The sudden and widespread attention given to the “Vote Different” video clip (also sometimes referred to as “Obama 1984″ or “Hillary 1984″ ) is a dramatic example of the sort of tipping phenomenon that the course is beginning to cover. On YouTube, the commercial has now been viewed almost 3 million times, which doesn’t […]

In class, we talked about the Web as a network. We also mentioned that much information on the Web is not indexed by search engines and is part of the internet’s “dark matter.” This content is also known as the deep Web, invisible Web, hidden Web, or Deepnet. The deep Web consists […]

New York Poised to Join Move to Earlier Primary
Today’s discussion on information cascades brought to mind a growing trend in the upcoming 2008 election. Presidential nominees in both major political parties are traditionally decided during the primary season, and for the past few decades, the first major proving grounds for a candidate’s success (or […]

Every holiday season, I resort to doing the bulk of my shopping online because of the convenience and ease. And like any shopper, I always want to find the best price. I always find that I spend most of my time cross-referencing many online stores and checking the current auction prices on eBay. […]

 
Web search algorithms, such as PageRank or HITS, rely on hyperlink analysis to rank the relevance of web pages in the world wide web. As mentioned in class, the principle these algorithms rely on is that the presence of an in-link onto a page indicates a human approval of its content. Consequently, studying […]

UFO Crawler: The New Paranormal Search Engine
http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/ufo-crawler-the-new-paranormal-search-engine-.asp/3572/
After graduating from a high school whose mascot was a “grey ghost,” named after the spirit of a girl who haunts the old building as occasionally reported by janitors and employees, I have had a soft side for people who make seemingly wild claims about seeing ghosts or UFO’s. […]

New Sony Viral Marketing Ploy Angers Consumers
The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
The idea of viral marketing was touched on earlier in the blog, but recent decisions by Sony Corporation provide a particularly interesting example of how viral marketing sometimes can hurt more than help. The first link is a blog post about Sony’s recent […]

“Game Theorist Describes Unintended Consequences of U.S. Counterterrorism Policies”
Link- http://nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100065&org=SBE
The above article by the National Science Foundation talks about research done in analyzing government strategies when it comes to terrorist incidents. Although dated in mid-2004, it is still worth a read. The particularly interesting part is that the researchers actually use Game Theory […]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/5735/Digging-for-Diggers-Analysis-of-a-Social-Media-Website
In response to the other 3 posts about Digg.com, I was able to find a recently posted paper published for a class at Georgia Tech that studies the practices and complaints of the top Digg users. I will assume you know basic knowledge of how Digg works. If not check out the other 3 blog […]

What is one of the most common web sites visited by the students of Cornell University? Facebook.
Facebook is a student social network, that combines to some extent privacy and the ability to socialize in an initially collegiate environment. For example: finding the person that lives in your dorm that sat next you in class and […]