Simon Willison recently created an interesting mashup Wikinear, combining Fire Eagle (Yahoo’s new location tracking service) and Wikipedia: It’s a simple site that does just one thing: show you a list of the five Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to your current location. It’s designed (or not-designed) to be used mainly from mobile phones. The idea for the site came from living in Oxford for a year. The city is full of beautiful old historic buildings (many of them colleges), but very few of them are labelled or signposted. With wikinear.com and a GPS hooked up to Fire Eagle,…
Update: For the most current data (all of 2008), please see Top Mobile Websites for 2008. Last September, I reported on the top 20 mobile websites that readers of my mobile website list (Cantoni.mobi) were clicking on. Since six months have gone by, I thought it was a perfect time for an update. Today I present the “top 30” mobile websites as recorded on Cantoni.mobi. These results are captured by my MyBlogLog community widget which reports on not just page views, but links clicked http://www.massagemetro.com/shop/ exiting the site. The same caveat applies: any mobile browser with Javascript either disabled or…
If you haven’t yet seen the Explanations in Plain English series from Common Craft, you really need to go check them out. The latest in the series came out this week and it’s titled “Twitter in Plain English”. Common Craft has created a simple but effective presentation method using paper cut-outs and a whiteboard to explain technical topics.
The CSS-Tricks site has a cool article this week about using weather data to change your website’s appearance. Of note for Yahoo developers is that they’re using the Yahoo! Weather web service to fetch current conditions. The article has an accompanying sample page which focuses on the CSS and PHP code necessary to swap out the page appearance. The remaining work would be to intelligently identify where the visitor is coming from and fetch their weather automatically. Kind of a neat application for a service that probably doesn’t get a lot of attention.
Here’s an interesting report from yesterday quoting Akamai Technologies which found that traffic to advertisers’ website didn’t increase appreciably during the game: Akamai delivered the Web sites and advertising content for approximately half of the companies that aired commercials during the Super Bowl, according to company spokesperson Jeff Young. This year’s advertisements featured fewer commercials with so-called cliff hangers, which drive viewers to a company’s Web site to see the conclusion of the ad, Young said. I wonder if there is a good baseline to compare this against. It’s probably not realistic to expect a traffic increase during the game.…