It’s summertime, so I’m looking for a bunch of fun books to read. I just ordered two books by John Scalzi (Fuzzy Nation and The God Engines), two books by Dean Karnazes because I’m training to run a marathon (Run!: 26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss and Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner), plus [...]
Need advice from an attorney on patents? Have a question about cooking Indian food? Want a document translated, or help building a widget or debugging a program? Google tells us on one of their corporate information pages that: “Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. [...] Related [...]
On December 12, 2007, Girafa.com Inc. filed a lawsuit agains Amazon Web Services and a number of other parties for patent infringement over a patent titled Framework for providing visual context to www hyperlinks (6,864,904). The case claimed that defendants Amazon Web Services LLC, Amazon.com, Inc., Alexa Internet, Inc., IAC Search & Media, Inc., [...] [...]
Each year I try to settle on a small set of big goals for the year. Last year my big goal was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This year, I settled on 2-3 goals I wanted to achieve: 1. Go skydiving. I was with a group of ~15 people in January and we realized that no [...]
There’s some evidence that the Panda updates to Google’s ranking algorithm may be based upon a decision tree approach to classifying and creating quality scores for web pages and sites. Curious as to whether Google might be using a decision tree approach to classify other information, I went digging through some of Google’s other [...] [...]
When you design a web page with fixed dimensions, set for a specific display resolution, sometimes visitors will arrive at your page with a higher web page resolution level. What this means is that there can be empty space showing in their browser window when viewing your page. There are other times when someone [...] [...]
A patent application was published at the USPTO this morning that describes an interesting new application from Apple, enabling people to find others with common interests or common experiences or both, based upon location. The patent is fairly detailed, and I’ve somewhat brushed the surface with my description below. If you’re interested in location [...] [...]
In 2005, Google’s John Lamping was a guest speaker giving a presentation titled On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog (pdf) to a class at Berkeley on the Quality of Information. In his talk he asked and answered questions such as: Why is the Daily Californian advertising German pages? How much can the [...] [...]
I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams. In a way that’s impossible to explain, [...] Related [...]
Google, Yahoo, and Bing have joined forces to enable web publishers to include additional HTML that adds more structure to their pages, and possibly makes those pages easier to index and may provide them with a little more control over what may show up in search results for pages. There’s some controversy over the [...] [...]