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I'm happy to announce that the new edition of Google Hacks has been released into the wild. I started working on Google Hacks, 3rd Edition earlier this year and now it's finally hitting the shelves. I had the fun task of contributing a slew of brand new hacks to the book, updating existing hacks, and tweaking the structure of the book to bring it up to date. Rael and Tara had already put together two editions of Google Hacks that were fantastic, and I'm glad to be in their company by bringing the book up to date.

Working on Google Hacks has brought me full circle on my personal Hacks Series adventure. In April, 2002—shortly after Google announced their Search API—I put together Google Smackdown to try out the API. I didn't think of the Smackdown as a hack per se, but a few months later I got an email from Tara asking if I'd like to contribute the code to a book about Google. I added some comments to my code, passed it on to her, and that was my first contribution to the Hacks Series. It turns out the Smackdown is a hack, and I'd been hacking applications together for quite a while.

Since then I've contributed three books to the series, one with co-author Jim Bumgardner (Flickr Hacks). In the process I even came up with my own method for writing hacks for the series: How I Write a Hack. The chance to work on Google Hacks brought me back to my first contribution, and if I remember correctly, the first book in the series.

The second edition of Google Hacks came out toward the end of 2004, and nothing's really been happening at Google since then. ;) There was a lot to cover, and this new edition tackles hacking Google Maps, covers working with blogs and Blogger in more detail, and covers tinkering with a host of other new Google applications such as Google Video Search, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Personlized Search, Google Analytics, and on and on. I also added information throughout about protecting your privacy, and I hope it helps readers understand the trade-off we all make between convenience and sharing personal information with a large company. I found there's an art to keeping up with news about Google, so I included an Appendix of sources you can tune into to stay on top of Google's moves. And of course the book still provides a complete reference to squeezing the most out of Google's Search Syntax, Gmail, tuning your site for Google, their Search API, their desktop tools, and a bunch of fun tricks and games (like the Smackdown) that people have built to customize Google or generally mess around. shew!

I received my copy of the book a couple days ago:



And it's satisfying to see the end result. You should be able to get your copy at bookstores everywhere now. To preview some of the new stuff, check out O'Reilly's page for the book: Google Hacks, 3rd Edition. You'll find a Table of Contents there, and five sample hacks. Happy Google Hacking!

Update: Here's O'Reilly's press release about the book: The World According to Google.

Molly Wood (hooray for!) over at CNet took some tips from Yahoo! Hacks, and made a four minute video pointing out some Yahoo! Search tips: Video: Yahoo hacks.

A mini-obsession of mine right now is polar exploration. (Not actual polar exploration, just reading about it.) When we were in New Zealand last February, sk and I went to the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch where they have a permanent exhibit about Antarctic exploration. The most fascinating part was seeing artifacts from early expeditions by Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott. (Seeing their gear in person makes their survival stories even more compelling.) When I got back, I picked up Caroline Alexander's excellent account of Shackleton's failed Endurance expedition (aptly titled The Endurance), which includes hundreds of photos by Frank Hurley—the meticulous and talented expedition photographer. I've been reading the book very slowly, taking time to study the incredible photographs. The book text uses diary entries from several members of the crew, and often reads like weblogs. The crew complain about each other, praise each other, and paint a very personal picture of what they were going through.

And speaking of polar blogs, I recently tuned into Ben Saunders' blog. He's currently training in Greenland for an expedition in October to retrace Robert Scott's 1912 South Pole attempt. He's literally following in the footsteps of the early polar explorers, and posting photos and diary entries along the way thanks to a digital camera and satellite phone. Saunders recently posted about how he's able to blog from the middle of nowhere: Arctic Geeks.

After focusing on Yahoo! and Flickr for most of 2005, I've been kicking off 2006 by poking, prodding, and generally hacking another side in the search wars: Google. I'm going to be bringing Google Hacks up to date and into its 3rd edition.

The first edition of Google Hacks was published in February, 2003 and it was a runaway success. Here's an article Tim O'Reilly wrote just months after it was released: Thoughts on the Success of Google Hacks. (The key ingredient? Having fun with technology during the darkest post-bubble days.) Google Hacks, 2nd edition was released in December, 2004 during the mad frenzy to get a gmail account. (Doesn't that seem like ancient history?) It's been over a year, and there are plenty of new topics to cover. 2005 was the year of Google Maps Mashups, and O'Reilly felt the topic deserved its own book: Google Maps Hacks. It's out now—and it rocks! (please note O'Reilly bias, but seriously. it's good.). I'll be including a few Google Maps Hacks in the new addition along with many, many more new Google features that you can tweak to your advantage.

