I’m also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer…Looks like a winner to me.

If you have tried either of these, I’d love to hear about it.

This bug affects every content management system using FCKeditior.
Please pass on to everyone writing content on the web

If your using Firefox and Skype (almost everyone is), then most likely you have a Firefox extension that was installed with Skype that messes up content in the portal (and all other content management systems you post to).

If you look around the web there are currently 22,000 calls for help on this issue. It looks like this in your content:

<!–Session Data–>

If you’ve seen this and wondered where it came from, its because you inadvertently have been adding it.

Please stop!

Here is how:

1) open Firefox

2) in the top menu (files, edit…) click Tools then Add-ons

3) in the add-ons window click Extensions

4) Find "The Browser Highlighter" and uninstall it

This will also make firefox faster (according to this guy – http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/871907.aspx)

What is it:
its a piece of unwelcome, poorly implemented software that ebay built and released with skype. It does things like look for Skype numbers on the web page and highlight them. You wont miss it I promise.

This is a short test to see how the insert map feature of Windows Live Writer works. I think I am ready to give this product my endorsement. The push pin is a bit ugly though…I mean come on.

I’m not sure how Polaroid feels about their name being used, but this plugin does and pretty good job of doing what is says it will do. Very nice usability and great results. Here is the link. 

Oh…I looove the caption option. Just so you all know, I inserted the image on the right without the border, dropshadow, caption, or tilt – windows live writer and the polaroid plugin did all the work…very nice.

It does have more padding on top then I want…not sure how to fix that.

Let me list my first impressions as I am using it for this first time…

• Easy to install, unlike a lot of blogging tools that had to be handheld to the remote blogging API, this one found it right way. all I needed was my url and username and password.
• It downloaded the theme…..awesome.
• Great usability – the features are labeled well, and easy to find.
• Looking around now for more…what is this “colorize”..oh…it changes the color of the application….not very interesting, they could have hid that under a menu….
• Spellcheck works
• Preview is awesome…
• Nice category tool
• Easy to set the date
• Plugins….what’s this….105 plugins….one to integrate with Firefox…created by microsoft (!) . Lots of interesting plugins. Seems to be an active community.
• Easy to link to earlier posts…wow.
• Inserting images…wow, adds nice like drop shadow… automaticlly created a thumbnail

I think we might have a winner here.

• Somehow it managed to post with the wrong timestamp. Ok, figured that out, there is a choose date feature…nice.
• I can’t figure out how to insert a blog splitter – as most of you wordpress fans know, WordPress lets you insert a <hr> tag to tell wordpress where to put the "more" button.
• It has spell check, but and suggestions, but clicking the suggestion doesn’t change the text…weird. Oh nevermind, it does…
• It has an insert ad feature, put it takes a loooong time to insert and you can not do anything while its inserting.
• Its Java based and that scares just me a little.
• I really like the droppad tool. This is a floating desktop icon that stays on top of all windows. Select text or pictures and drag them to the drop pad. You can do this over and over, then when your ready, double click it and you will see everything you have collected read for your blog entry. nice.

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Blogs

So what’s the deal? Why are blogs and wikis so popular? Are they really as popular a search term as music and movies? To try and find the answer I looked at the cities and countries where the data comes from. Blogs are dominated by the French and Vietnamese?

The word blog returns 3,510,000,000 results worldwide on Google (that’s 3.5 Billion with a B). My research (consisting of asking Google “blogs popular in france”) returned this article. Although it is already 2 years old, it asked the same questions and reports that users of France’s most popular blog spent over an hour there on average versus just 12 minutes in the US.

French blogs stands out in other measurable ways. They are noticeably longer, more critical, more negative, more egocentric and more provocative than their U.S. counterparts, said Laurent Florès, the French-born, New York-based chief executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands.

“Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate rival ideas in the discussion,” he said. “French bloggers never compromise their opinions.”

Wiki

Wiki appears to be crazy popular in Japan. Just look at these results:

Let’s ask the same question. First some anecdotal evidence, like this article about a Japanese government official caught doing something he should not have been on the internet…editing wikipedia articles about the robot toys known as Gundam?
I love this quote:

“The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam,” ministry official Tsutomu Shimomura said.

