June 2009
Links for 2009 06 29 →
Al Jazeera Labs is Testing Ushahidi - The Ushahidi Blog
Al Jazeera testing Ushahidi, the Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and…
Google on Google →
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I got up to a mic to ask Eric Schmidt a question. No, it wasn’t, “what would Google do?” I wanted his reaction to a notion I’ve talked about here that has crystallized…
China blinks →
I said in What Would Google Do? – and argued the point in a talk at Google in Washington – that Google and other technology companies have more influence than they know – and should use it – in…
The need for – and risks of – government... →
At yesterday’s Personal Democracy Forum – where I was in the unfortunate position of speaking inbetween two of my favorite geniuses, danah boyd and David Weinberger – I sang the obvious hymn to the…
Links for 2009 06 29 →
Al Jazeera Labs is Testing Ushahidi - The Ushahidi Blog
Al Jazeera testing Ushahidi, the Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and…
Links for 2009 06 29 →
Al Jazeera Labs is Testing Ushahidi - The Ushahidi Blog
Al Jazeera testing Ushahidi, the Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and…
New Google study on speed in search results →
Googler Jake Brutlag recently published a short study, “Speed Matters for Google Web Search” (PDF), which looked at how important it is to deliver and render search result pages quickly. …
Help us help hyperlocal news →
For CUNY’s New Business Models for News Project, we would be very grateful if local blogs and sites filled out a survey to give us data in our analysis and modeling of the economics of hyperlocal…
First, kill the lawyers – before they kill the... →
Following the frighteningly dangerous thinking of Judge Richard Posner – proposing rewriting copyright law to outlaw linking to and summarizing (aka talking about) news stories – now we have two…
The $1M Netflix Prize has been won →
An ensemble of methods from four teams has passed the criteria to win the Netflix Prize. Other teams have 30 days to beat it, but, no matter what happens, the $1M prize will be claimed in the…
Netflix competition is over? →
The Netflix competition is a $1 million research competition to improve the Netflix movie recommender system by 10%. A large team called BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos just announced that they won….
The King of Twitter →
Reporters have been calling today looking into the importance of Twitter and social media in the two big stories of the month: Iran and Michael Jackson. Have we come to a next step stage in social…
Posner’s dangerous thinking →
Mike Masnick on techdirt points us to some dangerous and incomplete thinking from Judge Richard Posner on his blog. At the bottom, Posner writes:
Expanding copyright law to bar online access to…
Beta-think: Live work →
Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff says the future of computing will be like Twitter – that is, live, not batched. “Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be…
Spoiling the paid party (again) →
Paid Content reports today that The New York Times Companies’ Martin Nisenholtz is talking about charging for the paper’s mobile app.
On the face of it, this seems to make sense: People are…
Drowning upstream →
Here’s what I think is a pretty solid business tip: I wouldn’t back or bet on a company and industry that’s described this way in today’s New York Times (my emphasis):
Like newspaper owners,…
Physical tools to improve research productivity →
Using the right tools can improve your productivity:
I use black gel pens with a large to medium point. Right now, I favor uni-ball 207 pens.
I always carry a pocketbook. I use it to collect…
Is mobile search going to be different? →
In an amusingly titled WWW 2009 paper, “Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my!” (PDF), a quartet of Googlers offer some thoughts on where mobile search may be going. In particular, based…
User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization... →
User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization conference (UMAP) will be in Trento from today up to Jun 26, organized by Fondazione Bruno Kessler. UMAP is the most important conference for…
User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization... →
User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization conference (UMAP) will be in Trento from today up to Jun 26, organized by Fondazione Bruno Kessler. UMAP is the most important conference for…
State coverage as a worthy charity →
There’s nothing unsexier in journalism than covering state government. “Trenton bureau” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Paris bureau,” does it? Do you know the names of your statehouse reps?…
Oh, to be the Economist →
When newspaper people in the U.S. aren’t wishing they were the Wall Street Journal – “well, they can charge” – they aspire to be The Economist.
Dream on.
I just got email announcing The…
Defending public as a journalistic doctrine →
In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even though what Google captures is the very definition of public: what can…
Adding value in the new news ecosystem →
How can and should news organizations and others add value to the new news ecosystem that is being used in the Iran story?
