Googlism of the day

My greatest fear.

Two del.icio.us bookmarklets - look up tag and popular entries from selection

Here are two bookmarklets that help you look up things on del.icio.us:

tag?

popular?

Drag these links to your toolbar, then when you highlight a word on a page you're browsing and click on the bookmarklet, you'll get the del.icio.us page of links tagged using that word (tag?) or the del.icio.us page of popular links (lots of links added recently) using that word as a tag. Try it: highlight (select) this word: design and see the del.icio.us entries for the word "design".

Thanks to Aaron Straup Cope for the base code I yoinked for this.

Blogs and feeds are the Internet's sensory system. That's what's so important.

By now, it seems to be way too self-referential and self-indulgent to ask "why are blogs important" but I've been thinking about it in a different way, and I thought I would share it.

The Internet-connected world is a big-ass system that comprises both the real world and the exploding information space that describes that world. Biological organisms (e.g. we) evolved sensory organs, sensory systems, an integrating nervous system, and some level of integrative consciousness to monitor and grok our environment so that we could make choices, initially about how to survive, and ultimately do more. Eyes converted light into nerve impulses. Brains filtered and integrated those signals (e.g. binocular vision) to extract higher-level information. Consciousness learned when not to be fooled by the information. It took millions of years of evolution to arrive at these systems.

Social systems evolved sensory systems to monitor and grok the environment to the advantage of the group. A sentry guarded the village so that everybody else could get a good night's sleep, systems of communication and trust evolved. It took thousands of years of social evolution to arrive at these sensory systems.

Technology emerged as the environment got more complex. Radar guards the coast so that everybody gets a good night sleep. It took hundreds of years to develop these technical sensory systems, with remarkable acceleration in recent decades.

Enter the Internet, with Google's 8,058,044,651 pages and counting. Have you seen them all? What is the sensory system of the Internet? It's evolving, and that evolution has happened over the last several years, with equally remarkable acceleration in recent months.

Millions of years, thousands of years, hundreds of years, decades, years, months.

I think blogs are a key part of this new sensory system, and the infrastructure such as RSS, tags, search, etc. integrate this sensory system into information to guide specific action. Simple example: I need to buy a new car. I can't possibly process all the information now available to best make that choice. Expert automotive bloggers attend to that part of the environment; they sense, report, aggregate, feed. I process and integrate that feed with others, and my decision is better informed. Multiply that by all the other areas where specialized sensing and feeding, in the form of blogs and feeds, result in better informed action. Attention is paid to these sensory systems, so they are reinforced, and so they emerge and evolve. Rapidly. That's their role and that's why they're important.

SpellWeb adds Yahoo! votes

SpellWeb went from scraping all the search engines I could scrape down to the one that gave me a true API to its results: Google. Several weeks ago, I added Alexa results, and now that Yahoo! has opened up their APIs to developers, it was a simple matter to add Yahoo! search results as well, so check it out.

The Yahoo! APIs, use the simple REST web service interface, so the call to Yahoo! is based on an http request with parameters, and parsing the XML file that's returned. For SpellWeb, I'm using a Perl script that uses LWP to make the call and XPATH to read the results.

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