October 2007
Happy Halloween from MyStrands!
halloween, muzika, mystrandshalloween, muzika, mystrands (via MyStrands Blog)
Personalized search for movies
Seung-Taek Park and David Pennock from Yahoo Research had a good paper on personalized search at KDD 2007, “Applying Collaborative Filtering Techniques to Movie Search for Better Ranking and Browsing”. While the paper focuses on personalized search for movies, the techniques discussed are applicable to other types of search. The authors start with some motivation that probably sounds...
Hidden Gems : seeking diamonds in your data...
On November 7th 2007, Hazel Webb will give a lunch talk at 100 Sherbrooke West room SU-2720 (LORIT) from 12:30 to 13:30 on seeking diamonds in your data.
The talk will be webcasted at http://mediasrv.lorit.ca/presentation (Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer under Windows required). During the presentation, emails can be sent to lorit@licef.teluq.uqam.ca (MSN messenger also supported).
...
Your platform is your software
Seb Paquet sent me a link to Delusions of Facebook - Should you be a Facebook Startup? I am immediately reminded of McLuhan.
The medium is the message.
When Microsoft Windows came along, many people only noticed the obvious. Windows made it easy to build a good-looking application. Microsoft offered a standard API which was usable. Microsoft Windows was used by millions of people. What a great...
A new Yahoo?
Last night, I got to crash a snazzy dinner thrown by Yahoo to talk about social media with London geekmedia. I came away wondering whether we will start to see a new Yahoo.
Two of their executives engaged in what I argued was continuing portalspeak. “Yahoo’s where the activities are,” said one, who talked about “properties.” Another bragged about owning consumers because they do their email...
Beeblogs
After starting yesterday with great conversations at Sky News, I traveled more than an hour on three trains to get to the BBC. It’s as if they tried to find locations that would put them as far apart as possible.
Robin Hamman invited me to be part of a session on blogs with BBC staff and it started off with Hemma Kocher of Headshift sharing lessons from a study of the Beeb’s blogs. The numbers...
Google: “All your network are belong to us”
This is huge, singularity is approaching fast! From Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday:
Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.
Great comment by Alex to the post:
On the other hand ALL the social networking sites will now have to open up otherwise...
In olde London
Some more followup to the National Union of Journalists row brought on when a member of the National Union of Curmudgeons rubbished web 2.0 and a chicken-little commission of the NUJ tried to close the door on change:
Roy Greenslade gave us his considered response to comments on his decision to quit the union. He discusses an anonymous journalist grappling with being stuck between the union and...
Google: “All your network are belong to us”
This is huge, singularity is approaching fast! From Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday:
Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.
Great comment by Alex to the post:
On the other hand ALL the social networking sites will now have to open up otherwise...
Mechanical Turk for research
A friend told me about an interesting use for Mechanical Turk. He says he uses it to get research tasks accomplished that he’d otherwise have to pay hourly employees to take on. For instance, coding documents for quality can be created as a Mechanical Turk job, and then the documents can be uploaded, and the users started off. He says that unless you can get your hourly workers for...
Open Source software for pay
I saw an article on Read/WriteWeb today about cofundus.org, a web site where people can chip in $ to get open source software they’d like developed. The idea is that a bunch of people chip in money, and then together spec out a pieces of software. Then programmers offer proposals for developing the software. The funders vote on a programmer to take on the job. The programmer the gets...
Phones should be open to anything… new Nokia...
Open to anything. We believe the smartest devices should keep getting smarter. That’s why we’ve left the Nokia Nseries open to enhancement, experimentation and evolution.
Phones should be open to anything… is the new marketing campaign Nokia is running that features some cool applications, such as MyStrands Social Player, YouTube, the GPS… Click here and see it yourself.
mobile, n95, nokia,...
Google Tech Talk on similarities
Yury Lifshits gave a Google Tech talk, “Similarity Search: A Web Perspective”, surveying various algorithms for finding similar items. Slides (PDF) from the talk are available. In the talk, Yury mentions his tutorial, “Algorithms for Nearest Neighbor Search”, which should be of interest to those who want to dive in deeper. (via Geeking with Greg)
Journalistic organizations
The talk of London — or at least media London — since I got here has been the departure of Roger Alton as editor of the Observer, the Sunday affiliate of the Guardian. I write and consult for the Guardian, but do so at a distance, so I don’t know a thing about Alton’s resignation. Still, I find the discussion fascinating. There has been speculation that the issue was politics — the Observer...
Cool new native HTML widgets
I name this the coolest hack of the week. Glen decided to apply the tag-cloud idea to other HTML widgets. See this example and recall that I am only using straight HTML/CSS (no ECMAScript, no flash):
Aggregators Blogs Collaboration Joy of Use Podcasting RSS Web 2.0 XHTML
Update: according to Benoît Boudeau, it does not work under IE 6. According to Kamel Aouiche, it does not...
