"What does it mean to "claim" a Weblog?
By claiming the weblogs that you (co-)author, your profile information will appear (if you wish) with your photo or image next to all searches that involve your weblog. When people click on your image, they can learn more about you — they see the information you want to provide to them about yourself — current contact information and other blogs you author. Naturally your profile information is completely within your control and all provided information is governed by the Technorati privacy policy."
[Added November 2005:] Technorati have now clarified that "Claiming your blog on Technorati allows you to customize your blog's display in our search results. You can add your photo, add a blog description, and place your blog in up to 20 categories in Blog Finder. Plus, if you claim your blog with the Technorati Embed, you can enable cool Technorati features on your site, like a search box, "blogs that link here" link, and more!"
"Enter the main URL for each weblog that you wish to claim in the members area. You will receive an email from Technorati with a snippet of HTML code to add into your weblog configuration. Simply cut-and-paste the HTML into your weblog template (usually it is best to put it into your sidebar in a blogroll or external links section), and save your changes! For most blogging packages, that is all you have to do. The next time Technorati indexes your weblog, it will see the special HTML code, and Technorati will update your account to show that your weblog claim is now complete."
"You can "claim" your weblogs in the member's area by submitting the weblog URL and then adding a small HTML snippet to the front page of your weblog. Technorati verifies that you are indeed an author of the weblog by spidering your weblog and looking for the special code you placed on your weblog.
Once you've done this, your picture and profile will be associated with all links to your weblog in any Technorati search."
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://technorati.com/embed/SOMETHING.js"></script>What that file does is to use Javascript to write certain HTML to your blog page. Once I figured that out, I got rid of the .js link and instead customised my template to insert manually just the bits which I wanted (this was in the days before Technorati offered the ability to tick just the bits I wanted, or perhaps I just didn't notice that option when I first claimed my blog!). For instance, I didn't want or need the Technorati profile pic to display again in my sidebar, because I already had my pic at the top of my blog.
<!--As Javascript people will know, that script has just the same effect as if you inserted the following HTML into your template:
document.write('<div class=\'technorati\'><p><a href=\'http://www.technorati.com/profile/YourTechnoratiUsername'>Technorati Profile</a>');
document.write('<a href=\'http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=http%3A%2F%2FYourBlogURL.com\'><img src=\'http://static.technorati.com/images/bubble_icon.gif\' align=\'absmiddle\' hspacing=\'5\' height=\'20\' width=\'24\' alt=\'Get Conversations about YourBlogName\' /></a>');
document.write('</p><img src=\'http://www.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=YourTechnoratiProfilePicID\' height=\'60\' width=\'40\'>');
document.write('</div>');
// -->
<div class='technorati'>So if you want to customise the code by hand (instead of using the tick options), it's easiest to forget the Javascript version (whether the .js file or a version of the "document.write" stuff above) and just stick to HTML. As can see the first "a href" inserts a link to your Technorati profile; the second a link to your blog's cosmos; and the img bit displays your Technorati profile pic. The advantage of using HTML is that you could insert the profile link in one place and the pic and cosmos links in other places in your sidebar, etc, as you wish - whereas using the Technorati code, those links will all be kept together. As mentioned earlier, I suspect the only bit you need to claim your blog (if that, see below!) is the first bit.
<p><a href='http://www.technorati.com/profile/YourTechnoratiUsername'>Technorati Profile</a>
<a href='http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=http://YourBlogURL'>
<img src='http://static.technorati.com/images/bubble_icon.gif' align='absmiddle' hspacing='5' height='20' width='24' alt='Get Conversations about YourBlogName' /></a></p>
<img src='http://www.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=YourTechnoratiProfilePicID' height='60' width='40'>
</div>
"But they can fake passports, so why can't terrorists copy ID cards too?"
"Who has to have ID cards? Only British people? Why can't a terrorist come here from outside the UK, plant a bomb, then leave again?"
"Freeze mother-stickers, this is a fuck-up!"
"Please do not flush the toilet paper. Use the bin provided. Thank you."
Creative Archive
As an aside, also of interest in this vein is that coincidentally - or not - in the same week as the English CC licence was officially released, the "Creative Archive Group" led by the BBC and including Channel 4, also released their own version of a copyright licence, the Creative Archive licence, which some have criticised as being more restrictive than the CC one and may risk confusing the issue, with people not knowing whether to go for a CC licence or Creative Archive one.
The main point of that licence is that the Group intends to release audio and video under it (Ashley Highfield of the BBC has said "The creative archive is an initiative to dig into the archive at the BBC, starting with our factual stuff, natural history etc. We'll see if we can't get some of that locked-up content archived, and provide it on the internet to download. It is predominantly intended as an educational tool, but we'll see how it goes. That's the idea. It's the beginning of a long journey to release the potential of all these locked-up tapes in the archive."). It's great that people will be allowed to download and remix clips from the BBC and Channel 4 etc for free, as well as watch them (all for non-commercial purposes only) - and in popular formats too like Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG1.
And it looks like the Beeb are going to talk to programme makers about this licence for their future work too: "The BBC and PACT will hold further good faith discussions about the Creative Archive - with a view to agreeing how the Creative Archive could be covered under these Terms of Trade and the standard programme production agreement." (Pact is the UK trade association that represents and promotes the commercial interests of independent feature film, television, animation and interactive media companies.)
