MM-Suggest provides AJax autocomplete with fuzzy matching that’s tolerant of misspellings and word reorderings and that can scale to millions of records.   A German shopping site that uses their technology is Billiger.  A nice improvement over the typical online search experience. 

site24×7.com is a web site monitoring service from Zoho that provides a more complete feature set than other free and low cost services I’ve looked at.  (It supports response time and availability graphs and reports, multiple http: and https: urls, test intervals as short as 5 minutes, monitoring for the presences and absence of keywords, and checking for web site defacement.)

The service currently totally free in beta, final pricing is not yet disclosed. 

Alex King has created a number of good Wordpress plugins , including a WordPress Mobile Edition plugin that automatically generates a PDA friendly version of your blog.

Popularity Contest

This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given point values to determine popularity. Latest Release: Version 1.1, 2005-07-28. The latest version (including unreleased bug fixes) can always be found here.

WordPress Mobile Edition

A PDA friendly interface for your blog. It’s (almost) XHTML compliant. You can see it in action on my site. Latest Release: Version 1.8, 2006-03-02.

WP Since Last Visit

Shows the number of new posts and comments (including indicators showing what posts and comments are new) since a visitor last came to your blog. You can see it in action on my site. Latest Release: Version 2.2, 2004-07-05.

WP Unformatted

This allows you to add custom fields to a post to disable auto-formatting and/or auto-smart-quote conversion. Latest Release: Version 1.0, 2004-05-21.

WP Grins

This plugin allows you to put clickable smilies on your post and comments forms. Can’t remember the right syntax for one of the smilies? Just click on it and it will be inserted right into your post/comment. Latest release: Version 1.1, 2004-05-12.

Cool as a dog– Adam Doppelt has a blog.

Adam is a remarkable developer. He has an infallible sense of the most important problems to tackle, and the ability to demolish those problems forcefully, directly, and simply. Check out his posts on the virtues of laziness.

Researchers report on a safe storage method for man-made carbon dioxide beneath deep-sea sediments:

Deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for carbon dioxide, the gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, according to a team of scientists that includes a professor from MIT.

The researchers estimate that seafloor sediments within U.S. territory are vast enough to store the nation’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for thousands of years to come.

“The exciting thing about this paper is that we show that CO2 injected beneath the seafloor is sequestered permanently,” said Charles Harvey, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Harvey is a co-author of a paper on the work that appears in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“CO2 injected underground on land is buoyant, and hence has the potential to escape back to the surface,” Harvey said. “This is not the case under the deep ocean. Because the ocean floor is so cold, liquid CO2 stored beneath the floor is denser than water and will not rise to surface. Furthermore, the top of the injected CO2 plume will form a hydrate, an ice-like solid that plugs up the pore spaces, ’self-sealing’ the injected CO2 plume into the deep sea sediments.”

GoogleBase has just released a REST api that allows developers to build applications that query, create, update, and delete objects stored in GoogleBase.  

The Google Base data API service lets developers interact directly with the Google Base server. Using the API, the Google Base data can be more efficiently stored and accessed. The API allows you to:

o insert, update, and delete data

o query for items by specifying search criteria

o explore existing item types to discover what data you can fetch

The GoogleBase bulk upload API provided little feedback when things went wrong, and did not allow the efficient or timely updating or deletion of items, so the GoogleBase API has the potential to be valuable.

But there are two problems: too little traffic and contradictory terms of use. 

On the traffic front, we’ve heard anecdotal reports that people aren’t getting meaningful amounts of traffic from Googlebase.

Google needs to do a much more effective job of promoting Googlebase content on high traffic sites like the Google search site.  Google also needs to make the Googlebase site easier to use; it still has the feel of a geek’s playground rather than an inviting site. 

Google Video saw quite a spike in usage when a link was added to the Google Search page, so Google clearly has the potential to goose traffic if they want to, but today the experience isn’t worthy of that boost.

