Curiouser and Curiouser!

One PageRank to rule them all

To Google, what is a blog?.

I haven't really commented on the "should blogs be in Google search results" debate, but one random question. What is a blog? What's the technical difference (from the perspective of a search engine) between my blog and The Register? I don't see how you can "filter" blogs. You can obviously change the page ranking mechanism to give certain types of sites an advantage or disadvantage, but I don't see how you can filter blogs. My blog is just a bunch of html created by a content management system.

If more people think that the google search results are poor because the top results are not "relevant" it means the ranking system is broken, not that something has to be "filtered". The whole point of a search engine is that it searches everything and finds the most relevant pages.

By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]

Joi's question was pretty much the question I had in mind when this first came up -- how will they do it?  I mean if they could detect a blog by analyzing the page this would be pretty cool because they might be able to come up with a "garbage filter" algorithm at the same time!

Joi then goes on to make, for me, the right analysis.  The issues are with the ranking system and, perhaps, that one ranking system does not fit all.

Maybe the time has come for Google user accounts?

Meeting Richard Soderberg

I've just had a great conversation with Richard Soderberg who kindly offered to help me with some of my Perl questions.  He was able to fix me up in about 5 minutes for which I am very grateful.  My problem had to do with my not understanding how a hash (returned from an XMLRPC::Lite call) was being treated as a scalar.  The answer: Use % to cast it back to a Hash.  Thank you Richard!

We then went on to chat about how you meet people virtually in a number of different ways (and sometimes even in person), about languages, and about k-collector.  Of course with Richard's help I am a little closer to implementing the k-collector client for MovableType.

Good to meet you.

Strange omission

Here is something that suprised me:

Mozilla's show source doesn't list line numbers or provide a 'go to line' facility.

This makes it fairly pointless telling me which line a Javascript error occurred on.  Quite a strange omission in my eyes.

PHP based Wiki systems

Does anyone have any experience of PHP/MySQL based Wiki implementations?

I have a friend who is considering:

• PHPWiki
• WakkaWiki

Does anyone have any positive/negative comments about these?  Or an alternative suggestion?