Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I'm back from a short vacation without Internet access and thus working hard on catching up with reading emails, RSS feeds etc. etc.

Most notable finding so far (which is on my "read ASAP" list): Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists.

(via Boing Boing)

I was spammed informed about a nice new service from Blog Flux which is called MapStats.

You can use this to find out where the visitors of your site come from (similar to GEOLOC and HitsMaps/ClustrMaps). The cool thing about it is that it uses Google Maps to display the visitors' position, which means you can zoom in and out as you see fit, and you get real satellite maps of the area. Now, is this cool or what?

See my stats for an example.

OK, I heard lots and lots of stuff about Google Earth so far. Yesterday, I actually installed it on some not-so-free-OS box and gave it a try. Two things are floating on my mind now:

1. w00t!
2. This is the scariest shit one can imagine!

I "browsed" different parts of the world and got more and more fascinated... and scared. For instance you can see the Statue of Liberty, and if you zoom in enough, you see people walking around on liberty island! Nice on the one hand, major security and privacy problem on the other hand.

There are loads of interesting ways to use Google Earth, e.g. over at Google Earth Hacks. I'm afraid most of my spare time during the next few days has just crumbled to dust... Now, if they would only port it to Linux, that'd be really nice...

The HitMaps service provided a small world map showing where visitors to your site or blog live. They now started a new service called ClustrMaps™ (beta) which basically does the same. It's still free for smaller sites (< 1000 hits per day), but you'll have to pay if you run a more popular site.

(Wow, I just found out that I'm one of their TOP-50 users, though I'm far away from 1000 hits per day)

Users of the old HitMaps service can upgrade for free and get 5 invitations. New users are only accepted via such invitations at the moment.

Worldprocessor is an ongoing project creating globes which display various statistics and information.
There's a huge catalog of globes on their site, some of them quite interesting...

(via jwz)