March 2008
Track ... Yourself →
Read/WriteWeb has a look at a very interesting new Web site called Traackr. The idea is that you tell Traackr all of your media accounts (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc.), and Traackr logs in…
February 2008
Research productivity versus funding received →
Who should you keep funding? The scientist who receives $10,000 and has an impact factor of 10, or the scientist who receives $1,000,000 and has an impact factor of 15?
Source: The idea is from
Kevin Rose opens up and Diggs in | The Social -... →
In part 1 of a two-part interview, Digg’s founder says a “smarter” social-news experience is coming—and that Yahoo Buzz doesn’t sting. Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give…
Cubicgarden talk on DataPortability for Educators →
Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: dataportability, apml
VIDEO - More DataPortability and Me Videos →
Video Inder - Microsoft (on Soapbox)
Robyn Tippins - Yahoo
John Breslin
…
MSN Video > What's Hot > by relevance > page 1 →
Inder Sethi, a principal development manager at Microsoft, talks about the importance of web data portability to make it easier for consumers to communicate and share contacts and other data…
Pity the big, bad wolf →
A post written for Comment is Free on the Microsoft fine; crossposted here. Interesting comments already underway over there.)
I have a theory about the regulation of companies that get too big…
Publish or Perish: the Tool →
Through Sebastien Paquet, I found a software application called Publish or Perish. It queries Google Scholar and computes statistics for you automagically. It works well. Linux and Windows version available. The Windows version runs under MacOS if you have wine.
Online teaching is the future? →
Recently, Bill Gates gave us the main reason for the ongoing revolution in University teaching:
Fortunately for all of you, you’re in a generation where all of these courses are going to be online and basically free. I’m taking solid state physics from MIT, though MIT doesn’t know it. You are far more empowered in terms of your ongoing education than any other generation has ever been.
It is,...
Collective Intelligence FOO Camp →
I just got back from the Collective Intelligence FOO Camp that O’Reilly organized at Google. The meeting was great, the people were great, and overall the experience was great.
One issue that popped up is what exactly people mean by Collective Intelligence. At a high level, it was clear that everyone meant basically the same thing:
agent -> work
agent -> work
agent ->...
Google U →
I wonder what the distributed university will look like. For that matter, I wonder what the distributed education will look like. It’s not an idle curiosity. Like media and every industry and institution before it, the academe is waiting to be exploded by the internet.
Start here: Why should my son or daughter have to pick a single college and with it only the teachers and courses offered there?...
IDEAS 2008 (April 27, 2008 / September 3-5, 2008) →
The Twelfth International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2008) will be held in Münster, Germany.
SanFran MusicTech Summit →
Yesterday was the first (hopefully of many) SanFran Music Tech Summit. This was a gathering of musicians, producers, lawyers, radio heads, and technologists. The summit was held at the Kabuki Hotel in Japan Town. Kudos to Brian Zisk and the rest of the organizers for putting this all together.
I was lucky enough to get to moderate a panel on recommendation and discovery. The panelists...
The Times will change →
So now the hedge funds pushing New York Times Company management own about as much as the Sulzberger family. I don’t know whether they’ll win their effort to elect directors to the board, but I do think this has reached a critical mass and that the family and management will be forced to make strategic changes. So I’m curious: what would you change? The hedge funds are urging the company to divest...
Twitter →
My Guardian column this week is a tribute to Twitter. Since I haven’t written about that much in the blog, here’s the full text:
When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter - which enables users to publish 140-character-long messages via the web and mobile phones - I thought it was silly. Or rather, the uses to which it was being put were silly: people announcing that they’d just woken...
Back from CI Foo →
I got back from Collective Intelligence Foo Camp late last night. As promised, here is a summary of some of the highlights, the major thoughts I took away from the conference. Tim O’Reilly intentionally tends to leave his terms weakly defined — as he did for the term “Web 2.0” — so there were several attempts to come up with a compact understanding for what is and is...
What is the Times thinking? →
The only thing more shocking that the New York Times printing salacious innuendo about a presidential candidate is its editor not understanding why this caused controversy. I’m not sure whether he’s isolated or clueless or issuing cynical spin.
I was gobsmacked reading the story when it came out. I didn’t blog on it because Jay Rosen did a great job succinctly dissecting its issues and...
Crowdsourced editing (and conspiracy theorizing) →
The Dallas Morning News has put up PDFs of the boxloads of documents about the JFK assassination just released and asked the public to help find the stories therein.
Should we fear Google? →
Google is getting in the health records business. What happens when a single company has full access to your emails, your videos, your family pictures and your health records?
Abuses are possible, but I predict that not much will happen. The American NSA is recording and mining a large fraction of all Internet communications. The same is happening in China.
Privacy is an illusion. Even if...
