "I'm feeling lucky!" [rolls eyes], I'd probably buy it. Unwind? When the hell does that guy wind? Come on. Only because you don't see the hairline in that photo, Scott... Wednesday, 29 August 2001The war against making software that has lawful uses continues:Grand Jury Charges Russian Company and Programmer [EFF.org] Since the grand jury handed down a five-count indictment, Sklyarov -- who is out of custody on $50,000 bail -- could face a prison term of up to twenty-five years and a US $2,250,000 fine. As a corporation, Elcomsoft faces a potential US $2,500,000 fine. Adobe doesn't seem to be saying anything about this development so far. Why the DMCA should be repealed. Pictures from Peter Gabriel's recent gig in Seattle [requires javascript]. I've never seen him perform live. I'd really love for him to finish 'UP'... Also, he's in the technology news: Peter Gabriel puts a price on downloads [CNET] Peter Gabriel's record company has launched a subscription service for Internet music downloads, beating major labels in the race to ask fans to pay for digital access to their music. The service, called "Womad Digital Channel," will give fans a monthly package of 40 tracks for about $7.20. I might look into that... Kristie's got an interesting theory: Someone suggested to me once that Mac users always put their sidebars on the right, while PC users always put theirs on the left, since that is the way their computers are set up. Hmmm.... ...and it may well be true for some, but I actually moved the sidebar for practical/usability reasons (and because I over-think things like this). Genehack has reminded me more than once that people who use text-only browsers have to scroll down through whatever's in the left column before they get to the real content of the page. The longer the left sidebar, the greater the obstacle to the reader; a site like, say, Cam's will require a Lynx user to page down several times to see today's new content. If the sidebar is on the right instead, the meat of the page will show up in the first or second screen of the text browser. I never had much in my left sidebar, so I wasn't too worried about it before, but hey, I was redesigning anyway so I shoved it to the right. (Pre-emptive note, just so I don't get 10 corrective e-mails from professional designers: It's true that the scrolling problem won't occur if someone lays out their page using CSS instead of tables [and puts the left sidebar material after the main content in their HTML file], but I'm not going to be doing that for another couple of years because of the number of legacy browsers still hanging around. And because I don't mind table layout all that much, even though I know I'm supposed to.) (Also: There are plenty of good aesthetic and graphical-usability reasons for having the sidebar on the left. No one should feel bad about choosing to have it on the left. I just decided to change how I do it, for text-browsing usability. Who knows, I may change back if I get tired of it.) So, that's why the sidebar's on the right now. Plus, I'm a Mac user. :) Tuesday, 28 August 2001In case anyone out there missed it, Apple's Titanium PowerBook (a.k.a. the best Mac ever) became a much better deal last week.Comics: Carol Lay's Story Minute: Out of Time He tried to find a time machine to take him home... but the promise of that technology was still in the future This Modern World: If CNN were actually a 'liberal' news network... After all, everyone remembers the network's outspoken opposition to the gulf war... the fawning coverage of their comrades in the anti-globalization movement... One of the cool things about getting the Washington Post is that about this time of year you hear about the 'West Wing' cast coming to town for various location and exterior shots. We haven't tried to track them down (we're not that obsessive), it's just fun to hear about.
Right then. Thought I was slacking off, didn't you? Nope, I've been making the transition to managing this portion of the site with Greymatter instead of with Frontier/Radio Userland. This involved various redesign work, as you can see. This design may evolve some over the next month or so... Using Greymatter will make it much easier for me to post one link at a time instead of having to create a whole day's worth of content before posting anything (which is how I've done it for years). This lowering of the barrier to posting will hopefully mean I'll post much more frequently. We'll see. Anyhow, welcome to the new Now This log. I'm enjoying it more already. |  | Links, exploration and synthesis from Steve Bogart  photo by my wife If you want to be e-mailed when there's new stuff here, say "add me." Archives by week
Older Archives: 2001 (Aug-present) 2001 (Jan-Aug) 2000 | 1999 | 1998 Medley/AllTooCozy Entropy Genehack rc3.org GirlHacker LarkFarm Search log since Aug. 2001: Ye olde Amazon wish list  How's my HTML? How's my CSS? |
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