Football season’s over, baseball hasn’t started yet, the NBA & NHL are in the middle of their interminably long seasons – does anyone actually pay attention before the playoffs start? – and March Madness is still 3 weeks away. So...

a slick infographical (& quite provocational) movie discussing some of the US political issues involved in the Iraq war.

looks visually similar to the more recent google master plan.

[link: knife-party.net(mov) & video.google.com|thnkx Theo]

Recent discussions on changes in RSS subscriber reporting at FeedBurner as a result of Google’s starting to report Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers have prompted Rick Klau at FeedBurner to post an analysis of how people are reading feeds and interacting with them.

The FeedBurner analysis is based on 604,533 feeds managed by FeedBurner on behalf of 347,000 bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers. FeedBurner notes that the service sees more than 3,000 feed reading clients on a regular basis. There is adequate data in a sample of this size to gauge the impact of the various aggregators whose subscriber data FeedBurner publishes.

Because FeedBurner provides stats on item views and clicks, the service can provide a sense of audience engagement level based on the client used. Are users of one client reading the posts more than users with a different client? Are these users clicking back to the original site in smaller or greater numbers? Rick Klau of FeedBurner addresses these issues in an extended post filled with documentation. He notes that:

Looking at engagement across the top web-based aggregators, several top readers are driving the lion's share of clicks and views back to our publishers' content.

In clicks, Yahoo! (54%) leads the pack. This is not surprising since users of Yahoo! are presented just headlines with links to the content. My Yahoo!, Google Reader/Personalized Homepage, Bloglines and Netvibes - account for 95% of all web aggregator clicks to FeedBurner publisher's content.

For views the FeedBurner sample shows that Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator and Netvibes - account for 98% of all item views. It should be noted that how an aggregator chooses to display a feed in the reader can influence the number of views recorded.

There are several conclusions can be drawn from this data. First, the Google Reader has rapidly grabbed a significant share of the market. The intricacy of the data shows that there are number of variables that must be taken into consideration in reporting feed consumption. Finally, this post just looks at users consuming feeds in Web-based aggregators. Feeds are so flexible that these readers just cover a small portion of the consumption methods available. Today readers consume content in a number of different places -- directly from the content provider’s site, through a feed-reading client, within a widget, via resyndicated headlines on another site, or on a social-networking site.

We’ve talked a bit about how remarkable the Movable Type community is, but it’s not just the work that our community does with blogs that makes them special. Take Kevin Shay — he’s a long time expert-level plugin developer, responsible for such cool stuff as BigPAPI, the innovative plugin framework...

文本编辑器有很多，但找个好用的还是挺不容易的。虽然以前投奔Vim之后，基本没再找过其他的，但看到这个Madedit之后还是被它吸引并且在用的机器上都装了。

Madedit特色如下：

• Win和Linux平台支持，提供deb和rpm包；
  
• 支持超级多的编码方式，尤其是CJK这些编码更是一个不落，可以即时改变当前文件的编码；
  
• Unicode支持，UTF-8/16/32都有，BOM的也有；
  
• Unicode里面支持到CJK Ext-B；
  
• 自带中文简繁体转换功能；
  
• 支持16进制编辑和列模式；
  
• 支持多种编程语言的语法高亮显示；
  
• 查找替换上支持正则表达式；

打动我的主要是多平台（有deb）和多编码能力（作者写中文），当然它还是GPL的开源软件，个头小巧，运行速度快，实在是不错。据有经验人士测试，Madedit自动识别显示不同编码文件的能力是超级强的。

虽然vim用得很爽，但有时有个纯gui没命令模式编辑器的也相当方便。强烈推荐。如果有哪位能把加入到debian库里就更好了。

The quality score update to Google's ad ranking algorithm announced last week is now live, according to the Inside AdWords blog. That means that within the next four days, minimum CPC rates for all ads have now been re-calculated with the new weighting system applied for elements like historical performance of a given keyword, relevance of keyword to ad text, landing page quality, and other factors.

While all of these factors have been incorporated into the ranking system for more than a year, the new algorithm is expected to be more lenient on new ads, without historical data, while also being harsher on ads in other areas.