Victorian Accents from theLJ Estate Sale

A unique collection of lovely home accents with a Victorian theme ranging from hats & hat stands to wall hangings and boxes to pictures and potpourri.

Mostare in the $10-$20 range and larger pictures are available. The photos belowdon’t do these items justice and represent only about a third of thecollection.

 Ifyou’re into Victorian you’ll want to see the collection in itsentirety. If you’re interested in something specific just send an e-mail,if I have it I’ll reply with a picture, be sure to mention yourconnection speed (cable, DSL or dial-up) so I don’t send anything toobig).

Thanksfor looking!

Adrian Holovaty started the day with his session on evangelizing reporting and making data in news articles available for machine parsing (as evidenced in ChicagoCrimes.org). Although I arrived late (something about the Queen St. streetcar trying being diverged, and partly a result of a late night hunt to find a Gypsy jazz band and a Yahoo party), I’ve seen his talk on this before (and he is a good speaker), but it is heartening to see that it was incredibly well attended.

As he has readily admitted, it’s not rocket science, but it is a very original concept to the vast majority of the news industry, including those in the session. Each time he talks, and people see the results (both direct or indirect) of his work, there’s hope more news organizations will begin doing this kind of kind of interactive journalism, along with the more typical multimedia presentations.

From my experience, the two hurdles are:

1. finding the resources (both human and technical) to build out these applications;
2. and making it user-friendly for the reporters to input the data (i.e., creating a WYSIWYG interface).

The first is not insurmountable; there are a lot of talented journalist and Web developers who would be willing to do this kind of work. The second would require a more concerted project effort and training, but the results would continue to pay-off the years.

Microformats are quickly becoming a THE way to share information between different applications. 2007 should be named the year of the microformats.

As more and more people try to share similar data between extremely diverse applications, they are quickly realizing the importance of having standards for exchanging information. The Web 2.0 craze has driven a number of microformats, or miniature standards, for a number of types of information.

• hCard - People and Organizations
• hCalendar - Calendars and Events
• hReview - Opinions, Ratings, and Reviews
• rel-tag - Tags, Keywords, and Categories

Mostly, microformats are a way of adding semantics to programming. If you are a blog reader and have seen "Tags" or "Categories" for specific posts, you have probably seen microformats in action.

Now while there are still many people trying to decide if microformats are going to really take off (we already know how poorly people have followed so-called "standards" on the web), there are a number of people that truly believe these mini standards will help increase the efficiency of transferring information between applications .

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.

The faster that people can embrace these types of standards the sooner the web will truly become and interactive source of information. It will also help relieve some of the stress of programmers that have to deal with trying to get all of the different proprietary data structures to talk to one another. (Just go try to get Outlook Express, Outlook, and Thunderbird to talk nice and you'll know what I'm talking about.)

For more information about specific microformat structures, visit microformats.org.

We’ve done the holiday tours, and the packers are here now, boxing up the last remnants of our stuff which will follow us into Seattle a few days after we land on January 2.

The past few post-party (and post Winter Storm #1) weeks have been a whirlwind of purging, waiting, searching, visiting, and more waiting. However,our house-hunting trip to Seattle was a success; but only after a cancelled flight, missed appointments, and a last minute visit arranged by the miracle tool that is an iPhone on an unlimited data plan.

Sidenote: extrapolating the 20Mb or so of data I used in our three days over an entire month of usage would mean, with a Canadian carrier I would need the most expensive plan offered, and therefore, would cost me an additional $50-a-month.

Sidenote to the sidenote: over the holidays I saw a “Win an iPod” contest on the Canadian Global television network. Having been offline for about ten days, I had figured maybe the Canadian iPhone had arrived. As far as I can tell, though, it hasn’t. Best guess: post-MacWorld in January.

Now, with most things packed, cancelled, and switched-off, we are in a state of limbo and have nothing really to do except catch-up on some sleep before ringing in what will be a very new year.

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Dear Latest Social Network:

I’m sorry.  I really am.

But I am fresh out of energy to pick yet another username, fill in another profile, again list out my interests, find and choose “friends” or otherwise participate in your new “community”.

I know - I know.  It’s really cool.  It’s the latest thing.  It’s Web 2.0, it’s community-generated something or other.  It’ll add so much value to my life—I’ll know what my friends like and dislike, I’ll find people that share my interests, other people will find and adore me, I’ll be engaged, energized, actualized and empowered by using your....thing.

It’s just that—I’m already on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace (yes, in a moment of social networking weakness), Pownce, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Rollyo, YouTube, Flickr, Skype, three different discussion forums, a couple of IM accounts, plus a few sites that I know I signed up for but can’t remember the name.

I’m just. so. tired. of having to re-define myself to every new web site/service that comes along.  Seriously - enough already.  Either figure out how to connect to a place where I’ve entered all that data, or be gone.  I just can’t find the energy to repeat myself that much.

And - I’m concerned that with all the meta-data, tagging, commenting, bookmarking and sharing going on that I’m forgetting the more important piece—creating. 

Sincerely,
Becoming Antisocial
Holland, MI

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PageRank updates for the second time in January 2007. 

Well, Google is at it again. After a PageRank update just over 2 weeks ago, PageRank has again changed. While there is debate as to whether this is a "new update" or just old PageRank still lingering around in the toolbar, one thing is for sure, the little green bar is on the move. Over at Search Engine Roundtable they had this to say:

On January 9th we reported the last Google PageRank update. It seems too soon for an other PageRank update to be happening, but anything is possible.

This is either a new PageRank push to the Toolbar or it is still some data fluctuations of the old PageRank push.

From my point of view it looks like "old data" resurfacing. However, it could be due to the attempt to eliminate Google Bombing. Matt Cutts takes up the "help you understand" position again when he explains the scope of eliminating the Googlebomb.

Technically that example is not a Googlebomb, because the site in question "wants" to show up for the query. A Googlebomb happens when someone pushes "someone else’s" site up for a query. Another example is [french military victories]. That’s not a Googlebomb, because the #1 site wants to rank at #1. That’s just straight-out SEO. This change only targets Googlebombs.

Who knows if the two are related. However, normally any algorithm change can directly impact PageRank (however this normally wouldn't be visible for another 3 mornths or so), but I'm rather skeptical that they would release new PageRank information just for this. More than likely they had a bad batch of PageRank get released and had to re-release more accurate information. 

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