Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20121026124136/http://www.hyperorg.com:80/blogger/
I won the World Technology Award in the field of Media & Journalism for Too Big to Know last night in NYC. Awards are given from among a set of 5-7 nominees in each field, nominated by fellows of the World Technology Summit, which is to say, by previous nominees and winners. So, I’m proud ‘n’ happy. Thank you, WTA!
Actually, two. I also briefly saw Tim Wu, who won in the Law category. Not only was that richly deserved, but I can report that Tim looks like he was born to wear a tux. I’m a Tim Wu fan. (I inadvertently let out a “Woohoo!” when his name was announced and then was embarrassed.)
(Just to be clear, and also to re-boast, this is different from the Get Abstract International Book of the Year award 2b2k won a couple of weeks ago. Please allow me to woohoo myself!)
Gary Price from Infodocket is moderating a panel on what’s new in search. It’s a panel of vendors
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
The first speaker is from Blekko.com, which he says “is thought of as the third search engine” in the US market. It features info from authoritative sources. “You don’t want your health information to come from some blog.” When you search for “kate spade” you get authenticated Kate Spade fashion stuff. Slashtags let you facet within a topic, based on expert curation. Users can create their own slashtags. At /webgrep you can ask questions about the corpus that if upvoted the techies at Blekko will answer.
Weblib.com describes itself on its site as “Natural Language Processing Tools and Customizable Knowledge Bases for Semantic Search and Discovery Applications.” Thomas talks about OntoFind and semantic search, which is a search that produces “meaningful results even when the retrieved pages” contain none of the search terms [latent semantic search!]. He points to Google’s Freebase, which has info about 500M entities and their relationships. In a week you’ll be able to try OntoFind at ezu.com, I believe. Searching for big brother and privacy first asks you to disambiguate and then pulls together results.
ScienceScape.com is designed to help scientists follow science. It diagrams publications on a topic, and applies article-level metrics. It’s focused on the undergrad and graduate research markets. It integrates genomic knowledge plus much more. It lets you see the history of science top down, and browse e.g. by date. You can share what you’ve found.
If I don’t blog much over the next week, it’s because I’m doing everything I can to become an incubator of airplane-borne diseases. This morning I spoke at the excellent Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, then I’m on to NYC for the World Technology Awards, where Too Big to Know is shortlisted, then on Wednesday I’m in Chicago for Learning 3.0, where I’m keynoting plus arguing with Andrew Keen, then Thursday at Northeastern U. where I’m giving a breakfast talk on Open Access, and finally on Thursday night I’m going to the Genoa Science Festival for two days to give a talk and to support the Italian publisher of Too Big to Know. Ah, yes, just a typical week.
I’m on the first leg, and I’m already exhausted.
(And sorry that this is a braggy, self-centered, low-value post. I’ve decided I should do these occasionally. For example, it matters to me that because of 2b2k I’m one of five finalists for a technology communication award. I’m not proud that it matters to me — I’d like to be above it all — but it does.)
Categories: moi Tagged with: ego • travel Date: October 22nd, 2012 dw
Last week I paid a visit to my old PC store, ICG Computers, in Brookline. I hadn’t been there in maybe 5 years because I switched to Macs and thus spend time at the Computer Loft in Brighton. Also, when I was a PC, I was building my own computers out of components, so lots more went wrong (= I did lots more wrong). And, yes, I wish I could compile my own hardware and install the Mac OS on it. (Hackintosh scares me. Someday.) But, my remaining Windows machine crapped out last week, so I carried it to ICG’s small storefront.
Ray greeted me by name. Because no one else was there, we took the opportunity to catch up.
Ray comes from China and runs a quintessential American small business. He’s honest as the day is long, and could teach any bigger company about customer service. But it’s been a lean few years for ICG. Ray says that the recession hurt his primary customer base, small businesses. There haven’t been a lot of new businesses formed, so they’re not coming in to equip their offices. And, of course, the PC business has gotten commoditized. So, ICG relies on repairs and aggressively trying to beat the Internet on prices.
