ReadWriteWeb

"If Engineering at Etsy has a religion, it's the Church of Graphs," Ian Malpass writes on the Etsy Code as Craft blog. And how is Etsy fulfilling its religious obligations? With a Node.js daemon called StatsD, which the company has made available on GitHub. StatsD listens for messages on a UDP port, conducts its counting or timing, and then sends the info off to graphite for graphing.

It's based on a Perl daemon of the same name created by Cal Henderson for Flickr.

Etsy just announced an intriguing offer: a free four-week class on basic Web programming centered around its own API. The class is being offered through Codelesson.com and doesn't require any programming or HTML experience. This sort of course probably won't produce the next computer science superstar, but this seems like a great idea for getting more people coding.

Most programming classes focus on the basics and learning general skills. By focusing on learning the skills needed for a specific scenario, the instructors may attract a group of people who may never have learned programming otherwise.

Handmade marketplace Etsy is experimenting with its own recommendation engine technology called the Etsy Taste Test. The tool, available at tastetest.etsy.com, offers you a short quiz where you click photos of things you like. You can choose to look at either photos of items for women or items for men. The end result is a list of recommended items matching your taste... in theory at least; the experiment is still very new and results can be mixed.

Still - an algorithm for artistic crafts? Sign us up!

The internet is a big place and a lot happens on it every day. We try to cover the things we find most interesting, but in case you disagree with our judgement, here are some other things that smart people might want to know about today. We offer each with a touch of editorial about what it means - and in some cases why we haven't written about it yet.

Today's almost-news-to-us includes: Amazon doing unnatural things with Wikipedia, Facebook plus Etsy makes me a power shopper, if Groupon is like the Borg - here's who might be the Baby Borg next in line, everyone is talking about an iPad RSS reader that got Facebook integration and Dora the Explorer gets new iOS apps. Awesome!

Maria Thomas, former head of digital media at NPR and CEO of craft marketplace Etsy, has joined this year's Knight News Challenge and will participate in judging hundreds of funding proposals to create the future of news media, the organization announced today. The Knight Foundation began 70 years ago next month to support innovative news organizations; the deadline for submissions to this year's challenge is December 1st.

Previous years' winners include Ushahidi, Global Voices, MobileActive, the Public Radio Exchange and of course the MSNBC-acquired hyper-local news site EveryBlock.

Apps on the iPhone, there are so very many of them - how's a person to find the best ones? We look at a whole lot of them here at ReadWriteWeb and we'd like to share with you some of our favorites we've discovered in the month of February.

Some of us on the team are proud Android users but most of us are still using iPhones. I just discovered how incredibly effective the Genius recommendations on the phone can be, so I've been going nuts downloading new apps. Here are the ones our staff is most excited about this month.

Known by many as The Big Apple, and by some in the tech scene as Silicon Alley, New York City has been an international hub for media, art and business for decades. More recently New York has ebbed and flowed with the success and failures of the Internet startup culture, and is now well on its way to cementing its reputation alongside Silicon Valley as a driving global force in the industry.

Only four years after he quit his job and started The Sartorialist, fashion blogger Scott Schuman writes a monthly column for GQ, has been honored by Time Magazine, and more importantly, has gained the adoration and respect of millions of bleeding edge hipsters. Schuman's photography has inspired legions of salivating indie fashion fanatics, and many who've witnessed the mainstream outing of street fashion covet the simpler and less-ostentatious times. Yes folks, someone let the clowns on the bus and now wherever fashion goes, it looks like a drunk circus. Lookbook.nu is one site re-establishing exclusivity and celebrating fashion insiders.

The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore's Law. But just as Moore's Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we'll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don't, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.

Wouldn't you love to have people in every corner of the globe talking about your website face to face and on their blogs? That's the enviable position that online crafts marketplace Etsy finds itself in according to survey results the company published today. Word of mouth and personal blogs are the primary way people around the world are finding out about the site and there's an active community of craft sellers on Etsy from every continent but Antarctica.

At a time when marketers are obsessed with getting traction on Facebook and are just beginning to take users outside the US seriously, Etsy's survey of its international members is fascinating - as is the company itself.