Two days ago, the computer responsible for sending the messages of billigboard to our display crashed. Literally. It was standing on a wall-mounted board, and when I tried to grab the keyboard, the whole thing came down. Board, complete with screws, DVD-Player, computer, signal-converter and what not. The harddisk didn’t like the 2.5 meter crash while spinning very much and is sulking. You know, doing the klickedy-klack routine.
Until a new harddisk can be found somewhere, billigboard is down, in more than one meaning of the word.
Remember when I talked briefly about AJAX?
I used a tiny tiny bit of AJAX in the project billigboard. There is still a rendering problem with InternetExplorer (I spare you a comment), but overall, it seems to be working well. So, head over there, and add your message to the ones already there.
Thanks to everyone who attended my talk about Sixdegreesofgoogle during the Linzer Linuxtage at the Ars Electronica Center yesterday.
It was a good event, and I enjoyed the discussions about the role of Google and the possible emergence of alternatives afterwards very much.
For everyone interested (and in case you missed the event), I’ve put up the slides for download.
I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank Ushi Reiter from servus.at for the kind invitation and the “Introduction by shouting”.
servus.at invited me to hold a talk about Sixdegreesofgoogle at their programme to the Linzer Linux-Days.
I will give my presentation on Saturday, 17.06.2006 from 17:00 to 17:30 at the servus Clubraum (located in the Stadtwerkstatt).
If you want to know something about the reasons behind the project or some technical aspects and are in the vicinity, please drop by.
(The complete servus.at Linux-Tage programme can be found at their website).
Update: We’re up for an open-air talk on the lawn in front of the Stadtwerkstatt if the weather permits. Although the absence of a beamer might add to the depth of the talk, I’m afraid it will also mean more work preparing it. No beamer, no cute pictures. No cute pictures, no “ooooooh’s”. No “oooooooh’s”, more questions. More questions, more preparation.
So, it’s over. sucht.se is gone. I am told some people miss it already. In 24 days, a surprisingly active and caring community formed on the plattform. Over 500 users wrote about their favorite songs and movies, uploaded a picture of their favorite IKEA furniture or made a picture of their butt. More than 11.000 comments posted, over 40.000 Votes and roughly 870.000 pageviews.
But numbers are the least interesting aspect of this project. The immense gravitational force the website had on some people is simply astonishing. Some users where online most of the time, for the whole 24 days.
Yesterday was the end of one project, but also the start of a new one: Analysing the wast amount of data (over 150 mb worth of user activity) we collected. Let’s see what we can find.
Oh, and in yesterdays lottery, Miss Blume won the most liked furniture. Congratulations!
I just checked the logs of www.sucht.se (because the site will go down tomorrow), and lo and behold: 840.000 page impressions in three weeks.
I don’t think we will hit the million marker in the remaining 27 hours, but still nice.
I like data visualisations. And even more so when they are pretty.
Although the image cannot compete with these graphs, I still like it.
You can see more of these at the sixdegrees gallery. And if you like, download Walrus, because the graphs are even prettier in 3D.
On Saturday, the BASICS festival starts. Today, we delivered our part.
A big thank-you to all who made this happen. I think I’d be happy if I wasn’t so exhausted.
Sixdegreesofgoogle has been officially launched, after lurking around for a few weeks.
The project consists of two parts – a website, and a client. The client allows you to check the GoogleNumber of any website you want.
GoogleNumbers are inspired by the trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which in turn is inspired by Six Degrees of Separation. A GoogleNumber is the number of hypertext links between a website and a Google service. That means: If your site has a GoogleNumber of 2, a visitor must follow two hyperlinks to reach Google. You can read more about that on the projects website.
The client application is – of course – written in Java and works on Mac, Linux and Windows (and most likely on every other platform that has a JRE). It uses the excellent Prefuse library to draw some funny pictures while it does its work.
Once the GoogleNumber is found, you can submit your data to the website, which publishes the information (including the path) immediately. Additionally, a graph file for Walrus is created, letting you explore the database in three dimensions.
Oh, and it’s not over yet with goodies: A little HTML-badge (as seen on the right of this site) tells everyone your GoogleNumber. In my case, it is pretty low, but I’m sharing this host with a lot of other people …
Interesting tidbid: Currently, 172 sites have been checked. The mean GoogleNumber of these sites is 2.
So, go there, download the client, have some fun, and put your Sixdegreesofgoogle-Badge on your website!
