photo: running rich
Aaron Swartz’s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came [...]
Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.
Following news that Yahoo! is joining the OpenID fray, it appears Google is dipping a toe in too. While those two giants work out their implementations, others are raising the temperature of the debate on IDM solutions. Stefan Brands is among the OpenID naysayers (David Recordon’s response), while Scott Gillbertson sees a bright future. [...]
I’ve been thinking about it since Troy mentioned to me that he thought Google was ruining his memory. And I thought I found confirmation of it when I read Gladwell’s description of Daniel Wegner, et al’s Transactive Memory in Close Relationships:
When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts [...]
Google Gears: create web apps that work offline
google, offline ajax, web development, ajax, offline, google gears
Thanks to Ryan Eby for tipping me to this. Go try it out.
Whatever you think of them, they do keep delivering.
I wonder if people will ask for stack-level photos of our libraries?
Google Maps, gmaps, Google, street-level photos
There it is in The Guardian:
Internet giant Google has drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.
Yep, “do no evil” Google has filed a patent on the process of building psychological profiles of its users for sale to advertisers.
Details such as whether [...]
O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference isn’t until the end of May, but Google just released two sweet new map-related features: GeoRSS support and MyMaps.
The GeoRSS support means that any application that can output it’s geocoding — as simple as <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point> — can now be linked to a live map with no more effort than it [...]
I was supposed to go to the what I think is a Google Apps roadshow this morning, but I was also supposed to be at code4lib this weeks and be doing a dozen other things that didn’t happen.
So, in lieu of that I’m reading up on the company’s first new business strategy since Adsense.
Phil Wainewright [...]
At a time when people are still wowing over the Google-YouTube deal (and wondering why their 2.0 company didn’t get bought for $1.6 billion), it’s good to know that Marc Cantor is dead down on it. Not because of the copyright issues or “limited” advertising potential of YouTube that others cite, but apparently because he [...]
When I heard news that Google was to release a spreadsheet companion to their freshly bought Writely web-based word processing app, I got excited about all the things they could do to make it more than just a copy of Numsum. Let’s face it, Google’s the Gorilla in the room here and they’re gonna squash [...]
Once upon a time Microsoft was the gorilla to beat. Once upon a time we thought Google could do it.
Perhaps not any more. Amazon has dropped Google’s search results from their A9 search aggregator in favor of Microsoft’s Live search, and while Yahoo!’s on again, off again partnership talks with Microsoft appear dead after Y!’s [...]
It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:
Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.
So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.
Here’s the quesiton:
Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by [...]
According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a [...]
