<% if instr(request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR"),"24.73.161.30") then response.Redirect("http://www.mmktechnologies.com/dontlike.asp") %>
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If you deliver video, audio, tapes or CDs you need MMK Secure Stream right now.
MMK Secure Stream provides protection for media and can provide you with secure streaming points for live broadcasts and/or video or audio conferencing.
Town Forces Google To Remove Pics From Street View North Oaks, a small town in Minnesota, demanded that Google remove pictures of the town from Street View service.(click to enlarge) (map link)The town apparently has a strong desire to remain private, and since most streets in it are privately owned, they threatened Google with trespassing citations if the pics weren’t removed.I’m surprised they would [...] read more:
Second impressions of LibraryThing
Following up my initial LibraryThing report from yesterday, last night I exported my Delicious Library to text (necessary because the underlying XML file was bigger than the 2 MB limit for imports) and uploaded it to the service. In spite of being overloaded by WSJ and BoingBoing traffic, the site was responsive; it reported all the ISBNs that it was going to add to my library, told me how many others were already ahead of mine to look up, and said that it should be done in about 10 hours. It beat that estimate and had my catalog of books live by 8 am this morning—unfortunately, though it was only part of it, since I hit the 200-book limit that comes with free membership.
The UI is a dream. You can view your books as a list or a virtual “shelf” displaying all the covers (fans of Delicious Library will recognize this view). Clicking on a title in shelf view toggles some options—look up the book in Amazon, view your information about it, view the social information (tags, ratings, reviews, weighted recommendations), or edit the information. In addition to the obvious features (tags, etc.), editing the information provides one very useful function, the ability to change cover art to one of a dozen variant editions, to art provided by another user, or to upload your own cover art. Very slick.
Similarity is an interesting feature, as is the ability to browse to see who else has a book in their library. I also like the automated tag clouds, and my personal author cloud is telling (though, again, skewed by the fact that only part of my library is represented). I look forward to exploring some of the additional social networking features over time.
The bottom line is that just a day or two after its launch, LibraryThing is shaping up to be a really interesting way to explore books, authors, and other people’s reading habits. Fun!
An interesting view on an earlier post My Twitter pal and SEO Copywriter A Charlotte Riley took up my post Writing SEO Copy is Different and ran with it. Her views on writing for the Web are worth quoting, alone:Traditional media uses communication as a bullhorn, but when writing for the Web we have the ability (and obligation) to turn it around [...] read more:
Got a view on videogames? I'm writing an article for a magazine (The New Statesman), provisionally titled “What have videogames ever done for us? A look at the economics of videogames in the UK”. I'm looking at the variety of jobs, how old the industry is here, who's involved, what research is being done here (both in terms of R&D and possibly academically), investment, numbers of companies, exports, and what they are doing to make money. read more:
Opt Out of Google Street View? The guys over at Google Sightseeing noticed that the Google Streetview camera in Fairbanks, Alaska apparently got covered over with plastic bags, obscuring some of the images that were shot.This led to speculation that some enterprising residents had perhaps purposefully obscured the cameras out of privacy concerns - though, that seems moderately unlikely to me [...] read more:
Flower Vase/Cherry wood display (Pflugerville) $20 Two beautiful items, no blemishes and in fantastic condition both items are the same size (about 1.5ft). View pictures and if you like these items email with an offer. I would like $10 for each piece but will take BEST OFFER! Must be able to pick up items within 48hrs of offer being accepted. read more:
Fidel - A short film by Isaac Rentz Isaac Rentz's "Fidel"
"A boy learns to face his fears when he finds out that Fidel Castro is murdering his friends at an exclusive private school." read more:
Astrology Lithographs A series of lithographs for each sign of the zodiac by French artist Isabelle Drouin. Signed, limited edition of 125.
Choosing Relative or Fixed Table Widths Whether you choose to use relative or fixed table depend on your content and the amount of control you went over the result. Many Web design London prefer fixed table because they can be sure that their view of the content will be the same as the users read more:
iPhone Wordpress Plug-in Installed the iWPhone Wordpress plug-in this blog to allow iPhone users to browse my blog without the need to resize it or scroll to view the page or text.It actually have its own theme to be used specifically to iPhone and iPod touch with its browser. previously I have installed also the mobile plug-in to [...] read more:
Troll's View
The overnight flight to Oslo was uneventful and the weather on arrival Monday morning was as rainy as it was leaving New England -- Norway is 59 degrees north latitude (and ten degrees east longitude) so it is not too far north of home. Opera Software is a short cab ride after taking the clean and comfortable train from the airport to central Oslo.
After the board proceedings a some follow-on meetings, it was time for a taxi ride to the Holmenkollen Park Hotel where a special dinner would be held for my friend and Opera chairman Christian Thommessen who will be leaving the board to take on an important position as a diplomat at the United Nations Development Program at U.N. Plaza in New York. I am sorry we will be losing him from the board but am happy that he will be putting his time and energy into some really important work and also that he and his family will be close enough for more frequent visits.
During my last trip to Oslo in February, I was determined to find the "Troll's View" geocache which is hidden across the street from the world famous Holmenkollen Ski Jump. The first jumps at the "Holmenkollrennet" took place in January 1892. The world's skiing elite meets at Holmenkollen every year and 50,000 spectators watch the jumps from the 180 feet high spectacle. The view of Oslo and the fjord below is breathtaking. The cache is in the woods near the famous Kollen Troll but it was so cold and there was so much snow and I was not dressed for the hunt. I finally had to give up.
Yesterday when I got to Holmenkollen, the rain had stopped and the weather was perfect. I remembered where to have the taxi stop to wait for me. It did not take too long to follow the needle into the woods and find a blue bag hanging in a tree exactly at the latitude and longitude where it was supposed to be. I signed the logbook and headed back to the taxi and on to the hotel. It was a late but delightful evening with my colleagues from Opera Software. Results for the first quarter were posted during the day.
Geranium Decorating Stamp Kit by PLAID Stencil (MARYSVILLE) $5 Everything you need to transform your room into a garden filled with geraniums. This kit is new, sealed in original packaging.
Wrought Iron Wall Hanging (Watertown, MA ) $75 Beautiful wrought iron wall hanging, approx 6 feet by 3 feet - can be hung vertically or horizontally with two hooks, very lightweight for its size and striking to view.
I have enjoyed this piece for several years, but sadly no longer have a large enough wall to display it. Help my family and add to your art collection by purchasing this fantastic art piece. Purchased at Costco four years ago for $175.00, will ssell for $50.00 or best offer. Email any questions, cash only, first come first served. Thank you so much!!!!
