Jon Udell writes about how IBM are developing techniques to pour “through unstructured text looking for named entities (people, places, companies, or products, for example) and relationships among them”, thus allowing machine analysis of text without requiring people to tag their work with semantic markup.
Mmm, the semantic web sans metacrap. Delicious. I’ll take two.
FooCamp vs BarCamp
cat vs dog
Mac vs Windows (hee hee)
Coolest thing since sliced bread, this.
Rumour has it that Technorati‘s about to get snapped up by ‘a large search engine company’. Last time I blogged a rumour like this, it turned out to be true, but I can’t winkle even a single bit of data (neither a 0 nor a 1) out of my contacts at Technorati. Pfft. Trust me to hang out with such honourable people.
The guys over at Last.fm have have finally merged the Last.fm music playlist sharing and internet radio site with their Audioscrobbler.com site, which served the plugin that you need to make Last.fm work (fyi: my page). I spoke to them about that before Christmas, but sadly didn’t get the chance to work with them. What’s really cool about the new redesign is that they’ve added tags to the mix, so you can forget about all that horrible music taxonomy stuff and just tag stuff however you like. Plus there seem to be a lot more in the way of charts now, for the statistically obsessed. Good work, guys.
NYT article about the fact that one in six Americans now reads blogs, based on the Behaviors of the Blogosphere (PDF) report from comScore Networks, which I’ve downloaded but haven’t had a chance to read yet. I’ve a three hours train journey tomorrow, maybe I’ll get a chance then.
danah boyd blogs about the patterns she observes in bloggers’ linking behaviours, some of which are very interesting. A few of her comments, though, leave a little to be desired in terms of comprehension of existing technologies which address some of her problems with links – something Joe Clark ably discusses.
Is there a Moore’s Law of the Blogosphere?
The reason for asking that question is the announcement this week by blog tracker Technorati […], in its annual State of the Blogosphere report that the number of blogs in the world has jumped from 7.5 million in March to 14.2 million today.
In other words, in appears the blogosphere is doubling in size every five months. Or even more staggering — a new blog is being created out there somewhere every second.
Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors.
If Moore’s Law holds true for blogs, in three years we’ll have 2,000 million blogs. And I bet people will still be talking about ‘bloggers’ as if we are al the same.
Email is for old farts, apparently. How very apposite.
Tom Coates writes a great post asking why all the cool tech start-ups seem to be in America, and why there are so few of them here, despite the fact that the UK has some amazingly smart and inventive people. Comments on this post are a great insight, and I don’t just say that because I commented.
Technorati have now implemented language filtering for keyword searches, with their beta providing the opportunity to filter by Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese or Spanish. So, I can search for ‘pledgebank’ in all languages, or I can narrow it down to just French. Nice!
This is only a beta at the moment, but Dave Sifry tells me that they will roll out more languages in due course.