i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google introduced a number of new features today, most notably real-time updates and searching by an uploaded photo. Real-time updates means that Twitter and Facebook statuses will immediately feed to Google search.

I don't know much about Kwaga (http://kwaga.com/) except that it's a tool that performs semantic analysis on your Gmail in order to fill your calendar with dates, remind you to follow up when someone hasn't replied quickly enough, and warn you if there are passwords or other sensitive strings in a message.  None of this should disturb me--after all, mail is inherently insecure--and yet there is something unsettling to me here.  It runs your Inbox through its servers to do the semantic analysis, although it assures you that it would never share any of your email statistics.  T

Spock is a people search engine that uses a "man + machine" approach that includes text extraction and tagging to build pages about people. Spock crawls and indexes "people-related" web sites and augments this with editorial and social oversight.

http://searchengineland.com/spock-people-search-with-a-man-machine-appro...

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am starting to feel very concerned about Google's new Public DNS service. It seems that Google is trying to build its own Library of Babel collecting as much information as it can in order to improve its knowledge of web usage. I haven't read their privacy policy, but this opens new possibilities for targeted advertising.

Not to beat a dead horse, but this article in the New Yorker about the South African running champion Caster Semenya makes some very interesting connections between the androgynous runner's sexual identity and the historical politics of racial classification in her homeland.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/30/091130fa_fact_levy

...is the idea that one's writing style can be reduced to vectors, and that by having knowledge of how writeprinting works, we can better imitate the style of other authors. Not that I have a particularly notable writing style (aside from my excessive use of adverbs, a habit I am trying to break), but I find the notion that someone could understand my style vectors and imitate my writing to be dangerous. So yeah, criminal justice system aside, writeprinting kinda creeps me out.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Special-Delivery.aspx

XML mixup leads to trader purchasing 28000 tons of REAL coal, instead of coal futures...

Not entirely sure if this is true, but makes for an amusing story of the impact of XML screw-ups. :)

Sorry... it was a good question, but this is Craig's response:

"Dan, thanks! Can't disclose, though, any measures to detect bad stuff.

Craig" 

Hey, I'm just passing along something linked from DaringFireball.net. Blame Gruber (generally a good strategy, regardless).

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/02/google.search.obama/index.html

The picture is no longer the top hit when you search for 'michelle obama' but is when you search for 'michelle obama ape'.

I liked this quote:
"A result that you're not looking for is not a good search result," said Rubin, the Google spokesman. "It's not a good search experience."