Disqus - Latest Comments for andymurd

Re: Chinese filtering move demonstrates futility of Australian censorship proposal

andymurd — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:09:42 -0000

Problem is, that after the Great Firewall of Australia is proven not to work, the tools to bypass it will be made illegal.

Re: Woobius Scribbles — Document control - how hard can it be?

andymurd — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:32:54 -0000

The only successful document control I've ever seen implemented was based around document reference identifiers. Every document (and piece of source code and email and so on) had a reference like this:

CO/PR/TY/00001/V

Where:

CO - company identifier (companies change names more often than you imagine)
PR - project identifier
TY - document type. There were about 200 different document types but most people only ever dealt with about 6 and we could remember those off by heart.
00001 - a "next-out number" taken from a big register kept for each project.
V - version number

The system was imple enough that it would work for paper as easily as electronic documents. People actually used because it was simple and they could immediately see the benenfits.

Re: Twitter Shenanigans

Stuartfoster — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:10:03 -0000

Definitely, I feel like a broken record from how many times I have had to say "Twitter is all about the relationships"

Re: Twitter Shenanigans

andymurd — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:54:35 -0000

Good detective work! I'd wondered the same thing but I soon worked out that the number of followers a person has is a very poor measure of their worth/interest.

It's more fun to find those people who are interesting but have only just started tweeting and then interact with them. They might get 4,000 followers in the next twelve months, but they'll remember that you're the nice guy who chatted when they were starting out on twitter.

Re: How To: Dynamic Slide Down Disqus Comments

bgolub — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:56:52 -0000

One easy way to fix it would be to just empty all other Disqus iframes when
you open one; essentially only let one disqus thread be expanded at a time.

Re: How To: Dynamic Slide Down Disqus Comments

andymurd — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:53:42 -0000

Hi Ben, I stumbled across your post quite late because I want to implement something similar. I notice a small problem on rssmeme.com:

If I open two comment iframes, by clicking the "contribute" links against two stories then click the Disqus "options" button against the second iframe it shows options for the first iframe.

Any ideas on how to fix it?

Re: Andreas Lanjerud › helloandy checked in @ Albano, Stockholms Län, Sweden

andymurd — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:15:29 -0000

Hello back! I'll run the BrightKite feed through Feedburner, that seems to be the preferred solution.

Re: Semantic Series of Tubes

jkuramot — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:20:53 -0000

Hmm, I read this twice.

The first time, I was all, "ugh, advertising". The second time, I was like, "he's got a point".

I'm so conditioned to ignoring ads, the thought of targeted ads is annoying by default, but you make an interesting point. Would it be better if it were actually valuable? Maybe.

That would bring broadcast TV to its knees. Why run an ad on broadcast TV with old school demographic information when you can run it online and use the semantic ad target thingy?

I might still hate advertising though, which makes me wonder if the answer lies in social advertising, e.g. you buy a product and get range of rebates if you share your purchase and any reviews with your network of friends. That adds a measure of trust to the equation.

Weird times.

Re: Semantic Series of Tubes

andymurd — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:39:48 -0000

That's a great summary of where we all want Web 3.0 to take us.

I'd argue that "the improvement of advertising models" is not necessarily a downside to the semantic web. In my life, advertising models seem to be billboards, cold calling and mail drops. A smaller number of laser targeted adverts would be a welcome change - whilst saturation brand-building will only engender my enmity.

If I can ask my ad-manager-bot to recommend a bunch of $PRODUCTS meeting my requirements and ignore previously blocked advertisers, then great, bring on the semantic web!

APML seems like an excellent technology for ad servers to invest in but it would definitely need the ability to deal with temporal changes.

Re: My Links Are del.icio.us! | (jeff)isageek.net

andymurd — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:27:56 -0000

You're welcome, Jeff, and keep those links coming.

Loads of people had written blog posts about "10 people you must follow on twitter" or "FriendFeed A-Listers" and I just thought that good old del.icio.us needed a bit of love.

Re: Memo to online companies: Please Stop Georedirecting

andymurd — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:54:47 -0000

Georedirecting can also fail spectacularly.

A train company here in the UK provides free wifi on its long distance services, which is great but... the internet is delivered via a satellite link to a Swedish ISP. So, I'm sat on a train to London trying to decypher google.se.