The agriculture ministry verbally reprimanded five other bureaucrats who contributed to entries on movies, typographical mistakes in billboard signs and local politics. The six employees together made 408 entries on the popular Internet encyclopedia from ministry computers since 2003.

Test

One term I that myself use a lot is the word “test”. When ever think my internet connection may have been lost, I open my browser, and just to make sure I’m not looking at a cached version of google, I type test. I figured I was not the only one so test is pretty high on google’s rankings. The suprising thing is where it is popular.

Note that I graphed it versus, xp and jobs. Both of those show new year increases (one for new christmas computers, the other for new years resultions I imagine).

But look how steady test is, which fits my theory that the term “test” is used to actually test google. Now look at the regions:

The Germans are not only number 1, they dominate with the top 5 cities. What is going on here? It does fit the sterotype.

Why do this? Because otherwise, getting to the point where you can start developing themes or plugins is a pain.

I consider myself a well rounded developer. I don’t play favorites. That means, from one day to the next I may find my self in php, coldfusion, or java. I build prototypes using ext.js framework and also have local versions of Joomla, Conflunce, MediaWiki, and even Websphere portal with WCM, and SAP Portal (I keep those beasts locked away in a WMWare enviroments). But VMware is overkill for something as light weight as WordPress.
Here are the steps for setting up a local WordPress dev enviroment with Server2Go.

1. Download Server2Go – there are several versions. To pick the right one, check the requirements of the software you want to run. Since I want to run wordpress – I look at it and downloaded this one - (only ~23MB – nice).
   
2. Extract it somewhere (you can move it later) and and launch the server2go.exe. this starts the server. Any time you want to work in in, just launch it. If you want to change the way it works (like launch firefox instead of IE, edit pms_config.ini file.
   
3. Server2Go will launch IE for you and show the default screen. Now we have to create a wordpress database. So click phpMyAdmin under tools on the right.
   
4. In the Create Database feild type “wordpress” (no quotes) and press “Create”.
   
5. Download the WordPress package and unzip it into the htdocs folder in your server2go folder.
   
6. In your browser type: http://127.0.0.1:4001/wordpress/
7. Follow the instructions onscreen – click the create wp-config.php button, then “let’s go”
   
8. Type “wordpress” (no qoutes) into the Database name feild and submit.
   
9. Then you see this and that’s it! WordPress should now be installed.
10. Once your in wordpress, you can download themes from the internet and unzip them to the themes folder. Once you do, you can see them on the Design page in the wp_admin.
11. I like to find a theme that is close to what I want and modify it. Once you find one you like, create a site in dreamweaver and edit the theme from there. You can save changes to the php files and css and see them in immediatly on the site by refreshing.

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Also, gmail ignores the . in your name. So even if you signed up for FirstLast@gmail.com you can tell people at work its First.Last@gmail.com and set up a filter to auto tag those as work. Also cool.

1. From Windows install disk goto E:\I386 folder and open open (Double click) on the FP40EXT.CAB file. It should open.

(or – if you do not have the disk, find a working XP computer and go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\40\bin).

2. find fp4autl.dll in the list and copy it (ctrl-c)

3. go to c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin and paste it (ctrl-v)

4. Restart the 2007 office install

Viola! (thanks guys over at http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=627360)

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http://www.google.com (with your iphone)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140576-c,iphone/article.html
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2007/12/picasa-redefined-for-your-iphone.html

• Do too many cooks spoil the open source stew and lead to a natural conservatism?
• Do people save their really good ideas for patents, copyrights, and ultimately some plan for profit?
• Is the open source community not as dedicated (since I’m guessing it is not their full time job to write free software)?
• Is the open source community not as talented? Has Microsoft, Apple, and Google hired away all the talent?
• Is it a resource issue?
• Or is there some other flaw with how open source works that stifle innovation?

