Hard to tell right now, 25 upvotes is quite a bit, but all it really takes is about 4 or so in the first couple of minutes for anything at all to get a bunch more upvotes, I've seen that often enough. If it had a bunch of upvotes in two minutes or so that would be definitely suspect. Even PGs posts don't go that fast, so that's a good indicator something is fishy.
The http://mini- news.com/ (url messed up on purpose) seems to be an SEO spam site, so you're probably right.
Hey, jacquesm, honestly, - have you EVER VISITED the http://mini- news.com/ (url messed up on purpose) you mentioned so angry? Does it look like a spam site full of ads? Absolutely not! The spam is to tell people you don't know for sure!
Ramanujan, you would be surprised even more if I tell you that during last 2 hours I even wasn't online: my Internet provider had some problems and cut off Internet for me during recent hours.
Thank you, Lukeqsee! The execution is just in early ALPHA stage. I even run it on a cheapest shared web account (more powerful dedicated server and search soft are to be in October only).
As for what minimal page is, I would tell you I've seen a LOT of websites that call themselves Galleries (Top Lists, or whatever) for MINIMAL Webpages, where only few of their links point to really minimal ones. No matter what the name for the Minimal pages could be, I see them as SMALL and FAST ONLY!
If that "Thank you" was sincere: you're welcome. If it's not, sorry, I'm only trying to help.
My definition of a minimal webpage: a design that doesn't get in the way of it's content.
Unfortunately your current font-* styles get in the way of your content.
It's that simple.
It doesn't matter what web server you use, or how you define a minimal page. If I can't read your content, I'm not going to take stock in what it's trying to present.
My "Thank you" was sincere! I launched the Mini-WWW Search Engine because I SIMPLY COULD NOT READ many beautiful websites their developers still very proud of. So, that's my first criteria for the Ideal Minimal Webpage, - the one that it's EASY FOR DOWNLOADING!!! I'm also sorry that you don't like my current fonts and styles (in fact, the only serious drawback about them I know is that fonts are with fixed size). Tastes differ, and although I accept my pages may not be excellent, they are very good in emphasizing idea of SIMPLICITY! More important, - they LOAD FAST!
Which was inspired by the Readability experiment[1]. Not to mention that Safari has a similar feature now. Overall I like this approach better because I don't want to limit myself to a tiny subset of the web.
As far as I remember, the Instapaper simply saves web pages for reading later. Although it may somehow facilitate easy reading of long text content (e.g., by moving it into another reading platform like Kindle), but not too much.
Once again, any software, or any web browser (be it Lynx, Apple's Safari, or mobile ones) needs to LOAD WEBPAGE FIRST! FULLY! And that's for some users may be a very serious obstacle!
There is a big difference between forcing the dumb cut for a significant part of page's representation (e.g., by Lynx), and showing the creatively minimized images, JavaScript, and CSS files in Mini-WWW's pages.
You would use? Seems "simple": crawl webpages, remove html tags from source, wrap blocks of newlines around <p>s, style accordingly (good, readable font and generous white spacing).
Depending on the execution, this could be characterized as stealing other people's content, but anyway, are the above mentioned "features" what you want?
It was just a thought - I find myself using Readability a lot and imagine there might be some interesting things that could be done with it (e.g. better support for things like iPads).
How one can use Readability for the cluttered site like Digg, if the latter practically stops low powered PCs at the very first stage, - downloading!!!
Nope, it's not that simple: The Unformatted Web you propose is simply too dull and boring! That's why the MiniRank Formula specifically degrades such TEXT-ONLY pages!
http://mini-www.com/blog/mini_competitors/
It's a simple idea and simple to do. Other than the person I was replying to, I made no assumptions if you or anyone else would like.
I really don't want to be dragged into this discussion with you, we have opposite personalities and I don't want to talk about the MiniRank Formula TEXT-ONLY whatever. Thank you for understanding :)
inerte, your "crawl webpages, remove html tags from source, wrap blocks of newlines" means STEALING other people's content, while Mini-WWW's way does not! It only points to EXISTING simple pages! And yes, I do want such pages. To be able to read them effortlessly.
> Although launched with a zero funding, the business model for the Mini-WWW is highly scalable: The more you invest into it, the more reviwers can be hired.
I don't think this is what we usually mean by scalability. If you find a good algorithm to measure the "simplicity" of a page, it could be useful, but relying on a manual review process is a recipe for failure.
Relying on a manual review process would be a failure only in the case you want to include into your search engine the whole Web. In contrast, the proposed niche is for a small Sub-Web, where a slow, - yet quality! - manual reviewing would be quite sufficient:
http://mini-www.com/blog/next_big_thing-be_small/
Use Google to access the Web.
And Mini-WWW for the "Mini Web"
The problem is that such a slow reviewing process means that the results are likely bad, because only manually submitted pages are indexed. For example:
The results are currently terrible, and at $1 per page indexing fee, or a backlink to mini-www.com required I expect the results will stay bad for a long time, perhaps forever.
Who said the actual implementation for the Mini-WWW search would be the same next week? And WHO SAID THE MINIMAL INTRODUCTION PRICE OF $1 IS FOREVER?!!
Manual reviewers are people. You'll still need guidelines to determine what's minimal. People are points of failure... Will be hard to determine what really is minimal.
It's not too hard to measure what might be considered a "minimal" page, if he means simple, uncluttered web pages.
Here is what you do; number-of-CSS-blocks + number of images + javascript-dependencies + some magic function involving unique HTML elements in pages = minimal#
The lower the minimal# the better.
You can also throw in some weight products as well, to skew the results and penalize specific components (say flash=1000, gif=300, java-applet=1000, real-media=2000, etc.)
I described your algorithm elsewhere here without seeing your spec. Ok, if you have a history of delivering software, you should be able to pull this off. You will need some massive crawling work, but you can narrow down an initial target by using "good" bookmarks as a starting point.
That's exactly what I will try to do next! However, the soft will be no more than some tips for pre-selection purposes only. Yet the final stage should be manual anyway.
Rather, I want to highlight existing Minimal sub-Web through introducing the special niche Search Engine http://Mini-WWW.com! Hopefully, it can encourage webmasters to create more USABLE pages, like mobile or RSS movement. But to get to that point the project must become a really popular service!
Your first sentence is buzzworded to hell. Do you mean a structured database of all published facts and opinions? Because I'd say the facts worth having are in wikipedia, or should be, so that's the place to work on semantics of facts, and opinions worth hearing are distributed by journalists, so work out how to make the New York Times semantic and work down from there.
As to your second question, because that would be a very stupid and bloody-minded idea. In order to make a simple web everyone can use it might just make sense to do it over a transport everyone can reliably and easily access, i.e. ipv4. Why the hell would you want to restrict it? ipv6 is not magic, just a complex new protocol for routing internet traffic that is not yet rolled out, and has no particular benefits for web transactions. It won't affect the web (that is, HTML served over HTTP) a damm.
pg might want to investigate how exactly an account created 3 hours ago got 25 votes for such a bizarre Time-Cube-ish link.