A couple of days ago, an article featuring TasteKid made it up to Digg’s main page. This triggered an “emergency landing” on Delicious’s main page, too. Around the same time, this happen. Then this. Then, others followed.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve started doing some changes on Emmy’s learning processes. What am I trying to do is basically increasing Emmy’s knowledge base and providing better quality recommendations.

This new redesigned engine is currently in testing, and it will take some time until its knowledge will be used on the public version of TasteKid. If everything goes well, I expect this to happen in about a month or so.

I will describe in further depth these updates when that time will come. Until then, Emmy continues to improve herself using the existing engine. Some of the time constrains are related to the limitations of the available hardware, so I think I will open myself a little bit more to sponsorship opportunities in the near future.

Getting Real is one of the best resources out there for all the people participating in designing, implementing, launching, marketing and pretty much everything related to a new web-based product or service.

The book (which is free to read online and is divided in small, easy to grasp chapters) dates back to 2006, but it is probably more actual now than ever. To give just one quote:

“The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back — and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.

These days it doesn’t take much to get rolling. Hardware is cheap and plenty of great infrastructure software is open source and free. And passion doesn’t come with a price tag.”

37signals has become a cult company, and, although some may consider they’ve broken their own rules when they took external funding, many of their advices and philosophies are valuable pieces of Internet business wisdom.

A recent mass-banning action performed by Digg led Mashable to perform an interesting analysis on the evolution of the Digg community. It all started just a few years ago as a democratic environment in which the news were submitted by users and promoted towards the main page by user votes, or diggs.

Nowadays, Digg is struggling to redistribute the editorial power from a handful of so-called “top users” that have managed to gain control on most of Digg’s voting process, back to the majority of its users.

This is a very interesting human behavior case study, the same way StumbleUpon is. We can easily draw a parallel between these two virtual communities and the real world we live in. They all have started as a nice dream of democratic systems in which the power “belongs to the people”, but the power seems to either inevitably concentrate in the hands of a few or loose coherency. Oh well, I guess it’s just human nature, or, depending on how you want to see it, maybe it’s just the natural thing to happen.

Today, TasteKid won third prize at Webstock Awards 2008, a Romanian Web 2.0 contest, within the “Utility” category. Thank you Cristian Manafu for suggesting me to participate in this contest. It was a pleasent experience :)

Whether we call it rewriting the URLs or changing the permalink structure, it is a common practice to use “nice” URLs on dynamic content websites, instead of the default ones. For example, this post has the URL http://tastekid.com/blog/?p=75, and if I was rewriting the URLs it would have probably looked like this: “http://tastekid.com/blog/2008/10/rewriting-the-urls”.

Nowadays, noble arguments are used in favor of rewriting the URLs, like “improving the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links” [Wordpress]. But let’s face it, these weren’t the most important arguments back when this whole practice begun. Instead, this was (and still is) one of the basic SEO techniques used in order to improve the SERP performances of web pages.

It is a known fact that one of the measures used by search engines when evaluating a page is the URL relevancy. For example, “http://example.com/how-to-rewrite-urls.html” will be seen as more relevant than “http://example.com/?articleID=2435″, for a search performed on “how to rewrite URLs”, given the same article content, page title, inbound links etc.

Besides the lack of relevancy, there was (and still is, to a certain point) a belief that search engines have something against dynamic URLs, that is, URLs that are using GET variables (e.g.: “?x=1&y=2″).

A long time ago, a large part of the web was consisted of static pages. That meant that if the URL of a page was “http://www.example.com/how-to-rewrite-urls.html”, a real physical HTML file called “how-to-rewrite-urls.html” presumably existed on the disk in the root of the example.com domain. The idea was that these static pages where considered to be more relevant than dynamic pages, that can be artificially generated in large numbers and don’t necessary contain relevant information. This idea is obviously obsolete now, and I am sure that for some time now search engines don’t even bother to consider that a “nice” URL may address a real physical file.

I don’t think that today search engines have anything against dynamic URLs. The only (but important) factor that contributes to the SERP performances is the URL relevancy. To explain my point of view by giving an example, I do think that “http://example.com/how-to-rewrite-urls.html” will perform better than “http://example.com/?articleID=2435″, but I don’t think it is considered any better by search engines than “http://example.com/?q=how-to-rewrite-urls”.

Rewriting the URLs is a good practice in most cases. Besides improving SERP performances, it also provides a sort of teaser for the page in the URL (if you give the URL to a friend through a messaging system, he or she will have an idea what it is about). Rewriting the URLs for this blog would be a good idea. For TasteKid though, I have decided not to do it. One of the reasons is that I consider a link like http://www.tastekid.com/ask?q=Radiohead to be sufficiently relevant. Another reason is a sort of statement against rewriting the URLs when it is not necessary, and proving that search engines don’t have preconceptions with dynamic URLs (Google has indexed most of Taste Kid’s pages). Also, rewriting the URLs comes with a (small but greater than 0) processing overhead, and for a search discovery engine, I think classic dynamic URLs are more appropriate.