Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Sérgio:
Gostou da foto, Rainer?

Foi um achado e tanto!

[[]],

Sérgio Stella

www.drsrg.hpg.com.br

The big buzz this sunday morning is the acquisition of Pyra (the Blogger company) by Google. At this writing, no major news source (at least according to Google News) has published anything. However, there’s ample commentary on hundreds of weblogs and on SlashDot.

Befitting the occasion, Pyra founder Evan Williams blogged the news live from a session at the Live from the Blogosphere conference.

Blogger hosts more than one million weblogs, of which a few hundred thousand are actively updated. Half a year ago, when starting this weblog, I did some tests with Blogger but was frustrated by the lack of control over some things, and the relatively frequent downtime.

Tons of commentaries and analyses are already out. Oblomovka makes an interesting point:

Google buys Internet stuff it doesn’t want to go away

also citing Google’s buyout of Deja, a company that archived NNTP newsgroups.

Dan Gillmor has a good overview, noting the recent announcement of weblogging facilities by Tripod (Terra/Lycos) and the possibility of AOL doing the same in the near future.

Nick Denton asks:

…will Google use weblog links to improve Google News? Right now, news stories are selected by an algorithm which counts the number of similar stories, and promotes widespread items. The results are occasionally strange, and usually bland. A system which analyses inbound links from weblogs would produce a much better selection.

Google apparently wants to harness weblogger’s data mining and analysis to improve its own services, a very shrewd move. However, they need to do so without alienating other weblogging companies.

Clearly Blogger-hosted weblogs will be scanned and fed into Google indexes immediately, rather than after a delay that today ranges from hours to days. My guess is that, soon after getting a grasp of what can be done which this setup, they’ll offer plug-ins for software like Movable Type, and URLs which home-built weblogs can ping, to enter information from non-Blogger weblogs into their system.

Ben Hammersley writes:

Google lives or dies on fresh links – and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google’s network: it’d be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It’s a distributed early warning system for Google’s spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google’s staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.

Update: Tons of comments already out at MetaFilter. As well as more name suggestions: Booger , Goggler…

I wasn’t going to post about the war, but this post by Burning Bird is too good to pass up…

Free World Dialup is announcing free worldwide VoIP (Voice over IP) phone service. Any FWD member with broadband Internet can call any other member for free, anywhere in the world. This works with some “software phones” and VoIP gateways like the Cisco ATA-186.

In practice, FWD is working as a registrar to index and map VoIP users; they have nothing to do with the infrastructure. This is, of course, the way new communication services should be implemented.

There are a few catches. The calls work only between FWD members; there’s no official bridging to the “plain old telephone system”… (but see below). You must buy an approved SIP User Agent – either hardware or software. Depending on your provider and connection, audio quality may not be all that great, or there may be audible interruptions.

Recently the ITU defined +87810 as the country code for VoIP calls. Another standard, ENUM is being used to map between VoIP phone numbers and IP addresses. This means that, once established phone companies decide to bridge their old systems – meaning, soon-to-be obsolete systems – over to VoIP, this will be the country prefix to use; all Internet users are in the same cybercountry, of course. So far, only some Austrian residents can dial +87810 to call a FWD from their old phone. It remains to be seen what “long distance” charges will be applied in such a case; to keep charges low, every city should have a local bridge.

Thanks to boing boing for the link.

Mark Pilgrim introduces 100 stories:

They are all original. They are all interrelated. Some of them are over 80 years old.

They are 100 stories of unfamous people.

Only a few of the stories are available at this writing. Fascinating stuff.

The Hairy Eyeball pointed me at Lingua Blogs, a list of blogs interested in/about language – a long-time interest of mine – and one of those is the Enigmatic Mermaid. Good stuff…

…and Enig was the one that linked to Japanese Smileys some days ago, and I lost the link. Sorry about that.

Can’t recall what links I followed to get there, but I ran into The Hairy Eyeball. Mostly in English, some stuff in Portuguese – the author lives in São Paulo. Great design, great content, lots of content… only the RSS feed wasn’t working, and I sent e-mail. (It works now )

And he liked my disclaimer! Thanks, Colin!

Andrew Zolli, in his guestblog on Boing boing, writes about Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico (with photos and links):

Although few history books mention his name, in the mid-1800’s Joshua Abraham Norton proclaimed himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

… Indulged by the local populace, Norton ate free in the best restaurants, which accepted his ‘currency’. During his reign, he issued a steady stream of proclamations, in which (among many other things) he abolished the Congress, called for the building of the Bay Bridge, and banished the F-word (“Frisco”) from polite speech.

Though a complete loon, he was beloved by San Franciscans during his time, and more than 30,000 people attended his funeral. Fittingly, no quote marks or other explanatory notes mark his epitaph.