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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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 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