Monday, August 2, 2004

Wordcount

The Wordcount Flash lets you enter a word and displays other words with the same frequency in English language. [Via Minding the Planet.]

Also see the Word Frequency Colorizer at this blog, as well as the Most-Used Words Online (including download).

Justin F. writes:

“Type in ’america’ and note the phrase that comes into view.

Spooky, isnt it?"

Wordcount by Philipp Lenssen

Nielsen on Deceiving Information Scent

Jakob Nielsen’s in his latest Alertbox (August 2, 2004) writes:

“Predators following a strong spoor are firmly convinced that they’ll find their prey at the end of the trail, and thus are less likely to be distracted and wander off the path.

Similarly, if users are clicking through a site hunting for specific products or answers, they’ll keep going as long as they continue to find links that seem to take them closer and closer to their goal.

Information scent can backfire if a strong attractor seems to be the answer, but isn’t.”

Nielsen on Deceiving Info ... by Philipp Lenssen

Kebapgraz SEO Contest

A new German-language SEO contest is running. The goal: to get to the top Google position for the word “Kebabgraz” (which is a nonsense word mixing a dish and a city). The contest runs from June 16 to September 10 2004, and the Google pagecount for the word went from 0 in the beginning to over 17,000 today. [Thanks to Jan, who is also participating with a Kebapgraz entry in his Wiki.]

Kebapgraz SEO Contest by Philipp Lenssen

Blogspace Meme Experiment

“This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

1. I found this experiment at URL: http://www.ejacqui.com/archives/2004/08/testing_meme_pr.html
2. I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Browsing or Searching the Web (Feedster)
3. I posted this experiment at URL: http://blog.outer-court.com
4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02 August 2004
5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 18:32
6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Stuttgart, Germany

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

1. My blog is hosted by: -
2. My age is: -
3. My gender is: -
4. My occupation is: -
5. I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: -
6. I use the following software to post to my blog: Blogger Pro
7. I have been blogging since (day, month, year): -
8. My web browser is: Firefox
9. My operating system is: -”

PS: The Google-ID was so long several people already broke it up into separate parts (like as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq6 - 2010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4). This of course will make it impossible to use it in a Google search to retrieve all relevant postings spreading this meme. I wonder why the original author didn’t think of a short ID to prevent this. In any case, a search query such as “The dataset generated by this experiment could help us” will work as well.

Blogspace Meme Experiment by Philipp Lenssen

Search Toronto Star

The Toronto Star newspaper opened its archive. You can search all PDFs from 1894 to 2001 (in 5-year chunks). This costs up from $5 for 5 hour. The year 1945 however can be viewed for free. [Via ResearchBuzz.]

Search Toronto Star by Philipp Lenssen

LookAhead

The Firefox extension Lookahead opens result pages in different tabs (see screenshot). Depending on how many people use this tool you need your own API key to make it work, though. [Thanks B. Rintoul in the forum.]

LookAhead by Philipp Lenssen

John Kerry Speech

Below you will find the 50 most-quoted sentences of the John Kerry speech held on July 29th at the Democration National Convention in Boston. This table is calculated by querying the web – via the Google API – for the pagecount of each sentence in addition to the word “Kerry” (to restrict to a relevant result set).

#	Sentence	Pagecount
1.	America can do better.	9,720
2.	But you know what?	4,710
3.	I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.	3,460
4.	I don’t want to claim that God is on our side.	2,510
5.	I’m not kidding.	2,130
6.	The stakes are high.	1,990
7.	We can do better, and we will.	1,900
8.	we only go to war because we have to.	1,850
9.	I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war.	1,750
10.	Strength is more than tough words.	1,700
11.	I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president.	1,550
12.	America can do better, and help is on the way.	1,420
13.	Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn’t make it so.	1,370
14.	Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn’t make it so.	1,280
15.	And proclaiming “Mission accomplished” certainly doesn’t make it so.	1,230
16.	We’re the optimists.	1,190
17.	Any attack will be met with a swift and a certain response.	1,150
18.	Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required.	1,120
19.	I will immediately reform the intelligence system, so policy is guided by facts and facts are never distorted by politics.	1,080
20.	In these dangerous days, there is a right way and a wrong way to be strong.	1,080
21.	We need to make America once again a beacon in the world.	1,020
22.	And as president, I will bring back this nation’s time-honoured tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to	979
23.	I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws.	911
24.	The future doesn’t belong to fear; it belongs to freedom.	868
25.	We’re the can-do people.	832
26.	We created 23 million new jobs.	811
27.	We value an America where the middle class is not being squeezed, but doing better.	786
28.	We paid down the debt.	728
29.	The sun is rising.	722
30.	I was born in the West Wing.	690
31.	Let’s build unity in the American family, not angry division.	688
32.	And that starts by telling the truth to the American people.	686
33.	We just need to believe in ourselves and we can do it again.	683
34.	In the weeks ahead, let’s be optimists, not just opponents.	657
35.	As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side.	655
36.	Our best days are still to come.	644
37.	Let’s respect one another.	641
38.	And we lifted the standard of living for the middle class.	632
39.	We lifted millions out of poverty.	630
40.	We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, reduce the risk to American soldiers.	618
41.	Let’s honor this nation’s diversity.	616
42.	We are a nation at war: a global war on terror against an enemy unlike we’ve ever known before.	612
43.	We were literally all in the same boat.	605
44.	And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose, and we will win.	599
45.	There were no Republicans.	597
46.	And let’s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.	589
47.	I want to address these next words directly to President George W Bush.	587
48.	For us, this is a country of the future.	584
49.	We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances.	578
50.	I know what we have to do in Iraq.	576

Notes: The speech used here was the actual one given, not the one being published at Johnkerry.com and quoted by many sources. Only the 10 first words of each query (“kerry”, plus the first 9 words from the sentence) are being used by Google when it returns the pagecount. Not all sentences must necessarily be from the DNC.

John Kerry Speech by Philipp Lenssen

Topix.net Relaunch

ResourceShelf reports Topix.net went live with new look and features. One interesting detail is that when you visit a news page (like the one on Google), it will be added to the navigation on the front-page.

Topix.net Relaunch by Philipp Lenssen

Googleplexer

Christian informed me about Googleplexer, which displays Google results with PageRank.

Googleplexer by Philipp Lenssen

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