the web is turning to soup

I am finally starting to see the mesh of innovative web sites that are allowing data to slosh around freely and expose people to more conversation. I must admit that I'm a little late getting onto the RSS bandwagon, but this is still a vital part of the equation not only for humans but for machines. There are a number of efforts to allow you to use the same profile on different sites, allowing you to connect with friends you may not have even known used these other sites. APIs allow third-party applications and other sites to send and receive messages and multimedia from not just computers, but also mobile devices. And these services will begin to truly become efficient as add the ability to push data (XMPP) in addition to pulling data (HTTP, RSS).

As many have pointed out, the noise level becomes a problem with so much text sloshing around. Duplicates are pretty easy to filter. The solution here is the same as personalized news. You rate items based on their relevance to you, and some algorithm figures out similarities between items you rated highly. There are several factors that could potentially be important to this kind of algorithm: keywords, length, author or originating source, ratings by users with similar tastes. That last one is enormously powerful. In fact, Netflix is running a contest to see who can do it the best.

I don't know if it will ever be possible to have completely synchronized discussions. But there are various hacks for now, such as tracking keywords on Twitter.

custom domain possibilities for Vortices

AppJet just added the option to use custom domains. I am cheap, so I will just use sub-domains
of vezquex.com. I want to have two for Vortices. The full one, vortices.vezquex.com, and the short one, v.vezquex.com.

I went into my domain registrar's control panel and pointed vortices.vezquex.com to 589766781.hosted.engine.appjet.net with a CNAME record, as per AppJet's instructions from the publishing tab of the IDE. So that domain should be working within a day or two.

Now the interesting part is the second sub-domain. One approach is to do the same for v.vezquex.com. Another may be to alias or redirect v.vezquex.com to vortices.vezquex.com. Theoretically, these seem equally valid, but I don't know for sure.

I'm trying the former approach to start.

China will be more powerful ($$$) than the United States in 7 years

This is the kind of thing you know in the back of your mind, but when you read it you are nonetheless shocked. The Beijing Olympics are a metaphor for China's regained dominance. Well, it was a fun ride for the U.S. while it lasted.

FTA:

Angus Maddison's forecast (which uses purchasing power parity) isn't built on outlandish assumptions. He assumes China's growth will slow way down year by year, and America's will average about 2.6% annually, which seems reasonable. But because China has grown so stupendously during the past decade, it should still be able to take the crown in just seven more years.

If that happens, America will close out a 125-year run as the No. 1 economy. We assumed the title in 1890 from - guess who. Britain? France? No. The world's largest economy until 1890 was China's. That's why Maddison says he expects China to "resume its natural role as the world's largest economy by 2015." That scenario makes sense.

Browser Extensions

In this small patch alone, I see evidence of three Firefox extensions or user styles:


The "k" on the upper-left corner of that gray box is from Adblock. It actually reads "Block" when it is not cut off. This is for blocking flash elements if you desire. I don't recall ever using this feature.

The little icon just southeast of that I thought was from the user style (using the Stylish extension) that inserts icons on links to different types of files. Upon further inspection it turned out to be part the Adblock thing.

All of those "Buy" links look messed up because of a user style I became aware of on news.ycombinator.com, which itself uses nofollow links extensively. You can make the style do anything you want; the selector is the important part. I just happened to settle on inserting a tilda in front of it by adding the :before pseudo selector.

/*highlight nofollow links*/
a[rel~="nofollow"] {
background: red;
}

/*denote nofollow links*/
a[rel~="nofollow"]:before {
content: '~'
}