We just finished up a real quickie Drupal site conversion for FindNews.org, an older news domain I've owned for over 6 years. The site was running on DotNetNuke since late 2004 and needed to be converted over to something a little more intuitive for us to manage and more search engine friendly. Drupal was the obvious choice. So, we simply plugged in Drigg, the Digg-style Drupal module, to allow for the social voting functionality you'll notice on the site.

If anyone would like to benefit from this website and submit anything news worthy, please feel free to do so. You'll get some decent traffic if the news is worthy enough and you'll also receive a link back to your website. Previous to the site's conversion (several days ago) the daily visitors was ~8,000 to 12,000 per day and there are roughly 150 to 200 visitors on the site at any given time.

We still have some things left as far as cleaning up some of the design and functionality of this social news website, but for the most part the initial Phase 1 functionality is pretty solid. Let us know how you like it and feel free to leave any suggestions below or through the FindNews.org contact page. Thanks and enjoy!

Every now and then we get emails from people who want or ask for the "not so typical" things. If you're in the web services business, i.e. web development or design, then I'm sure you can relate. Note: These are actual emails we've received from people asking for web development or web design help ...no lie.

Ask.com gets passed by Digg.com according to Alexa.com. Digg.com, the social networking web site which only began to gain popularity around the middle of last year, has been one of those rare web anomalies that is growing beyond other major web players that have been around for years.

An interesting note about Digg... The domain was actually purchased back in 1998 and was called "Digg Records" when viewing the earliest version of the site in Archive.org.

Personally, I think the name is more fitting to decribe a record label instead of a techy news site.

Here's a snapshot from Alexa (Note about Alexa: I only use it as a minor guage for overall traffic since it's data is often skewed).

I found an interesting post over at Wolf Howl about Adsense feeding keyword list to big clients, whether the keywords are relevant or not. Greywolf's post noted an Adsense ad displaying for the keyword phrase "Dead Squirrels" which was ultimately an eBay ad. So, to try and top that horrible ad, I thought I would try a few random queries myself. It only took a couple of minutes to find some that were just as bad, like the one you see to the right.

ZDNet announced earlier that Google has been working with HP Labs to "dust off" an optical character recognition (OCR) engine called Tesseract. OCR is the process of converting pages from books and other documents into text that can then be sorted and spidered for indexing within Google. This process is still in its infancy, but Google's aim is to have thousands of books online within the next year.

and...

A parody of the current OVERWHELMING Web 2.0 concepts and long-term value. You decide...

To quote Jeffrey Zeldman: