If you've missed it, there's practically been a spy novel written over the past couple of days about Bing copying Google's search results. The whole thing started with a novella by Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, which related the tale of Google's honeypot trap to catch Bing in the act of copying its search results. Ever since, the two companies have been battling it out in public, accusing and denying, in blog posts, tweets and more blog posts, but one question still remains - what now?
Even if the move wasn't intentional on Microsoft's end, the end result is the same - Bing search results that more closely mirror Google's search results. One ex-Googler has some thoughts on how this can change how Google approaches search, which he shared earlier today on Q&A site Quora.
Five years ago this week I began writing for AOL's blog network Weblogs Inc. I wrote 5 technology news stories each day and was paid a mere $5 per article. It was grueling, that was just one of 3 jobs I had at the time - and it was great.
AOL's secret internal plan to ramp up its online content business was leaked today to New York business blog Business Insider and people are saying it's got "content farm" written all over it. In-house writers are expected to write 5 to 10 blog posts per day and those stories are expected to go from an average of 1500 pageviews per post today to an amazing 7000 views per post in the future. How will stories be selected? The only thing that will matter, apparently, is search engine friendliness and monetization potential. That might sound terrible to outsiders, but having been there I want to say: Good luck AOL, I hope that strategy works wonderfully for you. I genuinely do.
Large quantities of low quality content, of marginal relevance, intended to draw visitors through search, but drive them to click through ads to other sites - that's what's called a content farm. The voices of critics of Google are getting louder with allegations that the world's leading search engine has been thoroughly gamed and is now drowning in content farmed links. Content farm is a very subjective designation, though.
Search startup Blekko is betting that web users want to search without seeing results from companies that are pumping out low-quality content just for the ad revenue. But is one person's low quality content another person's more-accessible reading material? Today Blekko released a list of the top 20 domains that its users have clicked the "SPAM" button on in their search results. Content from those sites will never show up in a Blekko search again, the company says. What do you think of this list?
By now you've probably seen several reports about how Steve Jobs, 55, has taken a medical leave of absence to focus on his health. According to the New York Times, an anonymous source at Apple stated that Jobs had been looking "increasingly emaciated," and that he was on a "down cycle" leading up to his medical leave announcement.
It's well-known that Jobs had pancreatic cancer, a rare form called islet cell neuroendocrine tumor with an incident rate of 2 per 1 million people. He was originally diagnosed in 2003 and successfully treated with a variation on the "Whipple" procedure, called a pancreatoduodenectomy, on July 31, 2004. This procedure includes the removal of part of the stomach and small intestine, portions of the duodenum, the head of the pancreas, the gallbladder, the common bile duct and regional lymph nodes.
Word clouds: No doubt you've seen these graphic representations of the most commonly used words in a body of text, floating around the internet. They are especially popular after big political speeches. Thanks to IBM researcher Jonathan Feinberg's web site Wordle.net, word clouds are easy for anyone to create. To draw a loose analogy: Wordle has been to text analysis what Blogger or Facebook has been to online publishing - great tools to democratize what used to be an elite skill. Are there substantial limitations to this word cloud format that need to be taken into consideration, though?
New York University PhD student of political science Drew Conway thinks there are. Conway hosted an interesting debate on his blog this week about one of the key concerns about word clouds and he offered an alternate model for understanding bodies of text. He calls word clouds "spatial visualization wherein space is meaningless." That's hard to argue with. Check out one of the models he proposes as a possible next step of the word cloud's evolution.
Business social network LinkedIn filed to go public on the stock market today and is expected to be just one of a number of initial public offerings by tech companies this year. In a survey we ran on ReadWriteWeb earlier this month, 66.04% of respondents said they would consider buying stock in LinkedIn - but what have the professional analysts got to say about the opportunity?
Not a lot yet, it turns out. We've gathered some of the most interesting reactions so far below.
The rise of social media has led to an exponential proliferation of content online and widespread demand for tools to filter that information. Popularity and relevance are the most common metrics through which to filter that content - but are they the best?
We asked three people building cutting-edge social software what they think the relationship between relevance, popularity and filtering is going to be in the future. They offered three very different responses. What do you think the future of information filtering will look like?
Facebook's acquisition of Rel8tion, a stealth-mode startup out of Seattle, may hint towards the social network's growing interest in the local advertising space. Rel8tion was developing a system for matching up a person's location and their demographic profile with relevant ad inventory, according to AllThingsD, which was able to pull a bit of information off the startup's website before it turned into the mysterious black page that it is today.
While Facebook won't officially confirm what its plans are for Rel8tion's technology, it's pretty easy to decipher: location-based advertising. On mobile. Using your Facebook profile info.
In fact, speaking at the Inside SocialApps conference yesterday, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor confirmed the company's primary focus in 2011 is mobile.
The media world is changing fast. The latest anecdotal evidence of that: TV star Keith Olbermann left his post at MSNBC this weekend with zero explanation, yet he hasn't lost his access to the public's ear. Olbermann just Tweeted to his 200,000 fans on Twitter.
Specifically, he Tweeted that he's going to Tweet. At 8 PM EST tonight. Presumably about why he left his show so abruptly. Was it because of the Comcast/NBC merger the day before? Was it not that at all, but rather longer-running tensions between the star and management? We'll be able to hear it directly from the horse's mouth in just over 5 hours. In 140 character chunks.
Is a post-TV future becoming easier to imagine, because of the Internet? That's one question raised by the news that SpongeBob SquarePants, the undersea mega-star of stage and screen, will premier his newest show first to his 16 million fans on Facebook and then only later on the old-fashioned boob-tube.
On Thursday January 27th, SpongeBob (or his people) will post a five episode anthology of episodes to his Facebook page, facebook.com/spongebob. The content will be simulcast on Nickelodeon's mobile platform. Facebook is the perfect place to broadcast new content to a large audience, considering its combination of market penetration, dizzying time-on-site, the newsfeed subscription model and the social notifications upon each subscription.
