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!