Sad news. New Zealand historian and author Michael King died with his wife in a car accident yesterday.

I have been in the process of reading his book, "The Penguin History of New Zealand", primarily in an effort to understand the relevance of New Zealand's past to race relations issues New Zealand faces today. The book and recent television interviews revealed King as an intelligent and wise man, who cared deeply for New Zealand and New Zealanders.

New Zealand approaches a general election that will be defined by issues of race. At a time when politicians attempt to stir support using idiotic and misleading arguments which appeal to racism, fear and ignorance, New Zealand will surely miss King's wisdom and knowledge.

The book ...

"The Penguin History of New Zealand"

From SitePoint Blogs : Dynamically Typed: PHP5 In Depth

Links to several articles at Zend on PHP5.

One of the latest buzzes/fads on the Internet is social networking. The basic idea as it is developing on the Internet is that the implicit trust that comes with established personal relationships is a good and important conduit to make new contacts and share information. In short - I am likely to find important commonalities with my friends' friends.

I thought about this in relation to networks of linkages between websites. The web is based on links between sites. I guess we might call these relationships "information networks" or "authority networks". In looking for relevant information we often make use of the linkages in a haphazard way. You find a site through a search engine query that has relevance to your query. Often you then browse to the sites which that site links to, as often these sites are also relevant to what you want to know.

Search engines like Google already take links between sites into account when ranking sites. What I am proposing is that they should allow the searcher, once they find a relevant site, to search the sites it links to or rank results based on the initial site's linkages. These sites may be more likely to provide relevant information than some unconnected site.

I know the various search engines often offer a "similar/related sites" option, but in my experience this rarely provides much in the way of relevant results.

In terms of an example, my site osCommerce Watch may illustrate what I am trying to explain. I often see in my stats people searching for quite specific technical support issues related to the osCommerce shopping cart software. If someone finds my site as useful - they may also be likely to find useful information at the sites I link to (e.g. those on the osCommerce Links page). A systematic way to search or rank based on the link relationships between these interlinked sites would seem to me to offer relevance faster than a haphazard browse.

I guess those sites linking to mine might also possess information relevant to the search.

Anyway - there is my idea for google or whoever else reads it - feel free to send me a fat cheque or guarantee me number one rankings if you use it. Really I won't mind one bit.