The Art, Science and Business of Recommendation Engines. By Alex Iskold In October last year, Netflix launched an unusual contest. The online movie rental company is offering 1 million dollars to anyone who can improve their recommendation engine by 10%. Netflix is known for its innovation and bold moves and in the grand scheme of things, $1M is not a lot of money for such a business. The competition is still running (it "continues through at least October 2, 2011"), so is this a publicity trick or an attempt to do research on the cheap?
Is better recommendations something that Netflix really needs or is it just nice to have? Today Netflix is facing a challenge from the awakened giant BlockBuster, so it is certainly looking for a competitive edge. A great recommendation system can retain and attract users to the service. Browsing and Recommendations A good recommendation engine can make a difference not just for Netflix, but for any online business. During browsing, the user's attention (and their money) is up for grabs. Beyond Amazon. WikiMatrix - Compare them all. List of social bookmarking services. The Talented Mr Twitter at MINGER.NET - The Long Tail of Web 2.0. I got interviewed by a writer for a business magazine on Friday about Twitter . Fittingly, Twitter's the only service I use regularly of the dozens of new Web2.0 social or communications sites, but paradoxically, it is also the one that I've yet to dedicate even a whole paragraph of writing.
I had dismissed Twitter as a flash mob-type fad and resisted attempting to understand this multi-headed hydra. I'm a big fan of Ries and Trout market positioning , and I keep their lessons in mind when I look at any service. They advocate the power of simple, clear positioning in the mind of the consumer. Whether Twitter will turn out to be a mere fad or find legs and break out is something for the market to decide. So what is Twitter? Social Networking System Chatroom Microblogging Multiplexer Group Communicator RSS Feed Salon Meme MLM Salon Social Networking System Works well. The unit of currency on Twitter is the message. Twitter multiplexes the mode of messaging. Chatroom, Public Timeline Meme, MLM. Syntax across languages. Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea. Introduction Connotea [1] is a free online reference management and social bookmarking service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group [2]. While somewhat experimental in nature, Connotea already has a large and growing number of users, and is a real, fully functioning service [3].
The label 'experimental' is not meant to imply that the service is any way ephemeral or esoteric, rather that the concept of social bookmarking itself and the application of that concept to reference management are both recent developments. Connotea is under active development, and we are still in the process of discovering how people will use it.
In addition to Connotea being a free and public service, the core code is freely available under an open source license [4]. Connotea was conceived from the outset as an online, social tool. Usage has grown over the past several months, to the point where there is now enough data in the system for interesting second-order effects to emerge. 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. The future of Digg-like websites. New social content websites are appearing every day, but I don't see any of them gaining a really big following. I've done a little research to find if there is a secret ingredient that can make a new social content website successful. If you've compare the traffic of the big 5 social news sites - Digg, Reddit, Care2, Netscape and Shoutwire, like I did in my Top 5 social news sites roundup, you can see that the top 2 are growing.
Care2 seems to be slowly losing momentum, Netscape's real quality traffic is indistinguishable from the huge amount of traffic they get on their name alone, while Shoutwire seems to stall (and if they keep having 2-3 days old articles on the front page, they'll probably start plummeting pretty soon). But what about the newcomers? Are there still some cookies left for them, or have the big ones scooped the entire bowl, leaving only scraps for the little sites?
First of all, let's divide these sites into some broad categories so we can notice the trends easier. Social Networks Research Report. Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison | ConsultantCommons.org (beta. Yahoo: Time to Kill Off Flickr, del.icio.us and Other Web 2.0 Br. The big news over the weekend is the publication of an internal memo by Yahoo senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, dubbed the 'Peanut Butter Manifesto'.
The crux of it is that Garlinghouse says Yahoo as a company is unfocused and has too many product lines that cross over. Here is how he described it: "I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. To stretch the peanut butter metaphor a little, Yahoo's peanut butter consumption is making it unhealthy and flabby. Google eats peanut butter too, but it is muscling up!
The funny thing is, the 'peanut butter' issue is exactly Google's problem too - remember a few weeks ago when Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted publicly that Google had too many products and was trying to do too much? Products: Integrate web 2.0 into mainstream. What are Trackback/Pings? As the newb on these forums, I'd like to contribute to a further elaboration of usage?! Let's pretend that John writes an article about CarWax on his blog. He explains the pluses and minues, etc. the brands, makes, techniques, etc.
