About a year ago I found out about Google Trends service. Google Trends shows a plot of volume of searches on Google a term over a period of three years. The chart has two areas. Above the time line is search volume for the term. Below the time line is how often the term appears in the news sources at that time.

Google Trends allows to see a color-coded chart for up to five terms at a time. The higher is volume of searcher for a term, the higher its curve will appear on the chart.

The chart below is a screen shot of a request for terms “Good” and “Bad”.

This chart tells us that people are looking for the word “good” more often then the term “bad”. I think that shows that people are more interested in good than in bad. This is a good news I suppose. And it is somewhat expected. It also appears that changes in volume of searches for the “good” and changes in the search volume for the “bad” follow each other almost exactly. This is very interesting! It means that all Google users as a whole change their interest in “good” and “bad” in a very similar way!

This apparent correlation surprised me and I started to play with terms.

Yes, Google users prefer to search for “Mother” more than for “Father” and volume of searches for them changes without as much correlation.

Look how closely curve for the “dark” follows the curve for “angel”. Striking…. From begining of 2005 these two curves behave almost identical. Why would it be? My initial thought that people are looking for a phrase “Dark Angel” a lot. This would explain correlation in the search terms.

This plot shows combination of three search terms “Angel”, “Dark”, and both words in appearing together in the same search . Look at the yellow curve. It lays flat on the botom of the chart. This contradicts my intuition. People do not look for a phrase “Dark Angel” nearly as much as they look for them separately. And there is no correlation on the volume changes. Why would it be?

Look at these charts - no surprises here:

Autonomic Computing idea is to automate process of managing software by Monitoring Analysis Planing and Execution (MAPE loop). This concept is a all the rave in Enterprise Systems nowadays. In a paper “Understanding Information Age Warfare” I found a similar concept applied to human cognition. It appears that Colonel John R. Boyd observed a similar loop by analyzing actions of American pilots achieving 10-to-1 kill ratio over enemy aircraft. Boyd attributes this high ratio to the speed with which American pilots were able to move through Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop using tools provided by F-86s aircraft.

See Boyd’s presentation dated August 1996

Changes log:

• Anchor “All” - allows to insert a candy in the defined place place for every post on the page
• Anchor edit field replaced by a selection box with values up to maximum number of posts per page

Installation

For first time installers follow usual plugin install procedure. If you are upgrading from v.1.1, you have to deactivate WPCanady 1.1 and remove it from the plugin directory. then place WPCandy 1.2 in the plugin directory and activate the plugin.

For plugin download go to the plugin page

I have written a new plugin for Wordpress that adds one missing (or may be I just think so) function for this great blog CMS. It can insert one or more snippets of text in the same location. Possible locations are:

• between blog posts
• before or after article title
• before or after of article content
• before or after of comment content
• blog footer

Take a look here for the plugin and install instructions…

Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0

Major dividing line between them is in mode of content creation. In a Web 1.0 site all content is created by site owner. In Web 2.0 site content is partially created by site owner. Degree of Web2.0-ness can be assessed by proportion of owner created content against user created content. Pure Web 2.0 sites do not have any (or very little) content created by the site owner (Flickr, del.icio.us, Google, Wikipedia). Less pronounced Web 2.0 sites have mixture of owner and participant content (blogs with comments, forums, wikis).

Web 2.0 sites differ in degree of literal participation (my term) of users . On some sites users literally participate in the content creation by commenting and contributing articles (Wikipedia, forums, blogs). On other sites participation is not as clearly visible - users do something (tagging of bookmarks in del.icio.us) that fulfills their need (organizing bookmarks for own use) and participation aspect is derived from this activity.

Examples of non-literal participation are Google link ranking, del.icio.us and Technorati tagging. In extreme cases of non-literal participation users are not even aware that their content is being used. RSS aggregation sites do not need to make RSS feed owner aware of aggregation. Users might not know how content is used too (Google does not disclose how much of site content is cached and how site ranking uses link information). The most extreme form of non-literal participation are mushups.

Variations in degree of literal participation present serous ethical and legal problems. Should content usage be acknowledged and how? What is fair use of content in a mushup? Is it ethical to aggregate RSS in a way that impedes site owner ability to receive advertizing revenue?

Initiative for Participation

For the sites with high degree of literal participation quality of the content define degree in which site can engage readers into participation. Wikipedia is a major success for this sort of sites.
For the sites with non-literal participation it is service and technology of information processing define degree of participation. For example del.icio.us provides a bookmaking service and participation is defined by usefulness of this service and underlying technology.

Web 2.0 vs BBS, USENET and Gopher

It is clear that Web 2.0 is conceptually close to earlier technologies for distributed collaboration. Good old mailing lists are still in use today. There is not much difference between USENET groups and Web 2.0 forums. Google Groups is an example to it. Old BBS systems were popular and they were used in a way similar to MySpace. IMHO MySpace is what AOL was some time ago…

I think there are several differences between older systems and Web 2.0
Friendliness of user interfaces

• Nice presentation with CSS
• Standartized syntax of HTML
• Interactivity of AJAX
• Multimedia content

Ease and ubiquity of access

• access over Internet is much simpler than calling a BBS using local phone number
• any Web 2.0 system can be accessed using the same browser
• user capacity of web server is usually higher than BBS and Gopher systems

Searchibility

• web sites are easier to search than old mailing lists
• there were no centralized search engine for mailing lists
• Gopher had very limited searching capability

Economic model

• advertizing revenue of some Web 2.0 sites exceed 1 million a month at the higher end of the scale
• a lot of blogs generate enough income for their owners. For many blog owners $100 a month is enough reason to keep writing

Mushability

• web service interfaces and APIs allow too create systems of systems
• RSS allows platform-independent publish/subscribe functionality
• meta data allows effective content filtering
• tagging allows identify popularity of content

MUDs, MODs, and Virutal Worlds

A special word has to be said about Multi-user Dungeons. I think Web 2.0 has not caught up with them yet. Degree of user engagement and participation in MUD is much higher… Would Web 2.0 become a virtual world for people? I remember how one my co-worker showed up to work with his palm in a cust because he damaged it playing World of Warcraft on a weekend. I have seen a student that could not do anything for two weeks because ot this game… Do we have that kind of participation in Web 2.0?

I think Virtual Reality games are proprietary version of Web 2.0. They tend to create their own worlds that do not interact with other worlds. My wild guess is that in the future we might see them open up and mushup. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see World of Warcraft conquering SecondLife… or a battle for domination between several virtual worlds?

However I think that more realistic scenario would be for Web 2.0 site to become more interactive and become more like Virtual Worlds. I can see an AJAX-based virtual environment working across multiple Social Networks sites mushed-up into one system. It would have virtual reality graphics and rules of participation similar to a Virtual World. That would become a beginning Virtual World Web. How is that for an idea?

Update procedure

1. open archive with tar xzvf vmeed-0.6.tgz
2. copy config.php from old installation into the new directory
3. replace old verison folder with new version folder

Changes

• Caller ID parsing  fix
• code re-structure
• bug fixes

I made a minor update to a handy plugin that its author, Jason Goldsmith, has not updated it since 2004. This simple plugin allows to add text (adsense javascript for example) before a post. Now it works with Wordpress 2.0 and above