Regrets? I’ve had a few, but then again…
Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error, the terrific blog chronicling uh-oh moments in news, now has a book of the same title coming out imminently and on the book’s site, he’s already posting errors and corrections readers have sent him. Goose, gander. The book is wonderful and important and I recommend it highly.
I was honored to be asked to write the foreword (and was extra delighted to...
Web Zwei
The much-anticipated launch of Der Western, the new web 2.0 local service from the WAZ regional newspaper group in Germany, comes tonight. Martin Stabe has links and background. Here was my blog post with Katarina Borchert, the most impressive blogger-turned-internet-newspaper exec who has led the development. Here’s Thomas Knüwer’s interview with her. And here’s a Spiegel feature about it all....
Podcamp Perth A Huge Success
This weekend Perth held Australia’s first Podcamp. It was a roaring success, with a huge turn out, great sessions, great feedback, and much fun had by all.
We had a number of people come across to share the event, including Cameron Reilly (The Podcast Network), Nick Hodge (Microsoft), Stilgherrian (Internet and Media Consultant), and Duncan Riley (Techcrunch etc.) made a trip up from the south.
...
Departure
I’m off to London for a week and a half today. Flying again on SilverJet so I can sleep (disclosure: I got a comped return thanks to my attendance at a Founders’ Club event; since I bought the ticket late, the net is that I’m paying their regular rate). If I can get a flat-bed seat and sleep on the way over to Europe, it makes all the difference in the world; I gain a day of consciousness. I’ll be...
Social value
$15 billion for Facebook doesn’t sound so crazy when you consider this: A Deutsche Bank analyst says that a newspaper reader in 2004 was worth $964 a year. Today, that’s $500. Facebook’s 50 million active users translates to $300 per at that valuation. And newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users spend an average of 20 minutes each day...
Yahoo as a platform
We’re finally starting to hear sensible strategic talk out of Yahoo. The Times Bits Blog reported this week that Jerry Yang is talking platform:
Mr. Yang didn’t reveal too much in terms of specific details. But the biggest new thing about Yahoo’s strategy is its plan to open up to others, and Mr. Yang spoke in general terms about his hopes for turning Yahoo into a “platform” where developers,...
Publish or perish? Let them perish!
(source)
There has been much ink spilled on the evils of public or perish, that is, the way professors and would-be professors are mostly gauged by what they wrote and especially, how much they wrote.
Most recently, David Lorge Parnas, one of the most prolific authors in Computer Science (I found 242 papers in his name) has published an article on this topic: stop the numbers game...
The Facebook economy
You know a platform is gaining traction when it spawns an ancillary economy. The Facebook platform has not only supported apps companies that are, in turn, supported by venture capital, but now it yields conferences that can charge $400 at the door. I don’t see why such a conference is needed when Facebook developers have been gathering in hackathons thanks to Meetup, which is a helluva lot...
Network them
Through the referrers, I just found the video presentation for one of the Knight News Challenge innovation teams, this one dear to my heart: It pushes networked journalism. The audio dies after the first four minutes but those first minutes are a powerful argument for collaboration.
(via BuzzMachine)
It's all new
I’m starting to work on a new project (still related to music discovery and recommendation). Starting a brand new project is really fun. There are not too many times in a decade that I get to start with a completely blank slate. It’s a great time to refactor for me to refactor my development process, learn about new tools and learn about new ways to do things. Still, sometime all...
You might be a geek if…
You might be a geek if you go to unconferences for fun but for women who went to She’s Geeky, that is just fine. Unlike any gathering of brilliant minds I have been to, the first order of the day was food. Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman, organizer and Queen Bee, said that food was a big deal. “Everything else just falls into place.”
Women came from as far as New York City. Attendees ran a full...
Fox fights free speech
Incredible. Fox goes after John McCain’s campaign to cease and desist use of a clip from the last debate that has the Fox logo on it.
It would be shocking enough for Fox to go after a citizen who put this online — and we should all fight for that citizen’s right to do so. It’s all the more shocking that Fox is going after a presidential candidate. It’s triply shocking that Fox is going after...
Hey, kids, let’s gather some data
Among the tools for networked journalism I’m wishing for is a simple one for creating collaborative data bases.
When the Brian Lehrer Show mobilized the people formerly known as its audience to find out the prices of groceries across New York, they entered their findings in blog comments, which were laboriously compiled by hand. How much better it would be if the show had a simple data tool — as...
2008 JavaOne Conference Call for Papers is Open!
I just received this in my inbox:
Dear Paul,
The 2008 JavaOne Conference Call for Papers is Open!
