Travelogue

I don't know how I could have missed something like this, probably I heard it but ignored it. But today I spent a lot of time reading up on the Internet archive. I am impressed people talk about google cache but the Internet Archive is just outstanding. Essentially made up of data crawled by alexa it has snapshots of websites from 1996 to today! Eg. I pulled up my website's data and it showed snapshots of how it used to look in 2004 with almost all functional links..
eg
bhasker.net from 2004 February
That's how my website looked back February of 2004!!..It was just amazing and fun to be able to see how it was and how it is now. Strangely enough in 2005 for some reason they stopped crawling my website I think. Anyway then I went on to see snapshots of yahoo.com and they have pages of yahoo.com archived all the way from 1996! with almost daily snapshots from the year 1999/2000.

The very scope of this project is mind blowing. It gives a nostalgic feeling to see how far the web has come in the last 12 yrs, I still remember the early days of internet in India when we used to use VSNL shell accounts in 1995. Heck I remember using ernet networks to browse the net which before August 1995 was the only way to get onto the internet in India. BBS's were all the rage then. Linux was in its infancy, Windows 95 the coolest OS out there and OS/2 Warp 4 trying hard to compete. So much has changed and its still changing so rapidly. The concept of the Internet Archive is just beautiful and I hope they keep up the good work. The system is named very aptly Wayback Machine!. It really is a walk down the history of internet as we know.

I will try to update as and when I come across some interesting history, time to go on a journey through time!

P.S : btw its not just text data that they are archiving, there are archives of movies,cartoons,audio,music etc etc

Almost everyone knows or has heard about adsense (google's self serve model for publishers) and not many have heard about yahoo's self serve model YPN (Yahoo publisher network) i.e http://publisher.yahoo.com. I had been wanting to try out how keyword/contextual advertising works when integrated with blogs. Does it really make any money for the publisher ??

As a result I applied for an adsense as well as a ypn a/c and thought of trying out both of them. Now I have integrated both into my homepage, I am using google ads for the front page and yahoo for each of other pages. I will probably switch them around dynamically if I can figure out the stupid javascript code to do so! Should be trivial I am just feeling lazy:) As of today google ads has made me hmm 0.35$! not bad I would say for its been on my website less than a week. Though what I don't understand is what/who clicked the ad or was it purely based on impressions!

Anyway the idea is if the ads can generate enough money to pay for this hosting I would be happy:).

Since the last few days I have been trying out various ways to get video content over the internet including watching episodes of heroes off NBC, TVU for news and other stuff. But the service that takes the cake is Joost from the founders of Kazaa and Skype. Though I agree the content is limited but the technology is amazing( P2PTV - Peer to Peer TV). The video playback is flawless the interface is one of the slickest interfaces I have ever seen.

It has a complete widget system which already has plugins for google talk/jabber , blogging support for livejournal/blogspot/wordpress , live chat rooms per channel etc. Their ad delivery is nice and doesn't intrude much on your viewing experience. They are also setting up content partnerships with a lot of big media powerhouses and I think we should see a lot of new content on it in the near future as it moves out of beta. Overall with internet pipes becoming bigger and bigger I see cable tv becoming redundant. Already with the increasing availability of online content my inclination to pay comcast 40+$ for cable is decreasing. I think Joost has a lot of potential and I won't be surprised if it takes off like Skype and manages to corner the online TV market.

I would be following Joost closely and other online tv sites. The question remains who will buy joost! or will it remain independent and take on the Cable TV monopolies. Also I wonder if this replaces regular cable for a significant number of people what will happen to the internet access rates.

After reading up so much on the facebook hype I had to give it a shot. So last week I finally created an account on facebook just to see what the whole facebook platform is about and why is it getting so much press.

My First impressions of facebook
- its clean
- UI is snappy and responsive
- I can trust it enough to let it browse my mailbox to pull up contacts
- Less of spam compared to orkut ( till now )
- Lots of applications

Now the about the whole platform. I was surprised to see that the number of applications available for facebook has already crossed 1000 and there are applications of all kinds from videos/book lists/music/graffiti/notes etc etc. Its surprising that how by providing a simple API they are able to harness the creativity of so many people to come up with some really interesting applications.

This piqued my curiosity to see what the platform was all about. I ended up reading it and it seems very similar to stuff we had been trying to achieve in our last project.

- a SQL based query language on top of the facebook's object database.
- It has similar restrictions to the kinds we had when we were thinking of how to implement a usable query language on top of objects ( not a full blown OQL implementation)
- The WebApis are just simple wrappers on top of FSQL which help in packing/unpacking of data etc.