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Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Passing a better hat 
| | The informations you request will be sent by a man named "Small Joe." He is a Belgium, very tall, blonde speckled hair plus a small hunchback. You will meet him at Hotel Intercontinental, by the whores. He will drink "Johnny Walker" plus he eats snacks, again and again. |
Blog counterblog
But leave your hat on
| | RageBoy: In From The Cold. Proof again that love is a place, as the cognitive lingusts say. The prepositions are give-aways. We're in love, or we're out of it (and we usually fall out, hard, like from a tree, or an airplane, or the moon). |
| | RB is in. And lo: the wisdom comes out. Grab some: |
| | My last lover wore out faster than these jeans I'm wearing. Next time I'm going to buy six pairs, put three away in the closet as spares. Also, I'm gonna take them off more often, give em a much needed rest. Take yours off too. |
Account(ing)ability
| | Looking for an OS X small business accouting package that will import from classic QuickBooks. Recommendations? |
Way to blog
| | Thanks to Dave for the link. |
Symmetry happens
| | John Leyden in The Register: P2P swamps broadband networks. This is deep. Profound. Scary, considering how much it might feed Hollywood's paranoia. |
| | Wondering if its's warming the hearts of Davids Reed and Isenberg. |
| | The entertainment industry is trying to turn Peer-to-Peer into a bad name. This is wrong. Fax machines are Peer-to-Peer. Telephones are Peer-to-Peer. Email is Peer-to-Peer. Cell phones are Peer-to-Peer. As we see here, maybe the Peer-to-Peer systems they should be complaining about are sold by AT&T Wireless, Verizon, and Voicestream. |
| | It's thick with good thinking, deep insight and solid information. Check it out. |
Blog of the Day
| | Yes, there is a cupid function to referer logs. |
Polybloggery
| | In an email exchange about blog exchanges like the current one between Larry, Ted, myself and others, I discovered there are precedents for both diablog and polyblog. |
Author!
| | For one thing, none of us here in the blogworld would get rich so fast — rich in fortunate Google PageRanks, that is. Or in what one friend of mine calls "Google juice." He says I have a lot of it. Probably true. Look here, here, here, here, here and here.` |
| | Daniel Brandt doesn't like PageRank. He thinks it's unfair: |
| | In the first place, Google's claim that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling. |
| | Let's substitute "authoritative" for "important." Because that's what PageRank is basically about. Links point toward sources. Those sources presumably have authority worth pointing to. That authority is determined by the number of inbound links from other sources whose authority is also established by inbound links from other authoritative sources, and so on. (It's more complicated than that, but we're close enough.) |
| | Why is this bad? Because PageRank doesn't give a fair shake to stuff nobody points to? What user would want that? |
| | And what's this about big business using Google to crush little guys? If that's the case, how come Linux is so huge on Google? Or Apache? This makes no sense to me. |
| | I mean, yeah, Google is a very big cheeze in the search game, and big cheezes need to be watched. But this seems more like whining to me. Another sample: |
| | There are other areas where PageRank has a negative effect, even for sites without a lot of data. The nature of PageRank is so discriminatory, that it's rather like the exact opposite of affirmative action. While many see affirmative action as reverse discrimination, no one would claim (apart from economists who advocate more tax cuts for the rich) that the opposite, which would be deliberate discrimination in favor of the already-privileged, is a solution for anything. Yet this is essentially what Google claims. |
| | ...PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more egalitarian approach to link popularity. This would greatly simplify the complex and recursive calculations that are now required to rank two billion web pages, which must be very expensive for Google. The crawl must not be PageRank driven. There should be a way for Google to arrange the crawl so that if a site cannot be fully covered in one cycle, Google's crawlers can pick up where they left off on the next cycle. |
| | Scaled down how? And again, why? So pages nobody reads get crawled more often? |
| | By the way, I'm pointing to the version of that piece that's archived in Linux Journal, rather than to one at another site that is no longer maintained but still shows up on the first page of a Google search for Doc Searls Ralph Nader. In a couple days, the one in LJ will probably move to the first page of the same search result. That'll happen because, modesty aside, this blog has earned a degree of authority with Google — enough to influence page ranks like this one. Yes, it's a hack on my part, but it's a good hack. |
| | And what gives me the power to influence Google's PageRank that has nothing to do with money or corporate clout. It comes from understanding what Google is trying to do for users, and putting that knowledge to good use. |
I like the way it rhymes
| | Looks like I'm a techno-Stuckist, anyway. Andrew Orlowski explains: |
| | "We call ourselves Stuckists. We like open hardware, and we like routers that don't care about the packets that run through them. We'd like to be stuck there. Where will we be in a world of Multiple TCPAs? |
| | Me either. I just started hearing about it a few days ago. Still trying to figure it out, actually. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Google watch, Susan Kitchens, 9/17/02; 10:53:02 PM Re: Tuesday, September 17, 2002, lou josephs, 9/17/02; 10:42:22 PM Re: Tuesday, September 17, 2002, Michel Benevento, 9/17/02; 2:26:34 AM
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