May 2009
Links for 2009 04 30 →
Paper “De-anonymizing Social Networks”
WOW!
We show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online…
Links for 2009 04 30 →
Paper “De-anonymizing Social Networks”
WOW!
We show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online…
April 2009
The Twitter flight (well, train) →
I was on an Amtrak train from New York to Washington today that got stopped cold by a torrential water-main break in Baltimore. Reflexively, I went to Twitter to see what others were saying (which…
End the University as We Know It: My Commentary →
Mark C. Taylor is quickly becoming famous for his New York Times piece End the University as We Know It.
The paper makes some good points:
Universities rely on graduate students as cheap…
Are magazines doomed, too? →
Condé Nast folds Portfolio even as it starts Wired in print in the U.K. So which are we to take as the harbinger for the future of magazines?
I hate to be calling doom for yet another medium,…
Links for 2009 04 27 →
Google Flu Trends | How does this work?
Simply based on what people search in Google, Google is able to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance…
Links for 2009 04 27 →
Google Flu Trends | How does this work?
Simply based on what people search in Google, Google is able to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance…
Reboot the university →
In today’s NY Times, Mark Taylor of Columbia calls for the end of the university as we know. As I do in What Would Google Do?, he uses the new structure of our post-industrial age to rethink…
Talk about needing a Geowiki! →
This Slashdot post talks about TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System, which the US military developed for groupd troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Developed as much on the
ground in active…
Leaving Microsoft →
With the dissolution of much of Live Labs, I have decided to resign from Microsoft. I will be leaving at the end of April. Working at Microsoft on search and advertising turned out to be a lot of…
A confession →
Good on Burl Osborn, former publisher of the Dallas Morning News and chairman of the Associated Press, for acknowledging newspapers’ missed chance: “”Now the consumers have taken charge — they…
GeoCities = MySpace = newspapers →
It’s fate that GeoCities dies at the same moment that MySpace reshuffles and reboots its management in the face of no growth (which, on the internet, is the same as shrinkage). What they have…
Google server and data center details →
At the Efficient Data Center Summit, Google and others were discussing techniques to reduce energy consumption from massive clusters. In the process, the Googlers offered some very fun peeks into…
Serendipity, diversity, and personalized search →
Aside from the amusing double entendre in its title, a recent paper out of Microsoft Research, “From X-Rays to Silly Putty via Uranus: Serendipity and its Role in Web Search” (PDF), is notable for…
Way Beyond the Desktop →
When I teach user interface design, I always come to a point about 2/3 of the way through the semester where I show the students this picture. It’s a picture from circa late 70s or early 80s of…
CHI Considered Useful →
The CHI 2009 conference was April 4-9 in Boston. I’m not here to give a trip report, not going to do it. I just want to mention one highlight.
I saw the most entertaining CHI event ever (and…
Journalists: Where do you add value? →
Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight - that is, more efficient - times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are…
Strands Online Training Logs →
At a press conference today with Abel Antón in Madrid, we excitedly announced a renewed vision for Strands.com (press release here). Strands.com, a service we first launched last May, now…
Death of the curator. Long live the curator. →
For a long time now, I’ve been pushing hard the idea of journalist-as-curator. It appears that curators are looking at journalists and worrying about their loss of control, as evidenced by this post…
Googley insurance →
I love it when folks extend the ideas in What Would Google Do? to their own companies. Peter Cameron-Inglis imagines Googley insurance in a cooperative community:
A Chamber of Commerce could be a…
It has come to this →
At McSweeney’s Robert Lanham pitches his course in “Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era.” Course Description
As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering,…
My testimony to Sen. Kerry →
Not that I’ve been invited or will be, but if I were, here’s what I would say in testimony to Sen. John Kerry’s hearings on failing newspapers. (What the hell, after writing a fake speech for…
Quantum databases: what are they good for? →
Hu et al. just posted An efficient quantum search engine on unsorted database. They refer to an older paper by Patel (2001), Quantum database search can do without sorting. Apparently without…
I have in my hands a list… of dying papers →
Sen. John Kerry is going to hold hearings about the failing newspaper industry. To do what, exactly? Bail them out? God, no. So what’s the point? And who’s he going to invite? Newspaper people?…
More bloggers than CEOs? Heh. →
Mark Penn writes in the Wall Street Journal that there are now more paid bloggers than CEOs.
Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans…
How to initiate collaboration in science… with... →
You have read someone’s work and you have ideas about how to extend their work. You are also interested in working with them on your ideas? Or maybe you just want a copy of their latest work? Or…
And in this corner… →
This week’s Media Guardian pits me against Maureen Dowd over Google and newspapers. If they’d told me that, I would have found at least 10 too-cute-for-words coinages.
