I toyed with the idea of a recap of top posts from the year. I sifted through stats and made a list of the most visited SEO by the Sea posts. I started going through my archives and making another list of my favorite posts.
And then I looked at the size of the list of draft posts that I hadn’t published and saw a bunch of topics that I didn’t get to cover in 2007.
Here are some of the remainders of 2007:
Del.icio.us Patent Applications
Joshua Schachter is the creator of Del.icio.us, and his name appears upon a couple of patent applications published this year which discuss advertising on a social network site (like Del.icio.us) and incorporate the relevance of tags left by people who bookmark sites into contextual advertising on pages that display those tags.
- System and method for selecting advertising
- System and method for selecting advertising in a social bookmarking system
Google Book Search
Most of what we have been hearing about Google book search has focused upon copyright issues, and relations between Google, authors, and publishers. A short white paper from a Google researcher explores some of the technical issues and challenges around book search, like using OCR to grab text from pages written in many different languages and the many different ways that there are to try to present information from books.
Use of Technology in Developing Regions
Three field studies, two based in India and another in Uganda, look at “technological solutions in the domains of communication, microfinance, and education.” We take a lot of technology for granted, and these field studies provide some interesting explorations of how technology can make a profound difference in the lives of many people.
Google User Experience Research and Active Blogs
What might a search engine look at to determine whether a blog is active or has been abandoned? A paper published for CHI 2007 provides some insights into how Google might make that determination.
International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
Held in Boulder, Colorado, at the end of March 2007, the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media looks like it was a very good event to attend. There are some terrific papers linked to on the site, and a news conference for 2008 has been scheduled to be held at the Hilton Seattle Downtown, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., from March 31 to April 2, 2008.
I’m guessing that the contents of the Conference program link will change once it gets closer to the news conference, so check it out quickly. I’ve included links to some of the papers from the conference, too. They are only a representative sample. There are many others listed on the program page worth looking at.
- Building Trust with Corporate Blogs (pdf)
- Discovering Weblog Communities (pdf)
- Looking at the Blogosphere Topology through Different Lenses (pdf)
- Using Blog Properties to Improve Retrieval (pdf)
- Identifying more bloggers: Towards large scale personality classification of personal weblogs (pdf)
- Feeds That Matter: A Study of Bloglines Subscriptions (pdf)
- BLOGRANK: Ranking on the blogosphere
Those are some of my unpublished topics for posts from 2007. I have a good number more, and will likely share some of those over the next few weeks. I suspect that 2008 will bring us some interesting new topics to explore as well.
Hope to see them in future Bill.
Slacker!