OK, for those of you who don’t recognize the Pearl Jam allusion, here are the lyrics and video. But most of all, congrats to Jeremy Pickens for jumping in to the blogosphere with his new blog: Information Retrieval Gupf. Most readers here who read the comments (note to RSS readers–you can and should also read [...]

[Read more →]

Like many bloggers, I learn which topics are “hot” from aggregators like Techmeme–which in turn automatically aggregate news sources from around the world (though lately they’re also receiving help from human volunteers). I’ve always thought this fell under the doctrine of fair use. But apparently neither the Associated Press nor the courts think so. As [...]

[Read more →]

The top story on Techmeme as I write is Randall Stross ‘s New York Times article, “Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big“. As Stephen Arnold notes, don’t read the article expecting to learn something new. Still, not everyone who reads the New York Times is current on the search industry, and the article does [...]

[Read more →]

Like everyone else who managed to get into the standing room only event (or at least everyone I had a chance to meet there), I had a great time at Times Open, the New York Times’s coming out party for its APIs. I won’t try to summarize, since Taylor Barstow has already done that superbly [...]

[Read more →]

Just wanted to let readers know that I’m attending Times Open, learning about how the New York Times is opening up its APIs to better engage the developer community.  Follow the day remotely (or non-remotely) in real time on Twitter!

[Read more →]

If you’re not in the  public relations industry or have not been emailing me your story ideas for The Noisy Channel, please feel free to skip the rest of this post. To those of you who have been sending me pitches for your companies or your clients, this post is for you. I’m flattered that [...]

[Read more →]

The other day, I was shocked to hear that Google was employing a pay-per-post stategy in Japan–precisely the sort of strategy they’ve historically condemned. I was certainly among those crying “hypocrisy”. Well, to his credit, so was Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. In fact, he didn’t just complain–his team did something about it. [...]

[Read more →]

OK, I’ve just started reading it–in fact, they’ve just started writing it! But, given the quality of comments on this blog from FXPALers Gene Golovchinsky and Jeremy Pickens, I’m expecting great things from the FXPAL Blog. Check out their recent post about “Recall-oriented search on the web“.

[Read more →]

Whatever else you might say about Google, they understand how to engineer web-scale systems. Check out Greg’s notes (or Michael Bendersky’s via Jeff’s Search Engine Caffe) about Google Fellow Jeff Dean‘s keynote at last week’s WSDM 2009 conference. Here’s the teaser from Greg’s notes: Jeff gave several examples of how Google has grown from 1999 [...]

[Read more →]

While we wait for Jason to iron out the bugs in his TunkRank implementation, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between TunkRank and retweet rank as influence measures. Here’s my thought: TunkRank assumes in its model that, if X reads a tweet from Y, then there’s a constant probability p that X will retweet it. [...]

[Read more →]