Nicholas Negroponte (co-founder of my fine institution) has been hearalding the future of 802.11 for a few years now, claiming that a grassroots movement could undermine other wireless efforts. I’ve been skeptical in the past, but I can say at the moment I’m pretty happy with the free wireless connection I’m getting from some office across from my hotel. Of course I have to sit in one chair in the corner of my room, being very careful not to move an inch, but hey, I’m not complaining.
the ultimate test of any web design.. does it hold up to webTV? my first experience says NO.
ugh.. off to the airport in less than 5 hours. being a procrastinator makes life painful. i’m making a note: in the future, don’t leave things to the last minute, especially when mardi gras is at stake.
The irony is so thick, you’d think I use rogaine: overstated is on the daypop top 40, but has yet to appear on blogdex, thanks to some bugs I introduced last night. Where I come from, they call that gettin’ poked in the patoot by yer own pitchfork. Maybe someday I’ll make it onto blogdex 
A bit of context for the previous post:
Let’s use Dave Winer’s scripting.com as an example. By looking at the social network of scripting.com, we see that Dave has a slew of people who read him, and also that he reads a number of other weblogs. These are Dave’s “social ties,” or the individuals that make up his personal social network.
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The traditional assessment of the dissemination of information assumes that people fall into adopter categories. These classes of innovativeness have become popular parts of our vernacular: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.
My analysis of the blogdex data has shown that webloggers do fall into such neat buckets. over the course of the past five months, very few individuals have been consistent in their patterns of adoption of memes: sometimes a person finds a meme at the head, and sometimes at the tail. Adopter categories are not a useful tool for understanding the community and their dissemination behavior.
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I’ve been swimming in blog data for the past few days, preparing for my upcoming presentation at Sunbelt XXII, a social networks conference. Needless to say, I’ll be working up until the last minute, looking for new insights. I’ll make sure and let you know if I have any
hmm.. Google is holding a contest to find the best new technology, run on a data set of about 900,000 web pages.
The winner gets: $10,000 hard cash, a “VIP” visit to Google, and the potential to run your idea on the entire data set of over 3 billion pages.
Google gets (fine print): “a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry.”
Sounds like a good deal to me! Every single entry, including the losers, becomes property of GoogleCorp. With 50+ Ph.D’s on staff, you wouldn’t think that they would have to resort to these highly contractual contests. My advice? Go get your own dataset, make your technology, then sell it to Google for a heftier sum of money. (link: webvoice)
I’m starting to collect the number of false stories that have been hitting mass media lately:
- a boy cries as teenagers hang his dog in front of him, only to reveal later that his story was a big fat lie.
- enron’s ken lay goes missing, then is found.
- the most recent retraction? the airline toilet suction horror has been debunked (props: rebecca)