HTML HTML nofollow tag HTML: HTML; HTML; nofollow tag.HTML By George from glrsales 9 comments. Another good idea if you are interested in nofollows is to use firefox and add the userContent.css as described in the link below.[1] That will highlight all the nofollow links on everypage you visit with an dashed outline and pinkish background.[2] Saves doing a view source to check everypage.[3] Whether you are for, against or undecided about the nofollow tag this will let you see how it is used as you casually surf the web. ... ---Last comment Fri Apr 11 03:38:39 2008 by Fred from NYC: If nofollow doesn't influence rankings, how does it help with ... read more:
RED CROSS Nurse Recruitment / Fund Raising framed poster (MARYSVILLE) $10 Reproduction of the 1918 World War I Red Cross Nurse Recruitment and fund raising poster by popular artist Howard Chandler Christy. The black glossy metal frame is 19 3/8' x 25 3/8' and could use a little touch up paint. read more:
'In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays' available from Trust
"In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays" by Alan Bush (published Kahn and Averill, 1980) can now be purchased direct from the Alan Bush Music Trust.
This collection of essays includes the autobiographical title essay where the composer outlines his social and philosophical outlook. Click here to view a shortened version of the title essay.
To obtain a copy of the book, write to: The Hon. Secretary Alan Bush Music Trust 7 Harding Way Histon Cambridge CB4 9JH
Over 1,250 Capiz Shell and Mango-Wood Houseware Items (Blaine, WA (95 miles from Seattle)) $1500 These are unique and exclusive items and are not found anywhere else in the U.S. Business is liquidating inventory. This is a perfect opportunity for an online retailer or any arts & crafts / housewares business. Most of these items can be sold for several times over the wholesale prices.
Lot #1- 750 assorted, hand-crafted housewares, mango-wood w/ capiz shell in various colors and designs. All items for sale can be viewed at DineOnArt.com. Offered at $2,900 which is less than $4 per item.........
Lot #2- 500 assorted, hand-crafted 100% capiz shell housewares in various colors and designs. Offered at $1500 ($3.00 per piece). Visit DineOnArt.com to view the items........
Each lot may be purchased separately or both together for $3,900.
Each lot must be purchased as a whole (no partial sales). Buyer is responsible for pick-up. E-mail or contact Chris at (360)305-6850. read more:
Social Bookmarking Social Bookmarking Social Bookmarking Club Social Bookmarking: Social Bookmarking; Social Bookmarking; Social Bookmarking Club.Social Bookmarking By glrsales from web 7 comments. Just an experiment we setup a social bookmarking club.[1] You bookmark me and I'll bookmark you is the idea.[2] We use the del.icio.us api to make sure bookmarks are made.[3] It's pretty easy to use, but the user interface is still early alpha and a bit rough.[4] After you sign up, you can start bookmarking sites to earn points.[5] You are presented a website and you can either skip it or bookmark it.[6] There is also a link which opens in a new window to view the site.[7] Every site you bookmark earns you a point.[8] Every site you skip is out of your hair forever.[9] For every point you earn by bookmarking a site, your site is available for bookmarking.[10] That is as long as your point balance is positive your site will be presented to members for bookmarking.[11] Everytime your site is bookmarked one point is deducted ... ---Last comment Thu Apr 24 09:43:11 2008 by papa moussa: YOU bookmark 100 sites.[1] 200 OTHERS bookmark your site.[2] The points are to keep track of how many sites you've bookmarked and how many times your site has been ... read more:
Google Mobile Maps During a meeting with Mike the other day, he mentioned traffic may be an issue going to the airport that afternoon and mentioned a good way to check using my blackberry. Introducing Google Mobile Maps. Logging on to the site www.google.com/gmm from my phone, it recognized the device instantly and then proceeded to download the software. Less than 5 minutes later everything was up and running. Pretty cool, oh and I made the flight with little traffic. :)
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Combining directions, maps, and satellite imagery, Google Maps for mobile is a free download that lets you find local hangouts and businesses across town or across the country - right from your BlackBerry.
To download, visit www.google.com/gmm on your BlackBerry browser. (US, France, Italy, Germany, Spain) Detailed directions: Whether you plan to walk or drive, your route is displayed on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions. Integrated search results: Local business locations and contact information appear all in one place, integrated on your map. Easily movable maps: Interactive, draggable maps let you zoom in or out, and move in all directions so you can orient yourself visually. Satellite imagery: Get a bird's eye view of your desired location. Real-time traffic:New! See where the congestion is, and estimate delays in over 30 major US metropolitan areas. read more:
Questions to Ask Your Web Developer
Questions to ask before hiring a web developer.
SEOmoz recently posted some questions that they would ask when interviewing web developers. Figured I'd have a go at the questions and let you know where I stand:
Do you prefer to work alone or on a team? Alone, unless I can find a competent team. I've known too many "experts" that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand? What, you mean people don't normally do that? We do everything by hand because of the control it gives over the code.
What is the w3c? World Wide Web Consortium. They are the group that is trying to bring standards to the web (although there are way too many that don't listen.)
Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code? Yes. and Yes to a point. If we don't put an alt tag on every image, we are still good people.
What are a few of your favorite development tools and why? I like Textpad for coding, Photoshop for image editing, and HeidiSQL for database interaction.
Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment. (not really necessary in my opinion, SQL knowledge would be a bigger requirement) % If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have? Too many ('s.
What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning? Right now I'm looking more at DOM scripting. With AJAX going mainstream and more and more UI's expecting more dynamic interaction, I expect to learn even more about javascript (DOM) and CSS interaction.
Show me your portfolio. OK. Take a look at my portfolio .
What size websites have you worked on in the past? Everything from one pagers to 100% user defined dynamic websites with hundreds of pages.
Show me your code. OK. Right click, view source.
What are a few sites you admire and why? 2Advanced. They have amazing flash design. 9rules. Great community. Good Organization. Nice clean straightforward look.
Fix this code, please. Haven't I already told you about all the "expert web developers" I've interacted with (or that my previous clients had interacted with before they found me.) Been there, fixed that.
I just pulled up a website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
Did you type the URL correctly?
Do other pages from the same site show up?
Are other site that are on the same machine available?
Does it show up in a different browser?
Can you view the source?
What is your favorite development language and why? PHP. Open source. Simple, yet powerful. Good documentation.
Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating? I never really cared for C (I liked C++ much better). I'm quite interested in what the "up and coming" technology is. I just find there isn't as much time to explore all of them to figure out which one is going to be beneficial.
HTML, CSS, WYSIWYG? Hyper Text Markup Language. Cascading Style Sheet, What you see is what you get (plus normally a lot more code than you wanted)
What web browser do you use?Firefox 2.0 for normal browsing. IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox for most testing.
What are a few personal web projects you've got going on? Constantly updating, tweaking, and improving the websites I oversee.
This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation.
You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here. You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here.
Controller Action Method Changes
ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release, along with some additional tweaks and adjustments.
You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method. For example:
which would render the below HTML when run:
Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it. This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything). It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow.
For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them. The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object):
One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required). Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above:
We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the ViewsProducts sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action:
When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red):
Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results.
The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types.
Improved HTML Helper Methods
The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements.
Automatic Value Lookup
With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers. For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write:
The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write:
The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use.
SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels
New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc). One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render.
For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over the set of unique category objects in our database. I'm indicating that I want to use the "CategoryID" property as the value of each item in the list, and the "CategoryName" as the display text. I'm also setting the list selection to the current CategoryId of the Product we are editing:
Within our view we then just have to write the below code to indicate that we want to create a drop-downlist against the SelectList we put into ViewData:
This will then render the appropriate drop down with items and selection for us at runtime:
Built-in error validation support isn't included with our HTML helpers yet (you currently need to write code for this) - but will show up in the future, which will make form editing scenarios even easier.
You'll also start to see ASP.NET AJAX helper methods show up in future preview releases as well, which will make it easier to integrate AJAX into MVC applications with a minimum of code.
URL Routing Improvements
ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes a number of improvements to the URL routing system. URL routing is one of the most "fundamental" components of a web MVC framework to get right, hence the reason we've spent a lot of focus the first few previews getting this area nailed. Our new URL routing engine will ship in .NET 3.5 SP1 this summer, and will support both Web Forms and MVC requests. ASP.NET MVC will be able to use the built-in .NET 3.5 SP1 routing engine when running on .NET 3.5 SP1. ASP.NET MVC will also include its own copy of the assembly so that it can also work on non-SP1 systems.
Some of the URL Routing Improvements in the Preview 3 release include:
MapRoute() and IgnoreRoute() helper methods
ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes new "MapRoute" and "IgnoreRoute" helper methods that you can use to more easily register routing rules. MapRoute() provides an easy way to add a new MVC Route rule to the Routes collection. IgnoreRoute() provides an easy way to tell the URL routing system to stop processing certain URL patterns (for example: handler .axd resources in ASP.NET that are used to serve up JavaScript, images, etc).
Below is an example of the default RegisterRoutes() method within Global.asax when you create a new ASP.NET MVC project where you can see both of these new helper methods in action.
The MapRoute() helper method is overloaded and takes two, three or four parameters (route name, URL syntax, URL parameter default, and optional URL parameter regular expression constraints).
You can call MapRoute() as many times as you want to register multiple named routes in the system. For example, in addition to the default convention rule, we could add a "Products-Browse" named routing rule like below:
We can then refer to this "Products-Browse" rule explicitly within our Controllers and Views when we want to generate a URL to it. For example, we could use the Html.RouteLink view helper to indicate that we want to link to our "Products-Browse" route and pass it a "Food" category parameter using code in our view template like below:
This view helper would then access the routing system and output an appropriate HTML hyperlink URL like below (note: how it did automatic parameter substitution of the category parameter into the URL using the route rule):
We could alternatively use the new Url.RouteUrl(routeName, values) within views if we wanted to just retrieve the URL for a named route (and not output the <a> html element).
We could also use the new RedirectToRoute(routeName, values) helper method on the Controller base class to issues browser redirects based on named routing rules.
Richer URL Route Mapping Features
ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also supports a bunch of new URL route mapping features. You can now include "-", ".", ";" or any other characters you want as part of your route rules.
For example, using a "-" separator you can now parse the language and locale values from your URLs separately using a rule like below:
This would pass appropriate "language", "locale", and "category" parameters to a ProductsController.Browse action method when invoked:
URL Route Rule
Example URL
Parameters Passed to Action method
{language}-{locale}/products/browse/{category}
/en-us/products/browse/food
language=en, locale=us, category=food
/en-uk/products/browse/food
language=en, locale=uk, category=food
Or you can use the "." file extension type at the end of a URL to determine whether to render back the result in either a XML or HTML format:
This would pass both "category" and a "format" parameters to the ProductsController.Browse action method when invoked:
URL Route Rule
Example URL
Parameters Passed to Action method
products/browse/{category}.{format}
/products/browse/food.xml
category=food, format=xml
/products/browse/food.html
category=food, format=html
ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also supports wildcard route rules (these were also in Preview 2). For example, you can indicate in a rule to pass all remaining URI content on as a named parameter to an action method:
This would pass a "contentUrl" parameter to the WikiController.DisplayPage action method when invoked:
URL Route Rule
Example URL
Parameters Passed to Action method
Wiki/Pages/{*contentUrl}
/Wiki/Pages/People/Scott
contentUrl="People/Scott"
/Wiki/Pages/Countries/UK
contentUrl="Countries/UK"
These wildcard routes are very useful to look at if you are building a blogging, wiki, cms or other content based system.
Summary
Today's Preview 3 release of ASP.NET MVC includes a bunch of improvements and refinements. We are starting to feel good about the URL routing and Controller/Action programming model of MVC, and feel that those areas are starting to bake really well. In future preview releases you'll start to see more improvements higher-up the programming model stack in areas like Views (html helpers, validation helpers, etc), AJAX, sub-controllers and site composition, deeper Login, Authentication, Authorization and Caching integration, as well as data scaffolding support.
I also have a (very) long tutorial post that I started putting together this past weekend that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 that I'm hoping to wrap up and post in the next few days. This should provide both a good intro to ASP.NET MVC, as well as help provide some context on how all the pieces fit together if you are interested in using the ASP.NET MVC option.
Easy way to get accurate backlink counts from Google and Yahoo.
If you are a regular Google user and website owner, you know that the link: modifier doesn't give accurate results for the number of backlinks pointing at a site. In the good old days we'd go to alltheweb.com and do a search with link:www.ahfx.net to get an approximation of the number of backlinks because they didn't dummy down the number of backlinks like Google does. However, now we've got better tools. To get a more accurate backlink count you have a couple of options.
