The Return Of The Link List

In the early days of the Web everyone had a carefully collected list links- it was just so difficult to find anything that you had to store whatever you found on your computer in order to be able to find it again. Then along came Google and search seemed so simple that the importance of the link list decreased. But now it seems the link list is making a comeback - albeit in a different form:

Google Co-op allows a user to create and launch a search engine with just a few specific websites included. Searches will return results from only that website.

And actually Google is not the first to offer such a service, Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo did it before. 

So now after first only link list and then only search we now have the combination of the two. I think the next step is a search engine that automatically gives priority to the sites that you visited in the past (Google Toolbar and/or Google Desktop Search know these sites already anyway).

This Weeks Links

Architecture and Security
Top Ten Design Mistakes in Weblogs
Robot Avatars
US taxing in-game transactions?
Portal to the academic blogosphere
AnnotationTools
Fun with Vista's speech recognition
Java Open Source Rule Engines
Search 2.0 round-up
400€ Million for Quaero (German)
Free Our Data: the blog
Crossword-solving system strikes a blow for AI
Intelligent search engine
Physics of Superhero's
sketch understanding (and simulation)
No more fast Internet in Iran
Airport Security Cartoons
Stop Using Google? (Privacy)
Crime and MMORPG's
BigTable: Distributed Structured Storage (Video)
Privacy Debacle Hall of Fame
NYT on Spore
Economist about Second Life

(Newest links here http://del.icio.us/vzach/blog (RSS))

Changes To This Blog: This Weeks Links

From now on I will (again) post links only as collections once a week (or once in a while).  Otherwise I'll stop making blog posts whose only purpose it is to say: "hey, that's interesting". 

In general this will mean less posts,  a higher proportion of original work and at the same time more links (because its less work for me this way and I will lower the threshold of what I accept as interesting link for this blog). Links will continue to be in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (with a focus on expert systems), Semantic Web, really important Internet developments and really important computer science advances in general.   In short: stuff that interests me and that I believe interests people working in the same field.

I use del.ico.us to collect these links, so they are also visible at http://del.icio.us/vzach/blog (RSS). The  newest couple of  links also appear on the frontpage of this blog (in the side panel).  

European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems / Services Workshop

Report on the 5th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) Workshop:

Some interesting presentations:

Margherita Sini talked about the FAO's work with OWL (Web Ontology Language) modeling of the multilingual AGROVOC thesaurus and continued steps towards an Agriculture Ontology Service. Advanced solutions are necessary in such a large scale KOS and varied service application. OWL and SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) seem to offer at least important parts of the knowledge representation required.

Sebastian Ryszard Kruk from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Ireland presented building blocks from several European projects, illustrating the role of ontologies in creating what he calls "Semantic Digital Libraries"

These and other presentations are here.

Information Factories

From wired:

The facility in The Dalles is only the latest and most advanced of about two dozen Google data centers, which stretch from Silicon Valley to Dublin. All told, it's a staggering collection of hardware, whose constituent servers number 450,000, according to the lowest estimate.

The extended Googleplex comprises an estimated 200 petabytes of hard disk storage – enough to copy the Net's entire sprawling cornucopia dozens of times – and four petabytes of RAM. To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.

The recent explosion of hard disk storage capacity makes Moore's law look like a cockroach race. In 1991, a 100-megabyte drive cost $500, and a 50-megahertz Intel 486 processor cost about the same. In 2006, $500 buys a 750-gigabyte drive or a 3-gigahertz processor. Over 15 years, that's an advance of 7,500 times for the hard drive and 60 times for the processor. By this crude metric, the cost-effectiveness of hard drives grew 125 times faster than that of processors.

Much more in the original article.

Win $1 Million With Data Mining

Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, is planning to award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.

To win the prize, which is to be announced today, a contestant will have to devise a system that is more accurate than the company’s current recommendation system by at least 10 percent. And to improve the quality of research, Netflix is making available to the public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings, a database the company says is the largest of its kind ever released.

More.