Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for June 11th through June 12th:

• Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users | Social Media Stuff | Justin Parks – Ideas for queries on Google to find Twitter users / content.
• David Ziegler’s Blog – A Python Script to Automatically Extract Excerpts From Articles – Some notes on cleaning up web page content to extract a text excerpt of the intended content.
• Papers on PageRank you should read | Science for SEO – A list of interesting PageRank and search relevance ranking papers. June 2009.
• aicoder: TunkRank Scoring Improvement – On influence ranking models for Twitter.
• datawrangling’s trendingtopics at master – GitHub – This repository contains the full source code for Trendingtopics.org, built by Data Wrangling to demonstrate how Hadoop & EC2 can power a data driven website. The trend statistics and time series data that run the site are updated periodically by launching a temporary EC2 cluster running the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution. Our initial seed data consists of the raw wikipedia database content dump along with hourly traffic logs for all articles collected from the wikipedia squid proxy (curated by Domas Mituzas). We made the first 7 months of this hourly data for all articles available as an Amazon Public Dataset. The current trend calculations are run with Hadoop Streaming and Hive. The output produced by these Hadoop jobs is loaded into MySQL and indexed to power the live site.

These are my links for May 21st from 06:07 to 22:34:

• Data.gov Launches to Mixed Reviews | Wired Science | Wired.com – Commentary and initial reactions to data.gov. Good news – government is taking steps to improve access to public data. Bad news – limited catalog of datasets to start (47). But it's going in the right direction.
• IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize – Robert M. Bell, Jim Bennett, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. A look at collaborative filtering and other predictive clustering systems used by one team competing for the Netflix prize, in which the goal is a 10% improvement over the original Cinematch recommendation system.
• bb: 21may2009 – (opinion) Graphic of the gap between how people (and companies) succeed, and how people think they succeed.
• Seventeen things that people are actually saying when they retweet others – meish dot org: life, unfolding – A look at various reasons why messages are retweeted on Twitter.
• Expanding the Cloud: Moving large data sets into Amazon S3 with AWS Import/Export. – All Things Distributed – More on shipping data to S3 via hard drive from Werner Vogels
• Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk! – Tanenbaum-style bulk transfer for AWS/S3! "Customers with AWS storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level often ask us if they can sidestep the internet and simply send us a disk drive, or even a 747 full of such drives. "

These are my links for April 3rd through April 7th:

• Agile Testing: Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 – Practical guidance on using cloud computing at EC2. Expect failures, automate deployment, more.
• joshua’s blog: on url shorteners – Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us) summary on the state of URL shorteners (tinyurl, bit.ly, etc), and issues with 3rd party redirects, link sharing through twitter, etc.
• Control Yourself » status.net coming soon – On status.net, plans for hosting laconi.ca sites, and federating microblogging status networks
• There must be some way out of here (Scripting News) – Comments on the rise of celebrity accounts on Twitter, increasing spam/noise, and alternative models for laconi.ca and status.net
• Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites – Tad Hogg, Kristina Lerman 31 Mar 2009 Abstract: We describe a general stochastic processes-based approach to modeling user-contributory web sites, where users create, rate and share content. These models describe aggregate measures of activity and how they arise from simple models of individual users. This approach provides a tractable method to understand user activity on the web site and how this activity depends on web site design choices, especially the choice of what information about other users' behaviors is shown to each user. We illustrate this modeling approach in the context of user-created content on the news rating site Digg.

These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:

• Google Friend Connect APIs – Google Code –
• Geek And Poke – Mostly twitter and cloud computing themed cartoons.
• Official Google Blog: Here comes Google Voice – GrandCentral makes a comeback, after disappearing into Google a while back. Now with voice transcription, SMS folders, and integration with GMail address book.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances – AWS introduces pricing structure for longer term, reserved capacity. Upfront payment, plus a (lower) incremental hourly charge, net savings for continuous 24×7 clients, and guaranteed availability of instances for backup or surge capacity.
• How To Monetize a Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent « abovethecrowd.com – Bill Gurley on the case for virtual goods and casual gaming as revenue vehicles on US-based social networking sites, in a look at China-based QQ / TenCent.
• Too Big Has Failed – Thomas Hoenig, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, March 6, 2009 (PDF) – Hoenig argues that too-big-to-fail institutions have failed, US banks will require some form of nationalization eventually.

These are my links for February 26th from 10:39 to 20:05:

• Piano Etudes – Assemble, play, and print scores for do-it-yourself etudes built from short musical snippets. An example GWT application.
• CloudStatus – Dynamically displays the last week of health status for selected remote computing services. For services with recent outages, a health bar is shown. Given no recent outages in a provider's services, key indicator charts are shown.
• Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Getting our house in order – Carol Bartz says "hello world" with first set of reorg and directions as CEO at Yahoo.
• Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate – Interesting discussion on app engine in the comments section.
• Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – Full content of last year's ICWSM 2008 conference papers.

These are my links for February 24th through February 25th:

• The C10K problem – On techniques for scaling to large number of network clients (e.g. >10000).
• Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Hello, (twitter) world – List of official Yahoo twitter handles for various activities including research, geo, search, and yui.
• New AWS Public Data Sets – Economics, DBpedia, Freebase, and Wikipedia – AWS adds Freebase, DBPedia, Wikipedia extract, and US Transportation data sets.
• eigenclass – Related document discovery, without algebra – Another approach to simple related document discovery, based on tags, should work ok for small data sets.
• SVD Recommendation System in Ruby – igvita.com – A 50 line SVD recommendation / collaborative filtering system for a Rails app. with the help of some simple linear algebra.

These are my links for February 18th through February 19th:

• Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds – Google Fellow Jeff Dean says from 1999-2009, while both search queries and processing power have gone up by a factor of 1000, latency has gone down from around 1000ms to 200ms. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999. 1000 machines handle a single query, all in memory.
• Government 2.0: Tweeting the Talk, Walking the Walk « Adriel Hampton – List of twitter users in various government organizations.
• The Absurdly Artificial Divide Between Pure and Applied Research – Olivia Judson – NYTimes.com – I used to explain myself as an "applied research" guy, small "r", not big "R" pure research. Love theory and analysis but want to see it get used for something eventually.
• Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Load data into S3 via hard drives? – Amazon asks for feedback regarding the FedEx option for bulk data transfer. "We have heard a number of requests about sending hard drives to AWS to load into S3. If such a service would benefit your business, we’d like to learn more about your use case."
• Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance – On the shifts in supply and demand, buyers and sellers in advertising markets as media moves from 1-to-many to niche-oriented, many-to-many and sellers take control of their own online media and advertising campaigns