Category Archives: Uncategorized

Links: 6-20-2008

On A Scale of 1 to 5 – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Quote: "So, when we think about rating and reputation systems, the first question to ask is not, ‘Am I using stars, bananas, or chili peppers?’ but, ‘what risk is being managed?’"
(categories: reputation ranking ratings risk )

massless.org: Four Firsts for Feeds
Good stuff in here from one of the original Google Reader guys. Two things: a) Attention data changes attention and b) the Reader Trends stuff was done by someone in their spare time.
(categories: googlereader feeds rss social attentionstream attention atom feed )

scottberkun.com » Innovation by firing people
Quote: "Pure democracy is not the political system that will create the most change – it’s a system geared for stability, not for innovation." Great article on innovation.
(categories: business creativity innovation management democracy )
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement : Harvard Magazine
Seneca: "As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."
(categories: inspiration speech harvard commencement speeches failure imagination empathy )
Did Darwin Skip Over Email? – Foundry Group
Thoughtful blog post on the opportunities that exist for companies to make email more useful.
(categories: email social communication socialnetworks socialsoftware smtp )
Datawocky: How Google Measures Search Quality
Google "… employs armies of ‘raters’ who rate search results for randomly selected ‘panels’ of queries using different ranking algorithms."
(categories: google machinelearning quality search )
MSFTextrememakeover: Eight Years of Wrongness
A *long* blog post about Microsoft underperforming. Props to Writer at the end.
(categories: business microsoft software strategy )

Official Google Blog: Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility
HTTP headers that you can use to exclude / remove content from Google’s index.
(categories: google googlebot http robots.txt search )
Epeus’ epigone: How not to be viral
Four patterns for developing viral (not canerous) software: scatter, nuture, fruiting, rhizomatic.
(categories: marketing social socialsoftware viral cancer )
Ice Cream Cupcakes at Joy The Baker
Come on. Stuff like this shouldn’t happen. How am I supposed to get work done when somewhere, someone is enjoying an *ICE CREAM CUPCAKE*?
(categories: recipes icecream cupcakes istherereallyanythingbetterthanicecreamandcupcakes? )

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft
Microsoft finally gets into the game. I’m assuming that it’ll be free / included with Windows Server.
(categories: architecture cache caching concurrency distributed memcached memory velocity microsoft )
Reputation Parent – Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
Interesting stuff from Yahoo Developer Network on reputation. We’re missing ranking (where are you in relation to other users), collectible achievements and identifying labels.
(categories: patterns reputation social ux yahoo community )

The Big Picture – Boston.com
Cool blog from Boston.com that shows high resolution imagery from news stories instead of the small crappy stuff that news orgs usually show.
(categories: news boston.com images photography photos photojournalism journalism media )
Facebook | Engineering @ Facebook’s Notes
Facebook using Hadoop, their largest cluster is 2500 cpu cores w/ 1 PB of disk space. They can use a small subset of SQL in the mapreduce process.
(categories: hadoop facebook mapreduce datamining hive )