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Who’s Saving The Web?
Gary has a list of sites that are archiving the web. Cool……
Gary has a list of sites that are archiving the web. Cool…
Category: Random, But Interesting
Predictions….
Remember my predictions for 2006? Well, this one is getting close to number 1…. From IWantMedia: Nickelodeon Lets Youngsters Make Own Cartoons Viacom's Nickelodeon is making available on its Web site technology that allows young fans to make cartoon mashups of different scenes from favorites like "SpongeBob SquarePants" and…
Remember my predictions for 2006? Well, this one is getting close to number 1….
From IWantMedia:
Nickelodeon Lets Youngsters Make Own Cartoons
Read MoreI Knew I Was Reading My Stuff Too Much
Eric Schmidt on blogs while speaking in England: "The average blog has one reader: the blogger". Damn, I'm caught out. Update: Interesting response to Eric's talk here from Micah Sifry – Eric was giving a speech to the annual meeting of the conservative party in Britain, Micah covers all…
Eric Schmidt on blogs while speaking in England: “The average blog has one reader: the blogger”. Damn, I’m caught out.
Update: Interesting response to Eric’s talk here from Micah Sifry – Eric was giving a speech to the annual meeting of the conservative party in Britain, Micah covers all things digital democracy…
The Information Factories
This month's Wired has a long piece (not up, but will be soon) by George Gilder on the "information factories," the massive server farms that Google, Microsoft and others are building up in Oregon and in other places about the globe. I read it (and the rest of the…
This month’s Wired has a long piece (not up, but will be soon) by George Gilder on the “information factories,” the massive server farms that Google, Microsoft and others are building up in Oregon and in other places about the globe. I read it (and the rest of the magazine) on a trip to NY over the weekend, and found the piece singularly frustrating.
Gilder has always been a shiny eyed fetishist of the first order, and he keeps the breathless pace up with this piece, which does a good job of laying out they why of the plants (cheap power, “peta” processing efficiency, etc.), but fails utterly to even engage in the consequences of having the world’s data stored in top secret high security locations owned by private companies with little if any transparency about how that data might be used. What about the social impact? Privacy, reconstruction of relationship of self to society, policy, data rights, etc.? Irrelevant in this blinkered paen to boundless techno utopianism. Even as I love blinkered paen to boundless techno utopianism, I’d expect more from Wired on an issue of this significance.
Conversational Ads
Cisco is trying something new in an ad campaign – they came up with a Wikia (the commercial version of Wikipedia) definition of "The Human Network", the catchline to their current campaign, and asked a bunch of authors to pen their own definitions. They also purchased advertising on those…
Cisco is trying something new in an ad campaign – they came up with a Wikia (the commercial version of Wikipedia) definition of “The Human Network“, the catchline to their current campaign, and asked a bunch of authors to pen their own definitions. They also purchased advertising on those authors’ sites. This was done in collaboration with FM, and I think it’s a neat spin on what folks like Snap and Symantec have done. I contributed my own definition here. Obscure Jesuit priests? Yep, I did edit that piece in Wired so long ago….
(and thanks to Louis Rossetto for the inspiration!)
(and thanks to Louis Rossetto for the inspiration!)
Shit Howdy.
Ten years ago, if a Martian from the future visited me at the offices of Wired, and told me that Microsoft would be announcing this, I'd have run him out of the building. No, wait, I would have interviewed him and put him on the cover, come to think…
Ten years ago, if a Martian from the future visited me at the offices of Wired, and told me that Microsoft would be announcing this, I’d have run him out of the building. No, wait, I would have interviewed him and put him on the cover, come to think of it.
Sure, not surprising to us at the moment, but really, think about what Microsoft was back in the 90s, and what this means now. From the LiveSide post:
At Advertising Week 2006 in New York, Microsoft is set to unveil a new unified global advertising initiative. Under Digital Advertising Solutions, advertisers will be able to more easily reach customers by packaging Microsoft’s products, including Xbox, MSN, Windows Live, Office, Windows Mobile, and Microsoft TV under one advertising solution….Clearly Microsoft is not only targeting Google and Yahoo with this advertisement push, but also TV and print media as well.
8 Years Old
My daughter is eight. Google is eight. Somehow, it all makes sense to me now….
My daughter is eight. Google is eight. Somehow, it all makes sense to me now.
Merchant Full Circle
Earlier today an odd thing started to happen – new comments started pouring in on a months old post I wrote on MerchantCircle, a local business search play. Apparently today the company started automatically calling merchants in its listings database, and what MerchantCircle had to say really upset any…
Earlier today an odd thing started to happen – new comments started pouring in on a months old post I wrote on MerchantCircle, a local business search play. Apparently today the company started automatically calling merchants in its listings database, and what MerchantCircle had to say really upset any number of business owners. Apparently in the call MerchantCircle informed the business owners of their relative rankings and reputation in the system, regardless of whether or not the news was good. As one might expect, if your entire livelihood is in your small business, and an automated system leaves you a voicemail telling you that there is an “unfavorable review” of your livelihood, why, you take that personally.
So what do you do? Well, you fire up Google and do a search for “Merchantcircle,” of course. After all, you want to know what is up with this company, which you’ve never heard of, and Google is always your first stop. And who has the third link on Google, and the first non MerchantCircle related link? Yup, Searchblog. You read my (not very deep) thoughts on the company, and then notice there is a comments section. AHA! A chance to take action is born, and action is taken.
As more and more comments pile on, the site author (that’d be me) takes notice, and I sent an email to Ben Smith, the CEO, alerting him to the issue. Ben has responded that he’s on it.
Read MoreGoogle Plugs In
Google is pushing for more efficient power cords for PCs. Totally random, seemingly, but a fine idea. From the Times: The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense — by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC’s running eight hours a…
Google is pushing for more efficient power cords for PCs. Totally random, seemingly, but a fine idea.
From the Times:
The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense — by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC’s running eight hours a day, it will be possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California’s energy rates.
Read MoreClickPrints
Clickstreams – the essential building blocks of the Database of Intentions – may have characteristics unique to each person – a "Clickprint", as this report from Wharton calls it. From Gary's post excerpting the paper: “We address the question of whether humans have unique signatures – or clickprints -…
Clickstreams – the essential building blocks of the Database of Intentions – may have characteristics unique to each person – a “Clickprint”, as this report from Wharton calls it. From Gary’s post excerpting the paper:
“We address the question of whether humans have unique signatures – or clickprints – when they browse the Web. The importance of being able to answer this can be significant given applications to electronic commerce in general and in particular online fraud detection, a major problem in electronic commerce costing the economy billions of dollars annually. In this paper we present a data mining approach to answer this ‘unique clickprint determination problem.”
The paper is reviewed in Wharton’s online publication. What I find rather irritating in the coverage (I have not read the paper yet) is there is precious little discussion of privacy issues, and none of government abuse. It strikes me that at the end of the day, these are the two most important issues facing the deployment of such a technology. Who knew your keyboard and mouse, in essence, are transferring your fingerprints across the web?