Recommended Books for Radiology Residents

Enjoy.

Also, if anyone knows of residency departments wanting to create such a list, let me know and I’ll be happy to add them to the web site.

Technorati tags: radiology medicine books residency

Google Gadget for Local Dining Suggestions

Or give it a try by clicking on the button below:

If you use a Google homepage, load it up on there and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

First, I’ve added a Top Reviewers list to the home page. Looks like Aaron has taken a huge lead with 31 reviews.

I’ve also improved the city pages a bit. Where they were just a search results page, now they are more of a summary page, with a tag cloud and most viewed restaurants list. Future features will include top reviewed restaurants, top reviewers for the city, and a list of nearby cities. Take a look at a few: Seattle, WA, Cleveland Heights, OH, and, one of the most popular, thanks to Aaron’s reviews, Stevensville, MI.

Not quite as recently, but not mentioned on this blog, I added the ability to mark other users as friends, so you can visit your profile and surf on over to a list of their reviews. Future improvements will include being able to filter, search, and combine your friend’s reviews into more useful lists, as well as being able to track friend’s reviews via RSS feeds.

Technorati tags: restaurants reviews tagging web2.0

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Foodry – The Blog

(Oh, and foodry now has maps! That’s right, it’s a mash-up.)

I set up a website and Google suddenly started sending search traffic to my pages, boosting my ad revenue by a significant amount. Just as suddenly, the search traffic dried up, sending me back into the gutter with the rest of the low-page-rank bums. Read on for the details and graphs.

I’m a Geek

A few months ago I got my period itch to throw together a new website in my spare time. While trying to figure out what to do, I ran across the US Census Bureau’s Zip Code data set while browsing Wikipedia (see their article on Zip Codes for more than you’d ever want to know about the history of postal zones). The data is a list of every Zip Code in the US with its population, longitude, latitude, city, and state.

It’s hard to resist parsing a huge batch of data, as I’m sure you understand, so I wrote a script to jam it into a few useful database tables. I now had something to get my website project going: a list of 25,701 US cities and 29,467 Zip Codes. That’s not an exhaustive set, I’m sure, but it’s good enough for government work. I also found the populated-weighted geographical centers of cities so I could find the distance between cities. Limiting the results to cities within 100 miles of each other, I still came up with over 6 million pre-calculated distances. My poor PowerBook was chugging all night working that out.

The vast majority of my traffic comes from Google.

Yet Another Job Site

That was the fun part. Figuring out what to do next was harder. For lack of better ideas, I started setting up a local job search site called Click. Hired!. It’s not a great name, I know, but it was the best unused URL that I could find at the time. I set up some quick search functionality and put in a few placeholder links to local results for Monster, Hot Jobs, etc., on each page and dropped some Google ads on there, for good measure. I even created a Web 2.0-compliant cloud of search terms. It wasn’t entirely useful, but I had plans to add user-submitted job listings, assuming I had some users. Until then, you can still find some useful links if you’re doing a search for jobs in Tacoma, WA, jobs in Elizabethtown, PA, jobs in Sarasota, FL, or pretty much any where else in the US. (I also set up a sister site for local hotel searches.)

After that weekend, I pretty much forgot about the websites and the world pretty much ignored them. That’s not much of a surprise, since I only linked to them from the sidebar of my blog. I did, however, set up a Google Sitemap, telling the search engine about the 25,000 or so pages I had set up, one for each city in my database. Google did what Google does and started crawling my site, and I found a hit every now and then resulting from Google searches like “looking for job in hernando, ms” and searches for other places in the long tail of US cities. The traffic was sporadic and resulted in fewer than two Google ad clicks per week through the end of August. At that rate, it would take a month to buy a cup of coffee.

My visits jumped dramatically for a period of 5 days.

Google Plays God

Then, on September 9, my site’s page rank must have gotten a boost, because the traffic coming from Google searches jumped significantly. I didn’t notice until two days later, at which point I tweaked my ad placements. I went from 2 clicks a week to a peak of 10 clicks in a day. That’s still not enough to retire, but it would by me a grande latte at the local Starbucks. I got a bit excited thinking about how I could actually make the site useful and increase the traffic even more.

Just as suddenly as the traffic spike, Google changed its mind about the page rank of my site. Visits returned to their former trickle, and with them went my dreams of a daily subsidized espresso drink. Most of all, though, this episode gave me more insight into importance and power that Google holds over the fortunes of those trying to do business over the web. I certainly don’t begrudge the search engine for dropping me in its results, but for someone trying to actually make a living from their website Google can make them and Google can break them.

My ad impressions and earnings jumped with the traffic. The earnings lagged a bit until I tweaked the ad placements. It looks like I missed out on the biggest days.

Technorati tags: google seo adsense jobs

Mr. Villafuerte runs a small business selling fabric and making clothes and is looking for a $700 loan to buy fabric, thread, scissors, a mannequin, and similar supplies. Kiva lets you lend small amounts like $25 to entrepreneurs like these via a local microfinance organization–Mifex in Mr. Villafuerte’s case. As a lender, I’ll make no interest on the loan and could lose my money altogether if he defaults, but Kiva so far has a 100% repayment rate and microfinance in general has something like a 97% repayment rate, so the low risk of a little amount of money is worth it, if you consider helping a poor entrepreneur get on his feet a good social investment.

A few months ago, I saw a program on PBS about microlending and wondered how I could get involved with something like that. I just saw a post on I Will Teach You To Be Rich about Premal Shah, one of the founders of Kiva. It can’t get much easier to get involved than to go to a website, pick a business to fund, and make a payment through Pay Pal.

I should be repaid over the next 12 months. I hope the $25 dollars will do much more in Ecuador than it would in my bank account.

Vote for this story on Netscape.

It took me about 30 minutes to pick out my 9 featured products, narrow down the browse categories, and tweak the colors to come up with a store that matches my food blog. Check it out:

Blog: Throwing Food
Store: Throwing Food Store

Tor’s not doing this because it’s a golly-neat idea, they’re doing it because it makes money — or at the very least, makes money for Baen, a book publisher who happens to be in the same line of business as Tor.

The problem with digital rights management for literature is that there’s a huge analog hole in the security called “books.” Over at Baen’s Bar, the online bulliten board run by the Baen folks, one of the members there describes how he’s made an unofficial personal e-book version of Old Man’s War with “a hardcover copy, an Epson scanner, FineReader 6.0, and some eyeball sweat.”

The major problem for authors is not piracy but obscurity, as I and so many others have noted again and again and again and yet again after that. I’m doing pretty well as far as readers go, especially as a newer-ish novelist, but I wouldn’t mind having more readers, and people sharing the book is one way to do that. Please, folks, won’t you let your friends borrow a copy of my book? I thank you for your evangelism.

It’s good to see that not all media distributors are adding knee-jerk DRM to their products and making the electronic consumption of their works a difficult thing for their honest customers. It’s also good to see that going DRM-free is starting to be seen as a good business decision.