Contributors

The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:

• Tim Allwine is a Senior Software Engineer at O'Reilly Media. He develops software for the Market Research group—various spidering tools that collect data from disparate sites—and is involved in the development of web services at O'Reilly.

• DJ Adams (http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro) is an SAP hacker who pines for the days when he wrote job control language and S/370 assembler and got around central London on his skateboard. Currently, he is knee-deep in NetWeaver technologies and uses up spare brain cycles playing with REST, RDF, and Jabber. He wrote O'Reilly's Programming Jabber: Extending XML Messaging and cowrote Google Pocket Guide, also from O'Reilly. He lives in Europe with Sabine and Joseph.

• AvaQuest (http://www.avaquest.com) is a Massachusetts-based IT services firm that specializes in applying advanced information retrieval, categorization, and text mining technologies to solve real-world problems. GooglePeople and GoogleMovies, created by AvaQuest consultants Nathan Treloar, Sally Kleinfeldt, and Peter Richards, came out of a web mining consulting project the team worked on in the summer of 2002, shortly after the Google Web API was announced.

• Paul Bausch (http://www.onfocus.com) is a freelance web developer and author living in Oregon. He was a cocreator of the Blogger weblog software and recently cowrote a book about weblogs called We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. He believes (like Google) that "love" (75,700,000) will conquer "hate" (7,900,000).

• Erik Benson (http://www.erikbenson.com).

• Justin Blanton (http://justinblanton.com) has a B.S. in computer engineering and is currently attending law school in Silicon Valley, where he is focusing on intellectual property law and will likely practice both patent prosecution and litigation. Much of his "free time" is spent writing about various things on his web site, including Mac OS X, mobile phones and other gadgets, general tips and tricks for the Movable Type CMS, and life in general.

• CapeScience.com (http://www.capescience.com) is the development community for Cape Clear Software, a web services company. In addition to providing support for Cape Clear's products, CapeScience makes all sorts of fun web services stuff, including live services, clients to other services, utilities, and other geekware.

• Antoni Chan (http://www.alltooflat.com) is one of the founders of All Too Flat, a bastion of quirky content, pranks, and geeky humor. The Google Mirror is a 2,500-line CGI script that was developed over the period of a year starting in October 2001. When not working on his web site, he enjoys playing music, bowling, and running after a Frisbee.

• Tanya Harvey Ciampi (http://www.multilingual.ch) grew up in Buckinghamshire, England, and went on to study in Zurich, where she obtained her diploma in translation. She now lives in Ticino, the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, where she works as an English technical translator (from Italian, German, and French) and proofreader, and teaches translation and Internet search techniques based on her WWW Search Interfaces for Translators. In her free time, she enjoys fishing with her father on the west coast of Ireland, writing poems, and playing Celtic music.

• Peter Drayton (http://www.razorsoft.net/weblog/) is a program manager in the CLR team at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, he was an independent consultant, trainer for DevelopMentor, and author of C# Essentials and C# in a Nutshell (O'Reilly).

• Andrew Flegg (http://www.bleb.org) works for IBM in the U.K., having graduated from the University of Warwick a few years ago. He's currently the webmaster of Hursley Lab's intranet site. Most of his work (and fun) at the moment is taken up with Perl, Java, HTML, and CSS. Andrew is particularly keen on clean, reusable code, which always ends up saving time in the long run. He's written several open source projects, as well as a couple of commercial applications for RISC OS (as used in the Iyonix PC, the first desktop computer using an Intel XScale).

• Andrew Goodman (http://www.page-zero.com) is founder and principal of Page Zero Media, which helps clients perform better on paid search campaigns. He blogs his thoughts regularly as Editor-at-Large of Traffick.com, a contrarian's guide to search engines and portals. Fortune Small Business, The Washington Post, New Media Age, The New York Times, Bloomberg Markets, Business Week, Reuters, The National Post, CBS Marketwatch, Forbes, and numerous other business publications have sought his views on search advertising. He is author of Winning Results with Google AdWords (McGraw-Hill, late 2004). One of his favorite Google hacks is GooPoetry.

