From a recent article on TechCrunch  on promoting your SEO stamp with videos.. Here is an experiment.

1. Create a random video of pictures. Tag it well with "Naperville hotels"
2. Host it on this site.
3. Create a video sitemap and submit it - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=10079
4. Check ranking for "Naperville hotels" in a few days to see if this domain ranks up or not..

So, in an attempt to sell this fantastic domain name :), I'd like everyone to retweet this message so I can spread the word of this awesome domain name and find a potential buyer..

Whats in it for you?

Satisfaction of helping a friend! And I'll buy/ship you a case of beer :)

List of items I'd like to develop in the next few weeks to make monitoring/analyzing data fun.

1. Charting indexed pages count from google.com for site:foo.com using rapheljs
2. Crawling multiple sites and visualizing data using the tool presented in the last post. Should have the ability to merge multiple data sets and represent as different colors.
3. Integrate page ranking for the crawled data
   
4. Intelligently suggest pages to promote based on analysis of competitor data sets
   

So you or your company has a website. You optimized it for SEO so you get all the organic traffic from google, bing, yahoo, etc... There are plenty of webmaster tools out there that will give you page rankings for specific pages. However, if you want to see for yourself how interlinked the pages in your domain or in your competitors domain are, you will have to poke around with some code. I have been using nutch for all the crawling and indexing purposes. It scales fairly well with hadoop. Bixo is another open-source tool, however I never got the hang of it and nutch provides just what I wanted - given a seed page, crawl through the server providing a list of inLinks for all URLs. This data can further be used (w/ some cleaning) w/ TreeViz, a great visualization tool for tree structures.. I will post some screenshots later today.

I was talking w/ my boss about the potential of data that is injected in twitter, search engines and other social networking websites daily. There is not a consistent API out there that could aggregate such data, map it to a valid location and present that for outside world to use. Trazzler does it in some form, but I can't find an API exposed for use by outsiders and seems to be limited to twitter data only. For instance, Superbowl 2010 will be all over the news and on twitter starting Dec 09/Jan 10. But what does that mean?? Absolutely nothing! Unless somehow you can map that to Miami, FL, USA. Same goes with Oktoberfest (Munich, Germany?). A cool project would be create a database that would update real-time with top search queries, tweets, etc. with a uniform location associated with it along with the ability for user interference to correct any outliers.

I recently bought a Panasonic home theater system which has built-in ipod dock. Now here is an idea: I don't have a ipod touch or iphone (I am ancient and carry an ipod mini from 2005), but it would be cool if I could dock my future ipod touch in the docking station, start an app - and let it listen for a streaming channel on the home network. This way, if you have any laptop, you would be able to stream music from itunes or youtube to this network channel and get music on your surround sound system from any room in the house. Obviously, this requires some more research as I have never really written an ipod app or even seen their SDK, so I'll have to digg up some more details.. More to come later!

I've noticed recently that Selenium IDE has recently become real popular in companies with agile teams to automate their testing. Capture/playback testing is great to show-off your testing skills with a faster ROI, but it is definitely not productive for large scale testing (multiple projects, features, etc..). If you have a product that requires significant amount of testing, there is no way you can record and playback every scenario and then maintain them for future use. There will come a time, where you would need to programmatically interfere to make development of test cases against the acceptance criteria easier. A recent post from infoq about testing:

In the late afternoon there was a discussion around the role of record and playback tools such as the Selenium IDE. Lisa Crispin thinks that capture/playback tools “can be a great way to help learn a new tool, and also can be helpful in debugging test scripts or figuring out the right statements to use in a particular test. However, people shouldn’t get bogged down in only using capture/playback”. Jason Huggins, Selenium developer, explained that he is troubled by the general use of the Selenium IDE (really just a record/playback tool). It was originally intended as a “little 'trainer' airplane that jet pilots train on first. The pilots can learn a lot from the trainer, but eventually they have to move up to a real jet.”

Don't get me wrong, w/ my limited experience of selenium, it has canned out to be a pretty good deal for testing, but one has to brush up on their scripting skills --- ruby, python or maybe even java to assist w/ selenium so as they can take full advantage of the tool and automate tests on a broader scale. Integrate that w/ a continuous integration system like hudson and you'll have yourself an environment self-sufficient for agile development.

Just my $0.03