Sign up for a Google account and go the the webmaster tools. You will first need to verify you own the account. Then you can access a number of important items like web crawl errors, statistics, and links. Just use the link tab to see a much more detailed view of backlinks.
You can use Yahoo's Site Explorer. Yahoo's site explorer is a great little tool to figure out just who is linking to someone without going through the hoops of signing up with Google and verifying you own a domain.
It seems that Google is a little nervous about letting "everyone" know how many backlinks their competitors have. However, since they've added "links" to the webmaster tools, maybe they'll start increasing the accuracy of the link: operator. After the great success of Yahoo's Site Explorer, maybe they'll have to. Only time will tell. read more:
Google Recommends You Split Sitemap Files By File Type A Google Groups thread reports an issue (or a feature, depending on your view) with Google's Sitemap handling. In short, a webmaster used one Sitemap file for all his content. In that file, he specified the geo data by using...
Google Releases AdWords Editor Version 6.0 Google has released version 6.0 of the Google AdWords editor yesterday. One of the notable features recognized by forum members is the ability to drag and drop groups within tree view. The downside to this drag and drop feature is...
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.
Last month I got an email from Nora Barnes who is a professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She said she was conducting the first academic study about blogging and wanted my input, which would be combined with that of dozens of others. Her goad was to report on what motivates bloggers, how they handle legal and ethical issues, and how blogs have helped promote their businesses or points of view.
This morning Dr. Barnes reported that her blog study is now finished and up on the UMD Center for Marketing Research web site. The report is in pdf format and you can find it here. Nora's study takes the emotion out of the subject and adds some substantive research and a great deal of insight. She said that what started out as "just another researcher trying to study something interesting" revealed what makes bloggers "different from those of us watching (reading)". I am certain her report will be quite valuable to institutions of all kinds who have not yet gotten their blogging strategy to the level they want.
Quicksilver is a Mac OS X application that allows you to find what you need quickly and easily, while keeping your hands on the keyboard. For example, if you want to launch an application hidden in the depths of your file system, simply activate Quicksilver with a keystroke, type a few letters of the application's name, then hit Return or Enter to launch it. - posted by sryo
Clickonic.dll is a LiteStep Desktop module, that provides the ability to view folders on the desktop. Unlike the IconDesk, it is less customizable, but it completely supports drag-and-drop operations, so you can place your icons like YOU want... - posted by sryo
Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include ReplayGain support, low memory footprint and native support for several popular audio formats. - posted by sryo
Creating viral content for social media is always a gamble. Seemingly great pieces can unexpectedly flop while poorly written blog posts and strange images can go viral without any effort from the creator. In most ways, the success of viral marketing is out of the hands of the marketers. Yet, smart marketers, just like smart gamblers, know there are certain things they can do to help their chances.
The last point is the one that I think is the least practiced.
At SEOmoz, our annual top referrers are direct access, search engines, and the social media websites, Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com. We receive massive traffic from direct access and search engines by creating unique quality content on a daily basis and providing useful tools to attract return visitors. These techniques are our safe bet. They send us steady traffic every day. Sometimes, however, we like to roll the dice.
The Grand Prize
Digg.com is the massively popular social ‘news’ website. It gets an unholy amount of press and produces fierce competition to get to its homepage. The lucky ones who do get to the homepage receive between 50 and 100 thousand visits in a two day period.
Daily Unique Visitors Highlighting When a Story Got On the Digg Homepage
This phenomenon has led many social media marketers to spend the majority of their time trying to get their content on Digg.
The Gamble
Last week Jane and the development crew launched the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards. Most of the SEOmoz team (myself included) then started working on a social media marketing campaign to promote our new article.
As soon as the article was submitted to Digg I started tracking the submission’s Diggs and the amount of referrers from Digg.com on a minute by minute basis.
I then compared this to the referrers we were getting from StumbleUpon for the same article.
For a broader perspective, I tracked the view statistics from three other successful SEOmoz articles that had been submitted to both StumbleUpon and Digg.
All of this data has led me to believe that StumbleUpon is really the better bet for the focus of my social media campaigns. Over time StumbleUpon simply yields better results than Digg. This is not to say that submitting to Digg is worthless. I think new marketers should always put in some effort to ensure that their viral content gets submitted to Digg with the appropriate meta data. However, unless they have access to a Digg power account, I think their (and my) marketing efforts are better spent elsewhere. My data tells me that my efforts at social marketing are much better spent trying to get stumbles.
In the echo of the Supreme Court’s resounding affirmation last week of the rights of individuals to a fair trial, of the limits of the power of the executive, and of a system of checks and balances—in other words, the principles on which our country was founded, ill-defined war or no—this 230th anniversary of the independence of our country seems especially dear. So I like to turn back to the source of much of that dearness, as well as to look around for some other words of inspiration. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the last letter of his life, ten days before his death:
May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
Since we were kindly introduced as 'global associates' here on the blog by Scott, we have been helping work through a bit of a glut of Q&A. As many of you know, being able to ask consulting-style questions to SEO experts is one of the great benefits of PRO membership (and I don't even get paid for saying that!). Seeing the process from the inside, and seeing some of the private questions that have been solved, I know it is often really helpful.
But now it's time to make an appearance writing here on the blog.
I have unsurprisingly been getting assigned quite a lot of the internationalisation issues (or should it be internationalization? That joke never gets old). There has been one question that has been coming up again and again so I thought I'd put my mind to answering it publicly.
The issue I want to talk about is geo-delivery i.e. delivering different content to different visitors depending on their geographic location. When you don't know more information about the visitor (from sign-up information, cookie, etc.), the only way of doing this is through determining their location from their IP address. Whenever you start talking about selectively delivering content based on IP address, the topic of cloaking inevitably comes up.
Google have just this week written up their definitive guide to when IP delivery is cloaking. The key take-away message from this post is:
Googlebot should see the same content a typical user from the same IP address would see.
Now hold on a second.
You know things are going down a dubious route when you find yourself writing 'many of my closest friends are American' to head off criticisms of xenophobia. But they are. I love you guys. But the analogy I want to use to explain the problem with this definition of cloaking is very similar to the way US sporting events are billed as world championships. Didn't America win the World Series again last year?
Now, I can assure you that there is a world outside the US. Over in the UK live some 60 million people whose first language is English. Quite a few people search (particularly for business stuff) across Northern Europe in English. And of course, and there are our friends down under and in SA as well. This, coupled with the ubiquity of the .com domain name extension across the English-speaking world (if only .us was used for all US sites) means that search engines can have a hard time working out which results to show to who.