As for the terms of use, they seem to prevent the very things the API was designed to allow. Omitting a lot of ORs and additional constraints, they read “You will not… use any… application to retrieve …any portion of Google services.”    Google needs to spell out more clearly what are valid uses of the API, otherwise this will make companies leery to invest in it.

Googlebase is a big test of Google’s growth as a company.  Can Google succeed in a space where community and user experience matter just as much as technology?  Can Google create a software ecosystem that allows partners to add significant value in areas where Google is weak?

Alex Bosworth writes on How To Provide a Web API. 

In a world where people are making interdependent webservices, API design and maintenance is pretty important. Unfortunately despite rising use and availability of APIs, there are significant problems with the way even big API vendors are deploying and maintaining their APIs.

What are a few simple rules for providing a web API?

1. Keep it clean and simple
2. Stick to standards
3. Make it about data
4. Keep it working
5. Design for updates

Read More

Good, common-sense design principles, but Alex gives examples where they aren’t followed even by the likes of Flickr, Google, and Yahoo.

Salesforce has introduced a new Google Adwords module which ties Google Adwords campaigns directly into Salesforce. (The feature was created by a small startup called Kieden that was acquired by Salesforce.) The announcement inspired quite a mixed bag of commentary on Techcrunch.

The tool provides the ability to “create online advertisements and then automatically track which ads and keywords are delivering results to the business” by reporting on “which clicks turn into leads, deals, and revenue.”

The following flash slideshow demonstrates the product in more detail: http://salesforce.breezecentral.com/p96761996/.

Chickenfoot is a Greasemonkey-esque tool from MIT that empowers users make the web work the way they want it to. Unique features include an integrated script development sidebar and a simplified set of scripting commands targeted at non-developers.

   In the example above, click(”google search”) clicks the button labeled “google search” .

The following items from the FAQ describe the tool and how it differs from Greasemonkey in more detail.

Chickenfoot is geared towards end-user programmers as well as hackers.
By offering commands such as click(), enter() and pick(), Chickenfoot provides users with a higher level of abstraction over their actions on a web page, which is more appropriate for an end-user programmer. However, Chickenfoot users are not restricted to this level of abstraction because Chickenfoot can run all valid JavaScript, so all the functions and commands that Greasemonkey users are accustomed to using will still be available in Chickenfoot.

Chickenfoot encourages users to experiment with web pages to develop their scripts.
One of the major contributions of Chickenfoot is the addition of a development environment inside Firefox for web scripting. Since Chickenfoot users are encouraged to work with the rendered model of a web page, being able to look at the page while writing the script is essential. Also, the Output pane makes it convenient to view intermediary results, and the Pattern pane helps users users see what their keyword patterns will match before adding them to their script. Greasemonkey does not provide users with such an environment, so users must switch back and forth between their editor and their browser to create and then test scripts.

Some of the most popular sites on the web still make users go through many pages of painful forms to accomplish common tasks, without any external help or automation.  Those sites typically block third party sites that seek to automate or simplify those flows on behalf of user, out of concerns that a third party will get in the way of their relationship with the user. 

Tools like Chickenfoot or Greasemonkey, however, cannot be easily detected or blocked, and will shift the balance of power back to the user. 

(The main feature missing from most web rewriting tools is a more server-centric model for script configuration. I shouldn’t have to recreate my script configuration on every browser, and given the need to inspect and trust third-party scripts, many users will want to delegate script configuration to a central authority anyway.)

Here’s a lovely little bug that Itea discovered in Jobster search.  

The first clue was several jobs being listed in Lakebay, WA.  Lakebay is small community in Pierce county, and these jobs weren’t actually in Lakebay.  Strange, but not yet obvious what could be causing the bug. 

Another key bit of evidence:  Lakebay also happens to be known as Home, WA.   

Still other jobs were listed with the dual location of Sweet Home, OR and Lakebay.  (Sadly, there is no Sweet Home, AL.)

The punchline should be obvious by now– a number of of the “work at home” jobs on Craigslist were posted with a location of “home” or “home sweet home”, and our location parsing code was a little too clever/stupid for its own good. 

I think we’ll be fixing that one.