http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14325063/site/newsweek/
Picture this situation: You’ve just gone to an awesome dorm party and to celebrate, you decide to take pictures of the event and post them on Facebook to save the memories and share it with your friends. A few days later, you learn that these pictures were viewed by administrators and that you were getting […]

If you’ve taken some basic economics, you know that the perfect competitive market equilibrium that economists love so much can be thrown off by a few things, including imperfect information. The exploding popularity of keyword-based advertising fueled by Google is a relatively young and developing marketplace with companies continuing to tweak their strategies and […]

An article over at O’Reilly Radar previews Metaweb’s Freebase, an upcoming product that aims to collect and organize the vast amounts of knowledge available on the web. Like Wikipedia, Freebase empowers users to view and edit its information archive directly. (In fact, Freebase has absorbed much of the content provided in openly available databases such […]

 
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 […]

Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, has several patents for the use of advertisement alongside e-mails. The use of advertisements based on the content of e-mails received many complaints about violating users privacy. In fact, several of my friends addressed concerns about this feature. I decided to look into this matter to see if there is any […]

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. […]

Interview with Google’s Matt Cutts about Next-Generation Search
In a recent interview with Read/WriteWeb, Google employee (head of the Webspam team) Matt Cutts talks briefly about applying Google’s PageRank concept to video search. Video search is becoming increasingly important to Google as it acquired and begins to integrate YouTube with its homebrewed Google Video offering. […]

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 […]

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=where_new_neurons_go_to_work_1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
The above link goes to a short series of posts on one of Scientific American’s seminar blogs. Contributors review and discuss an article by Kee et al. that appeared in Nature Neuroscience on Feb. 4, 2007. The name of the article is “Prefrontal incorporation of adult-generated granule cells into spatial memory networks in […]

http://www.game-advertising-online.com/index.php
Advertising helped Google to stay up and running and now it’s helping other websites bring entertainment to the masses. game-advertising-online.com (GAO from here on) is helping internet games make more money by giving them exposure or an extra bit of income. The whole operation rests heavily on two principles that we have discussed […]