Or to put the question another way: The New York Times keeps talking…
The responsibility of knowledge in news →
I tweeted a few minutes that I wish YouTube itself would be curating and featuring video from Iran because only it is in the position to know whether the video came from Iran and whether it is a…
New Business Models for News Project →
The New Business Models for News Project is now well underway at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. Here’s the blog and below is the post explaining our work:
We at…
‘No longer the province of elites’ →
In a Guardian interview, UK PM Gordon Brown says that the internet changes foreign affairs forever:
He described the internet era as “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social…
User economy v. consumer economy →
I’m fascinated with the services that are popping up in Italy - and now, I see, in the U.S. - enabling people to rent instead of buy things and to rent out the things they have: to share, in…
No thanks →
I’m getting email pitches - filled with legalese - to contribute to Dan Abrams’ awkwardly named Mediaite (guess all the good URLs were taken). This is the same Dan Abrams - lawyer, thus the…
Optimizing broad match in web advertising →
A paper out of Microsoft Research, “A Data Structure for Sponsored Search” (PDF), has a couple simple but effective optimizations in it that are fun and worth thinking about. First, a bit of…
Trust crevices and crannies →
The advantage to mankind of being able to trust one another, penetrates into every crevice and cranny of human life: the economical is perhaps the smallest part of it, yet even this iS…
Layar and see the world through your phone through... →
Layar.eu is a new ‘Augmented Reality Browser’ for Android phones. Forget everything you’re used to about searching the internet, Layar throws that all away.
By holding your phone in front…
The API revolution →
It soon will be - if it not already is - known as the Twitter revolution in Iran. But I’ll think of it as the API revolution.
For it’s Twitter’s architecture - which enables anyone to create…
Diversity initiative and blind audition and female... →
From the Office for diversity initiative at Columbia University:
Social psychology research has found that both men and women are more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant…
Links for 2009 06 16 →
Calvino’s invible cities and their web of relationships
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the…
Trust crevices and crannies →
The advantage to mankind of being able to trust one another, penetrates into every crevice and cranny of human life: the economical is perhaps the smallest part of it, yet even this iS…
Layar and see the world through your phone through... →
Layar.eu is a new ‘Augmented Reality Browser’ for Android phones. Forget everything you’re used to about searching the internet, Layar throws that all away.
By holding your phone in front…
How much can you do with one server? →
At a time when many of us are working with thousands of machines, Paul Tyma provides a remarkable example of how much you can do with just one. Paul runs the clever Mailinator and Talkinator…
Is Open Access publishing the solution? Really? →
Back when I was a consultant, I had client who was convinced that Microsoft Windows was free software. So, he insisted that all applications ran on Microsoft’s web server. To him, the Apache…
Links for 2009 06 16 →
Calvino’s invible cities and their web of relationships
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the…
Diversity initiative and blind audition and female... →
From the Office for diversity initiative at Columbia University:
Social psychology research has found that both men and women are more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant…
Beta life →
Three apparently unrelated items on the shift from valuing the product to valuing the process as the product:
* Trendwatching tells the story of what it calls “foreverism” - that is, that things…
Buy the Globe for the price of a Globe →
David Carr surveys a series of alleged experts to try to determine the market value of the Boston Globe, now that it’s finally up for sale (oh, if only they’d sold it when they could have). He…
Atul Gawande on Social Structures in Medicine →
Atul Gawande has a terrific article in the New Yorker about how the way doctors organize themselves into social groups affects the effectiveness and cost of the medical care. (I first got…
Some shameful facts about myself →
In 2003, I predicted that it would take decades before videoconferencing became cheap enough for home users.
I do not know my own telephone number or postal code, though I have lived for many…
Distributing investigations →
I’m delighted that the Associated Press is going to distribute the reporting of four nonprofit investigative news organizations: the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting…
Social networking 4 your business →
I presentation I gave on June 10th 2009 at Trentino Sviluppo, local agency in charge of developing local businesses. It is about the how and why (and why not) of using social networking systems…
Social networking 4 your business →
I presentation I gave on June 10th 2009 at Trentino Sviluppo, local agency in charge of developing local businesses. It is about the how and why (and why not) of using social networking systems…
Death to the 3-hour exam →
As an undergraduate student, I hated the 3-hour exams. But I knew how to do well on them. The secret? Get your hands on all exams from the last ten years for this class. Sit down for a couple of…
When innovation yields efficiency →
Much of the innovation we’ve seen lately hasn’t led to growth but instead to efficiency - that is, shrinkage.
I’ve been mulling over Mike Mandel’s cover story in last week’s BusinessWeek, in which…