Toluu

Rough Sort

October 7, 2006October 7 2006

Business Week's Kate Norton interviewed Microsoft Vice President Robert McDowell and me about the role of information technology in business following a debate we had in London earlier this week.

October 2, 2006October 2 2006

Richard MacManus notes the emergence of a marketplace for buying and selling Digg votes.

October 1, 2006October 1 2006

Noting the continuing decay in the quality of algorithm-generated search results - the current top Google result for a search on "Martin Luther King," for example, is a page created by white supremacists - CNET's Elinor Mills suggests that parents should encourage their kids to consult librarians instead of search engines when doing research. Bizarrely, a Google spokesperson defends the King result as an example of the "integrity" of the company's algorithm: "In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages."

September 30, 2006September 30 2006

Writes Jason Epstein in an otherwise surprisingly uncritical review of recent books on Google: "The confrontation of founders who wish to do only good with the complex reality of their astonishing commercial achievement is an issue of biblical scope which calls to mind the expulsion, naked and trembling, of our ancestral parents from prelapsarian Eden into a world where choice is obligatory and error inevitable, a blessing and a burden upon themselves and what Milton called, with mixed feelings, their hapless seed."

September 26, 2006September 26 2006

Facebook this morning abondoned its exclusivity hallmark and opened its doors to all comers. Facebook's most attentive watcher, Fred Stutzman, believes the move marks the end of the social network's relevance: "It depresses me to think that Facebook is simply building Classmates.com 2.0. However, I just don't see how else I can look at this ... Sure, a couple million people might sign on to check the service out, but are these people actually going to become first-class users? Of course not. Is Facebook simply looking for a bump in their userbase to sweeten the deal for Yahoo?"

With computers sucking up an ever larger portion of the world's energy output, two Google engineers will today push the computer industry to reengineer power supplies to improve their efficiency, reports John Markoff. The electric power industry has a similar initiative ongoing.

Mohit Chhabra finds the link between information technology, the Winchester Mystery House, and Indian businesses.