Category: Random, But Interesting

…I’d write long, overly analytical posts on these issues:

Metaweb. I spent some time with Danny Hillis today. What he’s trying to do is deeply important in terms of how the web is going to work – or not. I will write something soon, I promise.

YouTube. Man, this one is not going away, and there’s a lot to say about the new NBC/Newscorp thing. First, don’t pay attention to the content. I don’t think it matters. Pay attention to two things: One, the community – will it show up? And two, pay attention to the distribution they struck. Note how it’s all the folks on the web who are worried/terrified of Google? Uh huh.

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Who doesn’t love a good data visualization? This one’s a doozy. From the writeup on Seed:

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data.



Link to the big map. Thanks, Bill!

As many of you know, in a previous life I ran the Industry Standard. My partner in editorial pursuits was Jonathan Weber, a man I hold in very high regard. He’s running New West now, an innovative regional newssite based in Montana. He asked me to come to his New West Summit, and I certainly couldn’t refuse. It looks like a great event. If you have an interest in how the economy of the Rocky Mountain region is changing, I highly recommend it. And it’s not a bad place to be in June, I can attest to that. Jonathan is a consummate host!

I was in the Portland airport recently and I saw an image of a happy, professionally smiling face welcome me as I logged into the free wifi there. The image is at left.

It was very, very familiar. I felt like I had seen it, or rather, her, hundreds of times. Then it hit me. Once we can search by image, I mean, really by image, we’ll be able to find ALL the instances of this gal, all over the web. Imagine what happens once we can find every single stock image of glad handing corporate models? It’ll be just like it used to be, searching for “copyright (insert date here)” or “about us” back in the early days of text search. Ah, nostalgia!

We walked to the game, played a bit of catch in the stadium, then Bonds homered, Cain pitched well, some new talent showed off their bats, most of the vets stayed through the fifth, Benitez didn’t blow his save, it was sunny and gorgeous, and the “Lemonade Like Grandma Made” man signed a ball for my son. It doesn’t get much better than this.

This sounds cool.

gCensus.

First, check out Research Google, a CSE rolled by reader Chris that includes 160 or so Google related sites.

Then, check out cRANKy, which is “age relevant” search, thanks to reader Joel.

Well, no we didn’t, but as I’ve said before, when is Google going to gift the world with a non broken version of Alexa? Google Peter Norvig does a good job of anecdotally proving the obvious. (via another Googler, Matt Cutts).

For example, let’s look at the log stats for my site and for some of my friends who have recently published their stats for 2006. We list the actual number of visits and pageviews, and the Alexa numbers for reach and pageviews. The difference is quite profound.