Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header. Google announced the new gateway page on its Google Analytics blog, giving webmasters a few days to prepare for the change.

Mark Bernstein:- Bernard DeVoto, a cocktail purist, is no fan of The Joy Of Cooking or other cookbook cocktail compendia.

Mark Bernstein:- Scott Rosenberg’s excellent defense of links begins by shredding the silly studies that purport to show that link cause brain damage. (If you meet someone who tells you that links impose cognitive overhead, keep an eye on your wallet.)

Mark Bernstein:- ART actor Will Lebow has published (at last!) the privately-circulated open letter that launched the current ART Dustup.

Mark Bernstein:- I made a couple of Aviation Cocktails last night.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- The emerging HTML5 specification lifts video playback out of the generic

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and ease the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this...

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Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings? I shared a few ideas on green clouds at last week's

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. Gone are the days of idle CPUs, empty memory, or unused drive space. The cloud charges us for what we use as we use it (assuming capacity is available). In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.

Mark Bernstein:- Constraints: no meat, school night, some guests travelling hundreds of miles might arrive late.

Mark Bernstein:- Constraints: no meat, school night, some guests travelling hundreds of miles might arrive late.

Mark Bernstein:- So, I was trying to make the smoked pistachio brittle again this morning. “Easy!” I thought.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- H.264 is not a single video codec; it is a family of codecs with some shared shortcuts grouped into 17 sets of profiles and 16 levels of constraints. Video creators and playback software share a mutual understanding of these shortcuts, which are often accelerated by specialized chipsets. This post examines a few of the many flavors of H.264 video and their application in mobile, desktop, and Flash Player environments.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month (500 GB per day!). Jason Sobel, a former NetApp

Mark Bernstein:- A silver lining to the dark cloud of the Boston Globe’s decline to provincial status is that the new Globe can give lots of play to local stories. This Sunday, the Globe’s big page one story described cataclysms shaking the American Repertory Theater. (I’ve been a subscriber through most of its history.)

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Google App Engine released hosted platform version 1.1.9 earlier this week with big boosts in capacity and compatibility. The new App Engine supports standard HTTP libraries, larger files, triples the response deadline, and removes limitations on CPU-intensive processes. Standard HTTP libraries App Engine now supports Python's...

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- The macroeconomic climate of a global marketplace is on everyone's mind these days, including small business. On Friday evening I had drinks with owners of two well-known restaurants in San Francisco. Our conversation turned to business, marketing, and what changes (if any) are occurring within the service industry. In this post I will share a few trends observed in the front lines of the San Francisco food and beverage industry that may apply to broader business.

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Mark Bernstein:- Why is one called on the carpet? And where would that carpet be?

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Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- On Thursday BusinessWeek reported Facebook is seeking new financing for its data center operation growth in 2009. Facebook continues to add new members and their associated content at an extremely fast pace, with most new growth coming from international markets. Facebook needs to expand its abilities to serve these markets by bolstering current infrastructure offerings and cutting latency to its members through new international points of presence. In this post I will take a deeper look...

Mark Bernstein:- We were in Chicago to visit Mom, who isn’t very well. We’d had an early dinner.

Mark Bernstein:- Dirda adores Davidson, and this new collection is a nice supplement to the Davidson Treasury. Some of the wonderful literary confections like “Traveller from an Antique Land” depend on your knowing a lot of Victorian literary biography but they’re fun anyway. “The Peninsula” has a lovely sense of American business history and its resonance for families. “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is a wonderfully compact meditation on the terrible contingencies and chances of history.

Mark Bernstein:- Paul Graham can write:

Mark Bernstein:- Almost a dozen years ago, I wrote a short piece about Web pages that outlive their creators.

Mark Bernstein:- A cooking diary by Sharon Hwang. Lovely interactive HTML design (once you go ahead and start clicking and dragging stuff). Only yesterday, you had to do this stuff in Flash.

Mark Bernstein:- Dave Winer suggests that book reviews like the New York Times are using the wrong business model. Instead of selling ads, he proposes, they should sell books and take a cut of each book they sell.

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