And of course I'll be keeping a close eye on the news that Feds are after Google data. Wired News is already on the case letting people know that there are some privacy hacks you can use with Google or any other search engine. Personally, I'm happy to see Google standing up for their users' privacy.

I'm very excited to be adding to what's already a fantastic book, and I'm honored to be walking the trail that Tara and Rael blazed. Plus I get to play with all of the Google goodness at google.com and from around the Web. I'm searching for the most useful (and fun!) hacks, tips, and tricks I can find to include in the new edition. Got a Google Hack? Lay it on me.

Update: On a negative but important note, Philipp Lenssen is doing good reporting on the latest news that Google Censors Its Results in China.

Safari Books Online just launched a new service that gives you access to books before they're released. It's called Rough Cuts—here's a press release: Safari Books Online Launches New Rough Cuts Service. Flickr Hacks is one of the first books offered through Rough Cuts. We're not finished with the last round of editing yet, but you can get access to the full text of the book as it is now for $12.99 if you'd like: Flickr Hacks Rough Cuts. (You can pay $27.99 if you want the hard copy in addition to the online version once it's printed in a month or so. The printed book alone will be around $16.99.)

One of the most frustrating aspects of working on print books for me is the lag time between writing something and getting it out to an audience. The applications I'm writing about change quickly, so it's critical to get information out quickly. The editorial and review process is fantastic, and I love tightening text and tuning code. But it's frustrating watching your work expire while the book is in process because an application has changed. I think Rough Cuts will be a way to shorten the cycle. I also think it'll be great to get feedback from early adopters of the books so O'Reilly can tweak things before printing. Every book has errata, and with more people consuming books before they're out the door, hopefully more of that errata can be eliminated before the book is printed. (With enough eyeballs, all errata is shallow?)

So yeah, I'm excited about this new service—especially because Flickr Hacks is one of the inaugural titles. The author side of me is a bit nervous about letting people in early, but it's natural to the Web developer side of me. A few days ago I read through the entire book again as part of the editorial process and really enjoyed it. I know I'm biased, but I'm also proud of the book. (And let's face it, Flickr is fun!) And now you can read an early version too.

Update: For insights into the economics of publishing, check out Tim O'Reilly's take on Rough Cuts: The Long Snout.

Update (1/30): The Rough Cuts version of Flickr Hacks now has color figures. Check out Jim's Squared Circle mosaic in the Flickr Hacks Preface.

I'm really enjoying Peter Morville's Ambient Findability, and I feel like it's a must-read for Web literacy. The title refers to the intersection of search and ubiquitous computing, and the book is sort of a quick history of information management and a look at where information is headed. Morville mentioned an insightful quote by Calvin Mooers that I hadn't heard before:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a consumer to have information than for him not to have it.

I often think of more information and access to more information as inherently good. But Mooers has a great point that information has to be processed and can often lead to more questions than answers. I've found a personal information wall in my own use of RSS readers. And I think this quote is a more useful way of stating the information overload problem than the saying ignorance is bliss. If I think about information as painful as well as useful, I have to change the way I design and interact with applications. And Morville argues that the change should be toward collaborative filtering and information as something social. I think the book explains some important Web trends like folksonomies, user-contributed data, and long tail power laws without going into the land of business hype. I'd like to give this book to some of my less web-centric friends because I think it's a good guide to understanding how moving from atoms to bits affects our relationship with information.

As you probably know, I put together a book called Amazon Hacks a couple years ago, and there are a couple of other books I've worked on, so I have a few reasons to watch Amazon very closely. One way that I watch Amazon is by subscribing to an Amazon RSS feed that lets me know when new books in the Hacks Series are available. On August 9th I noticed that another Hacks book I put together—Yahoo! Hacks—was available for pre-order and I posted about it. At the same time, I set up a script to take a screenshot of the Amazon detail page for Yahoo! Hacks every day at 4:10pm. I wanted to watch the page evolve, and have a record of how the page looked at various stages of development. I often think of Amazon detail pages as static, but they change quite a bit over time. Because there's no way to go back in time for individual books (unless you can go wayback on a title), there's no record of this change.

So with that in mind, here's a rough timeline of the evolution of the Yahoo! Hacks detail page I found by watching the screenshots.

August 9th [view]

• Page added
• Price is at list price of $24.95

August 16th [view]

• The Editorial Review gets better formatting
• Page count jumps from 352 to 452

August 23rd [view]

• Cover image added
• First Sales Rank ranking

August 31st [view]

• Related Listmania! and Guides added

September 6th [view]

• Amazon drops price to $16.47 (standard Amazon discount)
• Page count at 488 pages

September 10th [view]

• Editorial review has even better formatting with bullets

September 28th [view]

• Page count at 489 pages

October 19th [view]

• Buy button changed from "Pre-order" to "Add to Shopping Cart" (I posted about it)

October 24th [view]

• Product dimensions added

October 30th [view]

• "Better Together" offer added
• I added my own image of Yahoo! Hacks to the page with the "customer images" feature

November 23rd [view]

• First customer review is added (it's good! shew.)

So yeah, probably of no interest to anyone but me. But I thought I'd share what I found. By the way, Flickr Hacks is available for pre-order at Amazon now. You too can watch that page evolve.

Last week a copy of Yahoo! Hacks arrived at my door, and I was finally able to flip through the pages. It's very satisfying to see months of work in Word and Photoshop become a solid object that you can pick up, throw on a table, or use to prop open a door. It's really a novel feeling for someone who usually writes in the virtual world. Today the book is available at Amazon without any of that pre-order nonsense. ;)

Yahoo! continues to release new features (and hire people I know) at lightning speed. Just in the past few weeks we've seen Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Blog Search, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Yahoo! Instant Search. The public perception of Yahoo! has definitely changed over the course of my writing, and I think the fact that Yahoo! Hacks even exists will be surprising to people who haven't been keeping up with Yahoo! lately.

When I started working on Yahoo! Hacks, I thought I knew the site fairly well and that I'd mainly be focusing on hacks related to new offerings like Yahoo! Web Services, Yahoo! 360, Flickr, and Y!Q Contextual Search. After a while though I came to view Yahoo! as a big city with hidden alleyways and entire neighborhoods that had always been there but were new to me. Of course there are plenty of hacks related to the new services, and I think the book is a good way to get up to speed with what Yahoo! has been up to technically. But I also hope people pick up Yahoo! Hacks and learn something new about perennial Yahoo! features like My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Groups. And maybe you'll even discover some new Yahoo! neighborhoods.

That's my pitch. ;) I'm very proud of the book, and I want to thank everyone who contributed hacks, hack ideas, and general encouragement. You can order Yahoo! Hacks at Amazon, read some sample hacks, or flip through it before you buy at bookstores everywhere. It also makes a great door-stopper.

I was chatting with Brian Sawyer (Hacks Series editor) earlier today about writing Hacks and the process I use, and he encouraged me to share the way I work. I think it's a bit like making sausage, you don't necessarily want to know what an author uses to put something together. But hopefully sharing my process will help other tech writers, or may encourage others to share the way they work. So here's a quick look at how I write a Hack.

Everyone has their own methods and process for writing, and here are the methods I used for Yahoo! Hacks. I printed out and taped the following numbered lists to my monitor, and reading over them helped me come up with supporting material for each Hack. I view a Hack as a project the reader can accomplish. The reader also needs to know why they might want to accomplish the project and have an idea of what the project should look like when they're finished. Here's my template:

1. Why this hack is needed (story, build desire)
2. Describe the relevant features
3. Hack prerequisites
4. Hack code/procedure
5. Example of the Hack in action
6. Brief summary (why the reader rocks!)
7. If possible, Hack alternatives

Whenever possible I use the conventional Hack headings of The Code and Running the Code to separate parts 4 and 5. And the heading Hacking the Hack for part 7. If the Hack is going to be centered on a piece of code, I like to write that first and get it working smoothly. Once the code is ready to go, parts 3, 4, and 5 are fairly easy to put together. If the Hack is more basic/explanatory, I'll often start at part 1. Part 1 is always the hardest for me, so my other lists revolve around how to frame a Hack for a reader. I've found that William Zinsser's On Writing Well has been a big help to me, and some of these ideas are straight from the book. Zinsser talks about a central transaction for any piece of writing, and the one I came up with for Hacks is: Hacker's love affair with technology. I felt like I wanted to convey excitement about technology throughout the book, and I always kept this phrase in mind. I only wrote in first person using I once or twice in Yahoo! Hacks. I was more comfortable writing in third person. I still tried to keep the idea of telling a story in mind, and I found this list helpful:

1. How was I drawn into the Hack?
2. What emotional baggage did I bring?
3. How has the Hack changed my life?
4. Tell with humanity and warmth.

