New theme thoughts

I’m thinking of changing my wordpress theme.  Any thoughts. I like my grapes, adapting this theme to include a few grapes and a slightly vineyer leaf would seem to be pretty cool. Anyone hate the idea? Thoughts most welcome.

More website ranking fun

Following on from this post about website ranking standards, I have found a new toy.

dnScoop provides another wideranging rating for your website, taking into account a stack of search metrics. The output is a value for your site in $s. Apparently the blog you are reading is worth $121. I’m rich!

On one level it’s a shameless attempt to earn textlinkads referal revenue, but good luck to them. Assuming WordPress.com doesn’t eat the code (it did!), here is an example of the output.

My Site is worth $121

How much is your site worth?

Youtube still doesn’t work for me

So Googles enemies are circling, planning an avalanche of quality content and exciting technology. Great.

I’ve been thinking about TV a lot recently. Apart from about 3 shows a week I hardly watch TV, despite recently buying a new LCD that barely fits in my lounge due to an old CRT exploding. I watch the odd Daily Show clip that catches my eye. And thats it. So why do I want to watch web TV?

The answer, to me, seems to be so that I will see the first episode of the next Office, or Peep Show sooner than the mid point of the run. Social networking, peer recommendation, the digg of teevee – whatever you call it – it has to be immediate, twittery, and so highly targeted that it squeals.

The point of squeal, for me, is the point where as I watch a new show I can immediately flow it into the top 10 of my contacts who I think will enjoy it. And where doing that will bump this show up the general list for people tagged similarly to those friends I sent it to. I don’t want to pick what I watch, I’m too busy doing other things, I’m quite happy to have my friends tell me which episode of the  Daily Show was funniest this week.

If this new play can tackle that problem and deliver it on my lounge screen and my office screen then it will work. But I doubt it can. Maybe one of the tiny players can truly nail that challenge in Meta and take a steal as the natural home for hyper niche new content. Just a thought.

Flickr collections – sometimes it’s the smallest things

I’m so happy. I can finally pull my Flickr photos into shape. Roughly 2,000 photos, loosely gathered into Sets. About 80 sets. With no way to collect these sets, until now.

While Flickr continues to run too slowly at peak times, to take forever to load on occassion, and to drop my uploads from time to time I still use it. It just feels nice when it works. And everyone I know understands what I mean when I say ‘it’s on Flickr’. That’s worth a lot. But this has bugged me since I first used it. Folders have existed for a loooong time. Collections are just folders. Sometimes it’s the smallest things…

Website Ranking Standards

For a long time now I’ve run a Firefox plugin (SearchStatus) that shows me Pagerank and Alexa information in the status bar when I visit a site. Sometimes I pay attention to these, but I always check them out for startups, as they give a useful insight into how long the sites have been active, how well they are linked, and a vague ‘doing well’ feel.

Technorati rankings seem less relevent than before, or is that just me? A new (to me) ranking that I love the concept of is SEOmoz (found via stevenmilne). The advice for this site is:

Your website/page is a relative unknown. Search engines and humans are (for the time being) infrequent visitors. Consider the accessibility of the URL, the desirability of the content and your marketing efforts online; all can have great impact on your reach.

Using data gleaned from Yahoo, Google, Wayback machine, Alexa, Technorati, del.icio.us, DMOZ and Wikipedia it constructs an overall score out of 10. This site scores 1 (unsurprisingly), techcrunch scores 7, apple.com scores 8. I’ll find a 10 eventually, I’m sure of it.

The ever present wigit to add to your page is also provided, shown here:

Note that the image isn’y dynamic, so as the score changes it will stay the same. So I could easily cheat and use the following badge:

I realise to reprocess every time an image is presented would be a huge resource drain, but to serve a saved value for 7-14 days and then reprocess would be reasonable. Or fix it to the number of requests which could also be fed into the page strength value.

Other than that small gripe Page Strength has, I think, got a reasonably good potentil to become a new standard and join PR and Alexa in my browser Status Bar as information that I just want to know. Now.

10/10 to Michael Arrington

I love a good arguement. It enlivens the soul. More than that I love a strong opinion strongly worded. Especially when it’s against the big guy. In a suitably subtley named post “Digg should sue wired” on TechCrunch today Michael Arrington kicks it to Wired for being down on Digg.

Mincing words isn’t the TechCrunch style, but this made me actually CLAP as I read it “Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that “news” is way over the line.”

Keep up the good work TechCrunch. My techcrunch fanboy status has been assured for another month! At least.

Real world meets web world

I love it when the real and online worlds collide, and some really neat examples have caught my eye on my endless list of RSS feeds today.

Problogger  has managed to gain a sponsor for his first gathering: “I’m really excited to announce that it looks like there will be a chance for the first ever ProBlogger readers meet up while I’m in New York in late March” Finding a sponsor is a nice extension of the usual ‘I’ll be in bar X for a couple of hours on the 6th” typemeet up.

One of my favourite website blogs is that of zooomr, yesterday had a slightly less formal: “Maybe we can organize a dinner somewhere too afterwards and then shoot some more if folks want. Come on out and join us if you have time on Wednesday afternoon or evening” invite to someone elses event – total spirit of the internet.

This has to be a badge of honour for any blog, that people get off their bums to come out and say hi.