Sitting in my chiropractor’s office the other day I read a fascinating article in the offline version of Businessweek: Math will Rock Your World.

In addition to finding out that using a laptop 12-14 hours a day can affect my spine, I also found out about the amazing rise of math in business, from analyzing clickstreams to tracking blog conversations. It seems Google and Yahoo already have next year’s math grads lined up for jobs. They simply cannot get enough brain power to do what they want to do.

Continue Reading: Mining the Two Types of User-Supplied Content

First, the podcast: Microsoft, Google, and the DOJ Privacy Case (7.21 MB mp3 )

During a meeting today at the Microsoft Search Champs Conference in Redmond, WA, Yusuf Mehdi, Senior VP of MSN Information Services, discussed the recent blowup involving the U.S. Government’s subpoena of personal information from major Search Engines including MSN, Yahoo, Google, and AOL. This was not the first time that the U.S. Government has requested information from corporations in this manner. It was, however, one of the most talked about, spurred on by a press release from Google, who announced that they had turned down the request. Soon after, it was revealed that both Yahoo and MSN has complied with it, casting an instant shadow over those companies. In response, Ken Moss, general manager of MSN web search, provided a few relevant details of the case on the MSN Search Blog.

Continue Reading: Microsoft Didn’t Give User Data to DOJ in Privacy Case (podcast)

I love reading Robert Cringely’s column over at PBS. He’s always got some amazingly interesting conspiracy or takeover theory that gets you thinking way beyond where you currently are.

Here I was imagining that Google would try to create a content platform with Google Base. Cringely, on the other hand, thinks Google is planting 20ft hardware boxes at 4.5 petabytes each at locations all along the Internet, to co-opt everyone’s data and put every other company on a platform below it, effectively taking over the Web. How do they do this? With their black fiber, of course!

That whole Google Office thing? That’s a laugh. It will be a small piece of their world-dominating technology. And he’s got links to get you thinking that he may just be onto something. I would love to be there when Larry or Sergei (the Google Guys) read this.

Cringely is either crazy, brilliant, or both. Whatever he is, he’s fun to read.

So Google Base launched today. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s been called an eBay and Craigslist killer among other things. Whether or not you believe that Google Base will have that effect, the anxiety it produces comes from the “item type” feature, which I find fascinating. Item types are simply content genres, or […]

Continue Reading: Google Base Item Types

Herbert Simon famously once said: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” This quote is turning into one of the mantras […]

Continue Reading: AttentionTrust – Returning Attention to its Rightful Owner: You

A great discussion came out of The Testosterone Meme by Shelley Powers, who wrote about her lack of confidence in the new aggregation service Memeorandum. Shelley (and several commentors) noted that the posts that become popular on Memeorandum tend to be A-List bloggers. The A-List bloggers tend to be men, and they tend to have […]

Continue Reading: Moving From Average Value to Personal Value in Search/News

Why is getting acquired all of a sudden a bad thing? That seems to be the new battle cry. Lots of folks are interested in the money side of Web 2.0. Charlie Wood, a great chap who I met at the Web 2.0 Conference, has created a blog to follow it all called, what else, […]

Continue Reading: Bubble 2.0 and Flock

There is a great I.B.M. commercial that was popular a year or two ago. In it a bunch of programmers and designers are eagerly surrounding a computer monitor that reports on a web application they just released. The team is happy, jovial, like all teams are during a much-anticipated launch. They get even more happy […]

Continue Reading: Scalability a Growing Problem in Web 2.0

Alex Barnett, whose blog I am enjoying more and more lately, asks a very important, but seemingly trivial, question to a recent post. In that recent post: A Social Revolution by Modeling Human Behavior, I said that Google models the way that we (humans) value content. Alex questions this by asking if I meant instead […]

Continue Reading: How Google Models How We Value Content

It’s easy to assume that Web 2.0 is a technological revolution, with acronyms like RSS, APIs, Ajax, and XML floating around. However, I think though technology has a central role to play, the real revolution isn’t technological, it’s people-based. Web 2.0 is a social revolution. A common view is that technology drastically changes the way […]

Continue Reading: A Social Revolution by Modeling Human Behavior