I have been looking at how communities like digg, slashdot, wikipedia, and other smaller forums operate. There does seem to be a conservative nature to large crowds. Mainly because the urge to contribute is high. So high, that people want to comment or tweak something even if they have no real expertise. Another issue is that as soon as some one mentions a novel or creative idea, there are 50 people eager to chime in with why its a bad idea. The burden then falls on the innovator to defend their idea. Without sources or previous examples they can cite (we are talking about innovation after all), the idea simply drowns beneath an ocean of criticism. Anyone surveying the discussion will conclude the idea was shot down.

This is all just speculation on my part. It will take more than just a few case studies to uncover any true underlying pattern.

• Date of last edit: April 2007 (A September backup is still in progress)
• Compressed size: 7.19 GB
• Number of files compressed: 9
• Number of files decompressed: millions
• Decompressed size: ~100 GB
• Time to download: 8 hours
• Time to decompress: 10 hours

Why on earth would you do this?

• The more versions of Wikipedia exist in the world, the less the chance it will get lost if something really depressing happens
• Having a local version means you can look things up offline
• Local versions can be used in corporate firewalls to give users access without granting full access to the web
• Local files can be parced by scripts to create reports and study the structure, trends, and patterns
• umm..its cool…do I really need a reason to want all the world’s collective knowledge on my laptop

Most people interested in this won’t have any problem downloading the compressed files. But few people have 100 GB free on their laptop. If you decompress the files to an external usb hard drive, it can take 30 hours per file (multiply times 9 files). Still, that is not too bad. You can buy 2.5″ laptop drives now that have 300gb and 3.5″ drives that are 1000 GB. The only problem is that decompressing the time it takes (10+ hours!)

Wikipedia is growing…fast.
Last year (Dec 2006) total compressed size of the English version was version only 5.8 GB. By April 2007 (just 4 months later) it was 7.2 GB (this is the version I downloaded). I am waiting to see what the September version will be. How fast is Wikipedia growing? It is hard to say. The last stats I found are for July 2006 but it was definitely on an exponential curve.

http://download.wikimedia.org/
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/December_2006/en/

Google trends has become an valuable tool for me in comparing the popularity of everything from HDTV sets, websites, software, and presidential candidates to vacation spots. I can’t wait to see what kind of mash-ups the web community creates.

• How long does it take for these networks to reach critical mass?
• What happens when the market is saturated?
• How many networks are people willing to invest time into?
• What’s next for them?

To answer the first question I went to Google trends and plotted MySpace versus Facebook.

From this it looks like myspace has peaked and facebook is nearly as popular now. Next I went to alexia.com which ranks sites.Here are the top 20 sites:

Rank	Change	Web Site
1	(none)	yahoo.com
2	1	google.com
3	1	live.com
4	1	youtube.com
5	3	msn.com
6	(none)	myspace.com
7	4	facebook.com
8	1	wikipedia.org
9	1	hi5.com
10	2	orkut.com
11	2	rapidshare.com
12	2	blogger.com
13	2	megaupload.com
14	3	friendster.com
15	1	yahoo.co.jp
16	7	baidu.com
17	2	fotolog.net
18	1	microsoft.com
19	4	google.fr
20	7	qq.com

Of the top 20 – Myspace, Freindster, facebook, orkut, and hi5 are all social networks (a collection of personal profiles linked together and competing for attention). The rest of the list is search engines, webhosts (which rank high because a lot of websites have that domain like rapidshare.com and blogger.com), and wikipedia – the king of user created content. Baidu.com is the top Chinese search engine.

Here is the one year trend for social sites on alexa:

One thing that is clear about the top 20 sites – user generated content is definitely king. Not a single site other than microsoft.com pay for content – they all harvest, search, sort, rank, and enable the general public to do it for them.

So getting back to social networks, how long can these things last, I think once they hit the level myspace and face book are currently, they have to innovate quickly or die. Like shopping malls in the real world, the crowds come for a while but are quickly lured away by brighter lights. Plus, a lot of users begin to get turned off when a system is seen as too main stream and want the cool factor of the next great thing. In any case there are plenty of options for users to try. While I do have profiles at Linkedin and facebook, I don’t update them. If I’m going to generate content, I want more control over it then those sites allow. Also, I want to benefit from the advertising.

