Author Archives: Cameron Marlow

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): “aContinue reading “New Google scam!”

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 toiletContinue reading “News agencies cry wolf”

I’ve found a couple of interesting early citations on information diffusion. This from “Person to Person Communication of News,” by Bradley S. Greenberg, from Journalism Quarterly, 1960: “It appears unwarranted, or at least insufficient to index a news event’s importance in terms of the number of persons who are aware of the event. This grantsContinue reading “News diffusion”

holy fucking shit: Bush, Blair Nominated for 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. what absurdist world have I been injected into?

From “The illusion of diffusion in information systems research,” (requires acrobat) by Tom McMaster: “An analysis of the citations from a sample of the literature suggests that claims that diffusion research is a mature domain of study may be wildly exaggerated. This contribution provides an alternative view of diffusionism as an amalgam of pseudo-scientific justificationsContinue reading “The illusion of diffusion”

before there was googlewhacking, there was wordwatching, the game of predicting and observing buzzwords. looking at the winners from previous years, i’m not placing any bets on “pink viagra” or “in silico.”

a gem of trailer park fusion cuisine: white trash sushi. it’s such a new invention, the sushi glossary has yet to account for dishes like “fish stix roll-ups.”

google: now supporting klingon, and 72 other languages.

i was “lucky” enough to be living in chicago when jordan drained a last-minute jumper to cap off the bulls dynasty in 1998, one of the most celebrated events in sports history. the result was utter chaos; after three days, the unchecked gun firing, car tipping and drunken driving simmered down, and chicago returned toContinue reading “Go Patriots. Yay.”

the players might be heroes.. but so is the local pizza delivery person! go pats!