magpie's shiny things

Go to the Ambidextrous Magazine website.

Click on one of the PDFs on the front page.
Read the nice­ly illus­trat­ed, pro­fes­sion­al­ly type­set article.

Carry one of the ideas around in your head for the rest of the day.

Tell me what you saw.

(thanks to DR over at meta­cool for the orig­i­nal link.)

Following on the Web Dragon’s book review post.

Smashing Magazine has an arti­cle on how Google’s PageRank (cur­rent­ly) works. It’s a sum­ma­ry of the things that are known about Google’s PageRank algorithm.

It’s good to see a dis­cus­sion of PageRank that reminds the read­er the PR is a mea­sure of quality/authority of a page and is not a test for rel­e­vance. PR is estab­lished inde­pen­dent of your search; it’s used after the search results are gath­ered to help in the rank­ing of the results.

The arti­cle is made up most­ly of quotes that illus­trate aspects of how PageRank is cal­cu­lat­ed and used. Every quote includes a link to it’s source so you are free to explore fur­ther if some­thing catch­es your eye. There’s a small sec­tion with ref­er­ences to a selec­tion of papers and arti­cle for those curi­ous about the heavy lift­ing and com­plex math­e­mat­ics involved in the algorithm.

If you have your own web­sites and are curi­ous about their PageRanks you can use one of sev­er­al tools list­ed in the Tools and Services sec­tion. Be aware that these are links direct­ly to the tools and the descrip­tions won’t help you choose a best tool for the job.

Well worth the 20- to 30 min­utes that it will take you to read it. Definitely some­thing to book­mark for the col­lec­tion of links. If you don’t like to screen read longer arti­cles they have promised a PDF in the near future. I’ll add it’s link to this post when I get it.

Re the pre­vi­ous two posts.

As I men­tioned ear­li­er today, there’s more than one thing hinky about one of the local TV sta­tion’s web­site. I now know exact­ly how I got myself stuck in mem­ber­ship hell. Follow along:

• open your favorite browser.
• go to www.king5.com
• enter a search like, say, “one car”
• enter anoth­er, “two trucks”
• anoth­er, “three buses”
• anoth­er, “four boats”
• anoth­er, “five bikes”
• anoth­er, “one more than I’m allowed”

oops… mem­ber­ship hell page.

• press the back­space key, nope still here
• click on your browser’s back but­ton, nope still here Continue read­ing “And Now I Know How I Ended Up in Membership Hell.”

I have now found the heinous mem­ber­ship page on the KING5 web­site. I’m not sure how a got there the first time, and to be fair when I went there on pur­pose — by click­ing on the top nav bar — I had no trou­ble using the back but­ton to return to the page I was read­ing when I dis­cov­ered the but­ton. Nonetheless check this out: Continue read­ing “Become a Member? Of a TV Station?”

Pay per view isn’t always in the form of sub­scrip­tions and the com­pa­nies that bring you your local news are either greedy or stu­pid or most like­ly very much both.

This morn­ing I went to one of the local TV sta­tion’s sites (KING5) to have a look at a piece of video and I learned what it real­ly costs to look at the local news on the ‘Net.

I recent­ly set my com­put­er and brows­er to ask me before installing cook­ies. Mostly out of curiosity.

In addi­tion to the KING5 cook­ies which I accept­ed (at least 4) I have to deny cook­ies from the fol­low­ing sites:

.belointeractive.com
.advertising.com.
doubleclick.net
.atdmt.com

Actually about 12 sites but they were all vari­ants of the above. That’s right FOUR dif­fer­ent adver­tis­ing net­works what to install cook­ies in my brows­er so that I can read one local news sto­ry. Not happy.

It gets worse… Continue read­ing “The News Ain’t Free”