But it's disappointing that so far, despite the initial fanfare, very little has in fact been released under this licence - only a handful of old clips by the British Film Institute, which was claimed to be a success with over 3000 downloads. Nothing yet from the BBC itself - not even a promised radio program on losing the past and archiving, ironically! - despite their statement back in March 2004 that "The Creative Archive will give everyone in the UK the freedom to search for and access clips from the BBC's television and radio archives via bbc.co.uk." The way to try and get more stuff (and more interesting stuff) on there is for as many of us as possible to tell the BBC what we want! Sadly for non-Britons the downloads are only available within the UK, although as Kevin Marks points out, the World Service remit might well be used to extend to a worldwide service.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. ...
What's a favelet or bookmarklet? If you're unfamiliar with bookmarklets or favelets, well here's my own definition: bookmarklets are things you can add to your browser's Favorites/Bookmarks, or Links bar or Bookmarks toolbar folder, where they appear just like another item in the toolbar or Favorites or Bookmarks list. When you click a bookmarklet in your Favorites/Bookmarks or toolbar it does something (hopefully useful!) - like help you create code for Technorati tags, bookmark a Webpage, produce a shortened URL for the webpage you're visiting (e.g. on TinyURL), etc.
Bookmarklets are usually presented as links on Webpages. Just drag the link to your Links or Bookmarks toolbar and drop it there or, if that doesn't work (some versions of Internet Explorer), rightclick the link, choose Add to Favorites and navigate to your Links folder, add it there and voila. You could also just leave the bookmark/favorite in your Favorites or Bookmarks list, if you prefer, and access it from there. Or you can click the link direct from the original webpage to access the same functions, if it doesn't work from your toolbar/Favorites (IE6 doesn't like long code in bookmarklets for some reason - Firefox works fine).
<!-- Please do not delete this note
Form to search Blogger.com profiles - results open in new window, to change this delete target="_self"
Copyright Improbulus 2005 http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/ licensed under Creative Commons License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
-->
<form action="http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g" method="get" target="_blank">
<label for="q">Find this word or phrase:</label><br />
<input type="text" size="25" name="q" id="q" /><br />
<label for="t">within this profile section:</label><br />
<select name="t" id="t">
<option value="i">Interests</option>
<option value="m">Movies</option>
<option value="s">Music</option>
<option value="b">Books</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Search" /> <input type="reset" value="Clear" />
</form>Ignore the "id=" (which is included to go with the "label=for") and the odd "/>"if you like, I'm just trying to acquire good habits and start learning to be XHTML-compliant like my pal Tab...
Note that I deliberately didn't include "name=" for either the submit or reset input button - you don't want to have name/value pairs sent out for those, for obvious reasons they're meaningless and useless if not downright confusing to the poor lil server that's just obediently processing the name/value pairs which do contain info of substance.
<input name="this" value="that" type="hidden">and then the user won't see them but they'll be transmitted as part of the final URL.Prefetched links are indicated by a double-underline, looking like thisA good concise summary is at SearchEngineWatch.
GWA doesn't seem to be helping Google's credibility in the eyes of many ( e.g. Something Awful: "...Google is Microsoft without the bad reputation"; and this thread). Is Google taxing users' loyalty and trust in its brand too far by releasing GWA without addressing the problems some of which I've summarised above? Lots of people seem to have a kneejerk "hate Microsoft, love Google" reaction, but as some have pointed out, Google is in the business of making money. It may have been a small cosy "do no evil" startup, but it's mutated into a huge corporation which effectively dominates the Net search world as much as Microsoft has dominated the world of desktop operating systems, with shareholders it has to keep happy first and foremost. Google has, with good reason, been much loved and trusted by many, techie and non-techie alike: that has given it a lot of power. But I firmly believe that power corrupts, and power without responsibility is sadly too common even amongst democratically elected politicians who are supposed to be responsible; never mind corporations whose power, equally real and probably greater, derives from popular usage and the vote of the almighty dollar.
Google has built up and been trading on its superb brand, cannily and, mostly, successfully, but if it's not careful, if (to put it colloquially) people start thinking that it's trying to take the mick, its users may yet hold to account in ways it may not expect or want. Innovation is a good thing, yes, and in many respects I am a huge Google fan myself. But I am not sure what Google's motivation is in risking its reputation by rushing out something which seems to have so many problems and may provoke a bigger privacy/security backlash than even Gmail and Google Desktop Search.
Of course, GWA is free and you don't have to use it if you don't want to. So far, in 3 days, it says the total time I've saved is 9.1 minutes counting both IE and Firefox - small beer compared with the time I spent headscratching about being unable to get into login sites, excluding any sites I can't get into etc - yet it's using up 17MB of my diskspace! But I'm going to keep trying it for now, practising what I preach about excluding certain sites or disabling it from time to time and using Opera often too. And maybe Google will provide the further info users are crying out for about how GWA works, and expand on their privacy policy. We'll see. I suspect I'm probably going to end up uninstalling it soon… UPDATE: yes, I've uninstalled it. Much easier that way.
What's trackback?: for those unfamiliar with it, my own definition of "trackback" is that it's a system which effectively lets you create a link from another blog post that you've written about, back to your own post on your own blog - so that people viewing that other blog post will see an extract from your post (or whatever else you want to say about your own post) on the other blog, plus a link from there to your post.
This is a form of "remote commenting" - you're commenting on another person's blog, but instead of doing that on their blog, you do it by making a post on your own blog, and using trackback to let them (and anyone else reading their blog) know that you've commented on it, so that they can check out what you said if they want to. Trackback seems especially useful if the other blog is more popular than yours!
(For more on trackback see e.g.Movable Type's explanation or Wikipedia's - this is digressing but it's a pity the "content aggregation" use for trackback never seems to have taken off, though it seems things like Technorati tag pages are starting to serve the same function. Whether trackback as it's commonly used now works generally, and who it benefits, is a whole different debate...).