tracking

Jul 18 2008   11:40AM GMT

Bit.ly: A better URL shortener for developers, data geeks and microbloggers

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, Web 2.0, programming, software, data, Technology, Web services, Internet, innovation, useful, cool, hacks, free, public domain, feeds, social bookmarking, social publishing, design, creativity, reviews, startup, resource, collaboration, community, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, code, tracking, traffic, Web analytics, tool, Web design, blogging, communications, Web applications, statistics, interface, geek

The old adage about not reinventing the wheel doesn’t quite extend to Web applications. URL shorteners may have been around for years but there is plenty of room for improvement. This list of 68 URL shorteners from Honkiat.com show both the competition in the space and the need for innovation. There’s certainly plenty of demand: TinyURL.com, for instance, which has been around since 2002, purports to receive over 1.5 billion hits a month. While that seems a little high, the emergence of character-limited microblogging platforms like Twitter and long, forgettable Web addresses spit out by content management systems has resulted in a need for effective ways to simply Web addresses.

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

Apr 30 2008   6:03PM GMT

May 1st is RSS Awareness Day. Have you checked your feeds today?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Web 2.0, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, podcasting, blog, cool, learning, free, feeds, event, creativity, screencast, tracking, tool, howto, blogging, RSS, fundamentals, communications, demonstration

Are you hip to Really Simple Syndication? If you’re still behind on the adoption curve, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day.

Daniel Socco of DailyBlogTips offers a detailed explanation of where the idea for RSS Awareness Day came from and what it was intended to accomplish. Check out RSSDay.org for more information.

In honor of the occasion, we’ve made RSS our Word of the Day to help get out the word, so to speak.

For more information, check out:

• Dan Bricklin’s article, What is RSS?
• our RSS glossary
• our podcast explaining what you can do with RSS
• our definition for RSS reader
• Google Reader
• WhatIs.com’s RSS feeds, including the Word of the Day, the feed for this blog, the enterprise IT tips feed and the enterprise IT newsfeed
• The video embedded below from Common Cause, RSS in plain English

UPDATE: Dave Winer wished everyone Happy RSS Awareness Day. I’m glad I tweeted him about it, as he hadn’t heard the news.

UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.

A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!

Apr 18 2008   9:46AM GMT

Wireshark helps you to determine if your ISP is throttling traffic

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Networking, applications, Internet, blog, commentary, event, downloads, freeware, forum, tracking, traffic, controversy

Download Squad to the rescue! The popular and useful downloads blog from Weblogs Inc. posted about a utility that can help you monitor your own network.

Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer that’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and many others. Download Wireshark here.

Wireshark is long since well-known to networking professionals, perhaps under its previous name, “Ethereal.”

In fact, our colleague Sue Fogarty posted about SHARKFEST over at The Network Hub, an event about protocol analysis specifically for developers and users of Wireshark.

Sue says that Vint Cerf wowed ‘em at SHARKFEST. No shock there — the “father of the Internet” is well-known for that sort of thing.

In his post on Download Squad, Ian Dumych also links to a white paper posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Detecting packet injection: a guide to observing packet spoofing by ISPs. Check in there if you want to learn more about the practice and how monitoring your own connection can help others.

Mar 10 2008   9:13AM GMT

Video: FBI can listen even when a cellphone is turned off

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Security, email, Mobile, applications, Technology, video, YouTube, Audio, tracking, traffic, tool, information, politics, hacking, communications, government

Fox News aired a report in 2006 that described how the FBI can turn on the mic on a cellphone and eavesdrop — even if the phone is turned off.

Today’s Word of the Day, government Trojan, describes efforts by various governments to covertly survail traffic of all kinds to and from suspect hard drives, including VoIP, cellphones and email.

These kinds of measures are only likely to increase as groups of all stripes turn to the Web to organize and communicate about activity the government wants to monitor. I find the “analog hacks” used here intriguing. VoIP or cellphone conversations and email messages may be encrypted during transmission but if an agency can record a target on the microphone or by using a keylogger, even quantum encryptography could be sidestepped.

Aug 20 2007   6:06PM GMT

WikiScanner: How Googlebombing Virgil led to radical transparency for Wikipedia editing everywhere

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, programming, Internet, search engine, innovation, useful, cool, hacks, free, academics, interesting, Silicon Valley, collaboration, wiki, community, tracking, tool, humor, Web applications, controversy

Sometime this past summer, future CalTech grad student (and self-styled”disruptive technologist”) Virgil Griffith decided that he wanted to see if he could elevate his personal home page to the top of search results for “Virgil.”

While that dream may or may not come true, there’s no doubt that the “quotes” should now be removed from disruptive technologist, (along with my self-styling). Virgil hasn’t written an epic quite yet but he’s clearly provided a useful tool to journalists and inquisitive netizens alike. Meet WikiScanner.

In two weeks, Griffith created a Web site that matches the IP addresses attached to edits of Wikipedia pages with the IP addresses listed in the publicly accessible whois database for companies and media organizations worldwide.

Using a simple, minimally designed interface consisting of a form, text, dropdowns and hyperlinks, Griffith’s site allows users to first determine what the IP address of an organization is and then plug it into to discover what edits have been made from that IP range.

By providing the means to cross reference who is editing what, Virgil’s code nearly approaches poetry, at least judging by Jimmy Wales, who told the AP that “It is fabulous and I strongly support it.”

It’s not quite fair to say that the effort is all about the Virgil Google bomb, either. According to this Wired article, Griffiths was inspired by the discovery that many Congressional offices were editing their own entries. Wondering what corporations were doing the same thing, he created WikiScanner.

As Griffiths notes wryly in his WikiScanner FAQ, the reaction to the tool’s discoveries has been more or less as expected. The CIA and FBI, Disney, Diebold, Exxon and a rapidly expanding universe of other entitities, large and small, have been editing away. Take a look at Wired’s “list of salacious edits” to see how far the count of “minor public relations disasters” that WikiScanner has enabled — and be aware that any edits that you make to Wikipedia may not be as anonymous as you might think.

Apr 25 2007   2:09PM GMT

Technorati placeholder post

Posted by: Alexander Howard
tracking, blogging, RSS

While you could view our Technorati Profile, you’d find very little there of interest regarding Alex. Of course, we look forward to seeing that change! If you find our posts interesting, funny or useful, we’d love your link.

While this post primarily serves to claim this blog on Technorati, you can also “favorite us” on Technorati:

And, as long as you’re here, we might as well point out that you can subscribe to this blog’s feed using RSS and a feed reader. Just click on the feed icon below and use one of the subscription options provided by Feedburner. Happy surfing!

Apr 11 2007   2:54PM GMT

StatCounter: Free blog traffic statistics in real time

Posted by: Alexander Howard
blog, useful, free, code, tracking, traffic, Web analytics

StatCounter offers webmasters and bloggers a free, highly configurable hit counter and detailed Web statistics accessible through an easy online interface. To get started, you just need to insert a simple piece of HTML code into your index page or blog template to get started with analyzing and monitoring all of the visitors to your Web site — in real time.