CBS says Couric unaware video essay plagiarized (Reuters)
Reuters - "CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric may vividly recall her first library card, but the network says she was unaware that her online video essay about the virtues of libraries was largely a work of plagiarism.
Welch relishes new role
Vermont's lone congressman enjoys being "free to be an advocate."
Linux: Comparing CFS to the EEVDF CPU Scheduler
KernelTrap: "Ingo Molnar announced the eighth version of his CFS CPU scheduler..."
CATCH THIS PLAY ONLY IF YOU CAN
THE 2008 theater season is already upon us. Rehearsing in a studio here in New York and trying out in a workshop here in New York as we speak has been the work-in-progress of the hoped-to-be Broadway musical of "Catch Me If You Can." For those with...
Slidecasting
Over at Bioscreencast.com, our goal is to allow people to capture the content of their screens and share those screencasts to demonstrate various software and internet workflows which they might use in their research activities. Another favorite, Slideshare (via Pedro), has a new feature that is pretty neat. It’s called slidecasting and ... (Read on Source)
PresentationMall.com Expands Digital Presentation Map Collection to Include Continents and Countries
PresentationMall.com has added world, continent and country maps to its collection of editable digital vector maps and presentation maps. All maps are customizable in a variety of applications including Adobe® Illustrator® , Microsoft® PowerPoint® , Adobe® Acrobat ® and other business productivity applications. (PRWeb Aug 10, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/VGhpci1Mb3ZlLVBpZ2ctSGFsZi1UaGlyLVplcm8=
Documentation Coverage Testing With dcov
How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls? Well, you’re in luck—dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).
Federal Judge Rules In Favor Of FDA In Ephedra Ban Challenge
ATLANTA - A federal judge on Aug. 15 affirmed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 2004 finding that ephedra dietary supplements are "adulterated," thereby granting summary judgment for the government in Hi-Tech Pharmaceutical's challenge to the final rule banning the supplements (Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, et al. v. Lester M. Crawford, et al., Nos. 1:05-cv-02083-GET, 1:06-cv-00406-GET, N.D. Ga.; See October 2005, Page 6; 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59849). Full story on lexis.com
Alt-N Technologies Unveils Future Strategy at International Reseller Conference: Representative
Alt-N Technologies, a global provider of messaging, security, and collaboration solutions targeted to the needs of small-to-medium businesses (SMB), hosted its annual International Reseller Conference last week interacting with a number of its top resellers from around the globe. Representatives from countries such as the United States, the Russian Federation, Australia, India, Mexico, Vietnam, South Africa and others met to discuss business growth of the Windows-based MDaemon email server and other products from Alt-N Technologies. (PRWeb Sep 26, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/WmV0YS1TdW1tLUNyYXMtTWFnbi1UaGlyLVplcm8=
Introducing the First Automotive Social Network -- One Stop Site For 'Everything You Need to Buy a C
Carfolks.com will offer consumers a new way to shop for dealerships online. By relying n feedback from existing customers of dealerships, car buyers can make buying decisions based on the most customer focused dealership in their local market. (PRWeb Nov 9, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/RW1wdC1QaWdnLVpldGEtWmV0YS1UaGlyLVplcm8=
Why is playing Final Fantasy XI online so popular?
Playing massive multi-player online games (mmpog) is very popular these days. While there are a lot of these games you can choose from only a few stand out in the online world. For every genre...
Online networks may help job-hunting: surveys (Reuters)
Reuters - Job seekers should tap into online networking sites to help hunt down potential employers, new surveys suggest.
Cox, Comcast Caught Red-Dotted
Only two countries in the world have ISPs actively blocking or interfering with BitTorrent transmissions: Singapore and the United States. Only one kind of ISP in both countries, though, is doing the blocking: cable.
An independent test conducted by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Software Systems showed that Comcast and Cox are both currently interfering with BitTorrent despite recent public and regulatory outrage.
Missiles, 100K police on China's Olympic team
China is mobilizing an anti-terrorism force of 100,000 to protect next month's Olympic Games.
Nokia morphs itself from within
Call for Prizes - Group Writing Project Coming Soon
It has been a while since I’ve run a group writing project here at ProBlogger so I thought it might be time to another one (if you’re new to ProBlogger and don’t know what a group writing project is I’ll describe it below). (Read on Source)
U.S. Swimmers Trim Times At Beijing Olympics Using 'Top Secret' Technology
Milliseconds can mean the difference between triumph and defeat in the world of Olympic sports, leading more trainers and athletes to look toward technology as a tool to get an edge on the competition. A fluids mechanics professor is using experimental flow measurement techniques to help American swimmers sharpen their strokes, shave seconds from their lap times, and race toward a gold medal in Beijing.
MET MUSEUM SHEDS SECRETS
MICHAEL Gross says his latest book, "Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum," was partly inspired by the museum's p.r. man, Harold Holzer, who told him the Met's inner circle would not...
A Fine Career
Brian Giles reached base three times Monday night and scored twice as the Padres downed the Dodger 4-0. Looking at Giles career, it's clear he's posted a great one. Twenty years ago a .404 OBA and .510 slugging percentage would... (Read on Source)
QNX RtP 6.2 -- World Preview
... FAT32 image file anymore, as a lot of users are now using NTFS under Windows 2000 or XP, a filesystem not supported by QNX, therefore the OS would not boot ...
