Jibbering

I got some BBC spam today, well actually not BBC spam, but Mentorn TV spam who are producing a TV show for the BBC, the spam is looking for people to appear on the show - it sounds like one of those crappy BBC 3 things.

The BBC say

Don’t reply, ever!
Never buy anything from a spammer. Don’t make spamming worth the effort - plus you’ll get even more spam once they know you’re willing to buy.

So I expect the BBC will be rather disappointed in the number of particpants the show gets, and will presumably be ceasing all business with Mentorn TV, which would actually be a great shame as it produces a lot of quality shows, but really that just makes it worse that they’ve descended into sending spam.

foafnaut is the SVG viewer of foaf data, unfortunately the current data doesn’t get updated as I’m trying to convince other scutter people to provide the data. I’ve just put together an HTML version, this does much the same as the SVG version, but not as impressively, there’s no sproings linking the blubs for a start. (A blub is the thing that represents a person, a sproing the line between them.)

In Internet Explorer using VML, or in Deer Park using SVG, there are sproings, the lines are drawn in. This shows very well how well mixed namespace documents can work, html is good at marking up the information panel, but atrocious at drawing the lines - especially ones that are animated. Hopefully soon Opera and Safari will get scripted SVG - Opera still has static - so I’m not going to attempt an alternative with lines for them, just wait until the UA’s catch up with the script.

The SVG version is still much richer, there’s some automatic layout to keep blubs away from each other, the dragging is more reliable, the graphics much better, but for a simple taster the htmlnaut isn’t too bad.

I seem to have annoyed the Opera Gods, as Opera 8.5 has introduced a bug which when rendering this blog appears to push the CPU to 100% and make all the links inaccessible, I can’t seem to isolate the cause, at first because it didn’t happen on my localhost I thought it might be the 0 byte favicon.ico I have (I really do not like browsers auto-requesting favicon.ico, it’s my URI I chose what it means not you!) but that’s not it, it just seems to only happen remote. An archived version of the page can be found at /2005/10/opera-bug.html.

I couldn’t seem to isolate any other stuff, so I’ve not been able to author a workaround, if anyone can see one let me know, as I’d quite like Opera people able to follow links, if not we’ve just got to wait until Opera fix bug 182028.

I’ve made a couple of changes to the Javascript RDF-Parser, this was to include Opera and Safari support, based on a patch provided Gorm H Eriksen via Chaals. And to fix a couple of bugs found by Ian Dickinson related to xmlbase and some leaking of global variables.

At the same time I’ve updated the very limited documentation and included the owl:sameAs code I wrote some time ago which never made it into a “released” version, also the rdf:datatype and xml:lang support hadn’t previously been mentioned, so that’s documented too now.

If anyone is using it, good luck, and please let me know of bugs, I’ll gladly fix them!

There’s lots of talk, and lots of work in the search engine world about local search, I’m sure the reason is to get more advertisers - there’s only so many people who it’s relevant for to advertise globally, or even nationally, local shops for local people however would pay for local adverts.

I wanted to find a bike shop in Kingston, so I could find one that’s likely to have a tourer as I’m thinking hard of cycling longer distances to get rid of the current fat belly (very old readers may remember me running 20:19 in the club handicap a few years back, 28:05 was my this month fat time).

One of things I knew was there was Evans cycles near the station, and there’s one just down the road from me in surbiton - a few miles from Kingston. Google local was my first choice as they put it on the map which is great. First there’s a search for Bike shop and Kingston. First up, google offers me 2 Kingston’s to disambiguate - good, but I’ve searched for stuff in Kingston before, it really should remember which Kingston I’m near, at least give me the results for upon Thames, and give a link “did you mean Kingston upon Hull” if I’ve just asked 5 minutes ago.

Telling it Kingston upon Thames I get some results. The nearest result is Action Bikes - 3.8 miles away from Kingston in Richmond, the furthest is 13 miles away in Harrow or Lewisham - neither of the two bike shops I actually know about are listed at all - this is the big failure of local search - people know their local area, they know if there’s results missing, with a web search it doesn’t matter, I’ve no idea what resources the search engine hasn’t found, but with local search I know what’s missing and I’ll get annoyed.

Yahoo doesn’t have something called a local search, but it does have a business finder which does the same job. So bike shop in kingston returns no results at all, but a suggestion to try more general words, and bike in kingston turns up a big list mostly linked to motorbikes, however there’s one on the first page and it has a link to a category cycle shops clicking on that I get a list of 4 in Kingston, no way to enlarge the area though, and it doesn’t mention the ones just outside Kingston. It also took 4 pages and thought of my search terms, much too much effort on a smartphone, and too much effort even in the office.

MSN search was just crazy bike shop in kingston tells me that “kingston” was not recognized. Please be more specific changing kingston to anything fromKingston upon Thames to Surrey or London didn’t get me anywhere at all, I always got the same message - I couldn’t find any location that it actually worked for!

The providers of business information to google and yahoo are Yell and ThomsonLocal. Yell performed the search without any problems, both guiding me through the process of narrowing down what I wanted to cycle shops, and returning me a list in Kingston and a wider area. Thomson Local however fail to map bike shop to anything about bikes, somehow suggesting I might want shop fittings, if I deliberately choose cycle shops (what I’ve learnt they want them called) then it finds them no problem.

Local search appears to have a very long way to go, and will always suffer the problem of being different to what the local person knows of their locality - if you know the chip shop has closed, you’ll be annoyed if it appears on the map, if you know the best chip shop is on the high street and there’s nothing there on the search you’ll doubt all the results. I can’t see local search being a useful feature to me, they have a very long way to go, if you have to use one though, yahoo is the way to go, even though they still haven’t bothered with a background colour.