DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » What a day!
Microsoft is supporting OpenID and Apple is denouncing DRM.
no comment by me is even needed here
Google Webmaster Tools – Webmaster Tools – this will now show you all links that Google knows of to your own pages.
Some things I noticed
So I was looking at the stats for Fagan Finder; it’s always nice to see new data, and I’ve never been very good at keeping track of it all myself. According to Google, 64% of the links are to the Translation Wizard. In second place is my article on RSS at 13%, and URLinfo at 8%. 98% of links to the Translation Wizard are websites using the translate this page feature. I had to play with the data in Excel to arrive at this.
Clearly there’s a power law going on here. And this is yet another confirmation that the Translation Wizard was a huge winner, and since it is largely broken now, seriously needs an update. I just do not have the time. Ideas, anyone?
Tories and Liberals trade barbs over environment – it’s funny how things change. When I was in grade 4 (’93-’94), we had some group work on determining political party issues and campaign platforms, or something like that. I vaguely recall that I didn’t really know what issues were big, but I figured stuff like the environment, maybe education. Then I found that it was actually things like healthcare, which I would have never guessed.
Fast forward to 2006, and the Conservative government reduces environmental spending, and pretends that global change doesn’t exist. Now it’s 2007, and all the major parties are trying to out-green each other, or at least pretend that they are. While I’d rather have a non-Conservative party handling things, this will (and is) certainly improve matters.
Toronto Transit Camp – extremely cool idea. I’m not sure if I can attend (nor do I have a lot to contribute at the moment), but I am looking forward to the results.
Quizlet › The End of Flashcards – so this is interesting. I’ve been working a bit on a new project of mine called Quizify, and I was hoping to blog about it for the first time when I get a couple of crucial features done. So today, via del.icio.us, I find out about Quizlet, which has both a similar name (well, fair enough), and to some extent, a similar purpose and methodology.
I definitely think Quizify is and will be sufficiently different from Quizlet, but one thing in particular is that they’ve built out a whole bunch of infrastructure pieces that I haven’t done yet, but have planned or at least thought of, such as a system for sharing these quizes. So I think that having discovered this website, I will probably very slightly alter my course, but overall I’m still committed to the same basic plan. The question is, can I get the quizes built with Quizlet to work with Quizify? It will certainly work the other way ’round.
Wow. Upon closer inspection they have an import mechanism identical to plans that I had and rejected. Their export mechanism is to save it as a file, so that means import into Quizify will be available but not seemless. Very interesting… especially, I’m sure, for those of you who I haven’t spoken to about Quizify and wonder what the heck I’m talking about…
I’m watching the State of the Union now. After rambling on about how America is great for a minute or so, his very first words were “on september 11…”. omg is about all I can say to that. one of his first sentences: “dictatorships harbour terrorists” – is that generally true?
I also likes how he points fingers at countries. “these guys are bad”, basically. argh, why do I even watch these anymore…
Map sources/GeoHack
– very cool, provides links to mapping sites at specified coordinates; this is a much more comprehensive version of my similar service.
Internet Archive Forums: View Post
In other words: “you have to put a (c) on a document and send it into the Library of Congress” (copyright of Thomas Jefferson from the founding) to a “you get copyright on every scribble and spew whether you want it or not, and, oh, it usually lasts over 100 years” (copyright sponsored by Disney circa 1976) has been ruled not a “change in the contours of copyright” according to Jerome Farris of the 9th Circuit.