The walls of the store are lined with components. Then there are a few tables of new and used machines. He prices his used machines against eBay, and his new machines against Net low-ballers. As a result, you can get a power-packed laptop for $250 or $300. And you can do so knowing that Ray knows the tech and stands behind what he sells.
ICG is a great place to buy a computer. It’s also a great place to hang out and talk about tech. Ray knows my own level of expertise and talks at that level. No condescension, no salesmanship, no BS. I always learn something talking with Ray. In this case it turns out that my PC needed a new power supply, and the one I’d put in was under-powered. So, yeah, Ray upsold me, but I have complete confidence that he also right-sold me, so to speak.
Bunches of small, locally-owned computer stores have gone out of business here over the past few years. So have most of the larger stores. Remember EggHead? CompUSA? Me neither. And much as I love the Internet, I hate what it’s doing to the Rays of our town, who epitomize the best of small business. ICG is surviving and will continue to serve our community. But I want Ray’s business to do more than that. It seems unfair that honesty, expertise, friendliness, and low, fair prices aren’t enough for a business to go gangbusters.
2. Romney’s story about his Binder Women was utter BS. In fact, according to The Phoenix
in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.
They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.
His administration had fewer women than the national average.
For those keeping score, it’s now: Bullshit 3, Truth 0.
3. Joe Biden today wonders why Mitt had to search for “qualified women.” (If I weren’t on a train with crappy wifi, I’d post the meme: “Some of my best friends are qualified women. I have a binder full of them.”)
4. [Added an hour later] As plenty have pointed out, Mitt’s idea of supporting women last night was to give them flex time (wow, there’s an idea that was innovative 30 years ago) so they can go home and cook dinner. See ladies, you can? have it all! (Some brilliant analysis — and writing — by Binder Person Amy Davidson.)
5. I think this tweet from the Obama campaign sums it up well: @BarackObama: Last night, the President talked about women as breadwinners. Romney talked about them as resumes in ‘binders’. http://OFA.BO/AEWhjM
David Wood of 3RoundStones.com is talking about Callimachus, an open source project that is also available through his company. [NOTE: Liveblogging. All bets on accuracy are off.]
We’re moving from PCs to mobile, he says. This is rapidly changing the Internet. 51% of Internet traffic is non-human, he says (as of Feb 2012). 35hrs of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Traditionally we dealt with this type of demand via data warehousing: put it all in one place for easy access. But that’s not true: we never really got it all in one place accessible through one interface. Jeffrey Pollock says we should be talking not about data integration but interoperability because the latter implies a looser coupling.
He gives some use cases:
BBC wanted to have a Web presence for all of its 1500 broadcasts per day. They couldn’t do it manually. So, they decided to grab data from the linked open data data cloud and assemble the pages automatically. They hired fulltime editors to curate Wikipedia. RDF enabled them to assuemble the pages.
O’Reilly Media switched to RDF reluctantly but for purely pragmatic reasons.
BestBuy, too. They used RDFa to embed metadata into their pages to improve their SEO.
Elsevier uses Linked Data to manage their assets, from acquisition to delivery.
This is not science fiction, he says. It’s happening now.
Then two negative examples:
David says that Microsoft adopted RDF in the late 90s. But Netscape came out a portal tech based on RDF that scared Microsoft out of the standards effort. But they needed the tech, so they’ve reinvented it three times in proprietary ways.
Borders was too late in changing its tech.
Then he does a product pitch for Callimachus Enterperise: a content management system for enterprises.
I’m at the Semantic Technology & Business conference in NYC. Matthew Degel, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at Viacom Media Networks is talking about “Modeling Media and the Content Supply Chain Using Semantic Technologies.” [NOTE: Liveblogging. Getting things wrong. Mangling words. Missing points. Over- and under-emphasizing the wrong things. Not running a spellpchecker. You are warned!]
Matthew says that the problem is that we’re “drowning in data but starved for information” Tere is a “thirst for asset-centric views.” And of course, Viacom needs to “more deeply integrate how property rights attach to assets.” And everything has to be natively local, all around the world.
