I think we've all heard now that Jimbo Wales has set his sights on creating a search engine to rival Google, Yahoo and the rest of the gang. It is currently under development as Wikia Search (but I'm guessing the…
Read More Open Questions on Wikia Search, Advertising, and User Privacy
Citing the absence of an acceptable return on investment, Earthlink announced that they are halting all new (and not-yet-completed) municipal wi-fi projects, which presumably includes the problematic San Francisco project (in partnership with Google). I have two initial reactions: First,…
Read More EarthLink to Stop New Municipal Wi-Fi Programs Citing Lack of Profit
The Jan van Eyck Academie in beautiful Maastricht, Netherlands is hosting a forum on the French information technology project Quaero, its political agenda, and the new frontiers that appear if its initial questions are to be taken seriously. For the…
Read More Quaero Forum: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine
The title of this post is the headline from a story in today's Wall Street Journal (non-firewall version here), detailing how the largest web search engines are starting to make changes to how they handle the data collected from their…
Over the past few months, I've grown to be a fan of Facebook (here's my public profile). I'm not sure why, but there seems to be quite a few of my professional colleagues on this social network, and I've come…
Read More Facebook Forces You to Describe Your Friendships (with 14 convenient labels)
I'm paraphrasing from this odd letter Peter Fleischer sent to the Financial Times in response to a fashion article about men's suits & ties. The key passage: Men should lose their "business attire" and wear T-shirts to work. Wouldn't you…
Read More Google’s Chief Privacy Counsel: “Don’t trust fat businessmen”
In a bold, unilateral move, the web search engine Ask.com has announced it will soon be implementing a new product called AskEraser which promises to allow users to erase their search history: With AskEraser, people can ensure that their search…
Today I gave an abbreviated presentation of my dissertation research at the OII Summer Doctoral Programme hosted by the Berkman Center. (PDF of slides) Along with a summary of the diss, my talk included a brief meta-discussion of both the…
Read More SDP2007 Presentation: The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine
Taking contextual advertising to the next logical level, it has been reported that a recent patent filing indicates Microsoft want to develop an advertising framework that uses applications and data on one's computer, rather than one's actions on the Web,…
Read More Microsoft Seeks to Use Application and Hard Drive Data to Sell Ads
Google announced today they are changing the expiration date of their cookie from 2038 (the latest possible date) to a rolling 2 year period. Once put into action, users who visit Google today, for example, will receive a cookie that…
Read More Google’s Cookie to have 2 Year Expiration (Because it is of little value after that time)
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