As a way of introduction, I should say that I work for a company that competes in some instances with Google and I specifically work in the group that is building a search platform for apps to use. My point is that my comments aren’t necessarily unbiased.

All of that being said, I enjoyed the article about Google’s search algorithm. It was interesting to see how THE company in search tweaks results and tests new ideas. I did think the article was a fairly obvious tactic for reminding everyone that Google isn’t going down without a fight, no matter how many other applications they launch or how many competitors join the fight.

PR ploy or not, some things to take away from the article:

1. When working on changes to the ranking of results, get people in a room, show two sets of results (before and after) and talk through them.

2. Use previous searches, whether good or bad, as data points for understand user’s intent and future searches.

3. Test, test, test… Especially on actual users in actual search situations. The article mentions that almost every search that is done is happening within some test group.

4. While you don’t want to only solve certain queries, use them as a way to discuss problems and talk about solutions.

Continuing to dig Guardian America

A look at the literary journal, Zyzzyva

Cloud Oriented Architecture

Dealing with a geographically distributed Memcache

NeverBlock is a Ruby library that allows developers to write non-blocking, concurrent code in a transparent manner. Meaning that you will keep coding in your traditional ways while you get the benefit of non-blocking IO operations.

Interview with Twitter’s Alex Payne

Using CouchDB with Django

Cyberstar, a look at Adrian Holovaty and EveryBlock

Fourth publisher the charm for LAT?

It takes an amazing amount of courage to start a company. I think it takes even more courage to do so after you’ve written takedown after takedown of other start-ups but that’s what Ted Dziuba is doing. It started as Persai but now it’s Pressflip.

Of course, when you try something new, people are just looking for ways to tear you down. This isn’t to say that Pressflip will be the greatest thing ever but at least he’s trying something.

Jason Kottke had the right idea when Twitter was down today. Also, check the impressive API.

• Some links to PyCon talks
• The story everyone missed on The Wire
• wikinear.com
• How good is Aggregate Knowledge?
• CiUI: CNET iPhone UI
• How to think under pressure
• Mediatyping
• Disks have become tapes
• Google Visualization API

Howard Owen gives a great list of things non-wired journalists can do to become digitally savvy. I think it’s awesome and I’m trying to think of how to pass it along to folks without it being viewed as some sort of slam.

Beyond that though, I think the list is something everyone should work on. Blogging, creating videos, posting pictures to Flickr, these are things that more people will be doing.

Lots of people are talking about Ask’s launch of their new search interface and new algorithm. It is a different way to search and so far, I’m very impressed by it. I’m not going to rehash all the new features as any of the above links can do that. Instead, I thin it is awesome that Ask continues to innovate and try new things. Honestly, I believe they are the most innovative search company right now, not counting the various vertical engines.

It’s true that they are somewhat forgotten by many end users based on recent usage numbers but that hasn’t caused them to go into their shell, lamenting that fact. Instead, they put out things like AskCity and the ability to draw on a map and search within that area. Put those things together with this update and you see a company with little fear.

Will this work? Will it cause a right in the amount of user’s searching? No one knows right now but to me it’s way better to go out fighting then give up and pander to your existing user base with lukewarm products and ideas.

Technorati Tags:
search, ask3d

One of my favorite blogs is information aesthetics. They post some amazing visualizations of data and sites which do the same. One of their latest posts shows off a physical activity fishbowl which was used in a study recently.

The basic idea is that a virtual fish’s size and facial expressions are tied to the physical steps that a person takes. When the person reaches their goals or moves beyond it, the fish grows in side and is happy. The other side is when the goals aren’t matched, the fish is smaller and has sad expressions.

The study [pdf] goes thru the process and how it increased the activity of folks. This is a very interesting idea of how virtual things can influence how people act and what they do.

Technorati Tags:
information+aesthetics, physical+activity+fishbowl

At XTech, a few of the Stamen Design folks gave a presentation looking at the different ways to express time visually. I enjoyed the presentation quite a bit though I wish more of the audience would have come earlier to hear my talk since they spoke right after me but that’s neither here nor there.

At any rate, they gave a sneak-peek at their latest project, a visual representation of the growth of populations. Now the project has been launched and it looks really interesting. Trulia, a real estate site is using their data to show how cities evolved over time via Hindsight. [ via ]

Technorati Tags:
stamen, trulia+hindsight