Category: Random, But Interesting

What would Google do…if it had tons more assets? Tim asks….

I’d call this article pretty obviously an attempt to get link cred….and I bit.

I don’t do gossip here. I tend not to write about folks’ personal lives. OK, OK, though. Yes, I did hear that Sergey got married (scroll down.) OK?

More like meat, potatoes, and vegetables….from SEL.

Good lord, has it come to this? That was my first thought upon getting off the plane here in Seattle, and seeing CNN – f*cking CNN! – running clips of David Hasselhoff reverse puking a Wendy’s Steakhouse Double Melt in a crowded airport during high rush hour (6 pm).

Yes, it has come to this. Why am I, defender of all things Internet (see my views on NBC making the Va Tech material available), offended by seeing on CNN what I can freely see on the Internet? This may not be in any way insightful, and I’m sure someone has put it far more elegantly, but it comes down to this one simple insight: What I see on the Internet, I *choose* to see, and in particular, I choose to see it *privately* – in other words, I see it when and how I want. But when I’m walking with 1000 other souls through a public thoroughfare, and a poor, sick, f*cked up man is losing his dignity on CNN, well, it strikes me the standards are different.

Even though we often watch alone, television is in esssence a shared medium. We watch it together. If it’s on, in a bar, on our homes, in our airports, well, it’s on for anyone who comes in the room. Collectively, we must form an opinion that individually, perhaps, we might form differently. We are forced to find common ground. And honestly, really, well, I don’t *want* to find common ground with a bunch of strangers in an airport about David Hasselhoff. No, really, I just don’t.

Read More

I met Elizabeth van Couvering while working on the book. She’s published a paper titled Is Relevance Relevant? Market, Science, and War: Discourses of Search Engine Quality.



For your Friday reading pleasure. From the abstract:

Fairness and representativeness, core elements of the journalists’ definition of quality media content, are not key determiners of search engine quality in the minds of search engine producers. Rather, alternative standards of quality, such as customer satisfaction and relevance, mean that tactics to silence or promote certain websites or site owners (such as blacklisting, whitelisting, and index “cleaning”) are seen as unproblematic.

At Mix earlier this week, Microsoft introduced Silverlight, a new approach to developing web applications. As I understand it, this allows developers the ability to code in native, PC languages like C sharp, bypassing the limitations of javascript and HTML. Scoble has interviews with folks claiming this will “change the web.” Will it? I honestly want to know your opinion…..

Via Digg, a photo essay on Life at the GooglePlex

Update: An astute reader notes:

These photos are originally from a TIME photo essay:

http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/inside_google/