Viacom has to model the content supply chain in a holistic way. So, how to structure the data? To answer, they need to know what the questions are. Data always has some structure. The question is how volatile those structures are. [I missed about 5 mins m-- had to duck out.]
He shows an asset tree, “relating things that are different yet the same,” with SpongeBob as his example: TV series, characters, the talent, the movie, consumer products, etc. Stations are not allowed to air a commercial with the voice actor behind Spoongey, Tom Kenney, during the showing of the SpongeBob show, so they need to intersect those datasets. Likewise, the video clip you see on your setup box’s guide is separate from, but related to, the original. For doing all this, Viacom is relying on inferences: A prime time version of a Jersey Shore episode, which has had the bad language censored out of it, is a version of the full episode, which is part of the series which has licensing contracts within various geographies, etc. From this Viacom can infer that the censored episode is shown in some geography under some licensing agreements, etc.
“We’ve tried to take a realistic approach to this.” As excited as they are about the promise, “we haven’t dived in with a huge amount of resources.” They’re solving immediate problems. They began by making diagrams of all of the apps and technologies. It was a mess. So, they extracted and encoded into a triplestore all the info in the diagram. Then they overlaid the DR data. [I don't know what DR stands for. I'm guessing the D stands for Digital, and the R might be Resource]] Further mapping showed that some apps that they weren’t paying much attention to were actually critical to multiple systems. They did an ontology graph as a London Underground map. [By the way, Gombrich has a wonderful history and appreciation of those maps in Art and Representation, I believe.]
What’s worked? They’re focusing on where they’re going, not where they’ve been. This has let them “jettison a lot of intellectual baggage” so that they can model business processes “in a much cleaner and effective way.” Also, OWL has provided a rich modeling language for expressing their Enterprise Information Model.
What hasn’t worked?
“The toolsets really aren’t quite there yet.” He says that based on the conversations he’s had to today, he doesn’t think anyone disagrees with him.
Also, the modeling tools presume you already know the technology and the approach. Also, the query tools presume you have a user at a keyboard rather than as a backend of a Web service capable of handling sufficient volume. For example, he’d like “Crystal Reports for SPARQL,” as an example of a usable tool.
Visualization tools are focused on interactive use. You pick a class and see the relationships, etc. But if you want to see a traditional ERD diagram, you can’t.
Also, the modeling tools present a “forward-bias.” E.g., there are tools for turning schemas into ontologies, but not for turning ontologies into a reference model for schema.
Matthew makes some predictions:
They will develop into robust tools
Semantic tech will enable queries such as “Show me all Madonna interviews where she sings, where the footage has not been previously shown, and where we have the license to distribute it on the Web in Australia in Dec.”
I woke up this morning with this forming in my head. Afterwards, I realized it’s about my friend Michael O’Connor Clarke who died yesterday.
Evergreen
The yew that margins our yard grew so implacably large that it shoved off the walk mothers with strollers, and brought dogs to curse at its succor for squirrels. So, when the cold days set in I did what the Internet said and lopped and sawed and hemmed past its quick, revealing the brute as a pile of scratchy sticks without shape except where it ends.
Now my yew is catching leaves from more proper plants that have learned by falling that autumn is a lie that winter smoothly tells.
My deepest condolences to Michael’s family. I cannot express the joy he brought to anyone within earshot, and especially to his friends.
According to TorrentFreak, a leaked AT&T training doc indicates that starting on Nov. 28, if a customer is flagged 4-5 times for copyright infringement [according to faceless algorithms], AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon will block access to unspecified “popular sites” until the customer completes an”"online education tutorial on copyright.”
No, there’s nothing even remotely Soviet about continuous surveillance that judges you via a bureaucracy without appeal, and punishes you by blocking access to information until you come back from re-education camp. Nothing Soviet at all, comrades!
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that if Net Neutrality means that access providers don’t get to block access to sites, then this grotesquely violates the FCC’s Net Neutrality guidelines.
Paul Courant, one of the founders of the Hathi Trust, explains this week’s ruling throwing out a lawsuit by the Authors Guild claiming that Hathi’s scan-and-index program violated copyright.