Re: Pop Quiz 1: Know Your Google

plagiarismtoday — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:04:44 -0000

Glad you liked it! The next one will be next week!

Re: Pop Quiz 1: Know Your Google

andymurd — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:13:05 -0000

Excellent, look forward to the next post.

Re: Pop Quiz 1: Know Your Google

plagiarismtoday — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:13:50 -0000

Real fast recap:

1. Correct. Also would have worked is their generic opt-out form.
2. Correct. I would have also accepted amac, which is the old one
3. Correct.
4. Correct.
5. Correct.
6. Correct. This was the one that two people emailed me about asking how it was done...
7. Correct.

So as Sarge from Red Vs. Blue said "Control Alt BINGO!"

I'm going to do the follow up post tomorrow with some more thorough analysis and the link!

Thank you for playing!

Re: Pop Quiz 1: Know Your Google

andymurd — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:47:54 -0000

Sounds fun, I'll have a go...

1. Robots.txt, meta noindex and webmaster tools
2. Had to look this one up, it's DMCA-agent
3. Webmaster tools
4. Google Alerts
5. Googlebot
6. NOSNIPPET
7. site:mysite.com

What do I win? Oh a link, cool!

Re: louisgray.com: SiteMeter's Attempted Challenge to Google Analytics Falls Flat

andymurd — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:16:52 -0000

The interface was very slow last night too.

A gradual rollout of the new functionality might have been more appropriate than the big-bang approach. Small changes are more manageable and mean that criticisms of new functionality can be addressed without degrading existing features.

Good to see Sitemeter trying to compete though.

Re: How to Avoid Some of the Problems in Writing a Working Recommendation Engine

andymurd — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:15:32 -0000

There's some good analysis of music recommendation engines on the Duke Listens blog at http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/. It's well worth searching out his analyses of the last.fm engine for some good detail.

Re: Compare Your Last.FM Music With FriendCompare

andymurd — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:51:13 -0000

I'll be trying out FriendCompare very soon, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I've found Last.fm to be a great service but (like del.icio.us) very personal and not given to socialising, so 3rd party apps that make for a more social experience are welcome.

Oh, and I see my avatar up there too, *waves*

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

andymurd — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:37:32 -0000

Agreed, delicious is hugely underrated as a research tool. What amazes me most is that bookmarking is an essentially selfish action - I tag pages for me, not for others - and yet it produces such astounding results.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:45:41 -0000

The rotting over time is exactly why I finally bit the bullet and moved to Ubuntu. At a certain point, you can't get back to the performance you had initially, even with a defrag.

My Dell is way faster running VMs on Ubuntu than it was running them on XP.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

andymurd — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:10:22 -0000

That hardware advantage is huge.

I use OS X, Windows and Ubuntu and I find that I spend similar amounts of time tweaking Windows & Ubuntu but none on OS X. Apple's hardware restrictions mean that I buy far fewer hardware upgrades so that has a big effect.

That said, I've found that any Windows install seems to "rot" over time. Taking longer to boot, using more and more memory and gaining conflicting DLLs. This just doesn't happen with Ubuntu.

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

kwbridge — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:51:31 -0000

I know you didn't :-) It's so frustrating because it seems like I lost my favorite followers and not the possible pseudo spammers. And, hey, I was pretty excited when Louis followed me back the other day and poof - now he's gone again :-) I am not hopeful about Twitter fixing this ...

Hey, and stop picking on me ;-)

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

andymurd — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:46:44 -0000

I guarantee that I didn't unfollow you Kim.

Oh, but you're just showing off with "Oooh, Louis Gray follows me, la la la". Louis, follow Kim again! Do I have to start a petition?

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

andymurd — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:43:41 -0000

Agreed. Follower counts are nice but I can live with a few bugs there.

The interaction supported by Twitter is the key and they have really improved reliability in that respect. Thanks for your comment Mka, I was wondering if I am the only person that really wants Twitter to succeed.

Re: louisgray.com: Identi.ca Launches SMS Support, Sort Of.

jessestay — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:39:42 -0000

I think open source efforts like the laconi.ca source code and others may lead to this. It is difficult however, with the way the cell phone companies are set up, to do anything that unified to make a difference. It will be a lot of work, and money, to do so right now.