Blogging. The human-computer algorithm. The New York Times has published this ode to the algorithm. They write: Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends. The article is in a section titled "Artificial Intelligence - Computers and the Internet", but the focus of the article is the trend of algorithmically harnessing human intelligence -- the goal of Luis Von Ahn. They mention his Google Image Labeller, which is an explicit algorithm with human subroutines. A constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts.
Generally Wikipedia is thought of as an entirely human project, but is it a giant distributed fault-tolerant algorithm? For other takes on this article, see here. 34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network. A few weeks ago we posted 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network, a review of several hosted, do-it-yourself white label social networking solutions. Conspicuously missing from that round-up were many additional companies that specialize in the creation of social networks. These companies were intentionally overlooked in the first post because we wanted to focus on self-service websites.
In this second post, we cover these remaining companies, all of which offer either made-to-order solutions or downloadable software. When reviewing Ning, KickApps, et al., I was able to test the products first-hand by creating social networks from scratch and for free using online wizards and tools. Testing this second post’s solutions was more difficult because they all require the formation of business relationships and/or local installation and configuration. (Update: Awareness has been added to the chart, raising the total to 35) 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network. An error occurred with this part of the page, sorry for the inconvenience. The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websit...
YouTube removed two videos from its platform showing Tesla drivers using their own children to conduct vehicle safety tests. The tests were meant to prove that Tesla’s Autopilot and “fu... Tesla will increase the price of its “full self-driving” beta software, the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), in North America to $15,000 on September 5, CEO E... In its five years as a standalone automaker, Polestar has placed into production two vehicles and announced the delivery schedule of four additional vehicles.
Welcome to The Interchange! Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Hello hello! Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. Welcome to The Interchange! How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words! The Downside » Blog Archive » Amazon forges yet another beaten p. I guess Bezos is getting tired of the ecommerce biz – Amazon has just released their Askville Social Q&A service, a competitor to sites like Yahoo Answers, MSN Live QnA, and my own Answerbag(which predates all of them, incidentally. Not being snippy, just pointing it out so the title of this post doesn’t sound hypocritical.) I suppose for Amazon it’s opportunistic – they saw it work at Yahoo Answers, so they did it themselves, and they have enough traffic already to make almost any social service work.
(I won’t pretend that they were imitating Answerbag, the smaller, nimble competitor!) The bummer is that they really didn’t add much to the concept. It works essentially the same way as Yahoo Answers and MSN’s service, but it’s actually even more limiting – when someone asks a question, only 5 people can give answers, and then those five people are the only ones who can evaluate the answers and decide which one is the best.
They’re probably right. ShareThis.