Saw it on the web

I’ve been running into a number of interesting, amusing, fun, and entertaining articles lately, and wanted to share some of them.

I’m finding myself in agreement with Jeff Jarvis, when he makes the following statement about Tagging at BuzzMachine. Interesting thought for companies like Google that want to organize the world’s information.

The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools – pencils, presses and Dewey decimals – thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself.

Speaking of Tagging, Gene Smith has a very nice recap of The Year in Tagging.

Barry Welford’s post at BPWrap on the Internet and the Enigma Machine had me thinking for days, and strangely (maybe not so strangely) wanting to reread Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.

I was also wondering how may professions have been profoundly impacted by new means of searching for academic papers in the way that the author of How Google is changing medicine has been.

I heard through the grapevine that Google’s big news this week at the Consumer Electronics Association convention that they are jointly keynoting isn’t going to the announcement of a Google computer. There has been some speculation that they are going to get into Television 2.0.

I skimmed over this short interview (no longer available) with one of Yahoo!’s newest vice presidents of worldwide research, Ron Brachman, halfway through last month. I’m glad I got back to it, and read it a little closer. I suspect that Artificial Intelligence will play an ever increasing role in both search, and search marketing.

Conversions? Will we see a transition from pay-per-click to pay-per-conversions in the search engines sometime soon? The conversion tracking that the folks at Google have been working upon, including their Secure Conversion Tracking approaches may hold some answer to questions like that asked at Wired recently: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet.

I also bookmarked this page, but didn’t get back to it until recently: Search technology comes to the camera phone. Nice stuff.

Finally, a paper that made me think about the wikipedia in a slightly different way: Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors. (via Sabrina I. Pacifici, at BeSpacific)