I do it all the time. Mainly by making the comment on my website, which people can discover either because they've subscribed to my feed or from the referrers in their logs (or from a service such as Google Reader or Alerts, which can scan feeds for keywords). No centralized company needed.
You're absolutely right, but it doesn't matter. People don't do what makes sense, they do what they see other people doing. I have a website with an atom feed, but I have Google mirror it to Twitter so people who can't figure out what a newsfeed is can subscribe.
You want to see the definition of a blank stare? Try explaining to one of your Facebook/Twitter using friends that they are depending on a single company for their social networking, and that company can either disappear tomorrow or decide to erase their content if they feel like it. That there are options that are completely decentralized, have none of the limitations of what they're using now, and that don't sell their information to advertisers.
It looks like you're right about that. That's more useful, but since it doesn't tell me the basis for the recommendation, most of my objections above still stand.
OK, you have a point in that my example was bad for this. But how about another recent search that I did: where to buy an internal notebook drive. Not that obscure. Suppose one of my contacts recently bought such an item and had a good experience, so +1ed the vendor's site. Is that useful for me? What if the site she +1ed is actually a terrible vendor, but she happened to luck out? What if next week she finds that the seller overcharged her credit card, or sold her a grey-market product that she can't return when it breaks? These social recommendations replace useful reputational and aggregate data by anecdotes. You don't know whom the recommendation is coming from (do you?) and, more importantly, you don't know the reasons behind it. Actual social interaction is useful, because you can actually talk to people and learn why they like things. If someone I trust tells me that she's been ordering equipment from a vendor for 12 years without any problems, that means something. A +1 on a site from a random person who happens to be in my contact list tells me nothing at all.
I'm skeptical about the utility of this kind of thing in general. The last thing I googled for was the name of the guy who discovered a closed-form expression for an integer's partition number, and links to his papers. Not a good target for spammers, so the good results were at the top. How would the votes of my friends enhance this experience? I suppose it might help if a number of my contacts were searching, fairly recently, for the same thing I am, and in addition that their judgements about what is a useful search result aligned with mine. I just can't see this as being likely enough to bother with.
I don't see the "mark as spam" widget anymore; it is still there for some people?
I guess it won't be all that easy to spam the +1 deal by making phony Google accounts, because, if I understand correctly, I only see the results from people whose email addresses are in my contact list. Anyway, I won't see the +1 dealies because I never made an account "profile" and I don't expect to any time soon.
I thought Google's algorithms were supposed to decide which results were the best and put those at the top. I thought the "+1" was supposed to be a link to a site from another authoritative site. Is this an admission that this mechanism doesn't work? That it's been hopelessly gamed by spammers?
Who is going to bother, after going to a site from Google and finding it useful, to return to the search result page in order to click the "+1" button?
Also, why is Google still using Flash simply to serve up a movie? I thought they were interested in pushing HTML5.
Investigating? When he wrote that there were already half a dozen QR code readers for the iphone. The ones I've tried have no problem with a moderately compendious vcard.
I wrote one of these that caches some graphics and the single html page the comprises the app, which is mostly javascript. Using 4.3 it still runs fine offline, so whatever cashing bug exists does not affect everything. Running the app through iphone's Safari might be a little faster. I didn't time it, but the difference, if there is one, is not dramatic.
I see dozens of ignorant comments here claiming that webapps on the home screen are just Safari bookmarks. What makes them real apps is that they can store themselves and the resources they need on the device and work offline.
The Huffington Post's business model consists of gaming search engines to get people to land on pages full of cheesy advertisements. Perhaps to some people they are indistinguishable from real news organizations such as the NY Times, because the latter also run some wire service stories. By all means continue to ask me what my "point" is: it makes you look clever.
Good example. They are on the first page of results even though they add nothing to the story: no reporting or analysis. Just other people's photographs that you've already seen if you've looked at the coverage in the Times or other real news sources.
It's not just fiction. Ever read an article in a newspaper describing something about which you have direct knowledge?
And the version in the paper is barely recognizable?
That's right: it's a spam site. I recently came across a description by one of their employees of their business model. They monitor what people are searching for on Google and create headlines that incorporate those keywords. The only goal is ad impressions.
Clearly, the new Google patch doesn't detect scraper sites. Catching those would be a big win, because there are so many of them and they have near zero value.
And obliterating the plagiarism sites from Google's index would help the original authors, too, and be a blow for justice.
I'm thinking that Google could compile a list of scraper domains similarly to how it caught Bing copying its search results (MS sockpuppets: don't bother. You got caught.). Create pages with long, unusual phrases; every time you crawl the web, note which pages contain these phrases, and apply the death penalty to their domains.
Slashdot Mirror
I do it all the time. Mainly by making the comment on my website, which people can discover either because they've subscribed to my feed or from the referrers in their logs (or from a service such as Google Reader or Alerts, which can scan feeds for keywords). No centralized company needed.
