i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Three years ago, scientists published that Pluto would no longer belong to the solar system planets category. In their words, "all small and nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune, which is now the most distant planet from the sun, will fall under the new tag." 

As we have seen in class, the frequency of a term is not enough to infer the quality of the document that contains it. Recently, we have had the case of a  Brooklyn eyewear merchant who goaded customers into posting scathing online reviews, with a better position on Google searches. For that reason, Google has modified the search for that query to 'punish' that particular result. Is this good or bad?

It is interesting how different cultures classify incomprehensible concepts. In almost every language there is an expression that is used when a concept is not well understood. For example, English speakers say: "This is Greek to me". While in Spanish, when something is not understood, they say "esto me suena a chino" (this sounds Chinese to me). Furthermore, Germans tend to say that it sounds Spanish to them; "Das kommt mir Spanisch vor".

London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) is renovating its technology infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of digital storage. 

There is a need to classify the huge amount of data that is available on the internet. The efforts to store it are just useless if we don't count with a good organizing system. What metrics can be valid in this classification process? According to this article in the New York Times, using social media information might be the answer. Recommendations on products or services by people we know or trust seems to be a good metric.

This interesting debate published this past August on Wired.com proclaims that the web, as a business phenomena, may have reached its limits. The internet is now moving from the browser sphere to the application sphere. Why? We haven't been able to find a viable business model for content.