Wikipedia Statistics From WikiCharts
If you wanted to know what’s hot on Wikipedia, check out WikiCharts. The newtool shows the articles from the English Wikipedia that are viewed most, but is still in testing and may report wrong results. Here’s what it claims are this month’s top 20 posts:
1831000 3% 4.2065% 1. Main Page 62250 14% 0.1430% 2. Wikipedia 52500 15% 0.1206% 3. United States 49750 16% 0.1143% 4. JonBenet Ramsey 39500 17% 0.0907% 5. List of big-bust models and performers 36500 18% 0.0839% 6. Hurricane Katrina 36250 19% 0.0833% 7. Irukandji jellyfish 35250 18% 0.0810% 8. Pluto 33250 19% 0.0764% 9. Wiki 30750 20% 0.0706% 10. Jeff Hardy 30500 20% 0.0701% 11. List of sex positions 30000 19% 0.0689% 12. World Wrestling Entertainment roster 29750 20% 0.0683% 13. List of female porn stars 28750 20% 0.0660% 14. Wii 27000 21% 0.0620% 15. Pokemon 25750 21% 0.0592% 16. Pornography 24500 22% 0.0563% 17. Neighbours 24250 22% 0.0557% 18. Celebrity sex tape 22500 24% 0.0517% 19. Volkswagen Type 2 22500 24% 0.0517% 20. Priyanka Chopra
My only question–what are “Irukandji jellyfish” and why are they so popular? Can you EAT them?!
Plastic Surgery Booming in China
Young adults in China are getting their plastic surgery done over the summer to let their bruises heal before school and work take off.
Jerry Chang Does Pachelbel’s Canon in D
The New York Times has an article about the internet-famous guitar player JerryC who published a YouTube video of himself playing an electric rock version of Pachelbel’s Canon. The movie was an instant hit, and spawned a huge number of imitations, almost none as good as Jerry C’s original, which you can view below:
Then, a guy only identified as Funtwo published his own version of the song, which was even better performed than the original:
Naturally, the Times reporter did his best to track this newcomer down:
By following a series of clues on JerryC’s message board and various Canon Rock videos, I was able to trace funtwo’s video to Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old Korean who taught himself guitar over the course of the last six years. Now living in Seoul, he listens avidly to Bach and Vivaldi, and in 2000 he took a month of guitar lessons. He plays an ESP, an Alfee Custon SEC-28OTC with gold-colored detailing. A close analysis of his playing style and a comparison of his appearance in person with that of the figure in the video, left little doubt that Mr. Lim is the elusive funtwo.
Is Clubhostcity.com Spammer’s Paradise?
I sent an email to Layeredtech, because DNS claimed that they owned the IP which operated Accelzone, a splog ripping off my content, but then I got the following email from Club Host City, who claim they actually operate the site:
We have received your complaint regarding copyright issues with Accelzone.com forwarded to us via the 3rd party that you erroneously contacted, Layered Technologies, who incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with Accelzone.com whatsoever and is **NOT** the hosting provider for that domain.
Did you ever think about looking at the WHOIS information on the domain instead of trying to do an IP lookup?
We share the same data center as Layered Technologies and our IP addresses come out of the same IP pool as them in the Saavis data center, Dallas, TX but we have no affiliation with that company other than the common location.
For future reference, the hosting provider is the domain shown on the DNS servers and also listed as the contact
address in the DNS record header.If you just took a look at the header record of the DNS or the DNS servers listed in the WHOIS, you would already know who the hosting provider was.
The hosting provider for Accelzone.com is Cybertoad Networks located on the web at www.cybertoad.net which is a reseller under our company, Clubhost City.
We would have been happy to handle your complaint! However, we have absolutely no tolerance for dead light bulbs like yourself so we are instead going to ban you from our entire network and all web sites that we control (more than 3 million) and instruct the reseller to give the customer Accelzone.com a free upgrade to the next account plan at our expense.
Next time you should be more careful!
–
Abuse / Policy Enforcement
Clubhost City
Here’s what DNS says for accelzone.com:
Domain Name: ACCELZONE.COM
Registrant:
accelzone
accelz *******@gmail.com)
4th street
NY
,90210
US
Tel. +76.12121455Creation Date: 10-Nov-2005
Expiration Date: 10-Nov-2006Domain servers in listed order:
ns2.clubhostcity.com
ns.clubhostcity.com
That doesn’t tell me anything substantive, so I looked up the IP address (72.36.230.170) and then WHOISed it:
OrgName: Layered Technologies, Inc.