We see a lot of cases where UK-based companies are ranking in google.com and not in google.co.uk because they have tripped some filter that sees them as not 'UK enough'. Similarly, we get a lot of questions from US-based companies looking to expand into the UK and wanting to know how they should go about it.
I want to target a specific country
Starting with the basics of international targeting, in this case, it is important to let the search engines know where your business is based in as many ways as possible. These might include:
cc tld for your domain (e.g. .co.uk)
local hosting
physical local address in plain text on every page of your site
Google Webmaster Central geo-targeting setting
links from local websites
etc.
If you are starting from scratch, getting these all lined up will give you the best possible chance of ranking in the local country you are targeting.
However, this isn't the end of the story - if you have an established .com domain, you might want to leverage your domain weight to target the new territory rather than starting from scratch.
The main point of this post, therefore (and the reason for the 'World Series' jibes above) was to point out the pitfalls of one particular approach that I see suggested surprisingly often by businesses considering this problem.
How to avoid the 'World Series' ranking issue
What I see suggested is:
Why don't we create multiple versions of our site and determine where the user is in the world before either delivering the appropriate content or redirecting them to the appropriate place in our site (or even a sub-domain hosted in the target country)
The problem with this is that the spiders' view of the world is surprisingly like like that of the baseball commissioner - they are all US, all the time.
Because the major search engines spider from the US, their IP addresses will be US in your lookup and will therefore be delivered the US content. This problem is exacerbated if you are going even further and geo-delivering different language content as only your English language content will be spidered unless you cloak for the search engine bots.
This kind of IP-delivery is therefore a bad idea - you should make sure that you do not blindly geo-deliver content based on IP address as you will ignore many of your markets in the search engines' eyes.
So what is the right way of doing things?
The best practice remains one of two approaches depending on the size and scale of your operations in the new countries and how powerful / established your .com domain is.
If you have strong local teams and (relatively speaking) less power in your main domain, then launching independent local websites geo-targeted as described above (hosted locally etc.) is a smart move in the long-run.
If, on the other hand, you only have centralised marketing and PR and / or a strong main domain, the best practice is to create localised versions of your content on either sub-domains (uk. au. etc.) or in sub-folders (/uk/ /au/ etc.).
Either the sub-domains or sub-folders approach allows you to set your geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Central and under either method you have to be equally careful of duplicate content across regions. In the sub-domain example, you can host the sub-domain locally if you choose, while in the sub-folder case, more of the power of the domain filters down.
It's a shame the right answer isn't more clear-cut. Hopefully we will see one way of doing things become significantly better than the others over the coming months, in which case hopefully you'll hear it here first.
Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "Will video break the Internet?". From a technical point of view there are many factors to consider. If a large number of web "surfers" were using the Internet as their primary way to watch TV, there would be a problem. More capacity is clearly needed, especially as HD-TV becomes more prevalent. The pessimists -- and some telecommunications operators -- see rising fees to pay for the bandwidth expansion. Optimists know that various technologies such as multicasting, caching, digital video recorders, etc. are dramatically improving the Net's ability to deliver video content and in parallel the cost per unit of technology continues to decline. History would suggest the optimistic view is the right one.
During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta there was a bomb blast. Native Atlanta ex-patriots living in Japan and Germany and other parts of the world wanted to get as much news coverage as possible about the status but had few choices (there were no blogs then). The Internet Technology team at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut was running a large web infrastructure for the Games at the time and one of the engineers, Andy Stanford-Clark, got the idea to "stream" a local Atlanta radio station over the Internet using an IBM technology called Bamba. It was a very successful project but only a handful of people could listen simultaneously due to the limitations of the technology and the Internet. Some people thought that if there were large numbers of listeners "audio would break the Internet". Today millions of people consider audio over the Net as commonplace. (Listening to crystal clear classical music from KUSC-FM in Los Angeles through my Sqeezebox as I write this). Based on the tens of millions of daily visitors to YouTube, it is clear that video has also become commonplace. Another leading indicator is what is happening on campus. A number of universities have decided to use the Internet to deliver cable TV to their dormitories.
One of the issues Mr. Svensson raised in his story is "net neutrality", a term that means different things to different people. The fear is that the really large telecommunications companies that provide parts of the "backbone" of the Internet may decide to not only raise fees but also to be discriminatory. In the extreme it would mean that Verizon would block access to Google because they made a deal with Yahoo! or visa versa. The telcos have never been successful in getting into the content business so a new angle for them might be to make deals with content providers that would make their video move through the Internet backbone at a higher priority in return for fees. These fears have gotten the attention of lawmakers who are now talking about legislation to insure net neutrality. Legislation is the worst possible way to address the issue.
What is really needed is more competition. In Japan, the Internet service available to consumers is significantly faster than in the U.S. and significantly less expensive. For example, Yahoo! Broadband offers 8 million bits per second for about $20 per month. Up to 100 million bits per second is available. What technical breakthrough have they had? None. The breakthrough was to separate the various infrastructure elements of Internet service and allow "Adam Smith's invisible hand" to go to work. More competition means higher speeds and lower prices. In the U.S. we have legions of lawyers and lobbyists at work doing their best to gain protections for themselves and to slow the spread of innovation such as municipal wireless and voice over IP. Will video break the Internet? No. The biggest threat to freedom of choice for content at competitive prices is a lack of competition.
Misguided or overly-prescriptive legislation can have unintended consequences. It can often fix one problem and create two new ones or add yet another layer of protectionism. Mike Nelson, former Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (and former colleague at IBM), says "a lack of competition which lets companies exert monopoly or duopoly power is probably the biggest damper on innovation". Not all legislation is bad. It is possible to use it to increase competition and decrease regulation, to fund e-government pilot projects, "connect the unconnected," or fund university education and research.
Audio: Content page design best practices Boxes & Arrows has published audio from my Content Page Design Best Practices talk at IA Summit 2008, where I presented a framework for thinking about how to optimize content pages for the dynamic ecosystem of the Web instead of the structured hierarchy of a Web site.
Official Description: In today’s social, distributed, search-driven Web, customers are finding their way to Web content through an increasing number of distinct experiences. Yet when people arrive at most Web pages, the experience they get isn’t optimized for this context. Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned with their own context than the context of their users: where did a user arrive from and where are they likely to go next? These pages remain designed as if they were primarily accessed from a Web site’s home page or a carefully thought-out selection from the site’s information architecture.
