langreiter.com plain, simple: 2008-01-03

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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2008-01-03

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6167 days AGO

Personalia in search:

Louis Monier (AltaVista, eBay, Google) joined Cuill's already-impressive roster (2007-08-06-dido).

Rich Skrenta & Co. are working on a search engine named Blekko.

2008-01-03-ps

"It's curious how the linguistically most diverse country in the world is Papua New Guinea - because it's also the place with the biggest biodiversity anywhere, one of the last places in the world where new species get discovered regularly."

2008-01-03-dual

Contextual ads in PDFs. Might be a not-too-shoddy way of earning some revenue through ebooks (back catalogs anyone?). Currently the ads a. work only in Adobe's Acrobat Reader 8 (which I generally advoid), b. come from Yahoo! and c. do reportedly (consequently?) fail to impress.^*

Kevin Kelly's announcement.

^* Maybe someone will ask Andrei Broder next week how Yahoo! pulls off the stunt of employing some of the top people in machine learning &c. and yet managing to be unable to put the slightest dent in Google's utter and (may I say) unhealthy dominance of the computational(ly enhanced) advertising market ...

2008-01-03-pdfad

Duncan Watts: "I am comfortable with the idea that the outcomes we get are often largely arbitrary. [...] We think there is something we can call quality and it is intrinsic to people and books, and it is timeless and the results we see in the world reflects this quality. If you find it disturbing that that is not how the world works, you should not become a sociologist."

In an extraordinarly interesting Washington Post article on current network dynamics research.

"The decisive factor, [Duncan & al.] show in a series of mathematical models, is not the presence of influential people but people who are easily influenced."

2008-01-03-arb