Patent on Flickr’s “Interestingness”

Yahoo! has filed a patent about the “interestingness” as ranking measure of media objects. There are 15 independent claims for a total of 77 claims. The patent was published on October 26, 2006.

photo by hi-tekznologik

United States Patent Application: 0060242139

Interestingness ranking of media objects Abstract Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as “interestingness.” These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

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Technorati Tags: Flickr Interestingness patent

About Volvo taking advertising risks with Google video ad format

Interesting reading from a non-search-engine viewpoint on web advertising.

A New Advertising Engine - washingtonpost.com

Google’s strategy is to bring the math and science that fueled its search-engine ad success to other forms of marketing. The company’s existing text-ad system allows advertisers to see how many people click on each ad and pay only when someone clicks, helping advertisers calculate the return on their marketing dollars. Eventually Google hopes to offer similar metrics for online video ads and off-line campaigns, though it is still in the early stages of figuring out how those might work.

By applying technology to measure their impact, Google plans to differentiate its banner and video ads from those of its competitors. Teaming with online research firm ComScore Networks Inc., Google is trying to correlate the effectiveness of each ad by tracking the number of people exposed to it who later perform searches about the product.

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Technorati Tags: Volvo Google advertising video

Centralized and Decentralized Internet

O’Reilly Radar > Real Sharing vs. Fake Sharing

Google has been a key enabler of the decentralized nature of the net — they make other sites more visible, distributing attention, rather than concentrating it. But some of the newer sites, and the newer applications from Google and the other big guys, are increasingly aimed at centralizing user activity and user data.

I’ve been concerned about this switchboard vs. repository issue.

These are unresolved issues, and I do worry that the YouTube acquisition moves Google’s model from switchboard to repository, and I’m not sure that’s good for the company’s DNA.

What folks like Larry remind us, though, is that even people of good will need to be reminded from time to time about the choices they face. Web 2.0 is still a work in progress. We can get it right, or we can screw it up.

Let’s not forget the hyperlink.

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Technorati Tags: centralized decentralized internet

About Windows Live Writer

Another blog clients for improving the writing experience.  Currently, I use a mix of Deepest Sender and direct editing thru the WordPress’ Write Page editor (in plain mode). I will be testing Writer and see if it enters the mix.

Install was smooth and Live Writer has properly recognized my WordPress hosted blog. This post is written from within Writer  and the image below, found thru flickr storm is dragged directly from the flickr page:  nice!

photo by scingram 

On the bad side, it takes ages to boot.

First test over.

UPDATE: Live Writer fails to log into a custom installation of WordPress.

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Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer Blogging Client

Feed and Weed. And the greenscreen

Techcrunch » Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary:

A couple of weeks ago Michael Arrington got together with a number of startup CEOs and executives to video a discussion about Web 2.0.

Save yourself 24 minutes zapping and watch this.  And you can get to see the faces of those guys too.

Pictures in Gmail

I  don’t know if this is new (it is for me), but there is a new feature in Gmail that lets you associate pictures to your contacts and for yourself (and control who sees it).

A picture’s worth a thousand words With contact pictures in Gmail, you can pick ones for yourself, see which ones your friends have chosen, and set certain pictures to show up for specific people in your Gmail account. Best of all, you can even send picture suggestions to your friends. Learn more We’re in the process of rolling this feature out to all users, so keep an eye out for it in your account! 

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Technorati Tags: Gmail pictures

Golden Week

It is Golden Week in Japan. Ergo, I am on a long holiday.

Sparse incremental feed reading:

• : barter in a world of ubiquitous information and access [via Micro Persuasion]
• is an open feedback system (with open API) to build online reputation and trust and helps to find, rate, and evaluate buyers and sellers [via Techcrunch]
• Talk: call from your mobile via your home PC Skype. Presumably good for international calls, especially if and when a roaming service will be available to let you choose from which PC you get your callback [via TechCrunch]
• nsoftware has opened the beta version of Desktop Server to the public.
• Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience, mentioned that there would be a couple of big announcements next Wednesday at the annual Google Press Day: Google Health beta coming? The alleged data center where you can peek at it belongs to Google Inc. [via Micro Persuasion]
• Seth Godin on What to write…when you don’t know what to write: If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything.