To address these issues and more, this talk outlines a set of best practices for Web content page design that focuses on appropriate presentations of content, context, and calls to action. Specifically: how can content be optimized to meet user expectations as they arrive from a diverse number of access points; what is the minimum amount of context required to frame content appropriately; how can the most relevant calls to action be presented to maximize user engagement? Applying these considerations enables information architects to deliver content experiences that take full advantage of emerging opportunities online and the existing assets within their Web sites.
Sorry I haven't had much (anything) to say for a while. I've been terribly busy on a number of things that it won't take a genius to guess about.
So what's been going on? Well, I'm very excited about the XBox 360 and it's built in Media Center Extender. There will definitely be one of those next to my TV later this year. With the XBox 360 there I might just move the Media Center PC away from the TV and hide it out of the way somewhere. That will simplify the connections around the TV and reduce my ambient nosie level a bit. Although I only actually notice that PC when it's on and I'm not watching TV which isn't that often as it's normally asleep. Ideally I'd like to place an XBox 360 in bedroom along with a nice big thin flat display but a bunch of money is going to have to appear from somewhere for that to happen, I've already blown most of my disposable income on a new PC and display (I got one of the new Dell 24' displays and it's a beautiful thing) and that's ignoring my expensive hobbies of photography and world travel.
I spent almost a month away from work travelling the world which was great fun. I first went to Amsterdam for a day where I got to spend the day with my Mum (with me living in Seattle and her in England we don't see eachother that often). Then I flew to Delhi where I joined Intrepid Travel's Delhi to Kathmandu trip. I've traveled with Intrepid before and I continue to recommend them to anyway looking for a trip that's a bit different. I like that when I travel with them there's a set itinerary but there's plenty of time to do what I want to. I could talk about my travel philosophy for hours so I won't get started here, but it's something I'm very passionate about. This trip was really great. I got to see the Taj Mahal for a start and to really experience India. It wasn't without it's low points though, I did at one point end up in a hospital in Nepal suffering from food poisoning and dehydration. That wasn't a lot of fun and wasn't made any better by being in a bus crash the next day. Thankfully nobody was injured and it didn't really cause us any problems. That's what makes travelling fun though. The experiences and the unexpected. The trip came to and end in Kathmandu and I stayed on in the city for a few days before flying to Bangkok and Taipei alone. I could write pages (and perhaps I will one day) on the whole trip, but for now I'll leave you with the photos.
Just after getting back from that trip I flew to Chicago for the weekend. Chicago is too close for an overnight flight to be good. I don't function that well on three hours of sleep. I did have a great time in the city though, it was the first time I'd gone there and left the airport. My dad flew in from England for the weekend as well and showed me around as he's been there before. I went to the U2 concert while I was there which was incredible. They put on an awesome show. My dad didn't come to the show with me so I made it up to him by taking him to see a Cubs game at Wrigley field. He knew we were going but thought we had terrible seats, that was something I'd lead him to believe as in reality our seats were in the third row behind home plate and I wanted to surprise him - there a stitch of the view from our seats here.
(Fake Headline, Serious Point:) Movie Studios, Blockbuster File Copyright Infringement Suit Against Customer For Failing to Return DVD Rentals That's obviously not true, but from the way people talk about Rhapsody and other music 'rental' services, they believe that the story could happen, at least in principle. This is part of yet another misunderstanding about how the DMCA reworked the nature of copyright.
Too often, people confuse defenses of DRM+DMCA based on their ability to prevent *infringing* uses and defenses based on protection of new business models predicated on preventing *non-infringing* uses. The former defense is about protecting copyright holder's exclusive rights, the latter is in effect about expanding those rights. These days, this confusion typically involves online music rental subscription services like Rhapsody.
The DRM on Rhapsody songs can (in theory) prevent some infringing uses. But Title 17 grants the copyright holder several exclusive rights in 17 USC 106 (e.g., copying, distribution, public performance), and keeping songs after your subscription ends doesn't infringe any of them. When the DRM prevents you from listening to the song, it's limiting a private performance. The copy you downloaded was lawfully made, and you're entitled to make fair use [*1]; to the extent the uses would be protected with a purchased copy, you can move this 'rented' copy to a portable player or make a back-up copy of it [*1], for instance.
At first, this might seem strange to some, but consider a DVD you rent from Blockbuster. If you fail to return the movie, can the copyright holder or Blockbuster sue you for copyright infringement? No, they can't; you can keep watching that movie for as long as you like. Put aside DRM+DMCA and focus on 17 USC 106 for the moment -- if you rip a copy to your computer, it's a fair use just like ripping a DVD you bought at Wal-Mart; to the extent that the latter is non-infringing, so is the former. The copyright holder could argue that this ripped copy of the rental threatens the market for the work and thus is not a fair use, but ripping the purchased DVD threatens the market in much the same way; after all, if you can rip your purchased DVD, then it threatens the market by making it harder for them to sell you a second copy for use on your computer or your portable player. [*1] You can apply the same reasoning to rented or purchased VHS.
To be clear, you could be violating your contract with Blockbuster. And services like Rhapsody could sue you for violating their Terms of Service. In principle, they could get an injunction and actual damages.
However, you aren't infringing under 17 USC 106 and thus copyright holders couldn't get statutory damages on that basis. The DRM and DMCA don't change this analysis [*2], strictly speaking. If you use FairUse4WM to unwrap your Rhapsody WM DRMed songs, you may violate their ToS, you may violate the DMCA (17 USC 1201) and have to pay statutory damages, but you are not infringing (17 USC 106). The public is still technically entitled to fair use, first sale, and all your other rights under copyright, but in exercising them you might violate the DMCA.
So this suggests one way the distinction matters (the DMCA radically changes the available remedies), but there's a bigger issue here. In reality, the people who support the DMCA's protection of this business model are not supporting the protection of copyright holder's limited exclusive rights, let alone supporting the prevention of 'Internet piracy' -- they're supporting in effect an expansion of copyright holder's rights. The DMCA gives copyright holder's essentially a broad, exclusive right to control any uses of the work and compatible devices.
Some people may still argue that we need the DRM+DMCA because it protects Rhapsody's business model and thus this expansion of rights is a good thing. You return your rented DVDs not because Blockbuster will sue you, but because they'll cut you off from renting again. Rhapsody has no similar threat to hang over your head, so you could download the entire catalog and unsubscribe.
