BTW, I’m now a huge fan of Home Star Runner (flash required). My favorites so far are “Teenage Girls Squad” and “System Down”.

Very funny!

Who needs Saturday morning cartoons anymore?

Tim Bray quotes Sam Ruby’s observation of the tenaciousness of collaboration via a Wiki

“[Sam Ruby] speculated that this was like rugby, if we get enough people pushing in the same direction we’ll eventually move the ball in that direction.”

Indeed!

Like many other bloggers, I’ve decided to give Google’s AdSense a test run.

I suppose I’m most interested in the type of Ads that get served on subsequent posts. Specifically, the context matching of content to Ads. So far it seems to be working well.

However, I do wish Google offered more flexibility with the style and sizes of the Ads.

The latest in Tim Bray’s series on search

I think this one is the best yet. Here’s a quote:

“Consider what a really intelligent search engine would have to do. It would have to read an arbitrary selection of documents in an arbitrary selection of dialects and styles, and ascertain what they are about. Then, it would have to look at an arbitrary query, once again in an arbitrary dialect and style, and ascertain what it is about. Then it would have to match the about-nesses of the query against that of the documents and return the right documents.”

“…intelligence in search requires deep processing of human languages, which (many believe) is the single most important defining characteristic of human intelligence.”

Dyne:bolic is another bootable Linux distro that’s focused on “Media” application. However what makes this one special, in addition to the multimedia applications, is that it will boot on a PC or an XBox (yes, XBox!).

It’s not quite an Open Source version of the Tivo software on a bootable CD, but it’s getting there. (link via /.)

Today must be research Wednesday for me, because here’s another great article on search. This one, from the latest issue of DM Review,
is specifically talking about “Discovery Systems” in relation to BI:

“Leading enterprise search and classification vendors, including IBM, Verity, Inxight and Stratify, have recently introduced “discovery systems” designed to automatically identify important relationships and trends within documents and document collections.”

Some interesting quotes from this article on CNET News.com about Microsoft new search initiatives:

“The fact that Longhorn is on the horizon raises questions to whether search services will be integrated into the Longhorn experience and what the ramifications will be to other folks,”

“Microsoft’s target will be to create little perceived difference between Web search and local search,”

“Ballmer identified search as one area where Microsoft will offer “new end-user functionality and services.” As part of his “integrated innovation” message, he said the company needs to “reach out broadly” through search, consumer services and other avenues to grow.”

“If Microsoft holds true to form, signs of its custom search engine will soon proliferate. As the company proved with browsers, media players and so many other products, it has myriad distribution points at its disposal and can exploit them at will to increase usage and market share. Already, sources close to the company say that it plans to incorporate a search toolbar into the Internet Explorer browser that will use MSN’s new engine.”

Now that MSFT has much of their core services in check, I think it makes a lot of sense for them to focus on the unification of seach and the classification of unstructured and structured data at the file system level.

There’s a lively discussion on diveintomark about the road map for a new syndication format (i.e. a new version or RSS), which is in-and-of-itself a discussion of sorts on Sam Ruby’s Wiki currently known as Pie, but that name may change.

Wow!

I can hardly formulate a coherent opinion at the moment, let alone try to evangelize RSS to business associates and colleagues — as Tim Bray pointed out recently

I sure hope this settles down soon, because on the plus side all the talk seems to be generating quite a buzz around the potential of RSS.

I know I’m in it for the long-haul, I just hope businesses don’t get too put off by all the “chatter”.

Tim Bray posts his third in the series on Search. This one is on Precision and Recall. Here are a few good quotes:

“While precision and recall are very helpful in talking about how good search systems are, they are nightmarishly difficult to actually use, quantitatively. First of all, the notion of “relevance” is definitely in the eye of the beholder, and not, in the real world, a mechanical yes/no decision. Secondly, any information base big enough to make search engines interesting is going to be too big to actually compute recall ….”

“…while Microsoft is not, at the moment, a real force in the search community, that may change.”

Based on the recent comments by Senator Orrin Hatch (no relation) and the ongoing reactions, I remembered a quote of his I posted back in February of 2001, which implied that Senator Hatch (no relation) was coming to the defense of the fledgling granddaddy of MP3 swapping … Napster.

Here’s the interesting quote:

“The Napster community represents a huge consumer demand for the kind of online music services Napster, rightly or wrongly, has offered and, to date, the major record labels have been unable to satisfy,” (Feb 2001)

However, I suppose no one should be surprised by the flip-flopping of a politician, the irony or fallout, but I suspect or hope Senator Orrin Hatch (no relation) has an ulterior motive.

Perhaps he’s exposing the “marketing problem“.