| BusinessWeek’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web |
|
Actually, it’s really 27 –the article counts Sergey, Larry and Eric as one human unit. Hive mind? For the most part, I’m OK with the list. I must confess that I’m not real familiar with some of the people who made it. Others, I’m not too fond of: Ariana Huffington and Jon Stewart. And it beats me why Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang are on the list. They’re faaaaaading. I’m also wondering why they chose Cheryl Sandberg instead of Mark Zuckerberg. (”25 Most Influential Adults on the Web”, perhaps?) And I’d have liked to see John Battelle and/or Michael Arrington there, as well. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
Comments (0)September 29, 2008
| Resistance Is Futile, You Will Be Google-fied |
|
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a long — more than 4,400 words! — piece on the Google Hive Mind. According to the article: “Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company’s direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they’ll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do.” It’s a great Google Turns Ten article. You should take a few minutes and read it. … And now for the opposing point of view: John Battelle thinks that “the hive mind that really matters is the triumvirate of Sergey [Brin], Larry [Page], and Eric [Schmidt].” |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| Facebook Gets Some Adult Supervision |
|
The LA Times reports that Facebook has hired Theodore W. Ullyot, former chief of staff to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as vice president and general counsel. The article discusses other members of Facebook’s management team, particularly Sheryl Sandberg, who was hired away from Google. Getting a group of adults together to help run the company — geeze, Mark Zuckerberg’s still only 24! — was inevitable once Microsoft decided to dump some money into Facebook. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| The U.S. Government, Brought To You By Google [UPDATED] |
|
Interesting article in today’s Washington Post about how Google has set up a Washington DC office in order to evangelize government agencies about the merits of Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Docs. The article mentions how Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer of the District of Columbia is in the process of switching all 38,000 employees over to Gmail. (Here’s a related article from PC World with more info.) The WP article gives a shout-out to Gmail’s “built-in spam filters and virus scanners [which cut] down on server maintenance costs.” I’m still using Yahoo Mail as my primary non-work account. This is partly inertia — I’ve been with them for like 10 years — and partly paranoia — I don’t want all my eggs in Google’s basket. But Gmail has many useful features. Here are two of my favorites: encryption and remote sign out. This all ties into a book I’m currently reading, which I’ve promised to review soon: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr. Update, 12:50 pm – Software guru Richard Stallman says you’re stupid if you use cloud computing apps. You gonna take that lying down? |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| I Have a Gub. Abt Natural. |
|
Yesterday the NY Times published a short piece about how, as of the end of last year, U.S. cellphone subscribers are sending more text messages than making calls. From the article: “Teenagers ages 13 to 17 are by far the most prolific texters, sending or receiving 1,742 messages a month, according to Nielsen Mobile. By contrast, 18-to-24-year-olds average 790 messages. A separate study of teenagers with cellphones by Harris Interactive found that 42 percent of them claim that they can write text messages while blindfolded.” I can confirm these numbers. My 14 year old son sent/received 2,600 text messages in July. (Just don’t call him. He sounds like a caveman on the phone — mumbling and making lots of other monosyllabic sounds.) My daughter, who just turned 21, sent/received 800 texts in July. (She’s the verbal one.) And my son does, indeed, claim that he can text without looking. However, a lot of his text conversations resemble this scene from Woody Allen’s movie “Take the Money and Run”, in which the incompetent criminal Virgil is trying to rob a bank: Teller: What does this say? |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| The ABA Section of International Law: Leading the World's International Lawyers since 1878 |
 By Robert E. Lutz III, Aaron SchildhausThe ABA Section of International Law: Leading the World’s International Lawyers since 1878 chronicles the founding, seminal events, distinguished leaders, and significant accomplishments that have shaped the 130 year-history of the Section of International Law. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
|
|
Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Digital Content Coordinator
|
September 26, 2008
| Guess Who’s Missing |
|
The NY Times reports that 3 of the top 4 U.S. Internet Service Providers have told Congress that they will develop a set of “best practices for behavioral advertising and information collection”. In other words, you will have to give them permission to scan your packets in order to dish up relevant ads. The ISPs are AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon. Who’s missing from the list? Go ahead and click on the link to the article. Then click on Edit-Find in your browser and type “comcast” in the search box. It’s not there, right? Hmmm … 14.4 million subscribers need to pay attention to stuff like this. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| A Bit O’ Shameless Self-Promotion |
|
I’ve written an article on next-gen search engines. It was published in The Legal Intelligencer on Tuesday, and it’s now made its way to law.com. Enjoy. BTW I have another article from May of this year, on encryption, available from law.com as well. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
September 25, 2008
| Wink Links to Half a Bil |
|
People search engine Wink now has now indexed 500 million profiles from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. I blogged this week about how I use Wink to look for people who don’t show up in White Pages searches (scroll down to the “Snip!” article.) When I show Wink in classes, I often get attorneys who say, “Hey, I can’t find my Facebook profile.” So knowing that they’ve updated their index, I performed a totally unscientific test. (Science not being one of my strong points anyway.) I searched for the 11 Jenkins librarians who admitted to having either a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile. I got hits for 4 of them, a 36% success rate. All them were for either Facebook or LinkedIn. (I haven’t yet found someone’s MySpace profile.) So Wink’s not a magic bullet. But then again, there are no magic bullets in Web search. You have to use multiple tools. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| More Copyright Pushback [UPDATED 2x] |
|
A couple of weeks ago I began reading and thinking about how much effort corporations are putting into the “command and control” of what we get to see and do on the Web. I decided to start following copyright cases. At first, I only cared about how copyright would affect Google/YouTube. But lately I’ve started to take an interest in file sharing cases. Which leads me to the following news items from today: Capitol v. Thomas: Judge Orders New Trial, Implores Congress to Lower Statutory Penalties for P2P Last October, Jammie Thomas was held liable for infringing the copyrights on 24 songs she made available via Kazaa. Damages totaled more than $200,000. The judge in the case, Michael J. Davis of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, decided that he had erred in one of his instructions to the jury — where he told them that they could find Thomas guilty of “unauthorized distribution” even if the plaintiff couldn’t prove that anyone actually downloaded the songs — heard additional arguments from both parties, and ultimately called for a retrial. He ruled, “… the plain meaning of the term ‘distribution’ does not including making available and, instead, requires actual dissemination.” Additional coverage from Wired. Update, 10/16: The RIAA is appealing and wants the judge to stay a retrial. Update, 10/27: Another U.S. District Judge in Texas ain’t buying the “making available” defense. DoJ to Senate: don’t make us be Big Content’s copyright cops This past Tuesday, Keith B. Nelson, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the DoJ and Lily Fu Claffee, General Counsel of the Commerce Department sent a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which they expressed strong opposition to Senate Bill 3325, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008. According to the letter, the bill “not only authorizes the Attorney General to pursue civil remedies for copyright infringement, but to secure ‘restitution’ damages and remit them to the private owners of infringed copyrights.” This “could result in Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources. In effect, taxpayer-supported Department lawyers would pursue lawsuits for copyright holders, with monetary recovery going to industry.” Track the bill’s progress via THOMAS. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
RSS