Updates from Josh Kenzer RSS
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09:16:39 am on December 23, 2008 |
I’m progressing in my use of the Canon DSLR. I think I have achieve proficiency, and am now experimenting on becoming good with the camera. I did a series of photos last night where I left the shutter open for for more than a few seconds and “painted with light.” I the images below, I went into a dark room, opened the shutter for five seconds and “wrote” on the wall with a laser pointer. You can view the whole set on Flickr.
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10:14:03 am on December 7, 2008 |
I’ve taken tens of thousands of photos over the years with point and shoots. I’ve become a snapshotographer. However, I’ve never taken the time to learn the ins and outs of photography. It’s very difficult when you’re shooting with a camera that only has full auto mode.
A while back, the CVB purchased a Canon Rebel XSi so we could take photos internaly and save money on outsourcing photo shoots. I finaly got a round to taking the camera home and learning how to use it. Being as naive as I am, I set it on Manual mode and started taking pictures. Each yielded the same result, a photo so washed out in light that it looked like an undeveloped Polaroid picture.
So, after reading the manual, I learned a bit more about how to use Manual mode as well as Tv and Av mode. I submit for you my first Flickr set of DSLR shots all taken in one of those three manual modes. For the Christmas lights, I used the window seal of the car as the “tripod.”
Anyone have any tips or sites they particularly like to help fine tune DSLR techniques? I’ve been really starting to hone in on good photos on Flickr to see what techniques these photographers are using. Any where else I should look?
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09:05:06 am on December 2, 2008 |
Disqus is a commenting system that you can plug in to your website or blog. It allows for threaded conversations, email notifications of new comments, and video comments. All tools to help your commentors get more out of commenting on your site. I’ve recently rolled it out on this site as well as a few other sites I have. I thought this would also be the perfect opportunity for the latest installment of a 5 question interview. Daniel Ha is co-founder and CEO of Disqus. I emailed Daneil 5 questions about Disqus and himself. Below are his answers.
Daniel Ha - Co-founder of Disqus
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How is Disqus doing? It seems a lot of the online chatter about Disqus has died down since Fred Wilson helped provide funding and major bloggers like Dave Winer switched to Disqus. Is that indicative of the adoption you’re seeing?
Disqus is doing pretty well. We have a great community of commenters and sites using Disqus which, as of this month, is growing at its fastest rate ever. We recently added two people to the team and have been working on a few new things, including an imminent major release. I pay a lot of attention to the online chatter you mention, and I’ve actually been seeing more chatter about blog discussion and comment systems.
When we first launched the service, there was a lot of blog posts and buzz because we were doing something a little new. Fortunately, the premise we’ve helped introduce has become better recognized (with assistance from the handful of competing services to Disqus) and the overall novelty has worn a bit. Of course, we’ve also been a little quiet in the last month as we focused on improving Disqus. We’ll be making more noise very soon.
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What technology did you use to write Disqus? Why did you choose it? How has it scaled?
Disqus uses Django, a Python web framework. We chose Django for a few reasons: a) it allowed us to rapidly prototype and develop; b) we are big fans of Python; c) it’s powerful and easily extensible; d) there was a growing, passionate community behind it.
Disqus isn’t a destination site, but rather a service that runs across so many different websites. We ran into challenges, both typical and particularly interesting ones. There was a long period during the summer where we devoted much our time and energy into rewriting parts of core Disqus so that we are able to scale much easier moving forward. We’re very confident of our scalability and performance today.
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What has been the largest hurdle for Disqus so far? Adoption? Finances? Scalability?
Our largest hurdle was communicating our goals for the service to potential users. We had to package up our thoughts and philosophy around building Disqus and offer something tangibly beneficial to people discovering Disqus for the first time.
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What has been your biggest personal learning experience from starting and working on Disqus?
It’s hard to say. I’ve learned so much about the many aspects that Disqus has gone on to touch upon: startups, web communities, scaling web applications, user experience, embracing feedback, the importance of customer feedback, the dynamics of new and current media… many many things.
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What new online technology has you most excited these days? Why?
I love new services that takes older mediums, such as print media and television, and breathes new life into them without radically changing our existing behavior. I feel that Disqus is in a good position to achieve this if we continue to innovate in this area.
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10:32:23 am on November 30, 2008 |
Tired of dealing with spam comments, I’m trying something new. I’ve switched the blog comment system for this site and for DisneyFrontier.com to Disqus. I’ve been intrigued by Disqus for awhile now and will now find out if it provides any more value than the default Wordpress commenting system. Anyone else using Disqus? Any feedback on it?
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10:11:21 pm on November 29, 2008 |
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03:39:54 pm on November 28, 2008 |
I’ve always been a fan of Dave Winer’s scripting.com design. It’s very minimal, based mostly of text design and has some neat options. When Automattic released their Prologue theme, I was immediately impressed by the simplicity of it.
So today, I decided to modify it slightly to fit my desire for a simple design. The Prologue theme was developed for a multi-author environment. Since I’m the only author on this blog, I made a few tweaks.