JavaOne, Sun’s 2008 Worldwide Developer Conference, is seeking
proposals for technical sessions and Birds-of-a-Feather (BOFs) sessions
for this year’s Conference. Attracting over 15,000 developers and leaders in the
developer community. From Industry leaders, to...
From the Networked Journalism Summit
njs009.jpg
Originally uploaded by CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
I like this shot from the Networked Journalism Summit. More shots here . (via BuzzMachine)
Nifty new Sun Labs page
There’s a new Sun Labs Communications page that has all sorts of links to information about the various projects in the lab, including project spotlights, blogs, podcasts, news articles and events related to activities in the research lab. Neat Stuff. (via Duke Listens!)
Facebook and the value of blocking Google
In his post, “The $15 billion nonsense”, Nick Carr nails it:
Extrapolating Facebook’s true worth from Microsoft’s investment is a ridiculous exercise … The investment … was a price Microsoft had to pay to nail down the partnership. Partnering … is far more about gaining future strategic options and blocking the advance of … Google … than about...
Leaving the union
Roy Greenslade, a fixture of British journalism — former newspaper editor, now journalism professor and newspaper columnist and blogger — writes a powerful post today submitting his resignation to the National Union of Journalists there. Posts by Shane Richmond of the Telegraph and me appear to have been the last two straws. Roy writes:
… I still believe journalistic skills are essential. I...
CleverClogs: @kosso Talk to omniglot from...
CleverClogs: @kosso Talk to omniglot from Brighton. He speaks more than a dozen languages, including Chinese and Japanese. http://www.omniglot.com (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: For the Seesmic-impatient, check out...
CleverClogs: For the Seesmic-impatient, check out Twiddeo and Eyejot (video tweets). Also check out the twittervlog.tv workflow using blip.tv and feeds (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @snitter Something tells me a...
CleverClogs: @snitter Something tells me a built-in spelling checker would be a good idea too. (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @loiclemeur I'll take a rain check on...
CleverClogs: @loiclemeur I’ll take a rain check on this morning’s Seesnmic invites offer. Does it count that I was at OpenCoffee talking about Seesmic? (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: On first sight Bemba seems like a...
CleverClogs: On first sight Bemba seems like a StumbleUpon clone to me. Very difficult to survive in that space, guys. (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @bemba What blog are you referring to...
CleverClogs: @bemba What blog are you referring to on your About page? A tech start-up without a blog, uh oh…. I will explore http://www.bemba.com now (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @snitter how about the option to...
CleverClogs: @snitter how about the option to temporarily display tweets from just a few twits? Makes it easier to follow Twitter threads or feuds… (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: Just discovered http://Twitteria.com ...
CleverClogs: Just discovered http://Twitteria.com - Twitter topic streams about your day, buying/selling, blogs, travelling, location, health etc (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @leehopkins I know Twitter Inc...
CleverClogs: @leehopkins I know Twitter Inc imposes a maximum number of API pings of 70 times a minute at the moment.Jonathan Snook (Snitter) negotiating (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @leehopkins Ah, thanks for that...
CleverClogs: @leehopkins Ah, thanks for that clarification on Snitter delaying new followers. If you come across a Twitter tool on Twitter, tell me, ok? (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @leehopkins not sure what you mean...
CleverClogs: @leehopkins not sure what you mean with your comments about Snitter. I’d love to pass them on, or tweet to @snitter (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: @snitter please cut off periods if...
CleverClogs: @snitter please cut off periods if they’re appended to a URL. (via CleverClogs River of News)
CleverClogs: Improved URL:...
CleverClogs: Improved URL: http://twitter.com/twtooltrack (via CleverClogs River of News)
What’s Happening With PodTech?
Fake Steve Jobs has the rumor, which given the source should be taken with a truck load of salt, that Podtech is going under.
I’ve Twittered to see if Scoble is about — it’s a good method to touch base with him — to see if he has a response. It would be very unusual that he doesn’t make a comment as soon as he sees the blog post.
It’d be a shame for them to go under. Although I don’t think there...
CleverClogs: On my way to Coffee Company in...
CleverClogs: On my way to Coffee Company in Amsterdam. First time since a couple of months for me to attend the Web 2.0 meet-up again. Yay. (via CleverClogs River of News)
Freaks wanted
freaks, jobsfreaks, jobs (via MyStrands Blog)
RecSys 2007 Keynote Impressions
MyStrands recently sponsored the ACM “RecSys” confererence on recommender systems. As part of the research division of MyStrands (as well as a participant in the associated doctoral consortium), I had the pleasure of attending. I was also offered the opportunity to discuss a few of the papers and “themes” of the conference in more detail here as a guest blogger.
There were too many ideas and...