While outsourcing the halting problem might not get you very far, outsourcing PR may be the next new thing for retailers. Saul Hansell at the New York Times reports that Amazon is now promoting “user-generated public relations“: The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who [...]

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Fresh from reporting why he switched from Firefox to Chrome, CNET’s Stephen Shankland reports that Chrome has a larger market share than he expected: For comparison, here are the stats for The Noisy Channel, based on the last 30 days (note that stats don’t reflects users reading the blog through RSS readers): Firefox: 58.4% Internet [...]

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Michael Mitzenmacher has a great post this morning on a humorous attempt to outsource the undecidable halting problem to GetACoder.com, complete with advice from Georg Cantor.

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Ryen White and Eric Horvitz just published a tech teport on “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search“: The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and disease, and to provide them with feasible [...]

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Google just released some nice enhancements to Street View. It’s tempting to make Clippy jokes about their mascot, Pegman, but the Google Maps team clearly understands how to make an avatar non-invasive. Video tour below (narrated by Pegman, of course):

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Bruce Schneier had a a column in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago entitled “Why Obama Should Keep His BlackBerry – But Won’t“. He uses Obama’s BlackBerry dilemma to make the broader point that, we’ve moved from an assumption of privacy to a world where everything is recorded. His argument is that, rather [...]

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Since I’m taking a week off after Thanksgiving, I thought I’d be clever and schedule a week’s worth of posts to appear daily while I’m gone. What I didn’t count on, however, is that a bug in TwitterUpdater would post tweets as soon as I scheduled the posts, rather than when they were published. My [...]

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I just ran into an intersting post by Vidsense CEO Jaffer Ali entitled “Has Online Advertising Lost Its “Schwerpunkt”?”. Its premise : “Creativity and strategic thinking and planning have become subservient to technology under the guise of analytics.” Part of his evidence includes the how marketers evaluate advertising agencies:   In 2005, those marketers surveyed listed the order of [...]

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Thanks to Amir Michail for a tweet that alerted me to a technical report by Ingmar Weber, Stephen Robertson, and Milan Vojnovic on “Rethinking the ESP Game“. The ESP Game is a human-based computation game designed by Luis Von Ahn to tag images. Part of the his motivation for developing the game was that image tagging was [...]

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I’m an avid LinkedIn user and fancy myself an expert on search, so I was excited today to see that LinkedIn has officially launched its new search platform. I recommend you watch the four-minute video below to get an overview of the new features. First, the good news. The interface is slick and streamlined as [...]

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