Because it’s a cheap and easy way to track attention today and in the future. (Almost) anything you do on the internet requires DNS queries. And when I say anything I don’t mean just web browsing (HTTP). I mean email, ftp, and most other internet applications.

Google wants to know what is going on on the net. They want to know of new sites. The want to know sparks in attention regarding a specific domain or service. Google Analytics does that -to a certain extent.

But if they could track all (or most, or a large portion) of DNS requests, they would be able to know in (almost) real time where is the global attention focused. They would also be able to track changes in the internet topology: if I move my data center to a new ISP, they will know, since all the IPs of my servers would change. Or, if users start using BING, they will know. They will also know, if, for example, the usage pattern of api.paypal.com has changed in the last hours or days.

Oh, one more thing: a DNS service that big can be turned into a cache cow: Google, already have a service called Google AdSense for Domains, my guess is they will extend it to be used for misspelled domain names.

And, in case some new, exotic service appears, they will be able to spot it and estimate it’s traffic…

Google public DNS service is a good move from their part. But I don’t like it. They have started to scare me.

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Today, The OpenFund anounced the selection of the first series of start-ups.

Four promising companies: crawdout.com (with an “a”, that’s right), youscan, fashinating, and my favorite, listiki.

Keep an eye on listiki -I think it can become even bigger than its founders think… I’ll be writing about it.

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In order for this to work, first of all, I need a file syncing service. Most of the above mentioned are good in syncing files -even though Linux CLI support is very bad, and my server is a Linux box. So they are on the right track.

dropbox has a nice feature: they have an RSS feed of all the changes.

Then it struck me. We need an open source file syncing service that would use RSS to describe the changes on the “main” file repo, and then use rssCloud to notify the rest of the repos.

It would work like this:
1. A local repo knows when a new file is added or modified and pushes this change to the main repo.
2. The main repo updates its changes.xml rss feed and uses rssCloud to notify all local repos of changes.
3. Local repos pull the changes and everything is in sync.

Of course, it might me as easy to set the whole thing as a decentralized system, where no “central” or “main” repository exists, and all repositories notify the rest of any changes.

An extra bonus: it would be very easy for developers to implement action hooks, the github style: for example, I’d like to run a couple of bucket3 scripts when new content is added or updated.

And the whole mechanism is based on open standards, widespread knowledge and experience with RSS, aggregators and tools like rsync making it easy to can have different implementations per platform of programming language or needs.

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– it would let me easily copy the whole blog to a new server when I decide to change hosting providers.
– I wouldn’t have to worry for database or other updates if I decide to abandon it
– I would be able to keep a copy of my posts localy
– I should actually have a local copy of *all* my content, including photos of videos posted there.
– It would use a version control system for my content, like git.
– It would allow me to create a folder (a real, file system folder) drop in it a bunch of photos, and it would create a gallery and a post from it.
– It would poll twitter and friendfeed for my activity and pull it back to my blog
– I should be able to send it an email with attachments (ex. a couple of photos and mp3 files), that would be automatically extracted to a folder, and all of them would be bundled in a single post, using the title of my email and its body text.
- I would just have to copy my latest podcast episode MP3 file to it, and it would read the id3 tags and automatically create a new blog entry, with enclosures and all.
- I should be able to easily script crazy things for it, in any language, from python to C -even bash.

That’s why I’m building bucket3.

It will only do very few of the above mentioned. But it will also give developers and sysadmins the tools, the environment, where they will be able to easily add functionality “the UNIX way”: by scripting and gluing together old and new tools.

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If we get 1 and 3 done, I will use my blog to host my “identity”, and the networking/sharing features of Friendfeed to connect with others.

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If you like the way ffdirect shows up in this blog, try adding the following lines in your CSS:

.ffdirect {
padding: 2px 4px 2px 8px;
background: #ebeff9 ;
font-family:Verdana,"BitStream vera Sans",Helvetica,Sans-serif;
font-size:10px;
display: block ;
}
.ffdirect a {
color: #0000cc ;
text-decoration: none;
}
.ffdirect img {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
(Make sure you enable the corresponding option in Settings->FFDirect after you install or upgrade the plugin)

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Please help me test it by adding likes and comments at friendfeed -the link should be automatically inserted bellow.

(it may take up to 30 minutes before your likes and number of comments appear here.)

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YES. Yes. I’m not just writing blog posts, I’m initiating conversations, that’s why I have the comments open. The discussion around my posts should be pulled back to my blog!

or…

NO. If people feel more comfortable to discuss my blog posts in other places, I should respect it. They prefer friendfeed or twitter or a forum, for their own reasons. They may even be different groups of people, with different codes of communication -mixing them might not be a good idea. There are even some privacy issues: do I have the right to make public a “protected” discussion on friendfeed, or a private tweet?

Well? What do you think?

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This is how the “cliend ID” will show up in your friendfeed posts.

Once you’ve installed and enabled FFDirect, go to Settings->FFDirect and check “auto-tag URLs for Google Analytics”, and you’re done!

After you’ve published a post or two with FFDirect enabled, check your Google Analytics reports. Go to Traffic Sources -> Campaigns and you should see something like this:

(you may have to wait a couple of hours for Google Analytics to create the latest report)

Images included in your articles should show up in your friendfeed posts.
Here are some, for testing:

Any link to an audio file (.mp3, .wav, .aac) will also appear in your friendfeed entry, using the embedded audio player (I’m not sure if the player will play wav or aac files…)

Here is a link to na mp3 file: test audio

That’s a good idea, but it will never work as good as it should. For one reason, there will always be services that BackType doesn’t understand well or don’t know of. Or short URLs that can’t be scanned easily for domain names.