Of course not every Hack is a life-changing experience, but the Hack probably did affect me in some small way: made something more convenient, helped me see something in a different way, let me share something with my friends, etc. I've found that it's not always easy to explain why someone should be interested in a particular Hack, but I think it's crucial. Here's the list of potential motivations that I tack up:

1. aesthetic (appreciation of beauty or good taste)
2. competitive (giving an advantage or keeping up)
3. gregarious (enjoying the company of others)
4. snobbish (regarding social inferiority)
5. exhibitionist (attract attention, show-off)
6. maternal (protect, warm and nurturing)

For Yahoo! Hacks I found that there are two basic varieties of Hack: Visualization and Productivity. Visualization Hacks let you see data in a new or unusual way and Productivity Hacks let you do something you already do more efficiently. So the motivations that I found most compatible were aesthetic for visualization hacks, and competitive for productivity hacks. Although gregarious and exhibitionist motivations worked well for community-oriented hacks. I don't use these exact words in the hack, but I might say something like, "this hack has a minimalist charm," that appeals to the aesthetic desire. Once I find how I'm going to frame the Hack by showing the reader why it's great, the words flow for me from there. Part 2 of the template is important because it's a chance to describe the service in detail. I always assume that the reader only has a passing knowledge of whatever I'm writing about, so I like to describe the details of basic features of a service in part 2. For example, if I have a Hack that shows how to scrape a site for movie times and create a custom email with listings in their area, I first want to show someone how to get movie times the standard way through the website, along with any tips and tricks for using the site. Then I'll go into taking those features a step further with the Hack. I feel that without understanding a feature as it was intended to be used first, the Hack won't make as much sense. I'm not very good at this, but I try to add a sentence or two at the end of the Hack that taps into the motivation from the beginning of the Hack. I think it gives the Hack a sense of completeness.

That's it! Of course much of this process is tied to the conventions established in the excellent Hacks series, and I hope sharing this will encourage others to take a stab at writing for the series. You'll have to see if you can spot these methods in action when Yahoo! Hacks is out in a month or so.

cool, Yahoo! Hacks is available for pre-order at Amazon!

On April 14th, 2002 I launched the Weblog Bookwatch—a look at the most frequently mentioned books across the blogosphere. (original post) Since then, the bookwatch has dutifully scanned the blogosphere day in and day out, noting book ISBNs (and Amazon CD ASINs) and the blogs where they were spotted.

In 2002 there were a fairly manageable number of blogs to scan. Between April and December 2002 there were 36,790 unique citations across 5,207 unique weblogs. Just to give you a sense of the size today, the Bookwatch scanned 47,512 weblogs today between the hours of 12am and 6am. I have a database with over two million citations in it, and it's growing exponentially.

I got an email from my ISP today informing me that I was over my bandwidth limit. I thought that was odd, did I get Slashdotted and not know it? My logs didn't indicate any spikes. Nope, the problem was traffic from my machine. In other words, scanning close to 50,000 weblogs every six hours tends to use some bandwidth. That got me thinking about whether or not I can afford to keep the Bookwatch running.

But what about all that sweet Amazon cash? It's true that the book links on the Weblog Bookwatch are an associate link to Amazon—and I get a cut when people buy books through them. But it has never been a big money maker. In Q2 of 2005 I made $118.67, which isn't even close to covering a month of hosting with my current setup.

I've enjoyed clicking through the sites to read what people are saying about books that show up on the page. But the Bookwatch can't keep up with the entire blogosphere anymore, and there are a couple of great services with more resources that track book mentions across weblogs (and much more!): All Consuming and Technorati Books.

I learned a lot about weblogs and gathering data while running and tuning the Bookwatch, and now it's teaching me about when an experiment should end. So as of today, the obidos-bot has crawled its last site. It's been a fun app, but it's time to say goodbye to Weblog Bookwatch. Thanks (again) to weblogs.com, Blogger, and Amazon for publishing data in an easy-to-use format.