March 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of March 2005.
Knowing the size of the Irish Blogosphere is an important part of building a search engine for Irish blogs. So far there is no accurate figure for the number of Irish blogs and the rate at which the IrishBlogs group on Yahoo Groups is growing suggests that it could be in the high hundreds. The IrishBlogs tag on Technorati shows only a small cross section of the Irish Blogosphere and depends mainly on the use of tags. These tags, without a quicktag solution (Wordpress) are cumbersome to include with each post.
The main WhoisIreland.com Irish search engine spiders are running here and I’ve just been checking a few keywords on the raw search database. This part of the index (the Irish ie/com/net/org/biz/info websites) is almost complete and the next section is the user/personal/subs websites. The surprising thing is that the term “blog” shows 1771 hits with at least 150 of these sites having their own distinct top level domain. The Irish blogosphere could be somewhat larger, though more fragmented, than was first thought.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Search Engines, Internet Statistics
Written by John McCormac on March 29th, 2005 with 5 comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines.
Data Retention of mobile and fixed line phone records is now clearly part of Irish law. It made it into an amendment to a Criminal Justice bill that was passed in January and signed into law on March 5th by the president of Ireland. And nobody in the mainstream media noticed.
The best analysis of the matter is an article on the website of Privacy International. The amendment itself is also cited on the Privacy International website.
The news of this amendment becoming law belatedly made it into the Irish media with an article in the Irish Examiner detailing the new legislation on March 4th. An article by Karlin Lillington in Saturday’s Irish Times which she later quoted on her blog summarised the post legislation situation. A Sunday Tribune article by Fergus Cassidy provided more back ground and more interesting questions. Bernie Goldbach also picked up the growing storm in the Irish blogosphere over the matter.
The law now requires mobile and fixed line phone companies to retain call and location data records for three years. Thus it would be possible to identify a target’s social network from the call patterns and potentially map mobile phone usage. This is stuff that is being done already. Phone companies use this kind of analysis to suggest the best tariffs to subscribers. What the legislation did was to clear up the questions about whether the companies should retain the data for three years or six months. The amendment puts data retention on a firmer legal basis but it does exclude the content of the calls.
Tag: IrishBlogs , Electronic Privacy , Data Retention
Written by John McCormac on March 21st, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
An interesting post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog about the rising number of blogs covered Dave Sifry’s (Technorati) post on the state of the blogosphere. The flurries of activities in the graph confirm the event driven nature of blogs that makes them different from ordinary websites.
In building the Irish blog search engine one very important fact has become apparent: Blogs are updated aperiodically whereas websites are updated periodically. This makes tracking blog updates difficult and necessitates the use of blog pings. The problem for search engines is that blog pings are open to abuse. Some blog aggregators have time limits on the number of times per hour that a ping can be submitted. The system is not perfect because spam blogs have appeared. As with traditional search engine spam, these spam blogs are set up with keywords to attract readers to adverts rather than to provide the reader with information. Some blog search engines have not resolved the spam problem yet.
Blogs have caused a shift in website patterns. Traditionally, the personal website has been some free webspace on an ISP. But with the advent of blogs, many personal websites have become blogs because of the ease of update. Previously, running a personal website meant having some web development software on the PC. The free blog services remove the necessity to have web development software and makes the publishing on the web accessible to a wider audience.
With a website, it is easy for a search engine operator to see that some sites update on a monthly or weekly basis and others have a yearly update frequency. Most websites are brochureware and are only updated once or twice a year.
Blogs, by comparison, are a very bursty form of communications. They need a trigger event (something about which the blogger feels strongly enough to write about it) to see updates. When particular blogs update, a cascade effect occurs on many other blogs. The blog posting link growth pattern is totally different to that between ordinary websites. It is the difference between the pattern of a shattering pane of glass and the growing branches of an oak tree.
With an aperiodic system, six months between updates means as much as six hours.The old periodic model of website updates does not work with blogs. The simple reason: blogs have a human factor whereas websites generally have a business factor.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Blogs , Internet Statistics , Search Engines , Technorati
Written by John McCormac on March 19th, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
For the past few days, the WhoisIreland.com spiders have been busy updating the index of Irish websites. The number of .ie websites has grown considerably and there are approximately 31,000 .ie sites in this update and slightly more Irish .com/net/org/biz/info websites. The Irish section of the Dmoz directory will also be included. This will result in an index of approximately 75,000 Irish websites making it the biggest index of Irish websites in the world. This new index will have a dynamic submission facility that will allow Irish sites not included in the index to be spidered within minutes of being submitted. The beta version of this new index will be available next week.
The beta test of the Irishblogosphere search engine will follow. The three fold strategy of detection, submission and monitoring will form the basis for this search engine and it will be separate from the main WhoisIreland.com search engine. As a result it will be faster and combined with a dynamically updated directory of Irish related blogs. It should make it easier to distill the voices of Irish blogs from the cacophony of the web’s blogosphere.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Search Engines , IrishBlogosphere
Written by John McCormac on March 19th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Search Engines.
John Battelle’s Searchblog carries an interesting article about Google open sourcing some code. The new Google site code.google.com contains a few interesting projects and some Google APIs.
Tags: Google, Open Source
Written by John McCormac on March 18th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
The .ie cctld is a minisule top level domain by .com standards. It has approximately 45000 registered domains most of which are Irish and Irish related. During the dot.bomb period, speculative domain registration was rife. Most of these speculative domains lapsed and were never renewed, the registrants disappearing as the dot.bomb tide receded into the distance of academic research. The Ebay.ie and Qxl.ie registrations had their own stories. They were registered by Irish limited companies of the same names but the companies had nothing in common with the internet auction businesses of of the same name. They were legitimate .ie cctld registrations. Both Irish companies had a connection to Irish auction website ebid.ie but were never active. The WIPO site shows that there was an action regarding Ebay.ie but the action was terminated. The Ebay.ie domain was transferred in the last two weeks to Ebay’s own nameservers.
Tag: IrishBlogs , IEDR, Ebay , ccTLD
Written by John McCormac on March 18th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
The BBC reports that US food corporation Kraft won Milka.fr from French fashion designer Milka Budimir. The principle of large companies protecting their trademarks and brands in ccltds is an old one. Many cctlds now have dispute resolution procedures that are based on ICANN models. The .ie resolution procedure is shown on the WIPO page detailing .ie cctld. The domains that went as far as the dispute resolution procedure were shopelectric.ie, ebay.ie and office1.ie. The number of French (.fr) domains that involved in dispute resolution seems small as well with four decisions in 2004 and one case pending in 2005.
The .ie cctld has been rather lucky when it comes to examples of glaring me-too registration attempts. The examples of ebay.ie and qxl.ie were dot.bomb echoes. Both domains had an associated Irish limited company. In the directorship of both companies, there was a connection to Irish auction website ebid.ie which sought to replicate Ebay’s success in Ireland with a comparatively miniscule market and poor technology. The Ebay.ie domain was transferred to Ebay in the last two weeks and now points to Ebay’s site.
A Microsoft related registration msn.ie changed ownership recently but the original site had all the appearance of one of the few remaining Irish dot.bomb ventures, Online.ie though it was clearly evident that it was not owned or operated by Online.ie.
Tags: ICANN , Domains, URDP , IEDR
Written by John McCormac on March 18th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
A paper (PDF) by Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilley takes a close look at a theory that was popular during the dot.bomb era. Metcalfe’s Law that the utility of a network is proportional to the square of the network size appears to be a bit on the generous side and the paper tries to derive a more accurate rule.
Tags: Networks , ISPs
Written by John McCormac on March 15th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
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