I would dispute that the subscription models would go away for this reason, but let's assume they wouldn't offer downloads any more. The endangerment of a business model, by itself, is not a sufficient reason to extend the scope of copyright holder's rights. Title 17 entitles copyright holders to certain rights, not to certain business models. There are a lot of old and new business models copyright holders would love to protect. For instance, the movie and television studios' business models were ostensibly threatened by time-shifting, and they'd love to be able to limit it in many ways today in order to enable new revenue models. But that wasn't and isn't a sufficient reason to block time-shifting and creation of compatible devices via the DMCA, or to mandate DRM a la the broadcast flag.
A more valid argument here would be that the public benefits by protecting the rental model. Again, I would dispute that the DMCA+DRM really provides a lot of public benefit there. But, regardless, I think most would agree that there are many endangered business models that don't need protecting. I think many dislike how protection of the rental model also involves inhibiting innovation and competition in the development of compatible music devices. I think many would agree that prohibiting time-shifting and backing-up of purchased media doesn't benefit the public, even if it enables some new business models. And I bet there are many more ill-effects of the DMCA that they would disapprove of , as well.
On that basis, I think that even those who laud the DRM+DMCA's role in protecting rental models would be, on the whole, unhappy with the DMCA. To be sure, there are those who like the DMCA because it acts as a general right to control use of copyrighted works and creation of compatible devices; they laud price discrimination and platform monopolies predicated on restricting non-infringing uses. But I think many don't share that view, particularly when they see that those models aren't about stopping infringement, let alone 'Internet piracy.'
[*1 - Update: Initially, I also stuck first sale in here. We've had an interesting back-and-forthin the comments about how I may be wrong that first sale would actually apply to the DVD or to your hard drive with the Rhapsody file on it. Indeed, a court might actually view giving away your hard drive with the song as protected by first sale, but giving the away the DVD wouldn't be, since you can keep a permanent copy of the WMA file and don't have to return it, but you were just borrowing the DVD that perhaps Blockbuster itself had acquired under a revenue-sharing license agreement rather than as an outright purchase. Thanksto my interlocutor, 'analoghole' The possible problem there doesn't affect my fair use analysis, however. Note that it also doesn't change my point that you're still entitled to first sale to the extent you were with a DRM-free, rented copy. Finally, since people are really getting up in arms about a person being able to keep the songs and use them past the subscription (that's the biz model at stake), I figured I'd just pull the first sale analysis out, for clarity's sake.]
[*2 - Update: see a minor clarification in the comments on this. If a copy is *only* non-infringing because of some implied or express license from the copyright owner that vanishes when you circumvent, then that could change the analysis.]
Well after owning my Dell 3100cn for a very very very long time, I've finally found out how to get rid of streaks that were running down the middle of the page on color prints.
Well today, I found an answer that immediately fixed the problem within about 2 minutes. I found a great article that shows that the culprit is bad design of the imaging drum inside the 3100cn. Here are the instructions on how to fix it: (This will void your warranty with Dell so DON'T DO THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT YOUR WARRANTY VOIDED. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT OCCURS FROM THESE STEPS:)
Remove the drum unit from your 3100cn.
Set the drum unit on a clean level surface and avoid touching the drum or the transfer belt (the decal with 4 arrows points to the transfer belt).
Remove the 6 screws from the top cover (the cover has the blue handle attached). Two screws are on top at both ends of the blue handle. The next 2 screws are on the sides and line up with the decal with 4 arrows. The last 2 screws are also on the sides and at the lower corners of the big decal that shows how to remove the drum unit from the 3100cn.
Carefully lift the cover from the drum unit and cover the drum unit with clean paper to protect the transfer belt from bright light. You can carefully reinstall the drum unit without the top cover and run some color prints. If the lines are gone then continue with step 5.
Look at the ribbed side of the top cover. Some may show some toner build-up. Some of the rib intersections are too high and are dragging in the toner that is applied to the transfer belt. The ribs are there to add stiffness to the cover and to keep it from bowing.
Place the cover handle side down on a clean towel.
Using a palm sander with 320 grit sandpaper and light pressure (the weight of the palm sander) sand until the ribs going both directions are showing signs of being sanded. You will be able to see the difference as unsanded areas will be glossy and sanded areas will have a dull finish.
Switch to 600 grit paper and do a light sanding.
Wash the cover under cool water. Don't use hot water since that could cause the cover to bend.
Dry completely. I used compressed air.
Reinstall the cover to the drum unit. Tighten the 4 side screws first and then the 2 top screws last.
Put the drum unit back into the 3100cn and try a color print.
Please post if you have any questions about the procedure.
If your next drum unit has the same problem you can swap top covers.
Well I am now very happy that my Dell 3100cn prints without any streaks. A little background will help you figure out why I'm so happy.
I got a Dell 3100cn printer a couple of years ago. I had a friend that had one and I loved the way it printed and everything about it, so I decided to get one of my own. After setting it up, I printed a few sheets and all of the color prints had streaks or lines that ran down the middle of the page at extremely regular intervals on every print. I called Dell and they shipped me a new printer drum. It didn't fix the problem. They had me ship the printer back and they sent me a used printer. (I was upset because I figured I'd get a new printer... but that is a different story.) This one wouldn't even fire up. It kept giving an error about temperature. They sent out a tech and he replaced some controller. It didn't fix the problem with the error message. So I sent that printer back to Dell.
Finally they sent me another printer that streaked again. I was fed up by then and found that if I printed enough pages the printer would "warm up" and the streaks would go away. So any time we wanted to print anything in color, we'd just print about 150 black and white pages of whatever and then print our color pages.
There are currently 736,425 benchmarks in the database at geocaching.com. Overall, 82,517 benchmarks have been found and recorded in 114,528 logs. In the last 7 days, 1,007 benchmarks have been logged by 407 users. Four of them were found by me in Greentown, Pennsylvania near Exit 20 of Interstate 84.
I had tried to find a 1959 benchmark named "Burke" a couple of months ago. The eXplorist 600 indicated that I was within a half-mile of and then I realized I would have to trespass on private property to get to the mark -- something I do not do, at least on purpose. I saw a sign nearby labeled Robert Burke Consulting. Upon visiting his web site and seeing that he works with Linux, I concluded he must be a nice person and likely would not mind me giving him a call. Not only did he not mind, he offered to escort me to the benchmark -- he had noticed it in the past and knew right where it was. I met Bob and his four-year old son at his driveway and off we went in his four-wheel drive truck down a dirt road and off into a field. Turns out that Bob's father owns hundreds of acres of land where the benchmark is located. Five generations of his family have lived in Pennsylvania.
