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‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web - Bits Blog - NYTimes. Twitter.com/nickbiltonAtul Arora’s Twitter stream shows a constant flow of breaking technology news links.

‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web - Bits Blog - NYTimes

When I finish writing this blog post, I will Tweet it. I will copy this link, go to my Twitter account and spend a minute writing an abbreviated (yet hopefully catchy) description of this piece. And I’ll follow the same actions on Facebook and other social networks. Then off I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.

Most of us do this to some degree. More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links. Mrs. Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. We are all human aggregators now. Levchin and Gurley Say That Next Big Company Will Capture The Interest Graph. Yesterday, at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, Googler and PayPal founder Max Levchin and Benchmark GP Bill Gurley discussed “game-changing technology” and the future of the Web.

Levchin and Gurley Say That Next Big Company Will Capture The Interest Graph

Emblematic of today’s mindset, they attacked this rather large topic by comparing the strengths and objectives of Google and Facebook, using the latter’s jaw-dropping stats (500+ million users, 1 in every 13 people on Earth logs into Facebook each day) and its promotion of the social graph as a measure of what’s to come. Levchin said that Facebook is fast becoming the new social white pages, i.e. when you don’t know where someone is on the Web, you go to Facebook to find and connect with them.

But, in addition to that, he says, the social networking giant is really “the rich white pages,” where you not only locate someone but have the added benefit of finding out what they like, what they read, what their favorite movies are, and so on. Google's decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search. Jeff Atwood, in Trouble In the House of Google: People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge.

Google's decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search

The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning. (via Anil Dash’s nice roundup on the issue) I’ve been frustrated as well by Google’s apparent defeat by spam. It’s not a sudden issue — it’s been gradually worsening for a few years. When I ask Google for something, it’s usually from these types of queries: Address bar: Where is this specific page that I know exists but I don’t know its URL? Over the years, the impact of spam — mostly affiliate marketing and auto-generated splogs — has decimated the usefulness of the “product research” category. But recently, spam has taken over the “guide” query results, and even many “reference” queries. In other words, it’s now nearly impossible to find good results for many commonly asked types of queries. “Hey, anyone know how to wire an outlet?”

Are Content Curators the power behind social media influence? By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist Are you overlooking some of the most powerful influencers on the social web?

Are Content Curators the power behind social media influence?

Let’s find out. Traditionally, there has been a 1-9-90 rule when it come to creating and consuming content: There’s a new element in this equation, though: Content Curators — people who make a practice of finding content relevant to their friends and followers, and then sharing links to that content. I am making a distinction between a curator and an aggregator who pulls content from around the web, usually related to a specific topic, to display on websites generally to enhance search engine optimization.