February 2003 Archives
February 25, 2003
Daypop put Kleinberg's "word bursts" to work
No sooner has Jon Kleinberg espoused his theory of word bursts, but Daypop has got in there with an application measuring their occurrence across the blogosphere - Daypop word bursts - so how long before "word burst" itself ends up top of the tree?...
February 24, 2003
London Congestion Charge: "Thousands are fined by mistake" claims Evening Standard
"Thousands are fined by mistake" screamed the headlines and billboards of the London Evening Standard on Thursday 20th February. Fact. But let us have a look at what was in the actual front page story: Thousands of motorists may have been wrongly sent congestion charge fines because of flaws with the scheme's spy vans Oh, I thought the headline said "Thousands are fined by mistake", not that thousands of motorists "may have been wrongly sent" Congestion Charge fines. And...
February 23, 2003
Contact the Evening Standard about the London Congestion Charge
The Evening Standard, London's evening newspaper, has provided an email address, charging@standard.co.uk to contact them about Londons congestion charge. I suggest you email them with your positive experiences, like I have done. Dear Editor, Thank you for your in-depth coverage of the introduction of the London Congestion Charge over the last week, and I am delighted that you have provided an opportunity for the people of London to write and explain their experiences of the Congestion Charge. I work...
February 19, 2003
Jon Kleinberg's word bursts
This article in the New Scientist about Jon Kleinberg's work - Word 'bursts' may reveal online trends - makes it sound like it is just the same thing that the BBCi homepage, Aaron Schatz's Lycos 50 and Google Zeitgeist are doing already with search terms. And very similar to David Sifry's work at Technorati, where what you could call 'link bursts' within blogs are generating great stuff at his 100 most interesting recent blogs and 100 interesting newcomers lists....
February 17, 2003
Congestion Charging introduced in London - Sky fails to fall on city's head
This morning's Metro was grimly predicting 2km tailbacks as Londoners struggled to find short-cuts and parking spaces outside the zone - and as you can see the opening fact of this Metro factfile is that the charge is "set to cause road chaos in the capital". However the introduction of Congestion Charging in London did not bring an end to civilisation as we know it. In fact it seems to be working quite well - I just crossed the...
Google blogging
There has been a lot of discussion about Google's purchase of blogging software provider and host Pyra , both from the webmaster community, from the blogging community and originally from Dan Gillmor Speculation has centred on ideas that: Google wants to leverage the content from blogger - but why, they index the content from CNN but haven't bought the company to ensure they have free access? Google needs a publishing system - but surely the Google Labs guys could...
Googlebot FAQ
Lazerzubb at Webmasterworld has put together a masterclass FAQ about Google's crawlers, which also touches upon this response, via Google Answers, of why sites appear and disappear from the Google index when they are new....
February 14, 2003
Latent semantic indexing for the web
Clara Yu, John Cuadrado, Maciej Ceglowski, and J. Scott Payne have published, under a Creative Commons License, a really interesting look at the practice, problems and applications of latent semantic indexing of documents for information retrieval systems called "Patterns in Unstructured Data". Although the mathematics can be potentially a bit head-spinning, they explain very well graphically how to represent a series of documents as mathematical values. And the key of course is that computers do maths well, and they...
February 13, 2003
London Evening Standard reaction to Congestion Charging - a prediction
Congestion Charging starts in London on Monday. It is the most ambitious congestion charging scheme in a capital city in Europe. I cannot wait I work in central London, at the junction between Kingsway and High Holborn. I cross that junction as a pedestrian every day. It is a box junction. I know rule 150 of the UK Highway code. I understand that a box junction means that you do not cross until your way is clear if you are...
February 8, 2003
Neil Gerrard MP against entitlement cards
I have done my MP a disservice. I used Fax your MP to contact him about the UK ID card issue, prompted by the work of stand.org.uk. When I got my email from faxyourmp asking whether he had replied, I mailed back to say no. However, two days later I received a personally written snail mail letter from Neil Gerrard, MP for Walthamstow. So apologies. He wrote: "I have had a number of responses, and the majority have been...
February 1, 2003
Space shuttle Columbia disaster - how search engines reacted
Altavista in the UK put a link to their news service on their homepage: "Space shuttle: latest news on the tragedy." This was the most marked effort of the non-portal search engines. However at the time I checked, 22:27 UK time, the results were ranking the BBC's talking point page, with mostly UK citizens sending in messages of condolence, above George W Bush's statement. And the top ranking news story was from Manchester Online. More recent yes, but perhaps...