Love the customer who hates you →
I have a column in Business Week’s customer-service issue arguing that customers who complain about you are doing you a great favor. Here’s the foreshortened version that fit in the magazine. And here’s my longer draft. Snippet from the draft:
Here’s some free advice: Go to Google, enter any of your company’s brands followed by the word “sucks,” and you will see the true consumers’ reports. Brace...
‘We don’t hire editors anymore’ →
That’s the provocative headline I saw in Folio’s report from its conference and a speech by Meredith president Jack Griffin. The fuller context:
As a result, the company invested in its interactive and integrated marketing businesses—spending roughly $600 million since 2002 on launches, acquisitions and building out its existing Web sites, Griffin said, as well as redefining its editorial hiring...
Should we fear Google? →
Google is getting in the health records business. What happens when a single company has full access to your emails, your videos, your family pictures and your health records?
Abuses are possible, but I predict that not much will happen. The American NSA is recording and mining a large fraction of all Internet communications. The same is happening in China.
Privacy is an illusion. Even if...
Snow day →
The view from my desk:
The walk up my driveway (which cut off early because of crappy reception out here in the ‘burbs):
When a terabyte is small →
With Kamel and Owen, I am working on a paper involving database indexes. We had over a terabyte of space, and yet, in the middle of the production of the paper, we ran out of space. Only a year ago, I thought that one terabyte was large.
So, I ask our technician about getting a new drive. He comes back with a small 500 GB drive. I ask how much they cost, he says “$200.”
This is a new...
The madness of a growing crowd →
Nick Carr makes an observation about problems that occur in “self-regulating, super-democratic communities” as they grow. An excerpt:
What we’ve seen happen with self-regulating communities, both real and virtual, is that they go through a brief initial period during which their performance improves - a kind of honeymoon period, when people are on their best behavior and rascals...
Clever exploit of DRAM to attack disk encryption →
Security guru Ed Felten posts about “Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption”, a sideways attack on BitLocker, FileVault, and other disk encryption programs. Some excerpts from his post:
The root of the problem lies in an unexpected property of today’s DRAM memories … Virtually everybody, including experts, will tell you that DRAM contents are lost when you turn off the power....
Yahoo deploys large scale Hadoop cluster →
Yahoo’s Eric Baldeschwieler reports that Yahoo is now running a 10k+ core Hadoop cluster that holds over 5 petabytes of data. Very cool. It appears Yahoo has now achieved most of the Hadoop design requirements they laid out back in July 2006. Please see also my July 2006 post, “Yahoo building Google FS clone?”, and my April 2007 post, “Yahoo Pig and Google Sawzall”.
Times whispers →
Damned good post from Jay Rosen about the Times’ odd effort to imply and not report a McCain affair.
When a terabyte is small →
With Kamel and Owen, I am working on a paper involving database indexes. We had over a terabyte of space, and yet, in the middle of the production of the paper, we ran out of space. Only a year ago, I thought that one terabyte was large.
So, I ask our technician about getting a new drive. He comes back with a small 500 GB drive. I ask how much they cost, he says “$200″.
This is a new...
The human satellite truck →
Visionary network news photographer Jim Long is gleefully putting himself out of business. Well, actually, he’s expanding his own business, for network executives should be plugging into his brain. But he’s reducing the need for that gigantic camera he lugs all over the world. While in Africa traipsing after George Bush and company, Jim turned on his mobile phone and hooked it into Qik.com and...
Going to CI Foo →
I am very much looking forward to going to Collective Intelligence Foo Camp this weekend. CI Foo is a Tim O’Reilly gathering hosted by Google to discuss how we can build systems that use “networked computers and humans working together to solve interesting problems.” It looks to be a remarkable event. The list of people invited includes Hal Varian, Peter Norvig, Rodney Brooks,...
AUDIO - First DataPortability Steering Group... →
Last night (PST Time) we had our first Steering Group Teleconference. It was great, productive call with lots of outcomes that are currently being implemented. We also agreed to meet in a similar way every 2 weeks. Listen to a recording of the call hosted here on John Breslin’s blog. Thanks to everyone who organized and participated.
The angry journalist →
OK, that may be redundant, but now there’s now a site for venting and venting about the venting. A lot of folks are whining about post No. 470, who in turn was asking the angry jouranlists to stop whining. Life is so meta these days. Says No. 470:
First off, I’m tired of the bitching. I’m a 25-year-old editor of my 24k circ paper and the newsroom (oops Information Center) is filled with bitching....
Obamania →
I’m a day late linking to an amusing skewering of Obamania by David Brooks in yesterday’s Times. He writes about Obama Comedown Syndrome.
Up until now The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense… .
...
Lemann links →
Some followup links reacting to Nick Lemann’s j-school memo.
Charlie Beckett:
The future of journalism (cue plug: “as I write in my new book, SuperMedia“) is about how paid journalists work with unpaid citizen journalists, professionals and public sharing the process. We will need fewer hacks churning out the basics and more expert editorial entrepreneurs and ‘enablers’ working with the citizen...