Optimist to a fault →
Here’s a Washington Post interview with me today, bringing out my optimism for journalism. Snippets:
Will journalism still make money?
I’m running a project on new business models for news to…
NewBizNews: Paid content models →
In the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, we will be fleshing out three kinds of business models to start:
* hyperlocal from the local perspective;
* a news ecosystem that comes after…
Defining the new economy →
I’m collecting links to thinking that tries to identify the essence of the new economy. In a stream-of-consciousness flow about just this, Brian Frank argues that we’re moving from an industrial…
The primary and secondary benefits of e-networking →
Social networking tools such as blogs, microblogs (Twitter), and Facebook, extend your communication abilities. The immediate benefits are threefold:
Increased broadcast capacity: you can now…
The newswire of the future →
Jackie Hai has a nice way to describe what follows the AP (my emphasis):
The AP syndication model works in an economy of information scarcity, whereas the web represents an economy of abundance.
On object lesson in walls →
I wanted to read about the news that former online publisher Steven Brill, former Wall Street Journal online exc Gordon Crovitz, and former cable exec Leo Hindery had teamed up to to create a…
Scouta.com closing to focus on recommendation web... →
Over two years ago we were very excited to launch scouta.com, a social web site dedicated to providing free media recommendations to the masses. However, the underlying business model was always to…
Abel Antón to Join the Strands Family →
Winning gold metals in the marathon at the 1997 and 1999 World Championships in Athletics, we’re extremely excited for Abel to join the Strands Family as a Marketing Director in Spain. In…
Biz Air →
I’m late to discovering Richard Branson’s plans to have entrepreneurs make video pitches, which he’ll then show to his captive audience: passengers. One wonders whether the ticket conditions…
e-Learning people: my top four →
For a prospective Ph.D. student, I prepared a list of the 4 people I follow in e-Learning. (This list is not meant to represent the most important people. It is just my personal list. It is in no…
MapReduce using Amazon's cluster and differential... →
Amazon recently launched Elastic MapReduce, a web service that lets people run MapReduce jobs on Amazon’s cluster. Elastic MapReduce appears to handle almost all the details for you. You upload…
Negativity: not shown, not present →
From an old paper of mine, note the message by eBay founder.
In fact, Resnick and Zeckhauser (2002) consider two explanations related to the success of eBay’s feedback system:
(1) “The system…
Designing Your Reputation System and Designing... →
Designing Your Reputation System
View more presentations from Bryce Glass.
10 practical questions for designing a reputation system. This talk was (partially!)…
Negativity: not shown, not present →
From an old paper of mine, note the message by eBay founder.
In fact, Resnick and Zeckhauser (2002) consider two explanations related to the success of eBay’s feedback system:
(1) “The system…
Designing Your Reputation System and Designing... →
Designing Your Reputation System
View more presentations from Bryce Glass.
10 practical questions for designing a reputation system. This talk was (partially!)…
No newspaper antitrust →
If newspapers try to collude to on pricing of their content, I hope we can get help to fight them on antitrust grounds. Any media groups ready to take this to court on the off chance that newspaper…
Media’s change-haters →
I wanted to get out of my growly phase this week, really, I did, but this just adds the cherry: The Atlantic and the National Journal poll an infinitesimal sample of mostly old-media farts (Kos…
Negativity: not shown, not present →
From an old paper of mine, note the message by eBay founder.
In fact, Resnick and Zeckhauser (2002) consider two explanations related to the success of eBay’s feedback system:
(1) “The system…
Negativity: not shown, not present →
From an old paper of mine, note the message by eBay founder.
In fact, Resnick and Zeckhauser (2002) consider two explanations related to the success of eBay’s feedback system:
(1) “The system…
Why are dynamic languages easier than static... →
Dynamic langages like Python or Ruby are considerably easier than static languages like Java and C++. John is asking us why:
How do you account for the huge increases in productivity that…
Its official: the standard programming language... →
Julian Hyde just announced that Oracle will support MDX: they were the last vendor to resist this Microsoft technology. MDX is to multidimensional databases what SQL is to relational…
1. Solve journalism’s data problem. 2. Kill the... →
First, a constructive proposal: News organizations need to band together — not to cut off their content, along with theirs noses, or to collude in antitrust cabals — but simply to set a new metadata…
Learning and the Social Web: A Call for Papers →
We are preparing a special issue for the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence (JETWI) on Learning and the Social Web. Send your papers before November 7th 2009. The full…