According to this post at Google Blog, Google supports rel=”nofollow” in links. What this means is that if you have a link like this
<a href=”http://somedomain/somepage” ref=”nofollow”>
in your pages, Google will not follow this link. Adding by default ref=”nofollow” to urls included in blog comments, refferers, etc should make blog-smamming useless since what these spammers want is to increase their PageRank (or search engine valuation in general).
This is one of the most brilliant ideas I heard for some time:Marqui’s world: This e-Mail Is… [x] Bloggable
Nice and simple. Just add something like
–
[x] blogable [ ] ask first []private
–
to your signature and make it easy for others to know the “license” each of your emails is distributed under. Something like a Creative Commons License per e-mail!
I want a Thunderbird plugin with Creative Commons signatures automation!
Those of you who have been reading this blog are already familiar with what I’ve called “Content Enrichment” (if not read this).
I was reading
Reference Tracking and the Performance of Technorati, Feedster, and Bloglines (by Jeremy Zawodny) when I realized that most people think of these engines as an interesting source to gather stats.
However, there are (or should be) so many better ways to use them! We should be moving to what could be called ContentMix, that is techniques to automatically mix content from different sources and create something more interesting and valuable. Get the tags related to a posting URL from del.icio.us, look them up in google using Google Web APIs, and get the top results! Create dynamic site navigation using del.icio.us tags at your site! Look up each link in your site to Technorati and get extra “Releted Links”! Clean up a feed from common words and look up what’s left at Amazon…
I would like to see some more of this around!
I was wondering what is the best way to prepare an organization to accept Linux in its IT infrastracture. Then it struck me: instead (or at the same time) of evangelizing Linux and Open Source, one could just inject diversity.
How would you do that? It’s simple and honest: just choose the best of the kind for each job! Don’t lock yourself to a single vendor! By PCs, Macs, Unix workstations, Windows XP Servers, Solaris Servers, etc… Just pick the best operating system, platforma and application for each job.
Then wait. Wait for the time incompatibilities will show up. It will be an upgrade of a client or a server. It may be a new feature, or a new program. This is the time to explain that “if we want the best of each kind we have to use Open Standards” –open standards in data transfer, open standards in services, open standards in document formats. Hopefully, little by little the organization will start using and valuing Open Standards and the cost of vendor lock-in.
When this is done suggest Linux! It will fit in naturally. That’s the kind of environment where Linux is most valuable, and easy to operate.
Do you think this is a good idea?
The Mac mini is soooooo cool! Will it run Linux? I’ll buy one the soonest possible. The perfect server for home.
The Technorati Developer’s Contest is over and here are the winners! Nice ideas, check them out!
Using Open Source Software means more than using the code, especialy if you are a high profile user like Google. It’s a relationship. In addition to free code, a Big Co using OSS may gain access to positive publicity, evangelists, early adopters.
However this comes at a cost. You have to favor this relationship. Google has not done bad in this field. Most of their products will work flawlessly in OSS browsers and they advertized their use of OSS when OSS needed this publicity. Do they need to give back more? I think they could.
Read Google Under Fire for Open Source Greed at Threadwatch.org.
lilina 0.6.1-pre1 is out. This version is a big step towards the direction I initialy imagined lilina should go. There are many bug fixes, minor functionality improvments and code clean-up, but what I call “content enrichment”.
By “content enrichment” I mean that lilna uses additional sources to enrich the feeds received by sites. One such source is del.icio.us. lilina will automaticaly look up each URL at http://del.icio.us/ and see if there are any tags associated with it. If so, they will be shown. next to the post title like this
The second source is Google. Using the Google Web APIs, lilina will query Google for the words contained in the post’s title and show the top 10 results. 
(you have to obtain a key from Google to enable your lilina installation to use this feature).
You can see lilina in action at my linkblog. Visit lilina project homepage.
I’ve spent the last days trying to install linux on an xbox, no luck so far -it looks like I have on of the newes ones where the Cromwell OSS BIOS does not work very well.. 
I gues I’ll have to wait for the next version of cromwell.
However I’ve been getting a lot of mail lately regarding lilina, so I decided to set up a forum at SF so that everyone can easily post ideas, suggestions and problems, and share it with other developers and users.
Merry Christmas!
Firefox is great, and now more people will be aware of it:
10,000 Firefox enthusiasts make history – Spread Firefox
my name is in there too! 
BTW, I have to congratulate the spreadfirefox.com peoplr for organizing a really successful and really profesional and amazing in so many ways, campaign (the NY Times ad is only part of it) for an Open Source Software product.
Thanks to all of them!