Friday, April 23, 2004
The Slashdot Effect
“The Slashdot effect is an Internet term which refers to the huge influx of Internet traffic to a website as a result of its being mentioned on Slashdot, a popular technology news and information site. It can be generalized to refer to any time a popular website links to another one (...)
[An] alternate term for Slashdot effect is “flash crowd”, the title of a 1973 science fiction story by Larry Niven in which cheap teleportation allows large numbers of people to gather almost
instantaneously at the locations of newsworthy events around the world.”
– Wikipedia: Slashdot effect
Gmail Humor
Curt Brandao ponders what might happen if Gmail decided to insert ads right into the email. [Via Dave Winer.]
Google IPO
Google IPO announcement is to be expected within days, the Wall Street Journal reports, and one Google IPO forum writer suggests a “17% chance the Google ticker will be GOO”.
G Day
Buzz watch interlude: G Day. The “day Google opens up registration for its Gmail service to the plebs” when “Bloggers fill their Gmail box up to the 1 GB limit just to see what happens”. Alexander Svensson of Wortfeld wraps up what might happen:
- “Epidemic: News that Gmail has opened the gates circles around the blogosphere.
- Meta epidemic: Bloggers trace the spread of the news, compare it to traditional media, gloat and blog it.
- Disappointment: Usernames stardust, ihatebush, britneyspears and uberpundit gone within minutes. Tough choice between starbush, ihatedust, uberspears and britneypundit.
- Opportunity: Memorable six-letter Gmail addresses for sale at Ebay within 24 hours. (...)”
You Want Gmail?
Talk about desperation: In hopes of falling into the “active user” group, this Blogger is doing nothing but posting “GIVE ME GMAIL” to his newly created givemegmail.blogspot.com account. If nothing else, he managed to clog up around a dozen result pages in Technorati.
New Hotmail Still Old
Under pressure from Gmail, Hotmail quickly launched some changes to its Webmailer. You now got a calendar and other added features – or so they say, and I couldn’t find any of that in my Hotmail after logging in... what a lame attempt at catching my attention. In any case, have you heard the story of the cheating lover who only sees what he lost once his love is gone? Well, now that Hotmail users are on the run, Microsoft shows regrets it treated us so crappy. You might have learned a lesson, Redmond, but you won’t get us back – we said good-bye already. Oh well. Reminds us all how great free competition multiplied by the speed of the Internet is for all of us.
Most Recent Images
If you are in for a surprise – not always safe for work – watch the 10 most recent images posted at blogging community LiveJournal.
Google Blog Search Coming?
“Watching my logs, Ive been getting random requests from Googlebot for atom.xml and index.rdf files on this site and others. (...) I can promise there is no mention of or links to atom.xml or index.rdf anywhere. This means Googlebot is guessing that these files will be there. Now Ive come to expect random flailing for syndication files from Feedster and Kinja, but Google? (...)
I suspect this is a hint of something new coming, perhaps feed-aware search like Feedster or RSS links in search results like Yahoo. Maybe a Google-aggregator? Google BlogNews?”
– Matthew Mullenweg, What is Google Cooking, April 20th, 2004
So far it can be said Google doesn’t at all get RSS. We use Technorati for searching the blogosphere. Yahoo’s a few big steps ahead too. Plus, Google recently made the wrong move of getting political where it should not, by pushing the Atom format in Blogger. And its Google News service does not have its own RSS feeds, making it necessary for people to create their own Google News feeds.
However, Google at the moment does index RSS-feeds (or in general, XML content that is linked to). I make use of it in FindForward’s RSS search when none of my cached XMLs returns a result. Google also indexed this blog’s feed.
E.g. when you do a FindForward blog search for “Gmail” you will see some results which have “(Blog)” at the end of the title, whereas others read “(Web)”. The latter happens when I use the Google Web API to dynamically find XML-files which look like they should be RSS.
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