Mike, who also has a blog, reads the article on Johns blog. So Mike writes about his new car, and how he loves to pamper and baby it with CarWax. Mike writes his own blog article 'inspired' by the one originally written by John. Mike is kind enough to use the trackback URL provided by Johns blog. On Johns blog, he receives the PING from Mikes blog associated with his CarWax entry.He is delighted (quite ecstatic) that someone sent a trackback ping. ... fast forward X amount of months later ... Mary, Josh, EvilRedEye, WikiWilly, and RobitussinRobbie all have written a blog entry of their own discussing the DOs and DONTs of carwaxing, washing, detailing, etc. << i hope i was able to explain in a real-world type scenario how this works. The 4 F's | Church of the Customer Blog. Amp; Blog Archive & Troubles in. The incredibly successful news site Digg has hit a few speed bumps recently.
Digg is a news site that promotes news stories, submitted by users, to its home page based on votes by other Digg users. If a story is “dugg” by enough users, it goes to the home page and a lot of traffic is directed to the link in the news story. In addition to the recent targeting of Digg’s business by AOL when they turned the massive netscape.com property into a digg clone, a number of people have recently complained, loudly, about the ability for groups of users on Digg to get a story to the home page, or removed from the home page, by acting as a group.
Political blogger Michelle Malkin was one of the first to complain that groups of conservative or liberal Digg users were acting to remove posts from pundits on the other side. To some this is troubling because it removes the supposedly democratic nature of Digg. Today Digg co-founder Kevin Rose responded to these complaints. Huge List Of Free Online File. Web Host Directory: The best free source o. Yahoo vs. Google, round two - August 21, 2. Yahoo vs. Google, round two The company took a beating last month, but CEO Terry Semel tells Fortune's Adam Lashinsky that he likes its chances against Google, YouTube, and MySpace. (Fortune Magazine) -- The year since Yahoo topped Fortune's list of the 100 Fastest-Growing companies has been a rough one for CEO Terry Semel. Investors pummeled Yahoo's stock - it fell 22% in a day - when he announced in July that the company would delay by three months the introduction of its new search-advertising system, code-named Panama.
The new technology is supposed to narrow the gap with Google (Charts), which delivers its advertisers far more revenue per click in search results, and Wall Street has begun to have doubts about Yahoo. A year ago Fortune said you had a "bold master plan to transform Yahoo into the 21st century's first media titan. " Yes. What's an example of depth? Yahoo Music. Isn't Apple's iTunes far bigger than Yahoo Music by revenue? We're not in that business. They've grown quickly. Management à la Google. OReilly Network -- What Is a Wiki (and How. By Tom Stafford, Matt Webb 07/07/2006 Wiki A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects. In this Article: Somewhere, in a dimly lit classroom, a library bench, or in a home study, some lucky so-and-so is writing an essay from beginning to end with no notes.
A wiki is a website where every page can be edited in a web browser, by whomever happens to be reading it. Wikis Work for Big Projects This article was written using a wiki, as were most of the 100 hacks in our book, Mind Hacks. Wikipedia builds on transparency, simple linking, and a low barrier to entry for crowds of people to be involved in editing and authoring. What It's Like to Use a Wiki Something we found happening a lot was this: during research, we'd discover lots of little facts. Choosing a Wiki So what should you be looking for? Scriptometer: measuring the ease of SOP (S. The Scriptometer tries to measure whether a programming language can be easily used for SOP (Script-Oriented Programming).
A script is here a command line program, mostly used in a terminal. (more scripting stuff (GUI, web...) could be added...) For this: the programming environment is checked: ability to compile and run in one command, REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop)... some typical SOP tasks are written in each programming language, and the length of the resulting program is measured. There are few yet. I plan TODO: ease of file access ease of converting between numbers and strings Suggestions and comments welcome (including spelling, grammatical and stylistic corrections :) conflict of interest warning: the author of this page is also the author of merd, so some things may be unintentionally subconsciously biased. merd is mostly vapourware and a dead project. Typical SOP (Script-Oriented Programming) tasks Here is the various information collected for each programming language Programs smallest.