Easy Access, Capacity and Security Combine in New Rainier Bike Rack
StowAway2 Cargo Carriers is proud to announce the release of its new Rainier Bike Rack. The Rainier is a hitch mounted bike rack that lets you have it all: easy access to the rear of your vehicle, a cargo rack for your extra gear, and premium security features. (PRWeb Sep 14, 2008)
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1325884.htm
My thoughts about Wall Street Recovery today
Today the market improved to make up for most of the losses yesterday. But one point hasn’t really been said. I believe, and I am not alone, the financial markets are so weakened, by the sub prime mortgage meltdown and a lack of liquidity, the markets can not function without massive governent and international assistance. (Read on Source)
Korean Fanatic Brings Starcraft to Spore
In another stint that makes Koreans look cooler than everyone else, a Korean Starcraft fanatic who goes by the roughly translated name of Krabby Patty has taken advantage of Spore’s vast content editor. What you see above, however, is just a small glimpse at what this user has done. Included in his (her?) gallery is a [...]
Korean Air expands Flying Art Ambassadors Service
Korean Air expands Flying Art Ambassadors Service.
Blood test for vCJD 'unrealistic'
Screening donor blood for the human form of mad cow disease is unrealistic and would scare away donors, government advisors say.
Instant-on Dell Desktop to Debut Next Week
Consumers will get their first look at Dell's new instant-on system for Optiplex desktops next week
Man Suspected In 2 South Side Sexual Assaults
Police have arrested and charged a man reportedly armed with a cutting instrument who allegedly sexually assaulted a young woman in an alley early Tuesday in the South Side's Woodlawn neighborhood. The man is also reportedly a suspect in another rape that occurred Oct. 8 in an apartment building in the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood, according ... (Read on Source)
Google Universal Search on Steroids?
Another Google Glitch
I nuked a recent post about sites potentially getting filtered because it become somewhat irrelevant and speculative considering Matt Cutts stated the following in a Webmaster World thread today:
I don't consider those rankings indicative of anything coming in the future. Some data went into the index without all of our quality signals incorporated, and it should be mostly back to normal and continuing to get back to normal over the course of the day.
Google glitches often reveal engineer intent, and based on that, http://216.239.59.104/ is a !!! fascinating data center right now.
The Index That Never Was
That data set does look a bit incomplete, with...
- some sites not ranking for their own brands (or other phrases that were aggressively used in anchor text)
- lots of internal tag pages ranking from authority sites like Wordpress.com or Amazon
- a bunch of international sites ranking in the global search results (no noticeable local bias)
- authority sites like media sites and listing sites like Craigslist or Indeed.com ranking for core industry phrases with a simple internal page job listing
- sites with a lot of usage data (possibly through brand awareness and related searches driven by advertising and/or affiliate traffic?) getting a bit more of a ranking boost than they would not have seen based on the PageRank model.
Universal Search Gets Big
Probably even more important than that ranking reshuffle is the appearance of universal search...everywhere, with the volume at #11 (or maybe 12?)! Just take a look at this search for credit cards...if you are not an AdWords advertiser, are not in universal search verticals (like news and video), and are not wikipedia, then you don't have many organic search results that you can rank for on the first page.
Other search results I looked at had a similar bias toward universal search - with heavy promotion of Google shopping results, Google books, videos, etc.
Having seen the above search results, consider that as time passes and we learn to trust search more we generally tend to click on the top few results, and then look at these click distribution stats from the AOL data from a couple years ago:
Overall Percent of Clicks | Relative Click Volume |
|
|
1st page totals: 89.82%, 4,425,226 clicks | |
Will a #1 Google ranking still be worth a lot of money? Absolutely, but the gap between winners and losers will grow much larger. If you were planning on getting a bit of traffic by ranking #5 or #6 in the organic results, that listing may end up on page 2 of the search results...yielding virtually no traffic.
The Business of Search Result Page Changes
Why would Google consider making such a large shift?
- they keep making the web more interactive hoping to eventually replace (or at least heavily augment) offline media distribution via television and other outlets (their real competition is not so much Microsoft or Yahoo!, but other information dissemination devices)
- if they send traffic to editorial partners they help subsidize those businesses, and get the businesses addicted to Google traffic...thus yielding significant control over to Google
- if they chop up traffic streams they make spamming less profitable and kill the incentive to spam
- if they promote verticals where they host information (books, video, local/maps, Google shopping) they get a second chance to monetize searchers who did not click on AdWords ads
Searchers Get Trained, Publishers (Frogs) Slowly Get Boiled
Universal search is a relevancy strategy, but it is also a business and profit strategy. There will be a role back on the above search results, but in time the search results will start looking more and more like the above. The shift will happen slowly, such that the publishers don't realize they are being boiled. *
* While the frog analogy has been debunked, it is still a memorable analogy, which is easy to use to describe gradual change.
New Ad Units & AdWords Expansion
As Giovanna noted on PPC blog, Google Checkout is spreading, and AdWords is becoming richer and more interactive. Some of the other universal search products (particularly local search, book search, music search, and shopping search) will present Google with more revenue options.
Strategies to Prepare for Universal Search on Steroids
- If your site is fairly close to what it takes to be considered in some of Google's verticals - like Google news, then consider upping your game a bit and submitting an inclusion request.
- Try to make some video content. Not good for everyone, but most sites could use some, and the competitive bar with video is much lower than it is with text - though I wouldn't expect it to stay that way for more than a couple years.
- If you have some top rankings that are bouncing around consider focusing on promoting that content again - when stratification occurs you are going to be better off focusing on owning a few ideas rather than being average to slightly above average at many. Top ranked sites also benefit from self-reinforcing rankings. Read up on cumulative advantage if you have not yet done so.
- Usage data (and/or brand searches) may become a big part of future algorithms. Get ready for that by reading about BrowseRank then invest in advertising, branding, and user experience.
Thirty-One Race Champions Crowned Tonight by Sports Car Club of America
Fluge Global Adventures Road Racing Championship Honors Top Area Competitors (PRWeb Nov 21, 2008)
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/11/prweb1643974.htm
name: MAGPIE