December 2007
Taking flight — and fixing it →
The other day, I wrote about how I’d like to see airplane flights become social economies as a way to improve and add value to the now-tortured experience. Of course, much of the hassle of flying is in the unfortunately necessary security gauntlet, and others are talking about how to improve that — including the security people running it.
Anthony Williams of Wikinomics points us to an article in...
Get smart with email →
Harold asks: do we suffer from information overload or do we have the wrong tools? Clearly, email is inefficient. It is like cars: everybody gets stuck in traffic.
To cope, I answer and compose emails only once a day, on a schedule (after 4pm). I check and prune my email regularly however.
How do you cope with email?
See also Improving your intellectual productivity by accepting chaos and How...
How Does Wikipedia Deal with Saboteurs? →
There was an interesting article in Fast Company’s April 2007 about Jimmy Wales new search venture, Wikia. (If you haven’t heard: he’s hoping to do for search what Wikipedia does for content, by using armies of volunteers to sift through search results.)
One quote from the article stuck out to me: “The way Wikipedia deals with saboteurs is to change them, not to
crush...
User Centric design and identity with Beacon →
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DataPortability -> The Web File System « Paying... →
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2008 Predictions | 1938 Media →
I love this guy… and I love his last line in this video “It will finally dawn on people that that the most importance voice on the web, is their own” Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: dataportability, apml, fun, interesting
Google is God →
For something I’m working on, I compiled a bunch of stats on Google (sorry, I didn’t intend to blog it and so I didn’t capture all the links, but I found the collection so compelling I thought I’d share it):
• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all...
Why Do We Care About Top 10 Lists? «... →
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Mobile on mobile →
Andy Carvin tweets that we can listen to his NPR report on mobile blogging from our phones. Just call: 202-683-7002. This is, indeed, where content and communication merge: We can listen to whatever we want whenever we want as if we’re just phoning up content. We can create and interact with content that way. Phone? What’s a phone?
Keeping track of your time… lazily →
Active Time is a free MacOS application keeping track of how much time I spend in various software applications — automatically! My bet is that most of my time is spent in a browser, but I want to get hard numbers.
MTV & partyStrands Create the Ultimate Interactive... →
MTV and partyStrands have teamed up to create an unforgettable interactive New Year’s 2007 experience in Time’s Square!
People in Times Square will be able to use their cell phones to send messages, vote to choose music videos and answer trivia questions on MTV’s 44 ½ giant HD screen in front of the MTV Studios.
People who aren’t able to make the New Year’s bash, can follow the party from home...
Coping with overabundance as a scientist →
We are in an era of overabundance. Many of the problems we face — spam, information overload, obesity, pollution — are actually the result of overabundance.
Scientists need new strategies:
Create fast, discard faster.
Aim for quality. When people have too much content, they want quality.
Focus and live in niches.
Produce shorter papers. People want to learn a specific facts. Make it easy...
MTV & partyStrands Create the Ultimate Interactive... →
MTV and partyStrands have teamed up to create an unforgettable interactive New Year’s 2007 experience in Time’s Square!
People in Times Square will be able to use their cell phones to send messages, vote to choose music videos and answer trivia questions on MTV’s 44 ½ giant HD screen in front of the MTV Studios.
People who aren’t able to make the New Year’s bash, can follow the party from home...
The social flight →
What if a plane flight were networked and became a social experience with its own economy?
For part of a book I’m finally starting to work on, I’ve been thinking about how companies and industries can be remade with Googlethink and social smarts (note how I’m not saying Web 2.0). It’s harder to reimagine some than others. The benefits of tearing apart and rebuilding cable companies are obvious....
Blogging from my iPhone →
Lucky me. My lovely wife gave me an iPhone for Xmas. So while I wait for new tires to be put on my car I can blog about it. Good for me. Not so good for you, dear reader.
You are Never Alone » Feedback coming in about... →
communicate and collaborate in an online world 1500 more APML files created Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: apml, dataportability
MyStrands.TV on Wii →
For those of you that just got a Nintendo Wii for the holidays (or like me you claim to have gotten for your kids but somehow you seem to be the one that is always playing it), I highly recommend that you download the Opera Browser (aka “Internet Channel”) for 500 Wii points and then fire up mystrands.tv on it. It works great and now easily brings personalized music into your living room.
Ho,...
