The first one is from Tagaroo, which uses the (Reuters) Calais API to determine tags that match the content of your posting. Like Akismet, you need to sign up to use the Calais API. It’s worth it, though. Tagaroo is a huge time saver when it comes to the discovery of relevant tags.

Next, we have Kaalga, which does for relevant links what Tagaroo does for Tags. It matches links to post content and then lets you add them. Kaalga doesn’t require you to have an API key, though, which is nice. It’s buttons come up in Livejournal and WordPress forms like any good Greasemonkey hack.

Both of these remind me of the work by San Francisco company Triggit, which performs similiar automated linking (by attaching items to the document’s DOM model), without the Triggit dependency. If you apply links from Kaalga, they stay in your document. With Triggit, if they go down, you lose the links as the Javascript monkey-patching becomes no longer available.

All of the links in this post were provided by Kaalga. I kept trying to get Tagaroo to work, but they wouldn’t send me an API key. After about ten attempts to get an API key, their site finally said ‘access denied.’

Lame.

Thanks to Andraz Tori’s presentation, “Beyond Who else bought what…” for discovering these tools.

Those that were lacking in an actual LOLCat slide featured lots of LOLSpeak. I know we’re discussing the web, but do we have to insert LOLSpeak everywhere? (of course we do. duh.)

I urge you to check out the slides. There were many informative presentations this year from our friends across in Berlin and abroad.

Photo courtesy Scott Beale, Laughingsquid.com

Scott’s original blog posting appears right here, on the laughing squid blog.

SFBeta was what you’d expect – Lots of industry folk, barely any food left if you showed up past 5:50pm or so (they opened at 5pm!), lots of people pushing random product at you, and not a hell of a lot of good technology. Most of it? Pointless, but every time I go, though, there’s at least one company showing a worthy technology.

i give you, search me:

A few months ago, it was PicLens, and this time, in the “we use and love coverflow” technology vein that PicLens is part of, it’s SearchMe.

They’re combining cover flow, Internet search, and a topic specific, topic sensitive system that displays categorical icons at the top of the page. The stacks feature allows you to drag and drop pages into a cohesive stack, share them with people on Digg, Twitter, and nearly every social networking site out there.

Give it a try – their developer tells me they are using their own crawler, which I think is a bad idea. I worked at Inktomi for a few years and I know how difficult it is to scale search. Their plight, in the face of Google and Microsoft, will not be any easier.

Part way through the day I got caught up in a bit of a media circus, but I survived. I finally got to meet Steve Gillmor, even if he had a camera shoved in my face.

(Oh damn, the media has picked up on this and it’s everywhere now, really…)

Ignite was slim (9 presenters) but still very valuable. I ended up going on second, with a talk about scaling for porn sites (even though I was supposed to be 7th or so). That talk is currently available on slideshare, but I hope to see some video up from the O’Reilly video peeps up soon with audio.

There’s still many more questions I’d like to ask of yesterday’s presenters. I have quite a few questions that need answering! While there, I spent some time with Artur, Steve, Brady, and Jos, and it was a wonderful feeling to be around such talented people.

BTW, slideshare folk, I had no idea you were so close to my house.
Hi! I found your office randomly while bicycling to work.

Time for sleep. I’ll see you at breakfast!

(p.s. duncan, I need headshots. What you got?)

The day opened (for me, at least) with the Measuring Performance presentation. The general takeaway from that was “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”. That’s the mantra of most of this Operations-specific conference.

I’ve also attended a scaling presentation on Hotmail with Microsoft’s Aladdin Nassar, and while I disagreed with most of the limits that he gave in – 300kbit/s as a international limit for bandwidth (because of the speed of light… whaa?), most of his presentation is relevant to today’s site operations.

I’m currently in the Cloud Computing panel discussion, where cloud providers from Joyent, Rackspace, Engine Yard, and a few others are discussing the pros and cons of moving your application into the cloud.

I’m still a bit against cloud computing; I tend to work on web sites which are large, memory, and disk hungry monsters that simply can’t be placed into the cloud. As you increase resource utilization on cloud based sites, costs typically increase. The majority of this cost (at least on Amazon web services) is in network and disk bandwidth.

Video providers can’t run in the cloud without paying high costs, but the cloud computing environment is a perfect nursery for startups and companies which are about to experience an immediate increase in load, without the corresponding network and systems administration infrastructure to support that load. (I’m hearing from one of the Rackspace speakers that they can easily handle a half petabyte or more of storage per customer, but at what cost? They’re a very, very expensive provider!)