I consider my blog to be the one place on the web I truly own. It’s my on line home. My on line identity is not my email, it’s my blog. I would like every single web service to ping back to it, whenever (I’m) it is mentioned. Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, they should all ping back my URLs.

One more thing: wordpress should accept pingbacks/trackbacks for the homepage, so if vrypan.net/log/ is mentioned somewhere, the service should be able to pingback this page.

URL shorteners are just lossless information compressors. Much like a zip function compresses information, in the same way URL shorteners compress a URL. No information is lost, but we need more resources to decompress and use it than in the original state.

There is one big difference between a function like zip and a URL shortener: the first one is based on an algorithm, all you need to extract the original information from a zipped file is knowing the zip algorithm. On the other hand, URL shorteners are using dictionaries: each URL shortening service is a dictionary that translates the short URL back to the original. If we don’t have access to this dictionary, the compressed information is useless.

In a way, there is a power shift from many to few: what everyone could read and “understand”, (ie go to a URL), now needs someone else’s permission, or at least existanse, to be read (ie the service must be up and running to convert the short URL to its original form). I think that’s what bothering Dave Winer when he says that “We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day.”

Obviously, URL shorteners are useful, that’s why they exist. They are useful in cases where we are willing to sacrifice some resources (CPU cycles, and a couple extra HTTP requests) to have the same information consume less space (characters in this case). What us users should be asking for is a piece of the “power” we lost. “Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to”, says Winer.

But that’s not all. Many URL shorteners go beyond information compression. They keep extra stats, like click stats. They capture user “gestures” and user “attention”. They let us know “how many users clicked on the link I suggested on twitter”, when they did, etc. Marketeers have been using intermediate URLs for years to measure email and banner effectiveness. Many URL shorteners give this feature to everyone.

Unfortunately, these intermediate URLs (in the form of short URLs) are the best tool we have to do this right now. This is why I don’t see URL shorteners going away, even if we found an algorithmic (and not dictionary-based) compression method to shorten URLs. But there’s an interesting field for new tools there.

One easy way to lower the cost of URL-shortening is to use our own domain names in place of tinyurl.xom, bit.ly, tr.im, et al. Any one of those services could take the lead here by allowing for that. Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to.

I would call it “data protability for URL shorteners”. It’s what I’ve been trying to push for more than a year by urlborg.xml (and was actually inspired by an older post of Dave Winer) .

Like Comedy Central, for example South Park -I don’t mind the ads they insert, even though I would like to be able to pause.

But why on earth, is Hulu and CBS blocked outside the US? Correction: I know “why”, don’t get me into the legal and regional (business) agreements they have. I rephrase: how does this help them?

What happens, is that most users that would watch Lost, Heroes, How I met your mother, etc. on their browser or boxee, get to download the episodes via bittorrent. This means a) they see no ads, and b) it’s easy for them to share the files even with people that wouldn’t bother to download them, or don’t know how to do it.

CBS, Hulu, and others, wake up! Your decisions on online distribution cost you money!

Here’s what went wrong.

I hadn’t realized it, but I was running out of disk quotas. Actually, I had no space left on disk on my server!
This caused some trouble to mysql (obviously).

All I had to do was to clear up some disk space (I deleted some big files, and backup folders), and restart the mysql service.

Dada! Everything works fine now.

From now on urlBorg will ask you to login if you want to create a short URL. The reason is that spammers took advantage of the URL shortening service to create short URLs they included in spam emails. As a result I got many complaints, I even have to pay $199 to GoDaddy (where the domain is registered) to

[...] cover the costs of responding to or “cleaning up” the outstanding spam complaints Go Daddy has received against your domain name so far. This fee is also used to cover the costs of processing future complaints, forwarding these complaints to you, and ensuring that the offending affiliates have been deleted. [...]

I still think GoDaddy is wrong to consider urlBorg part of the problem, but the truth is that even free on-line services should try to make the web a better and safer place. Authentication should make urlBorg spammer-unfriendly, or at least make it easier for me to fight them by disabling spam accounts and all their short URLs if necessary.

Requiring an account might be annoying to some, I understand. On the other hand, you can be sure all your short URLs are tracked and added to your profile (a feature that most urlBorg users like and depend on). Plus it will add some more “credibility” to any links starting with “ub0.cc”.

Obviously, users just clicking on short URLs are not affected, this is for people using urlBorg to create short URLs.

API usage is not affected, either.

However, since now, I used my own domain, “http://vrypan.net/”, as my OpenID. Other OpenID providers give a couple of lines of code that you can embed in any page and delegate the authentication. creativecommons.net doesn’t have instructions on how to do it, but after a couple of tries I ended up (I’m no OpenID expert!) with the following HTML headers I embedded in my homepage; it works!

<meta http-equiv="x-xrds-location" content="https://creativecommons.net/o/xrds/" />
<link rel="openid.server" href="https://creativecommons.net/o/endpoint/" />
<link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://creativecommons.net/o/endpoint/" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://creativecommons.net/vrypan/" />

Just change “vrypan” with your creativecommons.net username and it should work. Have a look at the html source in vrypan.net to see how to use it.

BTW, the ability to easily delegate your OpenID and change providers any time you like, is one of the coolest things about it!