In an attempt to move in a different direction from the rest of the blogosphere, I was going to write something about how strange it was that the ill-fated search engine Cuil was covered so widely in mainstream press. Unfortunately, it looks like ReadWriteWeb beat me to it.
I encourage you to read their piece, because it pretty much covers everything I had in mind. But I will say this: Cuil was the first story I heard on NPR when I woke up Monday morning, and I was constantly asked about it throughout the day by non-tech folk who had read about it in other mainstream sources. That sort of coverage truly surprised me because, for the most part, Cuil seemed like many other geeky startups that the blogosphere adores, but average internet users generally ignore.
The Trouble with Tech Bloggers…
But enough has been said about Cuil’s fail whale of a launch. Instead, check out this recent post by Sarah Lacy, who uses the Cuil launch to discuss a problematic trend in the technology blogosphere. She believes that the obsessive rush to break news before other sites, coupled with the obcenely short hype-cycle of online tech journalism, is ultimately not very useful readers:
At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn’t it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?
If we’ve got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that’s not Cuil’s fault. And I don’t think it’s serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve already gushed about Digsby as a potential killer for Trillian’s perpetually delayed Astra release, and now it’s open for everyone to try in public beta. Since I’ve initially written about the IM/email/social network aggregator they’ve updated constantly mostly taking care of connection issues and other bug fixes. You can see their progress over at the Digsby blog.
This latest release for public beta adds Twitter support, something which I’m going to take serious advantage of, support for video/voice chat, and an inline spell checker. You can find the rest of the updates for this release here.
Since I’ve started using Digsby I find that the only thing I truly miss from Trillian was the plentiful skins available at Deviant Art and other sites. Digsby advertises skins on their front page, but I suppose that we haven’t seen any yet because the product was hidden away in private beta. Now that it’s out in the open I suspect the skinning community to have a field day. Read the rest of this entry »
As of today Mint.com, the much-hyped Web 2.0 personal finance site, is open to the public. This also means that their NDA has expired, so I’ll finally be able to share what I’ve learned about the service while beta testing it these past few weeks.
Please note that the screenshots on this page were grabbed from Mint’s feature page. They mentioned that they would make screenshots available to bloggers and press, but I have yet to see any pop up on their press resource page. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any screenshots of my own because every page is chock full of private financial data.
Overview
If you’re at all interested in keeping track of your spending habits but just can’t find the motivation to configure and update traditional financing software, then Mint is exactly what you’ve been looking for. It allows you to track the activity across multiple accounts, including checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, all in one convenient location.
Using Mint
After the initial sign up is completed you then configure Mint to keep track of your various accounts. Upon successful authentication for each account, which they assure is bank-level secure, Mint then gives you an overview page showing your total cash and debt, and a nifty comparison between the two. It also allows you to get a quick glance at your current spending trends–something which really deserves special mention: Mint’s intelligent tracking for spending trends is by far its best feature.
Spending Trend Analysis
While it offers the ability to see all of your transactions in a typical list format (more on this list later), Mint’s trend analysis brings all of that data to the next level. At the top of the “Spending Trends” page you have a pie chart that organizes your spending into useful categories like “Bills”, “Entertainment”, and “Food and Dining”. By clicking on an individual slice of the pie you then get a more specific view of your spending within that category. When looking at the “Entertainment” slice I’m presented with another pie chart that separates my spending into “Arts”, “Movies and DVDs”, and “Other”.
Read the rest of this entry »
You might remember this site from the waves it made a few weeks ago at social news sites. It was a seemingly useful experiment meant to compare the uptime of several inexpensive hosting providers when faced with a flood of traffic. Dubbed the “Web 2.0 Effect: Which Host Will Survive?”, a term they invented to group the sort of traffic rush you get from being featured on sites like Slashdot and Digg, the experiment looked to be a useful reference for anyone getting started with paid website hosting. The experiment relied on being flooded with traffic, and that they were by Digg and Reddit. It garnered an impressive 1,812 Diggs and 838 Reddits at the time of this post.
I was first referred to the site from a friend who was looking for hosting of his own. I distinctly remember the first thought that went through my head when I saw the winner: “Who the hell is Burton Hosting?” That started a chain of events that made this post necessary. My friends and I thought there was a good chance that this entire project was just a marketing ploy, and we set out to do some research.
What we found confirmed our suspicions several times over: It appears that the Web 2.0 Effect was not a legitimate experiment in any way. We surmise that it was, in actuality, an elaborate viral marketing ploy meant to shovel sales into the hands of Burton Hosting.
Initial Suspicions
As I mentioned already, I found it curious that a relatively unknown hosting provider won out so clearly. There were several other peculiarities I noted upon first seeing the site:
- This wasn’t a very realistic experiment: The test was simply a paragraph of “Lorem ipsum” text on a colored background. If they really wanted to test real-world hosting capabilities they should have included post-1995 web features such as images, dynamic content through a database connection, and scripting of some sort.
- It wasn’t a controlled experiment: The crux of the project relied on seeing which hosts choked when flooded with traffic. The problem is that the site needs to be highly publicized to get that traffic in the first place. What’s to prevent any of the featured hosts from surreptitiously allocating more resources to the sites? Nothing, that’s what.
- Where are the better known hosting services?: Where’s the geek favorite, Dreamhost? And for that matter, where’s Bluehost, Lunarpages, Godaddy, or any other semi-popular hosting service?
- Take note that the HostGator test subject is actually listed as a HostGator Reseller. Any potential problems with that listing could be attributed to the reseller allocating their allotted resources badly.
- Burton is the least popular by far of all of the providers being tested: A quick Alexa comparison showed us that Burton receives drastically less traffic than the competitors. Burton is the blue line trailing the bottom of the graph.
Read the rest of this entry »