Marc, the Man Who Cried More Open Social - GigaOM →
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Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Broadband Mechanics... →
PeopleAggregator to use APML, oAuth and OpenID in 2008 Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: dataportability, apml
The lowest common denominator of speech →
Martin Stabe points to another legal story that is getting too little coverage here, with links to a news story and a FindLaw analysis about a New York court refusing to protect an American author from a UK “libel tourism” judgment over a book that sold a mere 23 copies in England.
What’s profoundly frightening about this is that we in America could find ourselves subject to the UK’s libel and...
Anonymity protected →
Just caught up with this (via a Steve Rubel tweet): A New Jersey court protected an anonymous blogger criticizing local government from being unmasked by a subpoena and dragged into litigation. When I was at Advance Internet, we got frequent subpoenas, mostly from local governments — often police chiefs who were being criticized in forums and knew how to use subpoena power to get IP addresses out...
Talk back to the Queen →
Queen Elizabeth got considerable press for opening up a YouTube channel for her Christmas message. Now Sky News is asking the people for their messages back to the Queen. Email the clip to newsonline@bskyb.com or upload it to YouTube and tag it SkyChristmasSpeech.
What to get with your Nintendo Wii? →
I guess many people are getting Wiis right about now. I have had mine for a few months. Here are my recommendations:
The Sims 2: Castaway. You do not need to know what the sims are. If you can cope with games requiring planning, some puzzles, but relatively little action, this game is for you. Reminds me of the TV show Lost.
Super Mario Galaxy. A relaxing and fun platform game. Very...
Silly advertisers →
A story in today’s New York Post exposes the silliness, stupidity, the strategic blindness of advertisers, who insist on creating scarcity — and higher prices — where it does not exist (probably because that’s how their agencies get paid):
It’s a conundrum for advertisers: even as ratings fall, ad prices on network TV are soaring.
Although it seems counterintuitive, it’s the law of supply and...
2008 - Data, Semantics, Attention →
As 2007 rolls to a close, bloggers have started predicting the hot trends of 2008. Data, Semantics and Attention seems like a consistent theme. Here are some highlights: Richard McManus (here):
Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections. Think search engines like Hakia and Powerset, wikipedia-like efforts like...
Papers from WSDM 2008 on click position bias and... →
The WSDM conference is being held Feb 11-12 at Stanford University. I am not sure I will make it down from Seattle for it, but, if you are in the SF Bay Area and are interested in search and data mining on the Web, it is an easy one to attend. Most of the papers for the conference do not appear to be publicly available yet, but, of the ones I could find, I wanted to highlight two of them....
Singing Digg’s praises →
Can you imagine anyone writing a song about the New York Times or Good Morning, America, or, for that matter, Yahoo? No. But here’s a song about Digg:
Now a cynic might say that young Kina Grannis wrote this song about Digg so it would get Dugg (4,178 times, at last count) and so many young (geeky and possibly lonely) guys would discover kismet with a very pretty girl and do what she says:...
I will be a better writer in 2008… I promise! →
I will not use negations…
I will avoid UA (useless acronyms).
When appropriate, my writing will be in an active voice…
I will very much try to avoid carefully needless words in my writing.
I will employ uncomplicated terms.
Here is a call to my readers: what annoys you about my writing? I vow to improve!
Meet the Team! →
The MyStrands team
RoyalTube →
The Queen has a YouTube channel. As the Observer points out, she beat the White House. Sadly, they disabled embedding.
ICDM 08 (July 7, 2008 / December 15-19, 2008) →
ICDM’08, the 8th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, will be held in Pisa, Italy. ICDM is a big and prestigious conference on Data Mining. Typically, it has some pretty good workshops, but the list of workshops is not yet available. See the workshops they had last year.
(If you do not mind useless advice, do check the workshops first if you are going to prepare a paper. I see very...
Fighting the future →
A herd of journalism-school deans wrote a predictable but also naive and possibly dangerous — and certainly not strategically forward-thinking — attack on media cross-ownership and the FCC’s loosening of its rules in today’s Times op-ed page.
They argue that the government should regulate local broadcast and make content demands on stations. That’s the dangerous part: government regulating news....
An exchange of networked journalism apps →
One of the best possible results of the Networked Journalism Summit, I’m told, is collaborative work by WNYC and the Ft. Myers News-Press to create a tool to enable crowdsourced collections of data from the public (a la WNYC’s Are You Being Gouged, which required lots of manual input and analysis).
This inspires another thought: Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations of all sizes and shapes...