I added my latest tweet to the top right corner. I added post titles to all the pages. By default, Prologue doesn’t use titles. Lastly, I added my friend feed stream to the sidebar. I think it looks nice. Thoughts?
I do wish I had the option to use the WYSIWYG editor on the post box that displays on the main index page when I’m logged in.
Update: After reading this post about adding the WYSIWYG editor to prologue, I’m now rocking TinyMCE at the top when logged in.
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03:45:10 am on November 21, 2008 |
Up till now, Google’s search engine results were based off an algorithm that determined a web page’s placement in search results. This algorithm used a number of factors to rank pages, one of the most important being inbound links to the web page from other authoritative pages. This idea of ranking based off citation was a huge evolutionary change that propelled Google to the top of the search engines.
Yesterday, Google made the next evolutionary change with searchWiki. searchWiki is new functionality that allows users to promote or remove search engine results from Google. While it’s being touted as a way to customize your own search results, there’s more to it then that. If Google decides to implement “promoted pages” as a factor into their already powerful algorithm, search engine optimization will change as we know it. The idea here: citation plus recommendation equals top listing.
How does it work?
Let’s explore how this would work. If I search for fly fishing equipment today (yes, I’m avoiding the running shoes example), I get results of an assortment of online fishing retailers. If I them promote Cabella’s to the top of this list becase I love their site, their checkout process and their customer service, awesome. The next time I search for fly fishing equipment, Cabella’s is listed at the top. But let’s say a very tiny tiny fraction of Google user’s do this. Um, I don’t know, like 20,000 people - I would consider this a micro fraction - Google can then look at that data and in effect say, Cabella’s is a very authoritative site linked to by many other sites and users seem to really like it, let’s place it number 1.
Keyword search results will in essence become top rated sites. The rating will be based off incoming links and user recommendations. This will prevent SEO professionals from being able to game the system. Instead, their sites will have to first rank high and then deliver on user experience. User’s aren’t going to promote sites that don’t fullfill on their respective promises and if the site’s really bad, they are liable to remove it all together.
Gaming the System
This new style of ranking would make the barrier to entry very high for new sites. It’s already high if you’re a new site trying to take market share based off competitive keywords. Usually involving a significant link building process that often borders on unethical. Now, you’d have to have a combination of link building and promoting. As anyone who’s into Digg.com can tell you, gaming promotion is entirely possible and is done regularly. However, the difference is Google’s shear numbers. Maybe, in the example above, they raise the number from 20,000 promotions to 200,000 promotions. A much tougher number to game. For very popular and competitive keywords, the number moves up to 2,000,000 promotions. Impossible to game.
When will it happen?
I’m confident that Google will sit back for awhile and be content gathering promotions and removals. This data will be initially be used for nothing more that personalizing search engine results for any logged in user. If it catches on, they might slowly begin to integrate it into the algorithm. They can easily start with those search terms that have the largest number of promotions and removals. If a search term doesn’t have any user sourced recommendations, they gracefully fall back on to their current algorithm. You know the one that’s gained them 74% of the market share in the US. But if it does catch on, be sure that this will be a historic game changer that will keep Google well ahead of it’s competitors for a long time to come.
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08:27:15 pm on November 20, 2008 |
I was surprised to do a search on Google today and see an arrow and X next to each result. Mousing over the arrow showed the link title Promote. Mousing over the X showed the link title remove. See below.
Upon clicking on the up arrow, I got the following pop-up window:
After I clicked continue, the arrow was then shown green.
Update: Apparently, Google is calling this searchWiki. Here is there official post on the subject including an introductory video. Read why this is going to be a huge evolution to search engine results.
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08:45:12 pm on October 14, 2008 |
The MLB season is coming to an end, and I have to say I am pleasantly surprised at how well my Python XML to Twitter feed has worked. Except for a few hiccups at the beginning of the season, I never had to change, restart or deal with issues related to my Python script. The only major issue I didn’t deal with was double headers. On double headers, the final score from the first game kept tweeting out.
Here are how the five teams break out:
- Diamondbacks - 87 followers, 4,949 updates
- Giants - 104 followers, 5099 updates
- Dodgers - 139 followers, 5,071 updates
- Athletics - 67 followers, 5,252 updates
I didn’t promote any team in any way. I set up the Dbacks because I’m a Dbacks fan and wanted to keep up with games. I set up the Dodgers for my friend. I set up the Giants and A’s to see if I would get more Twitter followers from the bay area. I’m surprised at the relative evenness of followers. Obviously the A’s had a poor season and the Dodgers are in the NLCS, but those things considered they are pretty even.
I’m also surprised that teams that aren’t in the playoffs are still getting followers. I’ve only ever tweeted manually when I first set up each account. I do have an account setup for the Suns, but I’m not sure I will go much further. I could do all the teams in all the sports, but I’m sure that would get me shut down, and I really just wanted to get the Dbacks updates.
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10:17:34 am on October 3, 2008 |
YouTube - 5 Friends Uncensored.