“I said that already” Erlang. Smart stuff, couchDB.

If you like ethnography and web2.0, you’ll love Metagold - an ethnographic research blog about the Japanese phenomenon Nico Nico Douga, an extremely popular video sharing site where people can comment in a kind of video overlay (you have to see it).

Social design as urban planning: “The challenge is how we make it bigger while still maintaining the same quality and sense of intimacy with now 7.2 million registered users and 23 million monthly unique visitors. It comes down to urban planning in a way that a massive city like London has all kinds of cozy little neighborhoods.” (Stewart Butterfield)

Gogrid is a competitor of Amazon EC2. Roughly similarly priced, but comes with free load balancing.

test

A so far undocumented feature in Google’s social API now lets applications suggest URL’s that might be of the same person. For example, enter petervandijck.com and get a bunch of related URL’s. Practically, this means that when you sign up for a website, and it asks you to enter your websites, it can start suggesting [...]

My Google profile page.

Speed continues to be really underestimated. Little known fact: Amazon internal testing showed that 100ms extra pageload time means 1% less sales. Google tests show that 500ms longer pageload (half a second) means 20% less traffic. Meditate on those numbers for a moment, and then tell me your webteam takes speed seriously enough.

Live from Bejing: "Whenever I show Chinese websites to American friends who don’t speak Chinese, the friends universally have the same reaction — “Wow! That site sure is crappy-looking! Guess those guys haven’t learned how to design a good website yet, huh?” "Most Americans are by now nodding their heads: “Yep. Love those US sites. Much [...]

Great post on working with teams in India.

The mionews UI for friendfeed is a relief. If they expand to incorporate the basic friendfeed functionality, they might well kick their ass, although probably not.

Google is retiring their Adsense referral program (you could make money for people downloading Firefox, for example).

Belgium is incredible in the summer: festivals, markets and activities ALL the time, and often free. So that’s a plus.

Great post on scaling. (via Simon) Some good bits in the comments: We do TV advertising and have huge spikes within 3-5 seconds of the spot running. After maybe 20-30 seconds everything is back to normal again, with maybe +5-10% traffic (a normal variation). Times was an article that included links to the site. The article was [...]

Visiting Google adsense now gives me this:

I love Japanese webdesign.

Insightful post by Steve Rubel about social search.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”. Specifically, they’re starting with some Wordpress plugins.

That’s 60 euro for a 500 GB drive on Amazon. Crazy stuff. Here are some of my older calculations of the dropping cost of storage: For investing US$10 a month, you’ll have accumulated 15 petabytes of storage space by 2020. Year—price per 1 Gig 1980—500000 1985—80000 1990—9000 1995—1000 2000—15 2001—6 2002—3 2003—2 2004—1…2008—20 cents for a gig!

Fuck twitter I like blogging :)