August 2009
Supporting the new news ecosystem →
Friend Mark Potts is announcing a new company today, called GrowthSpur, which will help support what I believe will be the future ecosystem of local news. You can read about it at Jon Fine’s…
WWGD? brought to life →
There’s little I love more these days than seeing people bring the precepts of What Would Google Do? into their realms. I just hope I’m right and don’t lead them astray.
Here’s a post by Arild…
July 2009
Microsoft and Yahoo, kissing behemoths →
It looks like we have a Microsoft-Yahoo deal. If you smack two amorous giants together enough times, I guess you are going to get a love child. I doubt Google has much to fear from the laggard…
Links for 2009 07 29 →
Great screenshot (jpg) of the upcoming trustmap.org
(tags: trustmap, trust, jpg, screenshot)
apophenia: Would the real social network please stand up?
A call for more…
Facebook versus Google? →
Greg Sterling has some good thoughts on why Facebook and Google are not in competition:
Currently the use cases for Facebook and for search are quite different. Facebook is entertaining, Facebook…
Pay = “mass delusion”: Schiller →
I know I’m a day late, but I can’t resist quoting Vivianne Schiller, head of NPR and former head of NYTimes.com, in Newsweek on paid content. Mind you, she is one of the few executives in the…
Google's thin client distraction →
Recently, Chris O’Brien at the San Jose Mercury News wrote:
It’s getting harder every day to articulate what Google is. Is it a Web company? A software company? Something else entirely? It’s not…
Links for 2009 07 26 →
Changehowwepay.com: paypal opening the platform and asking for ideas (crowdsourcing) - How will you change the way we pay?
We’re opening our platform and we’d love to hear your feedback on…
Another industry disintermediated →
Here’s another industry opened up by the internet: mutual funds and financial advise.
Covestor – a company in which I have a small investment – just introduced its new multi-managed account…
A next generation in Ann Arbor →
(First, full disclosure: I consulted for Advance Publications on its project in Ann Arbor and worked for the company for a dozen years as president and creative director of its online arm,…
Guardian column: Charity v. collaboration →
My Guardian column this week expands on an idea I discussed here, about viewing charity to news organizations as collaboration in the news ecosystem. The kicker: “Charity is likely to be a…
Netflix game gets exciting: BellKor’s Pragmatic... →
This is fun. A month ago, I asked whether the Netflix competition was over. After BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos merged the solutions of many players to break the 10% barrier, I expected them to win….
Google and Virgin to conquer Mars … opensourceing... →
Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars, by Google and Virgin.
The vision is heavily based on Open Source and Crowdsourcing. Clever move, both from PR perspective and…
How (and why) to replace the AP →
The Associated Press is becoming the enemy of the internet because it is fighting the link and the link is the basis of the internet. From Richard Perez-Pena’s New York Times story today:
Tom…
The death of snail mail & Sunday papers →
The Washington Post reports that “in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in mail volume in its 234-year history…. That downward trend is only accelerating….
How to handle an ass (like me) →
I want to love my cable company – honestly, I do. They bring me things I love and depend upon. I love TV. I really, really love the internet. (The phone? Well, I love that, too – but unfortunately…
Designers as Activitists? →
Since I started riding the bus to work, I’ve gained about 80 minutes of reading time a day, and lately I’ve been reading recent issues of interactions. I’ve found many of them quite interesting,…
Links for 2009 07 22 →
Trust No/Every One | The AppsLab
“When we inject trust into the equation. It’s altogether different. I have an implied social network I live and breath within at Oracle. They are not only…
Amazon Erases 1984 →
In a “too delicious to be true” story, Amazon has used one of its Kindle’s features to erase copies of the book 1984 from their customer’s devices. Yes, that 1984, the one about the futuristic…
The Netflix Prize and the MovieLens Data Sets →
Hello all. We’ve been asked by several of the Netflix Prize teams if they can use the MovieLens datasets in training their algorithms. The answer is yes! We’re happy to encourage algorithmic…
Links for 2009 07 21 →
i.document » Blog Archive » TwittARound
an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3GS. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of video see-through effect…
Links for 2009 07 20 →
Obama’s data and Clarke’s first law » Contrordine compagni
Vivek Kundra, the first-ever White House Chief Information Officer, time ago switched the District’s 38,000 employees from…
Hyperlocal sites: Please help →
Hyperlocal sites of any flavor: Please help us with the New Business Models for News Project and fill out our survey. Last chance before we start compiling data. The information will be kept in…
Charity or collaboration? →
The New York Times has accepted free stories from ProPublica. It has endorsed a journalist getting help from the public via Spot.US to underwrite a story that might appear at NYTimes.com. And…
Cablevision sucks →
Well, but that’s not news, is it? Everybody knows that.