The cloud is also an excellent place for performing repeatable functionality testing without damaging your production environment. You can reduce cost by not instantiating your QA environment until it’s needed, and throw away QA wen you’re not using it.

Some sites further exploit this by only turning up servers when load is present, and disabling servers in the middle of the night when load is at its lowest.

They are also making predictions now that cloud computing will replace standard data center management in the future, regardless of enterprise size. I’d say, if you’re a sysadmin, it’s time to work for one of these companies or start learning a new job. The clock is ticking.

(( More posting later as I hit the various sessions. ))

John Allspaw’s Capacity Planning for Web Operations:
http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/capacity-planning-for-web-operations-web20-expo-2008

Why startups need automated infrastructures
This talk was pretty awseome. It dealt with automating operations work.
http://www.slideshare.net/adamhjk/why-startups-need-automated-infrastructures

Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches (2007)
http://www.slideshare.net/techdude/scalable-web-architectures-common-patterns-and-approaches/

I’m also adding my friend’s talk (Artur Bergman from Wikia) from the upcoming O’Reilly Velocity conference in Burlingame:

Failure happens:
http://www.slideshare.net/crucially/failure-happens/

Additionally, here’s Steve Souders slides from his talk. Amazing takeaway from this: 9% of page load time is spent loading and generating HTML. The rest of the time is spent by the browser!

http://stevesouders.com/docs/web20expo-20080425.ppt

How do we store hundreds of thousands of movies in a redundant, distributed fashion across many data centers, and bring users to that content quickly?

There’s lots of ways to do this. Rsync, automated copies, directory analysis, usage pattern analysis, etc. Most of them have the same problem: Moving data takes time.

But have you looked at zvents? Their recent work on hypertable shows that they can make things happen, and that their strength lies in their engineering and not their domain name.

You’ll need a badge to attend, and I suggest you register as soon as possible!

Note that you will have to drop by Moscone Center and pick up your badge during the day before coming to DNA. 

Badge signup is here:
https://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/register

Select “$100 Exhibits only” and enter the discount code:
websf08ob3

To waive the $100 fee.

The schedule of speakers is after the cut…

The first set goes on 8PM. The second set goes on around 9:15. Doors open at 7PM.

First Set

Vanessa Fox – 5 Things Developers Should Know About Search Engines
750 million people search. Ensure your infrastructure lets search engines turn those searchers into your customers.
James Levy – Medill Eats Its Own Dog Food
In the aftermath of a serious trust scandal, a journalism school asks tough questions about its future. Transparently.
David Calkins – Robots Everywhere!
Robots are finally here. Brains, bodies, sensors, and actuators – building, using, and buying robots. Where’s your bot?
Christy Canida – How to Build Online Community Using the 7 Deadly Sins
Building online community doesn’t have to be complicated — just give people what they REALLY want.
Vinnie Lauria – How to “Use” your Users
From new features, to bug testing, to driving new traffic – how to get the most out of the community using your product.
Christian Crumlish – Grasping Social Patterns
I will discuss a set of social design patterns I am framing out as Yahoo!’s pattern detective.
Annalee Newitz – Why Giant Monsters Rule
Giant Monsters 101 — an intro to the greatest giant monsters, what they mean, and how to appreciate their mega-charms.
Kathy Sierra – Kicking Ass
How to make your users kick ass.

Second Set

Lane Becker – By the time I finish this talk, everyone in this room will want to run a marathon
Why every person who spends their day in front of a computer should get up from the chair and run a marathon.
Gregory Dicum – Asking Questions
Conducting interviews for bloggers and podcasters — techniques, tricks, and pitfalls from offline journalism
John Adams – Snarkatron
Discusses Snarkatron,a social experiment which allowed audience members to interact with performers using SMS/RSS/WWW
Salim Ismail – The Metaphysics of Growth
There are core processes that govern how growth/evolution happens. We’ll drill into them and how it affects technology
Jim Edlin – Can the web become America’s next polling place?
Do we really need expensive, specialty machines from dubious companies to run elections, or can the Web do it better?
John Adams – You Aren’t From Around Here, Are You?
What technical end users mean when they talk about Web 2.0, as observed in the field well away from Silicon Valley.
Dan Shapiro – Make Money Fast: Where the dough is in mobile
Overview of how to make money building software for mobile phones
Ted Rheingold – Dogs on the Web
Let’s follow Ted into Dogster
Sean Bonner – How to cause global chaos with a checkbox
Riot inducing feedback and fun times when redesigning a global blog network.