OrgID: LAYER-3
Address: 18816 Preston Road
Address: Suite #100
City: Dallas
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75252
Country: USReferralServer: rwhois.layeredtech.com:4321
NetRange: 72.36.128.0 - 72.36.255.255
CIDR: 72.36.128.0/17
NetName: LAYERED-TECH-
NetHandle: NET-72-36-128-0-1
Parent: NET-72-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.LAYEREDTECH.COM
NameServer: NS2.LAYEREDTECH.COM
Comment: Please send all abuse complaints to
Comment: *****@layeredtech.com
Comment: Please send all network queries to ***@layeredtech.com
RegDate: 2005-02-22
Updated: 2005-09-07
Since everything pointed to the site being hosted by Layeredtech, I don’t think I was wrong in initially emailing, and cannot believe the response I got from Clubhostcity. I replied to them:
The WHOIS information does not actually list clubhostcity as being anything but the nameserver, which is not an indicator of hosting status or not. I use dreamhost as a nameserver for many of my domains, while they’re hosted elsewhere on a dedicated server. Instead, I looked up the IP address to determine who was hosting accelzone, and it returned that the IP came from within Layered Tech’s address space. Naturally, I contacted their abuse department first, who insisted that I file a DMCA complaint. I’m not sure how I could have determined that you were actually the host.
Since I seem to have erroneously sent them that email, I’ll file it instead with you. Please expect to receive a DMCA notice by email shortly.
It seems that the infringing page is now down, but at what cost? Here’s a screenshot:
This is perhaps worse than dealing with yesterday’s incident with Robert Scoble, because the relationship between him and I involved correction and communication across a larger mistake. Here we have no mistake on my part (as far as I can tell) and incredible arrogance on the part of the host. Sorry Clubhostcity; in your email you confess that you’re going to give a spammer and splogger a bonus for evading the legal system. That means bloggers won’t like you.
The Sketchier Side of This Domain
A commenter on Scoble’s post complained about four of my sites, calling them spammy and auto-generated. Ignoring some of off-context commentary on me as a person, Matt wrote:
I wouldn’t blame Scoble that much, Elliot’s [sic] homepage links to a number of really spammy looking things:
vioxx.elliottback.com/ (that’s the worst)
msn-icons.elliottback.com/main.php
credit-card-information.elliottback.com/
celebrity-photos.elliottback.com/
universities.elliottback.com/He seems to be trying to automate the creation of a ton of content pages, take advantage of WP’s natural search engine advantage, and then use the trust from his domain (from the software he writes) to cash in via the really obnoxious adsense everywhere. Google seems to have indexed almost a million pages on his site. Probably not the type of content that Google wants their ads next to, though.
To address these concerns, I am about to give a breakdown of all the subdomains and properties I own into four categories: Respectable Blogs, Niche Blogs, Online Tools, and Automatic Experiments. You might be surprised by the breakdown–most of the websites that I am toying with are not automated in any way.
Respectable Blogs
These are hand-written, original blogs on a variety of topics. While you might not consider gossip and celebrity photos to be interesting to you, our editors do their best to populate them with interesting commentary and posts:
- Asia Blog
- Books Blog
- Business School Blog
- Eric Back’s Blog
- Gadgets Blog
- Elliott Back dot COM
- Video Games
Niche Blogs
These are blogs which I write content for, not because I love them, but to earn revenue. They cover topics I find interesting enough to create original content and share ideas for, but they are not my way of expressing myself. In other words, these blogs are just business.
- COMS 482 Notes
- Cornell University Blog
- Gold’s Gym Sucks
- The Gossip Rag Blog
- Hot Celebrity Photos
- University Tours
Online Tools
Every now and then, I get a crazy idea. I want to try something out–like a new platform for photo sharing via Gallery 2 (the MSN Icons site) or how to parse credit card information (the CC site). So, I build a site, plaster it with ads when I’m done, and see what comes of it. These are just fun projects for me, toys to play with. No one visits them, and I hardly make revenue off them.
Automatic Experiments
I have three ongoing experiments into automation. The first is WP-Autoblog, which I am using to syndicate posts from search engines on Vioxx, essentially turning my site into a meta-search engine on that topic. I’m using attributed excerpts to avoid any legal or ethical issues. The second project is Eye My Spam, a blog that goes straight from email to blog post without any filtering. Since no one uses the email address for communication with me, that blog essentially posts spam from my inbox straight to the web, useful for archival and public information sharing purposes. Now you can google a piece of email and see yes, it is indeed spam. The third project is the unreleased Infinite Tree project, which I’m still working on. Basically, it’s just an aggregator based around keywords.
Conclusion
I help this hopes you readers sort out exactly what I do–harmless dabbling, some serious blogging, and some for-profit stuff. I’m not interested in blog automation research that hurts anyone. My policy on internet techniques is not to be jealous of some one else’s software or business model, provided it falls within the law, but rather to be open to changes in the way people view the web. Is a syndicator dangerous? Yes. Does it provide a paradigm shift when used correctly? Yes. That’s why I wrote WP-Autoblog–to give people control over content and sourcing. It can be abused, but it can also be used to create useful directories of links, or create a meta-blog of blogs you manage.