Intellectual Desserts →
The west coast Sun Labs offers a weekly speaker series called ‘Intellectual Desserts’ where internal and external speakers present talks on an eclectic series of topics - mostly technical. Since I am headed out to the west coast lab next week I figured it would be a good time to give a talk about our new project, so I signed up for the Intellectual Desserts.
It was not until after...
Happy Birthday Scouta →
Today is Scouta’s first birthday.
One year ago today we launched the Scouta web site, and started saving people time by providing recommendations for great video and podcasts.
It’s a very proud day, because the team has made some amazing things happen over the year. The site has grown in some awe inspiring ways, and not only that, but we’re just heading into even better days.
Stay tuned, but...
FlexDBIST 2008 (March 18, 2008 / September 1-5,... →
The Third International Workshop on Flexible Database and Information Systems Technology (FlexDBIST-08) will be held in Turin this year. The scope is defined by this sentence: “Enterprises and organizations need to deal with such heterogeneous and often very large volumes of data, which may also be uncertain, imprecise and incomplete.”
MyStrands, Mobile Rules! Finalist →
We just learned that MyStrands Social Player has been chosen as a finalist for the Mobile Rules! 2008 Award. Mobile Rules! is the leading annual competition in the mobile world.
We will be accompanied by Arvato, Call Enhancer, Hyper Player, JuiceUp, MobSensor, MosKillTo, NovixLife, PhuneTV and Vagalume. Good luck to all of you! The winner will be announced in San Jose next March 19th- let us...
The Social Networker - Interview with Chris Saad... →
TheSocialNetworker Episode 5 - Make My Data Portable
Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give Thanks
Tags: dataportability, attention, apml, attention economy, business, …
New Trends in Physical Data Warehouse Design... →
Ladjel Bellatreche is organizing a special issue in New Trends in Physical Data Warehouse Design for the journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases. Submissions are through the journal’s online system. You can read the call for papers on EventSeer.
Recommending Journal Articles in a Scientific... →
Andr?? Vellino will give a talk on recommender systems in our offices (100 Sherbrooke West, room 2720) at 12:30pm this Thursday (February 21st 2008).
Recommender systems for scientific digital libraries that have been the subject of experiments in recent years have used corpora that are primarily in the field of computer science. However, designing an effective recommender system for journal...
Explaining the success of bad bands →
Turns out that run-away recommender systems are NOT responsible for all of the bad music out there:
bad, bad music
A good oops →
Nicholas Lemman, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, accidentally sent his class his self-evaluation intended for the university provost. No harm done, though. It’s an impressive document — it helps to hire New Yorker writers to pen memos — that sets out Lemman’s accomplishments and worldview. Here’s the bit, toward the end, that interested me:
I cannot be sure how long our school...
Murdoch’s incubator(s) →
I’m impressed that Myspace’s Chris Dewolfe has started an incubator inside News Corp.
Murdoch and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe plan to be closely involved in the venture, which News Corp. has seeded with $15 million to hire roughly 40 employees, mostly software developers, say people with knowledge of the plans. The venture is being launched nearly a half-year after archrival Facebook announced a...
Journalists’ votes matter →
Media have an Obama problem they’re going to have to grapple with now or after the election: They love him. They hate Hillary. And the gap between the two is clearly seen in coverage, which surely is having an impact on the election.
This, to me, only gives more weight to the argument that journalists should be disclosing their allegiances and votes. Reporters are not just covering the story....
Recommending Journal Articles in a Scientific... →
André Vellino will give a talk on recommender systems in our offices (100 Sherbrooke West, room 2720) at 12:30pm this Thursday (February 21st 2008).
Recommender systems for scientific digital libraries that have been the subject of experiments in recent years have used corpora that are primarily in the field of computer science. However, designing an effective recommender system for journal...
Thanks BL3RIB for your support! →
On March 23, 2005, MyStrands was awarded a grant for $30,000 by the Benton, Linn, Lincoln, and Lane Regional Investment Board (BL3RIB). The funding was provided to assist MyStrands (a very young start-up) in filling ten new positions in its Corvallis office.
At the time the grant was awarded, MyStrands had only nine full-time employees in its downtown Corvallis headquarters, and the support was...
How to be a great moderator →
Next week I shall be attending the SanFran Music Tech Summit. I’ll be moderating a panel on music recommendation and discovery. Now, I’ve seen lots of panels and have even been on a few of them in my day. Most panels don’t seem to live up to their billing and some turn into real train wrecks. As the panel moderator, my primary job will be to minimize the suckage - to make...
What would you kill? Jocks? →
Michael Fioritto was nice enough — and skilled at Excel enough — to compile results from my little survey that asked you what you’d kill from a newspaper’s budget. Keep in mind that it’s unscientific as hell and that respondents could pick as many suggestions as they liked. I need to do a proper survey and probably will at my New Business Models for News conference (this one was just a demo of...