intertwingly

Dare Obasanjo: My weekend project was to read Dive Into Python and learn enough Python to be able to port Sam Ruby’s meme tracker (source code) from CPython to Iron Python. Sam’s meme tracker, shows the most popular links from the past week from the blogs in his RSS subscriptions.

More recent code can be found here.  Fetches titles from HTML, handles etags, matches both www. and non-www. versions of a URI.  Handles people who point to things multiple times.  Allows you to group people who tend to all “vote” in bulk.  Note: I consider the alternate link to be a vote too, which gives a small bump to people who post original content vs links.

I’d also recommend that you invest some time into converting from a simple regular expression to a real HTML parser.  You’ll need it anyway for titles.

Jay Goldman: On November 6th, 2007, Facebook launched a series of new tools to help advertisers target the 54 million people now regularly using their site. They’re still throwing around a 3% weekly growth rate and have a target of 60 million active users by the end of the year, so it’s not hard to picture the day in the not-so-distant future when hospitals Facebook babies before handing them over and the little bundle of joy comes with a neural implant that pokes their parental units when the diaper is full. [via Simon Willison]