• Kevin Hemenway (http://www.disobey.com), better known as Morbus Iff, is the creator of disobey.com, which bills itself as "content for the discontented." Publisher, developer, and writer of more home cooking than you could ever imagine (like the popular open source syndicated reader AmphetaDesk, the best-kept gaming secret Gamegrene.com, the popular Ghost Sites and Nonsense Network, the giggle-inducing articles at the O'Reilly Network, a few pieces at Apple's Internet Developer site, etc.), he's an ardent supporter of cloning merely so he can get more work done. He cooks with a Fry Pan of Intellect +2 and lives in Concord, New Hampshire.

• Mark Horrell (http://www.markhorrell.com) has worked in search engine optimization since 1996 when he joined Net Resources International, a publisher of industrial engineering web sites, where he conceived and developed the company's Internet marketing strategy. He left in 2002 and is now a freelance web developer based in London, U.K., specializing in search engine-friendly design.

• Judy Hourihan (http://judy.hourihan.com).

• Leland Johnson (http://protoplasmic.org) is currently a student at Illinois Institute of Technology. He tried learning Perl in 1999, then tried again and was successful in 2001, and now uses it for everything except his classes. When he's not busied by his classes, he updates his weblog, explores Chicago, and plays far too many video games.

• Steven Johnson (http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/) is the author of two books, Emergence and Interface Culture. He cocreated the sites FEED and Plastic.com, and now blogs regularly at http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com. He writes the monthly "Emerging Technology" column for Discover magazine, and his work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Harper's, Wired, and The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

• Richard Jones (http://richard.jones.name) has spent the last four years working as a software engineer for Agent Oriented Software (http://www.agent-software.com). AOS develops a leading intelligent agent development platform known as JACK Intelligent Agents. Before AOS, he worked as a software engineer for Senate Software (a small search technology company), where he developed web page relevance heuristics. Before that, Richard was a cofounder of Earthmen Technology, which developed network intrusion detection technologies. At Earthman, he was responsible for a majority of the development, which included low-level TCP/IP networking code, Linux kernel hacking, and fast-pattern matching algorithms. He has two degrees, one in computer science and another in cognitive science, both from LaTrobe University (http://www.latrobe.edu.au). While in school, Richard majored in computer science, linguistics, and psychology, areas he retains a keen interest in. Richard is also a squash-playing Buddhist.

• Stuart Langridge (http://www.kryogenix.org) gets paid to hack on the Web during the day, and does it for free at night when he's not arguing about Buffy or Debian GNU/Linux. He's keen on web standards, Python, and strange things you can do with JavaScript, all of which can be seen at his web site and weblog. He's also slightly surprised that the Google Art Creator, which was an amusing little hack done in a day, is the most popular thing he's ever written and got him into a book.

• Beau Lebens (http://www.dentedreality.com.au) is a PHP web developer who believes that even complex systems can be made simple for an end user. Originally from Perth, Western Australia, he is currently working in Hawaii. He has released a number of projects on his web site, including webpad, the web-based text editor; AvantBlog, a Palm/Pocket PC Blogging application; and the PHP Blogger API, which provides PHP developers with access to the Blogger API. Beau is a big believer in simpler, distributed technologies like Atom, REST, and RSS for the future of the Web.

• Philipp Lenssen (http://blog.outer-court.com) was born in 1977 and currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany. He's working as developer on the web sites of a popular German car maker. Previously, he spent 9 months living in Malaysia and prefers to eat very spicy. In his sparetime, Philipp is the author behind the daily Google Blogoscoped (a weblog covering Google, online research, and internet fun in general), trying to crack his head on how to tap the web consciousness.

• Mark Lyon (http://marklyon.org) is the creator of the Google GMail Loader. A former programmer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he gave up his aspirations of programming greatness after an unsuccessful interview at Google. He is now a law student at Mississippi College in Jackson, Mississippi, with plans to practice intellectual property and technology law. In his spare time, he writes novel but mediocre software in whatever language strikes his fancy.

• Paul Mutton (http://www.jibble.org) currently works for Netcraft in the U.K. He graduated with first-class honors in computer science, winning the IEE Institution Prize for being the best overall student in his department. He uses Google on a daily basis and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to collaborate with fellow Ph.D. students in other countries. In his remaining spare time, he uses his Sun Certified Java Programmer skills to develop all sorts of open source software on his personal web site (http://www.jibble.org). Some of his research has culminated in the creation of the popular PieSpy application (http://www.jibble.org/piespy), which infers and visualizes social networks on IRC and even appeared on Slashdot once. He can normally be found jibbling around in #jibble and #irchacks on the freenode IRC network with the nickname Jibbler, or Paul on smaller networks.

• Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org) is the author of Dive Into Python, a free Python book for experienced programmers, and Dive Into Accessibility, a free book on web accessibility techniques. He works for MassLight, a Washington, D.C.-based training and web development company, where, unsurprisingly, he does training and web development. But he lives outside Raleigh, North Carolina, because it's warmer.

• Andrew Savikas works in the O'Reilly Tools Group, where he helps the production department turn manuscripts into O'Reilly books. Andrew is the author of Word Hacks, also published by O'Reilly. He developed and maintains the custom Word template and VBA macros used by all the O'Reilly authors who don't insist on writing in POD. Except for the ones who insist on writing in XML. Or Troff. Andrew also works with FrameMaker, FrameScript, InDesign, DocBook XML, Perl, Python, Ruby, and whatever else he finds lying around the office. He has a degree in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and lives in Boston with his wife Audrey, who loves to see her name in print.

• Chris Sells (http://www.sellsbrothers.com) is an independent consultant, speaker, and author specializing in distributed applications in .NET and COM. He's written several books and is currently working on Windows Forms for C# and VB.NET Programmers and Mastering Visual Studio .NET. In his free time, Chris hosts various conferences, directs the Genghis source-available project, plays with Rotor, and makes a pest of himself in general at Microsoft design reviews.

• Alex Shapiro (http://www.touchgraph.com) is the founder and CTO of TouchGraph LLC. Alex graduated from Columbia's computer science program in 2000, and spent his early career at a consulting company. After the stock-market bubble burst, he decided to spend time developing a network visualization product he had conceived. Through network visualization, Alex found that he could combine his interests in user interface design, graph theory, and sociology. After seeing a business demand for his technology, Alex founded TouchGraph LLC, which is slowly gathering a list of respected clients.

• Kevin Shay (http://www.staggernation.com) is a writer and web programmer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His Google API scripts, Movable Type plug-ins, and other work can be found at the soon-to-launch staggernation.com.

• Gary Stock (http://www.googlewhack.com/stock.htm) coined the term "Google whack" while he had intended to be doing research for UnBlinking (http://www.unblinking.com). When Gary writes for UnBlinking, he might better be focused on his role as CTO of the news clipping and briefing service Nexcerpt (http://www.nexcerpt.com). Gary works at Nexcerpt to get a break from stewardship of the unusual flora and fauna on the 160 acres of woods and wetland that he owns, which in turn keeps him from spending time with his wife (and Nexcerpt CEO) Julie, whom he married to offset his former all-consuming career as an above-top-secret computer spy, which he had entered to avoid permanently becoming a jazz arranger and pianist. Seriously.

• Aaron Swartz (http://www.aaronsw.com) is a teenage writer, coder, and hacker. He is a coauthor of the RSS 1.0 specification, a member of the W3C RDF Core Working Group, and metadata adviser to the Creative Commons. He's also the guy behind the Google Weblog (http://google.blogspace.com). He can be reached at me@aaronsw.com.

• Brett Tabke (http://www.webmasterworld.com) is the owner/operator of WebmasterWorld.com, the leading news and discussion site for web developers and search engine marketers. Tabke has been involved in computing since the late 1970s and is one of the Internet's foremost authorities on search engine optimization.

• Adam Trachtenberg (http://www.trachtenberg.com) is Manager of Technical Evangelism at eBay, where he preaches the gospel of the eBay platform to developers and businessmen around the globe. Before eBay, Adam cofounded and served as Vice President for Development at two companies, Student.Com and TVGrid.Com. At both firms, he led the front- and middle-end web site design and development. Adam began using PHP in 1997 and is the author of Upgrading to PHP 5 and coauthor of PHP Cookbook, both published by O'Reilly Media. He lives in San Francisco and has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Columbia University

• Phillip M. Torrone is a feature columnist for http://www.engadget.com and contributing editor to Popular Science. Coauthor of Flash Enabled: Design and Development for Mobile Devices, Phillip has also contributed to numerous books and magazines on hardware hacking, cell phones, and PDAs. Phillip's latest work and more can be found at http://www.flashenabled.com.

• Matt Webb is an engineer and designer, splitting his working life between R&D with BBC Radio & Music Interactive and freelance projects (primarily in the social software world), most recently coauthoring Mind Hacks for O'Reilly. Online, he can be found at Interconnected (http://interconnected.org/home) and, in the real world, in London.