You're absolutely right, but it doesn't matter. People don't do what makes sense, they do what they see other people doing. I have a website with an atom feed, but I have Google mirror it to Twitter so people who can't figure out what a newsfeed is can subscribe.
You want to see the definition of a blank stare? Try explaining to one of your Facebook/Twitter using friends that they are depending on a single company for their social networking, and that company can either disappear tomorrow or decide to erase their content if they feel like it. That there are options that are completely decentralized, have none of the limitations of what they're using now, and that don't sell their information to advertisers.
It looks like you're right about that. That's more useful, but since it doesn't tell me the basis for the recommendation, most of my objections above still stand.
OK, you have a point in that my example was bad for this. But how about another recent search that I did: where to buy an internal notebook drive. Not that obscure. Suppose one of my contacts recently bought such an item and had a good experience, so +1ed the vendor's site. Is that useful for me? What if the site she +1ed is actually a terrible vendor, but she happened to luck out? What if next week she finds that the seller overcharged her credit card, or sold her a grey-market product that she can't return when it breaks? These social recommendations replace useful reputational and aggregate data by anecdotes. You don't know whom the recommendation is coming from (do you?) and, more importantly, you don't know the reasons behind it. Actual social interaction is useful, because you can actually talk to people and learn why they like things. If someone I trust tells me that she's been ordering equipment from a vendor for 12 years without any problems, that means something. A +1 on a site from a random person who happens to be in my contact list tells me nothing at all.
I'm skeptical about the utility of this kind of thing in general. The last thing I googled for was the name of the guy who discovered a closed-form expression for an integer's partition number, and links to his papers. Not a good target for spammers, so the good results were at the top. How would the votes of my friends enhance this experience? I suppose it might help if a number of my contacts were searching, fairly recently, for the same thing I am, and in addition that their judgements about what is a useful search result aligned with mine. I just can't see this as being likely enough to bother with.
Google Chrome 10.0.648.204 on OS X.
Good summary of recent Google issues.
I don't see the "mark as spam" widget anymore; it is still there for some people?
I guess it won't be all that easy to spam the +1 deal by making phony Google accounts, because, if I understand correctly, I only see the results from people whose email addresses are in my contact list. Anyway, I won't see the +1 dealies because I never made an account "profile" and I don't expect to any time soon.
I thought Google's algorithms were supposed to decide which results were the best and put those at the top. I thought the "+1" was supposed to be a link to a site from another authoritative site. Is this an admission that this mechanism doesn't work? That it's been hopelessly gamed by spammers?
Who is going to bother, after going to a site from Google and finding it useful, to return to the search result page in order to click the "+1" button?
Also, why is Google still using Flash simply to serve up a movie? I thought they were interested in pushing HTML5.
Check out today's animated logo celebrating the 200th birthday of Robert Bunsen.
Initial reports due to incompetence - there never was a rootkit: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002133.html
A stunning result probably too recent to have made it in to the book under review: we now have a closed-form formula for the partition numbers.
Interesting. Did you specify the pages themselves (index.html or what have you) to be cached in the manifest?
Investigating? When he wrote that there were already half a dozen QR code readers for the iphone. The ones I've tried have no problem with a moderately compendious vcard.
What will they be looking at? The referrer? The url? Shouldn't be a problem for anyone who knows how to use a computer.
Does this mean that it's as fast as BeOS now?
I wrote one of these that caches some graphics and the single html page the comprises the app, which is mostly javascript. Using 4.3 it still runs fine offline, so whatever cashing bug exists does not affect everything. Running the app through iphone's Safari might be a little faster. I didn't time it, but the difference, if there is one, is not dramatic.
I see dozens of ignorant comments here claiming that webapps on the home screen are just Safari bookmarks. What makes them real apps is that they can store themselves and the resources they need on the device and work offline.
Don't forget the highest court in the land.
But the messages are rarely terse - merely brief.
The Huffington Post's business model consists of gaming search engines to get people to land on pages full of cheesy advertisements. Perhaps to some people they are indistinguishable from real news organizations such as the NY Times, because the latter also run some wire service stories. By all means continue to ask me what my "point" is: it makes you look clever.
Good example. They are on the first page of results even though they add nothing to the story: no reporting or analysis. Just other people's photographs that you've already seen if you've looked at the coverage in the Times or other real news sources.
It's not just fiction. Ever read an article in a newspaper describing something about which you have direct knowledge? And the version in the paper is barely recognizable?
That's right: it's a spam site. I recently came across a description by one of their employees of their business model. They monitor what people are searching for on Google and create headlines that incorporate those keywords. The only goal is ad impressions.
Really? On what phones? It can not do this on the iPhone.
And obliterating the plagiarism sites from Google's index would help the original authors, too, and be a blow for justice. I'm thinking that Google could compile a list of scraper domains similarly to how it caught Bing copying its search results (MS sockpuppets: don't bother. You got caught.). Create pages with long, unusual phrases; every time you crawl the web, note which pages contain these phrases, and apply the death penalty to their domains.
Too bad they haven't decided to stop filtering content in the USA.