Genuinely Usable Java: Principles →
I’m proposing a new programming language, called Guava, for Genuinely Usable Java. Guava would be very like Java, but would be designed for usability by learners, not for safety in the hands of experts. This post is to suggest some ideas about the motivation for Guava, and to lay out some of the principles that would guide its development.
I’ve been talking to friends for many...
Collaborative Filtering: Why working on static... →
As a scientist, it is important to question one’s assumptions. So far, most of the hard Computer Science research on collaborative filtering has used static data sets such as Netflix. Specifically, it is assumed that the recommender systems do not impact the ratings and what items get rated. A related assumption is that polls do not change how people vote (thanks to Peter for this observation).
...
Link →
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Ben Stucki » Did You Hear Your Name at DEMO? →
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How to win the Netflix 1,000,000$ prize? →
Yahuda Koren, one of the winners of the Netflix game so far, was nice enough to send me a pointer to a recent paper he wrote, Chasing $1,000,000: How we won the Netflix progress prize (link is to PDF document, see 4th page and following).
Their approach is based on the linear combination of large number of predictors. Their work is difficult to summarize because it is so sophisticated and...
Interactive machine learning talk →
Dan Olsen at BYU gave a talk, “Interactive Machine Learning”, at UW CS a couple months back. Dan’s group is doing some inspired work that combines machine learning and HCI. The UW CS talk is good but long. If you are short on time, first take a look at the fun short demo videos Dan’s group produced. I particularly recommend the clever “Screen Crayons” (WMV)...
How University professors ought to be teaching… →
I am not a teacher per se. As a professor, I define myself as a researcher first and I do not do research on teaching methodologies. So this makes me poorly qualified to tell the world how a professor ought to be teaching. Nevertheless, I do teach. And I think that some of the time, I teach better than some. In fact, in the last few years, 95% of all students who took my courses would recommend...
Cutting up a newspaper →
Friend Dave Morgan writes an insightfuul, provocative post — reacting to mine, here — suggesting that newspapers should disaggregate themselves into their separate, marketable skills: a news service; a sales/marketing company; a printing house; a distribution company; a digital shop. He breaks up the dependent, exclusive relationships that made newspapers businesses since their beginnings: nobody...
Buzz around town for APML →
Some interesting blog posts emerged over the last few days - particularly around the announcement of APML support in Ma.gnolia. Here are some highlights: From Jaffamonkey
I have latched onto APML, which I consider personally to be the best for web user profiling, and already many services exist to generate and manipulate APML data. What is this project for? The Graphsync project also summarised...
Surveillance Without Warrants →
The New York Times has an important article about the NSA’s efforts to have full access to the telecommunications infrastructure within the US. There are parts of this question that are difficult: should the NSA, with a warrant, be guaranteed the technical capability to wiretap anyone through the phone system switches? As a privacy nut, I’m skeptical even of this claim, but at least...
Engagd bugfixes released →
Just a quick note to let you know that we have rolled in a number of Engagd bugfixes over the last few weeks. Please keep up the great feedback and let us know if you come across anything else that doesn’t work quite right for you! Still a lot more to come! Thanks to Ash, Paul and the team.
Test post →
Working out some quick styling issues w/ blog posts
Test post →
Working out some quick styling issues w/ blog posts
A kick in the groin →
I knew it was bad, but Forbes details how bad McClatchy’s fall is: As Steve Yelvington notes, the entire company now has a market cap of $1 billion, which is what it paid for the Star Tribune (which it sold for about half that, says Forbes). The stock has falled from a split-adjusted high of $76.05 in 2005 to $12.75, a fall of 80%. It bought Knight Ridder for $6.5 billion, sold off papers to get...
Test Post →
Making sure the cogs are working on this thing.
How many Computer Science researchers are there? →
In current work with do on database indexes, we decided to use DBLP as a data source. Among other things, we use the authors’ name as a dimension. From one plot, I noticed that there must have half a million distinct authors. I doubted this number, and Kamel was nice enough to investigate further. It turns out that there are 531,480 different authors in DBLP! (As a basis for comparison, there...
21 open problems in Artificial Intelligence →
Peter has come up with a list of 21 (important) open problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I am not aware of any such list anywhere, so this might be an important contribution. For comparison, Wikipedia as a list of open problems in Computer Science. In the field of database, the closest thing to a list of open problems would be the Lowell report: it falls short of providing true open...