Wednesday, August 4, 2010 (busy day)

Today I 

• discovered I’m a patent holder (named in a patent granted to Quark)
• chatted with a friend about job #1
• spoke on the phone twice about job #2
• worked with Chuck Falzone to Alert Google about a Google Alert bug 
• marked the passing of Google Wave
• was served what looked like a Google Profile pop-up video ad (for Google TV)
• was invited to a LinkedIn Group, on accept noticed real-time updates & other innovations
• discussed videos about mathematics, physics, Feynman, N-dimensions
• continued yesterday’s thread about Iran’s ban on the teaching or playing of music
• spotted a suspicious search result for RDF TV: top result is RFD TV
• sent out a hot tip RE above to media pals, hope Richard Dawkins Foundation may be notified

I’m going to give myself a reward

Google Bike

Web War: Contemporary content battles and the future Web

UPDATE: in defense of Demand Media

Demand Media May Be Bad for Social Media, but Not for Journalism

The history of the Internet is being re-written so quickly it makes the future web a constantly moving target, even for the simple question “how will we access general information?”

(you really expect me to give up and go home?)

Overshadowing this issue is the way search engines crawl the Internet and rank pages on relevance. Google and Bing seem to be the two left standing. I remember having to sift through pages of AltaVista results back in the day. 

Search engines can be considered your primary filter for the Internet; but as they are bombarded with new content from “Content Farms” they — or we — must adapt. Some think “social search” will become the new primary filter, creating ad-hoc “ambient feeds.” These feeds would use human filtering to fight search engines defeated by 1) “SEO” gaming, or 2) drowning in a sea of mediocre content.

I already use Google reader, Twitter and FriendFeed for much of my content discovery; search engines are most useful when I need references for a topic I’m writing about.  However, it’s hard to imagine this solution working for the vast majority — who don’t “stay on top of” breaking news, and are happy enough with answers returned from any old portal like Yahoo.com or Ask.com.

Completely separate from yet completely bound up with the issue is business and profit, open collaboration and community and social issues, online public libraries and access to educational resources. Many blogs are profitable and growing, where news organizations are failing; some by federation and streamlining, some by ad revenue and huge traffic numbers. Some have started down the road of quantity over quality, and often echo each other, especially in the tech sector. This isn’t nearly as large a problem as that presented by “Content Farms” however.  The number of “hot stories” in the tech sector is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of different search engine queries at any given moment. The latter is what “Content Farms” aim to capture.

(if you don’t accept our low buyout offer, we will bury you until dead)

“Moderated collaboration or curated knowledge gardens”:

• Imdb (October 1990) — Film and television database started before the Internet as we know it today
• Wikipedia (January 2001) — Arguably the most successful open collaboration effort to date
• Stack Overflow (July 2008) — Upstart latecomer; programmer’s Q&A site with innovative “points” system

“Content farms”:

• Demand Media (May 2006) 
• Answers.com (January 2005) 
• eHow.com (April 2006)

(don’t let this happen to you)

Required reading

• RWW: Jay Rosen Interviews Demand Media: Are Content Farms “Demonic”?
• RWW: Richard McManus: Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
• Inquisitr: Duncan Riley: Why Demand Media is Good
• Inquisitr: Steven Hodson: The supersizing of content; or how we are turning the Web into an obese mess
• BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis: Content farms v. curating farmers

(live to fight another day)

Still images from 300 (film) Imdb link

Related Post: Expert Village Advanced Piano vs. Lang Lang with Orange

Bing image search: This explains all the hits

I’ve been wondering about all the image search hits I’ve been getting recently. Above is a screen capture linked to the bing search that generated it. Note that bing indexes my tags and associates them with the image, and provides full access to my blog. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this as yet.

Search customization for Firefox & Chrome

Firefox has a simple “Quick Search” mechanism (a.k.a. “Smart Keywords”)  that uses”special” bookmarks with a keyword and a token replacement mechanism. Then, when you type that keyword in the address bar, the rest of what you type is dropped into the bookmark’s location at the proper place. You have just made a custom search right from the address bar — you don’t have to navigate anywhere first.  Once this is set up to your liking in Firebox, switch to Chrome and “import bookmarks and search engines.” This will give you the equivalent set up in Chrome, without the need to edit a single thing.

Let’s say %s means “token replacement string” — then the magic web “locations” below simply tack on your search “tokens” to the end of a web address, making a search query:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=%s

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%s

The best part of using this feature in Firefox & Chrome is that the feedback in the address bar is immediate,  and you are reassured — and made aware you are doing a “special” search on some other site.

Here is the the “Bookmarks (quicksearch)” HTML file - suitable for  download and “Organize Bookmarks / Import HTML” in Firefox.  This file includes the set of 15 custom searches shown below, and nothing else.

I opted for the concise style, where the “bookmark name” tells you everything you need to know. If you want to change a bookmarrk’s keyword, change the bookmark’s name to match. Also, there is no need for a “description” field at all — the name says what it is, and how to use it.