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Technorati Tags: RentAThing SoonR RSSBus Google Health RapLeaf

Google Maps Mini Viewer

Google Maps has added a mini viewer in the lower-right corner of the window. It gives a mini view on a larger area than that displayed in the main window, and can be used to scroll around. Compared with Yahoo! Maps beta, it is smaller, does not have a zoom control and scroll is not as smooth; placement in the lower-right corner seems to be a better user interface decision as the mini viewer does not get in the way when you are visually navigating the larger map.

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Technorati Tags: Google Maps Yahoo! Maps beta

Parasites of the Blogosphere: an AdDense problem

This morning I was reading the Veoh Vs Video Bloggers post on Om Malik’s Blog; it is about unauthorized videoblog’s content acquisition and republishing. I followed the link to the We The Media website where the story is more detailed and I recommend reading this as it gives you enough information for start making up your mind about this rising phenomenon.
What phenomenon? Om Malik called it credit-less remixing or Wholesale Blog Plagiarism, or in other terms, the activity of the parasites of the blogsphere. A parasite is defined as

1. Biology. An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
2. 1. One who habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others without making any useful return.
   2. One who lives off and flatters the rich; a sycophant.

which fits very nicely in the observed behaviors.

Again, reading the posts on GigaOM and following the links therein will give you a better picture.

Am I not myself a parasite? I try not to be. I do feed on a number of blogs, but I try to contribute some and give credits. It may be that someone drops on my blog (maybe using the Next Blog » thing of wordpress) and gets to know about this story from here, but then she is likely to go to the sources and proceed from there. Next time she will first look at the sources, at the guy at the bottom.

It is not just a matter of rightness and intellectual property, it is also a matter of money. Om Malik writes:

Clearly, these sites ONLY exist because they can make money from Google AdSense.

How all this embroils Google is further discussed here and here and somewhere else.

How to spot para-sites?
If someone is stealing content to hope making money with Google AdSense, she may rearrange the text to look different and that can make hard for a computer program to detect counterfeit that would be obvious to a human reader (at least to those knowing the original). But synthesis ought to be as complex as analysis is, that is to say changes in text (content) will cause changes in both Google search’s results and what AdSense understands about the meaning of your content. As Google puts it:

Google’s complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult.

So it is likely that the keywords that command how Google grasps the meaning of contentbe still there (in the counterfeit).
Let us call O the original content and C its counterfeit and say they are AdSense Equivalent, that is O and C generate the same set of eligible advertisers, A, on their respective ad spaces. In other terms, AdSense(O) = AdSense(C) = A and the set of all contents is partitioned into AdSense equivalence classes.
Now imagine that given a set of eligible advertisers, B, it would be possible to determine the set of contents CB that generate B, that is AdSense(cb) = B, for each cb in CB. We may call it the reverse AdSense or AdDense : AdDense(B) = AdSense⁻¹(B) = CB.
Finally, consider a (new type of) PageRank™ that ranks identities or consumer-generated URLs (and not just the hosting site). Let’s call it a URLRank.
Now we have all we need (so to say) to determine and rank the guys at the bottom of an ad.
The process would flow as follows (user U drops by on URL U1 where content C is hosted):

1. AdSense generates a list of eligible advertisers, A, for the ad space on (U1,C).
2. AdDense generates the equivalence class for A: ECA = AdDense(A).
3. URLRank ranks all contents in ECA.
4. The set of URLRank-ranked contents {C, ECA} compete for authority on A.
5. monetization of Ads by Google on U1 is computed in real-time based on the ranking calculated in step 4: the less authority (U,C) has on A, the less its monetization is set.

The naive idea is that AdSense should generate less earnings on counterfeit content by introducing (fair) competion among the potential owners of an ad space.
A zero-sum game variation could also be considered where the earnings for the current AdSense program would be distributed across the set {U, ECA} (see above) according to the authority. If things work well, para-sites may start contributing something to the survival of their host.

Ok, stop dreaming and back to work.

technorati tags: Splog Sploggers Google AdSense

Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service

’s Simple Storage Service is another step forward to the Web as Platform. Read more about it on TechCrunch, where there is also a link to a post about Google Drive.

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon S3 / Amazon Web Services

Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.