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?

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.

Take a less straightforward dataset, say the behaviour of a set of users of one of our systems which leads me to propose a certain change to a process. How do you convey THAT without a week of ‘I don’t get it’.

New toy time.

The ‘many eyes’ project has some nice examples. The holy grail of visualisation has to be an automated system which you throw a dataset at, and it proposes an endless sequence of possible visualisations. I have a big screen, show me lots of options. The following is a very wordy example:

Words used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Obviously. It’s a tag cloud. Big deal.  Hitting the ‘visualise using this dataset’ button brings up a stackof options. I can think of a dozen nice ones that aren’t already there. One frustration is that it doesn’t filter out the plots that the data set wouldn’t support. Even better would be a wizard to give you options for creating the data elements that you need to make a certain plot. For example I could define an X axis as the Scene and the Y axis as the distance through a scene. I could then visualise the data above in relation to how far through the movie the words were. Bottom left are words that appear early in the movie and the scenes. Top right are closer to the end of the film or scene. I’d guess the punchline words will be further to the right and top.

Plot this for a thousand comedies and you should certainly see if the punchline zone top right has interesting language in it, or just terms of ridicule. I’m off on the hunt for more projects, but if you know of any drop me a note. Link (via)

http://storeatmyhouse.com/  does exactly that, the ebay of space! I haven’t tried it but I’d be tempted if I have the need again. You can sell space and buy space. It’s as simple as that. Even the about us page is simple to the point of almost not even being there! “We’re just some simple guys who want to make finding storage space easier for everyone.” Securing the web earth interface seems to be a worthwhile activity to me. Tie this service into an eBay ‘trust’ service, and even OpenID style web accountability and the one major inhibitor (trusting someone else not to mess with your stuff) should disappear.

I found store at my house at the techcrunch forums.

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…

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.

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.

When I signed up to Explode, the meta social networking service based on ELGG I wrote about earlier, I had to give it my email, my name, my ‘username’, an image to represent me. That’s a lot of stuff.

Wouldn’t life be sweeter if I could just give it my Flickr address and an authorisation key so that it could pick up my details and avatar from there, or my Second Life key, or my Google Apps key, or just whatever OpenID type device I chose.

The only reason I use Google spreadsheets over Office or another online spreadsheet is lack of friction. It does 90% of what I need perfectly well, and the 10% I can usually fudge. The one thing it does really well is not ask me for another password to access it.

Once that hurdle has been jumped, since I’m daydreaming anyway, wouldn’t it be cool to play Sim City, drop into the stadium for a game of madden while your Sims watch, then jump in a Ferrari for a quick GT. All with common physics engines, refresh rates, and cool streaming commercial free radio.

Oh, and fat free ice cream that tastes like ice cream!

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.