Philip Jacob / Whirlycott

The Gap Between Google and Rivals May Be Smaller Than You Think – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
Over the last 5 years or so I have seen, based on traffic to my sites, Yahoo and Microsoft (MSN, Live and now Bling) fall to less than 5 percent total share of all traffic… combined.

I didn’t make that comment, but I could have.  It’s possible that the world is misinterpreting comScore numbers, but nobody I know sees >5% of their referrals coming from Yahoo and Microsoft.  I’m sure such sites exist, but the comScore figures that we see on a regular basis would have us believe that this is quite normal.  It’s not.

Op-Ed Guest Columnist – Notes From the Chairman – NYTimes.com
“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

A fun little post over on the StyleFeeder tech blog about social media spam.

“Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.” from Douglas Bader on Wikipedia

I wanted to futz around with Django tonight, so I figured I’d update my installed version with the latest release, but I didn’t count on having to deal with crap like this in order to get the python MySQL driver working on the current version of OS/X. I’d understand if I was trying to install a Teradata driver for SBCL on an ancient version of DG/UX, but this is a bit ridiculous.

I remember listening to this TAL show while driving in my car earlier in the summer. The Global Pool of Money seems like something that our politicians should have been listening to for years, but I’d have been happy if they had started paying attention to this mess before, well…

That only took 21 months since I asked them nicely. What I don’t like about what I’ve read so far is that they are not using a lazy-loading proxy (ala Akamai, EdgeCast, Panther) and are instead opting for S3 as the content origin. That sucks, because it basically means that you have to do something in order to get your content onto their network. With a lazy-loading proxy, you just tell your CDN provider to effectively make static.whatever.com a mirror of www.whatever.com. It’s much simpler.