But that hit home – again – tonight when I returned after three days away to find our internet not working. I called Cablevision and after a…
A few things American academics should know →
I sometimes get annoyed at Americans who seem to think that the rest of the world is modeled after them. Here are some things many American academics seem to take for granted:
Professors are paid…
What FriendFeed got wrong →
Don’t you feel sometimes like your brain is running out of storage space? Myself, I am very forgetful. I always seek new tools to extend my brain.
FriendFeed is a fantastic social networking…
Determinants of faculty research productivity →
Should you hire Ph.D. graduates from top schools in your country? Maybe not:
The present analysis however dispels the notion that graduates of high-status doctoral programs in the discipline of…
When news people lose sense →
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber predicted that “almost all” news organizations will be charging in a year just because they need to. Meanwhile, former McClatchy news exec Howard Weaver …
Bone growth as a metaphor for Wiki-work →
In the human body, there are two groups of cells that manage the production and refinement of bone. Osteablasts create new bone while osteaclasts break bone down. These cells are constantly…
Reinventing BusinessWeek →
A few years ago, BusinessWeek’s Steve Baker and I sat over coffee concocting a scheme to create a crowd-sourced, wiki-based, curated effort to get the magazine’s readers to fix General Motors. Oh,…
The failure system →
Brian Frank riffs on yesterday’s post on the license to fail and argues that our standard for success should not be perfection but instead “generativity”:
… instead of evaluating things on…
Share your great mistakes →
In the comments on the post below, John Caddell says he started MistakeBank so people could share their valuable booboos. Fascinating idea.
So what are the great mistakes you’ve made that…
Pedagogy, innovation and convenience →
Organizing learning around courses implies the creation of groups and a tight control by professors. It is convenient to organize students into classes, and grade students by topics. Industry-based…
Tripping the future →
In an Economist interview, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg says “the leading news organisations have a stake in web-only newspapers not working because they will accelerate the decline of the large, if…
The license to fail →
The only hand I remember getting at the Personal Democracy Forum was when I suggested that government must be granted the license to fail – and we’re the ones the grant it – so it can have the…
Now the FCC cares about journalism →
First John Kerry and then the FTC fretted about journalism and what government should do and now FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is swinging his worry beads. CNSNews.com (I hadn’t heard of it…
Time effects in recommendations →
The best paper award at the recent KDD 2009 conference went to Yehuda Koren’s “Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamics” (PDF). The paper is a great read, not only because Yehuda is part of…
Links for 2009 07 12 →
Facebook | Social Data Revolution
Andreas Weigend, Former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, teaches a course on Social Data Revolution at Stanford and at Berkeley and put the two classes in…
Links for 2009 07 12 →
Facebook | Social Data Revolution
Andreas Weigend, Former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, teaches a course on Social Data Revolution at Stanford and at Berkeley and put the two classes in…
Metadata for news →
The Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust (never heard of them) have proposed a new standard for metadata for news.
Depending on its use and intent, I think it’s a good idea to add…
Links for 2009 07 10 →
10 Rules That Govern Groups « PsyBlog
Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about the dynamics of group psychology.
(tags: Psychology, …
Training the crowd as journalists →
In the Philippines, the ABS-CBN TV network has been training citizens – 1,000 in the first recent class, 700 in the next – to report on the upcoming election there. They call it the Boto Mo…
It ain’t over →
It wasn’t Craig’s fault. It was the internet’s. Almost $10 billion in annual newspaper classified revenue has disappeared (since it’s 2000 high, versus 2008) and it was essentially replaced by an…
Links for 2009 07 08 →
Facebook’s Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users
+513% increase in your (gran)parents (age 55 or more) creating accounts on Facebook
…
After Netflix? What next? →
The Netflix competition is nearly concluded. We have learned that ensemble methods are the solution for more accuracy.
The recommender system community moves on. Immediate questions come to…
Links for 2009 07 08 →
Facebook’s Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users
+513% increase in your (gran)parents (age 55 or more) creating accounts on Facebook
…
What Google Would Do →
Is Google’s OS the end of the OS – the long-predicted moment when Google and the web take over the PC? Or is it merely the disruptive OS throwing marbles on the floor for Microsoft and to some…
Ad fatigue and relevance →
At the recent Ad Auctions Workshop, I had a paper (PDF) and talk (PDF) that argued for discounting relevant advertisements more than we currently do. To briefly summarize, if seeing bad ads…
Pretending not to. Social networks as covers (both... →
Great paper by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Harvard Business School) “Networks as Covers: Evidence from business and social On-line Networks” . Amazing which patterns everybody can unveil when…