Hmula & 12 Questions with Mary Poppendiec. Last week, I invited the readers of shmula to pose questions to Mary Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback) , which won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004 and, the sequel Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback) which will be available in early September 2006. For this interview, 12 Questions were submitted and Mary was gracious enough to answer them — the reader’s Questions and Mary’s responses are below. 1. Joe Spooner said, August 21, 2006 @ 1:58 pm What are some of the agile development success stories Mary has seen in government or higher education? I haven’t done a lot of work with governmental organizations and none with higher education.
But I did have one great experience with a defense contractor. 2. Scrum should not be considered a static methodology, it should follow its own advice (inspect and adapt) and evolve over time. 3. 4. 5. 1. 6. 1. 7. 8. 1. How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And H. 1. Digg is a wonderful idea.. but it's horribly broken. Of course many people have been raising concerns about the manipulation and irrationality of Digg front page items (for example here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Recently the problem of "cabals" of Digg story promoters is getting more and more attention. To their credit, the Digg administrators have made it possible to track who is submitting and promoting which stories, and the results are dramatic. A tiny portion of Digg members are submitting stories, and tiny networks of friends are promoting each other's stories, resulting in a very tiny elite group of people determining an overwhelming amount of content that gets attention on the Digg front pages.
Kevin Rose, one of the Digg founders, has recently announced new efforts to try to outsmart these organized groups of co-promoters, in an effort to "catch" them and downgrade their influence on voting. Digg suffers from a fundamental flaw in design. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Googles antisocial downside | CNET News.co. 33 Places to Hangout in the Social Network. Social networks have had giant growth spurts over the past couple of years, and it seems there's one for everyone: from dogs to moms to book-worms to shoppers. Social networks, I think, more than anything give people a place to belong and to hang out.
Because of the drastic growth, popularity and craze these days, I created a list for people who have their odd MySpace or Bebo profiles but would like to seek further and discover new ones. Note: I haven't included social bookmarking sites and sites with a 'tinge' of social networking (think YouTube or Flickr ). Also, I've divided the list into two categories, General and Niche, and covered only publically open services (e.g. no invitation-only betas). General MySpace – Probably known as the biggest social network out there, MySpace has taken the U.S. by a storm. Currently with over 80 million users, MySpace was bought by Newscorp for $580 million, and continues to grow and be a general trend-setter in social networks. Teens, Young Adults Kids. Yahoos Strategy: Growth by Acquisition. Musings of a social architect: Link Time: understanding the dyna. The World Wide Web as a social infrastructure for knowledge orie. Personalized News: A Market Overview. Written by Guest Blogger Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus.
Introduction Personalized Content is one of the two most popular approaches in next generation news sites - the other is Power of Masses, which we will cover in a future post. The leading examples of these approaches are reddit for Personalized Content and digg for Power of Masses. In this article, we will cover the personalized content approach and in particular reddit. First a brief technical explanation: the Personalized Content approach uses a very similar technique to spam detection software. Reddit's quest for personalized news nirvana Reddit, backed by Paul Graham's Y Combinator startup program, is the leading player in this field - and has put a lot of effort into having the best algorithms.
However, as the dharmesh.com site explains in detail, many users still complain about not receiving relevant news recommendations. The competition But competition is heating up for Reddit. Feeds 2.0 process Findory process. News: Social Bookmarking Showdown. The reason that social bookmarking has exploded in the last year is obvious -- storing your bookmarks online instead of in the browser just makes sense. Social bookmarking services let you keep links to your favorite web destinations in one location that's accessible from any computer on the net. Add the ability to share your favorite web destinations and search through other users' bookmarks to discover new sites, and you've got a highly addictive and truly remarkable phenomenon. There's a score of services out there, and no single service has it all. Some social bookmarking sites focus more closely on sharing and discovery, while others offer more options for sorting and organizing.
Last week, we set out to review some of the more popular social bookmarking websites on the Monkey Bites blog. We discovered that almost all these sites have the same basic features: browser bookmarklets for one-click link saving, RSS feeds, tags and sharing capability. Del.icio.us Wired News rating: Wink Furl.