Surprise Surprise… My new facebook username / vanity URL is http://www.facebook.com/karmona
Go and get yours before someone else will @ http://www.facebook.com/username/, although it is probably too late ;)
Good Luck!
Surprise Surprise… My new facebook username / vanity URL is http://www.facebook.com/karmona
Go and get yours before someone else will @ http://www.facebook.com/username/, although it is probably too late ;)
Good Luck!
→ 2 CommentsTags: Conspiracy · Internet · Social Network

Google, Yahoo, Ask and Lycos have released* their top search terms for the past year (2008) and I have aggregated it to your convenience in one happy table below.
I don’t have anything smart to say about it but I did manage to pull out five intriguing insights.
My Five Cents:
Top Search Terms | 2008
| # | Yahoo | Ask | Lycos | |
| 1 | sarah palin | Britney Spears | Dictionary | Poker |
| 2 | beijing 2008 | WWE | MySpace | Paris Hilton |
| 3 | facebook login | Barack Obama | YouTube | |
| 4 | tuenti | Miley Cyrus | YouTube | Golf |
| 5 | heath ledger | RuneScape | Sarah Palin | |
| 6 | obama | Jessica Alba | Coupons | Britney Spears |
| 7 | nasza klasa | Naruto | Cars | Clay Aiken |
| 8 | wer kennt wen | Lindsay Lohan | Craigslist | Pamela Anderson |
| 9 | euro 2008 | Angeline Jolie | Online degrees | |
| 10 | jonas brothers | American Idol | Credit score | Holly Madison |
Update (18 Dec. 2008): Top 10 search queries that people used on Delicious in 2008 are: news, blogs, reference, wiki, restaurants, hotels, css, web 2.0, artists, music… I think it is loud-and-clear that the biggest bookmarking site isn’t fulfilling its search potential (!)
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* Note: Microsot (Live) didn’t released the updated list until now and AOL didn’t break out overall terms so wasn’t included here.
→ 4 CommentsTags: Google · Internet · Search
This post is a weird collection of three Internet Conspiracies from the last 24 hours.
Note: I do realize that this post is a creepy testimony to the fact that I might be building a search engine and reading too many blogs and the affect it might have on my sense-of-judgment…
Conspiracy I (Google thinks Facebook is a dangerous Phishing Site)
Google Chrome browsers around the world have claimed today that Facebook is a dangerous Phishing Site (read more on Facebook Developer Forums)
Conspiracy II (Searching for a compatitor ‘search engine’ with Yahoo)
Searching ‘Google’ in Yahoo, results with suggestion to use Yahoo search: “You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.” (it also works with ‘ask’, ‘aol’ and ‘live’ :)
Conspiracy III (Apple Anti-Virus or not)
Two weeks ago, Apple updated a technical note on its Support Web site that says:
“Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”
Yesterday, Apple removed the KnowledgeBase article from its support site (KBase Article HT2550 now points to a bare error page – see below) and Apple spokesperson Bill Evans explained:
“We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate… The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box… However, since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, running antivirus software may offer additional protection.”
…
→ 2 CommentsTags: Conspiracy · Google · Internet
“You can always start a weekend experiment but you can never know how it will end” (Moti Karmona, 2008 ;)
I was very curios and wanted to take the GAE for a quick test drive but the Google documentation have few inaccuracies and isn’t sufficient if it is your first Python encounter so I lost three hours of precious beauty sleep and compiled this blog-post-capsule for future generations.
How to setup your development environment to work with Google-App-Engine
Enjoy :)
P.S. More about the framework in future posts.
→ 4 CommentsTags: Development · Google · Internet · Software
Last weekend I was wasting time on my Blog performance and all I got is 10 sec. and this lousy post.
Quick profiling with FireBug and YSlow FireFox extensions have done great wonders with my amazingly slow, not-really-that-interesting, hosted (webhost4life) WordPress blog.
Main action items:
Results:
Have fun!
→ 2 CommentsTags: Blogging · Development · Internet · Tools · WordPress
Yahoo have released the Y!OS (Yahoo Open Strategy) 1.0 platform.
This is a cool set of simple APIs that can give you access to everything you ever wanted in Y! but was afraid to ask for…
Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP)
// The Yahoo Social Platform is a set of RESTful APIs for Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status.
Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
// The Yahoo Query Language is a web service that functions much like SQL (see example below)
OAuth Authentication
// OAuth is the authentication and authorization standard Yahoo has decided to use when giving third parties access to Yahoo user data.
Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP)
// Currently very limited and in a restricted sandbox.
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Example: How to use YQL APIs to access MyBlogLog profiles?
Simply ask for all the community members of MyBlogLog community with this YQL:
select * from mybloglog.members.find where community_id in (select id from mybloglog.community.find where name=”Karmona Pragmatic Blog”)
And once you have the IDs you can ask for my personal profile by:
select * from mybloglog.member where member_id =”2008070609482910″
Well… together with the existing BOSS API, this set of APIs is a powerful enablers to the Y! development network and I am sure some cool stuff are going to emerge from this innovative move…
Amazing!!!
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* You can have more YQL experiments using the YQL Console
** Boss Hack Day is coming to Tel-Aviv | November 6, 2008 @ Feature (!!!)
→ 1 CommentTags: Development · Disruptive Technology · Internet · Search · Software · Web 2.0
With the recent Russian spam attack on my business inbox, I have found out three interesting facts:
First, I really “prefer” my spam in English / Hebrew.
Second, Mr. Gates didn’t keep his promise* (what???) to a world without spam…
Third, Spam isn’t personal, everybody have it and Symantec have some nice monthly statistics** about it so we could all feel normal back again.
______
Spam highlights from last two reports (8-9/2008)
- More than 80% of our emails are spam!
- Top spam “stories”
- Spam categories
______________________________________________
* “Two years from now, spam will be solved” (Bill Gates, DAVOS – Switzerland; Jan. 2004)
** Each month Symantec publishes its State-of-the-Spam-Report highlighting major spam events or trends observed during the previous month.
→ No CommentsTags: Conspiracy · Internet · Statistics
Technorati have finally started to release the “state of the blogosphere” report.
I must admit I was really waiting for this shitty report and I hate the fact that I need to see this reports in shards (will be released in five consecutive daily segments) but it was worth waiting until now.
2008 Blogosphere statistics includes:
WOW (!!!)
→ No CommentsTags: Blogging · Internet · Statistics · Web 2.0
We have launched the Delver alpha an hour ago…
F5 on the monitors and statistics, geeee what a rush!!!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/delver_launches_social_search.php#more
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/delvers-social-graph-search-engine-now-open-to-all/
http://mashable.com/2008/07/15/delver-alpha/
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/15/delver-opens-social-powered-search-to-the-public/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9991378-2.html?tag=blog.1
http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/3975
…
→ No CommentsTags: Delver · Internet
Dunbar’s number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships.
In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates* to predict a social group size for humans and using a “simple” regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human “mean group size” of 150 (with 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).
Dunbar’s Friends is my definition (and trademark ;-) to those few “real”, trusted and known people in your huge** online social network***.
—
* Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, non-human primates have to maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through grooming (and not “poking” as you might be expecting :-). The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain.
** Did you know that Robert Scoble is following 21,060 people in Twitter, 2,992 in FriendFeed and only 71 “lousy” friends in Flickr…
*** Social Network for Dummies – Lee and Sachi LeFever (a.k.a. the CommonCraft‘s family :) have created a wonderful video explaining social network in plain English.
→ 1 CommentTags: Internet · People · Social Network · Statistics