The first thing you need to know is that in GMail, your chats are actually stored as normal emails with a tag "Chat". So all we need to do is convert the chats to email, upload them and tag them as "chat".  Below are the 5 steps to get them uploaded!

Step 1) Extract Yahoo IM chats to Text files
Yahoo saves your chats in an encoded format. Normally you can use the Archive reader that comes with Yahoo to read it, but in order to upload them, we need to convert them first. I downloaded and installed Dapyx Yahoo Messenger – it is free and does a good job of converting extracting the files from the Yahoo Archive and saving them as text files. Before you download it though – please be warned – It changes your IE homepage without asking and I did have a problem with the time zone. All the dates where correct but the times where 9 hours off…I sent an email to the Dapyx support and posted a bug to their forum but I have not heard back.

Step 2) Convert the text files to unix email format
Once you have the files converted as text the next step is to turn them in to email messages that Thunderbird can use. I wrote a simple vbscript that reformats the txt files into unix email format that Thunderbird can import. This script reads through all the text files in a given folder and turns them into one large output.txt file.

Instructions to use this file:

1. Download this file to your harddrive (note: never, ever run strange scripts on your computer unless you know what they do – right click the file and select and click edit to see what this what this one does – that said- lets run the script) – double click to get started
2. It will prompt you for some info – where are the exported text files from Dapyx, what is your name, and where do you want the output
3. It takes about 20-30 seconds to convert the chats to email
4. After the script is done, it will tell you its done. Open the output.txt to see the chats in email format the thunderbird can open.

Step 3) Import the email into thunderbird
Copy the output.txt file into a folder that Thunderbird reads and remove the .txt extension (unix email files have no extension) so it will just be output (with no .txt). Restart Thunderbird and you will see all you chat as emails with the first line as the subject and the date and time of the chat as well as who it was with.

Step 4) Upload to Gmail with IMAP
I already wrote about this earlier.

Step 5) Tag as chat – When you import them to gmail, make sure you have gmail tag auto tag the mail when it comes it – the word "chat" is not allowed so I used "yahoo chat", "aol chat" etc.

Your done! Enjoy!

1. Report 1: social network – How many people are in my social network? – Unique names are pulled from the To, From, CC, and BCC fields – the total counts for each  are shown. A tag cloud is created showing all the names. Overall, the names are evenly spaced out – but when 2 names appear in the same email, they are more related and grouped closer together. The more often names appear, the more larger and bolder they get. The cloud can be filtered to show only data from the to, from, cc, or bcc feilds or to show activity for a given period of time. Lines with arrows can be turned on to show the origin, destination and direction of email.
2. Report 2: A River of email – OK – so I know you are all familar with NameVoyager. No? Its a dynamic graph of Baby names (see screenshot below). Imagine the same thing for your email – years on the bottom, blue is received, pink is sent, you type a letter and the list is filtered (second screen)
   .
   (All Email – with count per year, per person – you can zoom in to see by month, or filter to see a given name)
   
   This activity over time (a graph showing the peaks and valleys of overall emails sent and received). It will be interesting to see email drop off at the holidays, peak when I’m on  projects with large teams, and drop off when I am working with small teams or not on a project)
3. Visual 3: Company wide graphs – Once I can do this, it is a small step to analyze not only mine, but a whole company’s email. This lets me build social networks. Who knows who? How well connected are they? Need to get introduced to someone – did you know your friend worked with him two years ago?
4. Visual 4: Integrate with your contacts – zoom out to see all your contact at once with a color indicating your activity with that person.  Or just be able to sort by most popular.
5. Visual 5: Build a tag cloud of words you use in all your messages (like manyeyes.com). Show topic popularity this way.
6. Visual 6: Building on the data from visual 5, build a tool like google trends that uses words as they appear in email. This would show the topic trends.
7. Visual 7: World map of email sources – using server source show the geographic location of people who have sent you mail.

Of course many other visuals are possible using other attributes over time (word count, attachment size, tags, etc).

Does anyone out there have something like this already? Working on it? What other plugins are needed? And most importantly, who wants to help