Google search referer changes
Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header. Google announced the new gateway page on its Google Analytics blog, giving webmasters a few days to prepare for the change. Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Yesterday, 4:18am
Recipes
Bernard DeVoto, a cocktail purist, is no fan of The Joy Of Cooking or other cookbook cocktail compendia. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 31, 12:52pm
Corporate Linking
Scott Rosenberg’s excellent defense of links begins by shredding the silly studies that purport to show that link cause brain damage. (If you meet someone who tells you that links impose cognitive overhead, keep an eye on your wallet.) Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 31, 11:00am
Lebow
ART actor Will Lebow has published (at last!) the privately-circulated open letter that launched the current ART Dustup. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 31, 10:19am
Aviation
I made a couple of Aviation Cocktails last night. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 30, 12:46pm
HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback
The emerging HTML5 specification lifts video playback out of the generic Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 29, 4:42pm
Create enhanced results on Yahoo! and Facebook with Share markup
Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and ease the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this... Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 29, 4:17am
Measuring efficiency in the cloud
In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings? I shared a few ideas on green clouds at last week's Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 28, 4:23am
The anatomy of cloud computing
Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. Gone are the days of idle CPUs, empty memory, or unused drive space. The cloud charges us for what we use as we use it (assuming capacity is available). In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets. Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 27, 4:55pm
Thursday Feasting
Constraints: no meat, school night, some guests travelling hundreds of miles might arrive late. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 27, 1:27pm
Thursday Feasting
Constraints: no meat, school night, some guests travelling hundreds of miles might arrive late. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 27, 1:27pm
Precipitate
So, I was trying to make the smoked pistachio brittle again this morning. “Easy!” I thought. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 26, 2:30pm
The many flavors of H.264 video
H.264 is not a single video codec; it is a family of codecs with some shared shortcuts grouped into 17 sets of profiles and 16 levels of constraints. Video creators and playback software share a mutual understanding of these shortcuts, which are often accelerated by specialized chipsets. This post examines a few of the many flavors of H.264 video and their application in mobile, desktop, and Flash Player environments. Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 26, 4:19am
Facebook's photo storage rewrite
This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month (500 GB per day!). Jason Sobel, a former NetApp Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 24, 4:19am
ART Dustup
A silver lining to the dark cloud of the Boston Globe’s decline to provincial status is that the new Globe can give lots of play to local stories. This Sunday, the Globe’s big page one story described cataclysms shaking the American Repertory Theater. (I’ve been a subscriber through most of its history.) Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 23, 2:32pm
Google App Engine 1.1.9 boosts capacity and compatibility
Google App Engine released hosted platform version 1.1.9 earlier this week with big boosts in capacity and compatibility. The new App Engine supports standard HTTP libraries, larger files, triples the response deadline, and removes limitations on CPU-intensive processes.
Standard HTTP libraries
App Engine now supports Python's... Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 23, 4:48am
Economic anecdotes from SF restaurants
The macroeconomic climate of a global marketplace is on everyone's mind these days, including small business. On Friday evening I had drinks with owners of two well-known restaurants in San Francisco. Our conversation turned to business, marketing, and what changes (if any) are occurring within the service industry. In this post I will share a few trends observed in the front lines of the San Francisco food and beverage industry that may apply to broader business. Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 20, 4:42pm
Carpeting
Why is one called on the carpet? And where would that carpet be? Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 17, 12:36pm
Facebook's growing infrastructure spend
On Thursday BusinessWeek reported Facebook is seeking new financing for its data center operation growth in 2009. Facebook continues to add new members and their associated content at an extremely fast pace, with most new growth coming from international markets. Facebook needs to expand its abilities to serve these markets by bolstering current infrastructure offerings and cutting latency to its members through new international points of presence. In this post I will take a deeper look... Read more...
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Aug 17, 4:17am
The Violet Hour
We were in Chicago to visit Mom, who isn’t very well. We’d had an early dinner. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 16, 1:05pm
The Other 19th Century
Dirda adores Davidson, and this new collection is a nice supplement to the Davidson Treasury. Some of the wonderful literary confections like “Traveller from an Antique Land” depend on your knowing a lot of Victorian literary biography but they’re fun anyway. “The Peninsula” has a lovely sense of American business history and its resonance for families. “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is a wonderfully compact meditation on the terrible contingencies and chances of history. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 16, 1:05pm
Web Stones
Almost a dozen years ago, I wrote a short piece about Web pages that outlive their creators. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 12, 11:31am
Cooking Diary
A cooking diary by Sharon Hwang. Lovely interactive HTML design (once you go ahead and start clicking and dragging stuff). Only yesterday, you had to do this stuff in Flash. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 10, 12:05pm
Book Reviews
Dave Winer suggests that book reviews like the New York Times are using the wrong business model. Instead of selling ads, he proposes, they should sell books and take a cut of each book they sell. Read more...
Mark Bernstein, Aug 10, 9:42am