111th Boston Marathon

April 13th, 2007

This weekend is the 111th running of the Boston Marathon. The weather certainly looks like it will be a factor this year (isn’t it always?) with rain, and maybe even snow, predicted for what will be a cold race day.

Blaine Moore, at Run to Win, has a post on where the name “Heartbreat Hill” comes from. As part of his post, he’s used one of my photos from flickr taken on the day Dean Karnazes was in Boston during the Endurance 50. I’m flattered!

Good luck to everyone running this coming Monday! Hopefully there will be no broken hearts this year.

links for 2007-04-12

April 12th, 2007

links for 2007-04-11

April 11th, 2007

links for 2007-04-10

April 10th, 2007

Web 2.0: End of Innocence

April 6th, 2007

More commentary on the state of the web, and some of the dog-eat-dog moves that are going on. On one hand you can’t argue with what Google and the other established players are doing, after all they have a business to support too and people are making money off their services. However, they are shooting themselves in the foot if they create an environment where nobody builds anything on top of their services for fear of being put out of business when the big players feel like wielding their power. Perhaps this is really just another sign that there is no real business models in on the web that have proven successful beyond advertising.

Real estate roller coaster

April 5th, 2007


An interesting way to look at the ups and downs of the real estate market [via speculativebubble.com]

New design

April 5th, 2007

I was getting bored with the monotone, all text design, so I had a bit of a play with the HTML and CSS for the WordPress theme. There are still a few tweaks to make, but it’s mostly finished. If you happen to read this via a feed, you might want to wander over and take a look at it in all it’s glory!

links for 2007-04-04

April 4th, 2007

Refactoring Internet metrics

April 4th, 2007

Back in December I circulated a link to Steve Rubel’s post on the death of the page view. At the time it was one of the arsenal of weapons I was using to show that the effects of the technology shift we are within — begrudgingly I’ll acknowledge it as web 2.0 — are far reaching, and fundamentally alter the business model we have grown accustomed to.

I don’t think anyone really expects page views to completely disappear, in the same way that people still talk about hits (albeit never used for anything other that geek bragging rights these days). David Biesel talks about some of the emerging metrics and tools that are trying to provide useful information in the face of page views becoming less representative.

It’s interesting to see this evolve. Given the predominance of ad based business models, this under appreciated area of web technology, must keep step with content and browser technologies.

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean (3,462 mi)

April 3rd, 2007

Try asking Google maps for directions from Boston, MA to London, England. The Google Maps team, once again, proves it has a great sense of humour.

Update: I wonder why they route you via France first?