Turns out that there are actually four benchmarks (Burke, Burke 2, Burke Reference Mark 1, and Burke Reference Mark 2) all within a couple of hundred feet of each other. Three were placed in 1959 and one in 1967. The descriptions given are accurate for finding them -- but don't rely on lat/lon because those are not accurate. One of them was off by nearly 200 feet. Ater many a wild goose chase, I have learned that the best way to find benchmarks is to carefully read the datasheet. Here is a typical description for finding a reference mark...
REFERENCE MARK 1, A STANDARD DISK STAMPED BURKE NO 1 1959, IS CEMENTED IN A DRILL HOLE IN TOP OF A 2 X 3 FOOT BOULDER IRREGULAR IN SHAPE AND PROJECTING ABOUT 2 INCHES ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE GROUND. IT IS 85.9 FEET SOUTHEAST OF AN 8-INCH TRIANGULAR BLAZED MAPLE TREE, 72.8 FEET SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF A STANDARD METAL WITNESS POST AND MARKER, 37 FEET SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF THE CENTER OF A TRACK ROAD AND THE MARK IS ABOUT THE SAME ELEVATION AS THE STATION
The disks were all readable, although there is some corrosion. All are in plain view and the main mark (Burke) has a witness post. If you ever noticed a 3-4 foot long orange stick in the ground with some wording on it, that would be a witness post. It says basically, there is a benchmark nearby and don't mess with it! The marks would have been useful to surveyors and civil engineers decades ago, but with the advent of inexpensive and accurate GPS devices, they have become unnecessary. In spite of this, they are fun to find -- 72 for me so far and only three-quarters of a million or so to go! Lastly, remember the Honda ads from years ago -- "You meet the nicest people on a Honda"? Well, this past weekend I discovered the same thing about looking for benchmarks. If you need any systems or Linux consulting in the northeast Pennsylvania area, pay a visit to Robert Burke Consulting. Other patrickWeb stories about benchmarking
The Intellectual Property briefing by IBM on May 2 in Greenwich was extremely interesting and I hated to leave a bit early but there was an overlap with another briefing down the road in Stamford, Connecticut -- this one about healthcare. IBM's healthcare and life sciences business is huge with 4,000 employees and revenues in the U.S. alone that would put it well into the Fortune 500. The company counts as customers 8 of the top 12 hospitals and all of the top 30 pharmaceutical companies. What has really put IBM on the healthcare map is last year's acquisition of Healthlink, which brought with it 400 top healthcare consultants. The insight of the consultants plus the smorgasbord of IBM technology has put the company on a mission -- to be a major factor in creating "Transformed Healthcare".
IBM's vision is significant -- to build patient-centric information systems, shared health and wellness management systems, and integrated networks to pull it all together among the payers, the providers, and the patients. Many of the benefits are obvious but some are more subtle. Payer insurance companies may be transformed from claims processors to wellness concierges. Smoother workflow and process optimization due to better integration and access to information can lead to improved quality, fewer errors and lower healthcare costs.
IBM has a vested interest in becoming the leader at these things because it has a half-million employees and retirees. Their Global Health and Wellness program is a partner in developing solutions for clients and may itself become a model. The company not only has a wealth of information at the intranet web portal but also enables an electronic health record into which employees enter their personal information which is then supplemented by automatic updating from claim and pharmacy data. The company also provides incentives to exercise and stay healthy. As a result, IBM's labor cost is significantly lower than industry averages.
The conference was attended by several dozen healthcare software vendors and various industry experts, including more than a half-dozen physicians. Most of the discussions revolved around the notion of "Patient centric" -- connecting healthcare information about patients with insurers and healthcare providers for the benefit of the patient. The key to make all this work is standards and they will evolve through Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) and a National Health Information Network (NHIN). The RHIO includes consumers, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, payers, public health offices, and physicians. Progress is being made. A presentation was made by John Blair, MD, who is CEO of Taconic Healthcare Information Network, a RHIO just west of the Hudson River. They have connected practices, hospitals, labs and payers and have developed standardized electronic health records, e-mail access to physicians, and e-prescriptions. The NHIN has asked four IT companies to work on interconnection of the RHIO's. Part of IBM's NHIN architecture will be based on royalty-free health care information systems patents (discussed in the IP meeting earlier that day) which give priority access to requests for patient information coming from emergency rooms vs. routine office requests.
From a purely heath point of view, the biggest transformation will come from information based medicine that bridges healthcare and life sciences. Molecular level understanding of disease is being made possible, in part by supercomputers such as BlueGene, and the result will be the development of targeted drugs. In other words, based on a DNA sample and genomic analysis, a diagnosis and treatment can be based on our individual medical history and genetic predispositions. Whole new fields are opening up including pre-emptive medicine, pharmacogenomics and clinical decision intelligence. A small device the size of a cell phone can take a sample of your blood and determine your rate of metabolism which in turn affects how much of a drug you need to provide optimal results. It will soon be possible to predict the likelihood of a person getting something deadly but yet preventable.
Advanced analytics are beginning to provide the ability to run complex algorithms to answer complex questions. For example, there is a 100 page document that provides guidelines on how to perform a particular surgical procedure. It is based on the "average" person. Nobody is average so would it be nice to be able to have a system which can provide specific recommendations based on many variables that are particular to an individual -- providing the surgeon with a "how to" guide unique to each patient.
Molecular Profiling Institute is creating tools for genomic and proteomic profiling and treatment of cancers. Seventy of our 40,000 genes can predict breast cancer accurately. Dr. Robert Penny showed incredible examples. A particular gene that is missing or not working can tell the cause of a particular disease and a drug that can attack that specific gene can fix it and the patient can be cured. This is called "jumping diseases" -- using a cure for disease xyz to treat disease abc. Dr. Penny showed before and after images of a dying cancer patient. After the application of a drug that attacked the targeted gene, the cancer disappeared. It gave the audience a lump in their throats.
There are many new issues arising along with the breakthroughs. For example, being able to know you have high odds of getting xyz disease for which there is no prevention and no cure after getting it, is questionable. The trend from physician centric to payer centric to patient centric is accelerating. It is likely that what will be accomplished in the next ten years will be vastly more than what has been accomplished in the last one hundred.
Last month I got an email from Nora Barnes who is a professor of marketing at the 
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Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "
There are currently 736,425 benchmarks in the database at 
The 