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Tag Archive for 'Technology'

Firefox’s marketshare now 27.8% in Europe?

Published

on 16/7/2007

. 8 Comments

Tom’s on holidays, I’ll be your host for today. My name’s Frank P, you might remember me from such blogs as “BifSniff.com”,” FestivalShirts.net/blog” and “Aonach.com/chatter”.

Damien asks us what our site stats for Firefox are after reading the results of a survey by XiTi monitor which shows Firefox having 38.6% marketshare in Ireland.

A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe

With regard to Damien’s question: For BifSniff.com Google Analytics puts Firefox at 39.54% for the month of June - that’s for all traffic not just European traffic (Northern Europe accounts for 50.48% of that traffic with Ireland accounting for 18.59%).

Win a t-shirt

Published

Tom Raftery

on 4/7/2007

in Technology

. 1 Comment

Frank just told me he has a new t-shirt design site going on called FestivalShirts.

The site sells t-shirts to people going to festivals with slogans like “Will swap t-shirt for dry sleeping bag”, “I know where there’s a usable toilet” and “Don’t take drugs. That’s stealing.”

Frank now has a blogger’s t-shirt available and a competition to win a t-shirt.

To be eligible to win you simply link to the site with the words I want a t-shirt!

Let the ~~games~~ links begin!

Foxmarks to launch next great search engine?

Published

Tom Raftery

on 26/6/2007

in Search Engines

. 2 Comments

Google had a great idea. Order your search results based on the number of times a site is linked to. Brilliant! A link to a site is counted as a vote of confidence in the site’s quality/veracity. And it works because people generally only link to interesting sites.

Foxmarks is a nifty little Firefox plugin which uploads your Firefox bookmarks to a central server, so you can synchronise your bookmarks across machines. Again brilliant - if you typically use more than one computer (one at home and one at work, for example).

I read today on TechCrunch that FoxMarks is going to use the bookmark information which users of the plugin have uploaded, to create a new search engine. Privacy concerns aside, I love it!

This is the 1,157th blog post on this site. I don’t have any numbers on the amount of outward links I have created in those posts but I imagine two per post would be a conservative estimate. So I have created, in the order of 2,300 links on this blog. And I write in and contribute to other blogs as well. Let’s say I have created (again conservatively) a total of 2,500 links.

Now how many sites have I bookmarked? About 160. Therefore, any site I go to the trouble of bookmarking, must be significantly more important than one I simply link to.

Foxmarks are taking the Google model of a link as a vote of confidence and replacing it with the bookmark as a vote of confidence. Will it work? Well, according to Mike Arrington, who got a demo recently:

it definitely has a â€œwowâ€ factor. Searches for most things ended up with incredible results.

Foxmarks also shows if the results appear on Google and Yahoo, and on what page in the results they appear. For many of the queries, the top result on Foxmarks was quite obviously the perfect result - but it appeared, if at all, deep on the result set for Google and Yahoo. Terms that are likely to have a lot of SEO pollution (ecommerce in particular), the results were strikingly better on Foxmarks v. Google.

Having said all that, Google have their Google Browser Sync application which has similar functionality to Foxmarks currently, so fine tuning their search results with bookmark info should be trivial for them.

I hope they do because getting 1,210,000 results for the search term “Microsoft Hotmail deletes email” is just ridiculous, even considering how bad Hotmail is!

Paddy Valley trip - help needed

Published

Tom Raftery

on 18/6/2007

in Technology and social media

. 1 Comment

There is a contingent of Irish heading to Silicon Valley in December (2nd to 9th) to meet up and forge links with the movers and shakers in the mecca of the computer world.

The Paddy Valley Tour, as it is being called, has 17 Irish companies signed up so far. Many of those going are seeking to showcase products and to meet investors while there.

The organisers are looking for a little help:

There is a lot we need to cover so suggestions, reviews, tips and anything else is welcomed. We canâ€™t do all of it on our own (and remain sane).
Things we need to do:

* Create shortlist of hotels to stay in that are central but also cheap.
* Create shortlist of venues for a showcase event. (A big room with connectivity and projector).
* Create shortlist of people to meet.
* Create shortlist of companies to visit both large and small.
* Create a list of potential companies.
* Cost of showcase.
* What can EI pay for or other Govt groups

If you can help with any of this leave a comment on the Paddy Valley site

BarCamp Belfast

Published

Tom Raftery

on 14/6/2007

in Technology and barcamp

. 2 Comments

I got an email from Brian Cleland notifying me that the next Irish BarCamp, BarCamp Belfast is taking place in Queens University Belfast on Saturday June 30th.

Congrats Sir Tim!

Published

Tom Raftery

on 14/6/2007

in Technology

. 3 Comments

According to an article on the BBC’s website, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is to receive an Order of Merit from the Queen of England.

I don’t think there is anyone who would argue with that award. Not alone didÂ Tim Berner-Lee invent the World Wide Web, but he made no attempt to patent it and that fact was one of the factors in its success.

Frankly, I don’t think there is a single person who has done as much to change the world for the better as Tim Berners-Lee.