From the monthly archives:

February 2008

the social horizon

February 27, 2008

Does the inherent limit on human interaction group size apply to online social networks?. That limit is called “Dunbar’s Number” and is estimated to be ~150, based on observations of social networks among primates and then extrapolating to humans taking increased brainpower into consideration. An intriguing piece in the WSJ asks whether online social networks [...]

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email the google-killer?

February 23, 2008

Fascinating numbers via Bernard Lunn at RWW about the true market share threat to Google of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger: Email is 49% of Impressions. Portals and Search Engines is 10% by contrast. This is some free data from Nielsen-Netratings. click on Top Site Genres. 56% is Microsoft and Yahoo combined market share of webmail. Gmail [...]

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Semantic authoring

February 21, 2008

RWW argues that for the Semantic Web to really take off, content-management systems need to incorporate semantic markup. They argue, Allowing authors or readers to add tags to articles or posts allows a measure of classification, but it does not capture the true semantic essence of the document. Automated Semantic Parsing (especially within a given [...]

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social search skepticism

February 20, 2008

Last summer, there was a dust-up between several high-profile “web 2.0″ personalities that made for interesting reading. It started with Robert Scoble, who created a three-part video essay provacatively titled “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years“. Scoble is obsessed with the idea that search engine optimization (SEO) [...]

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wordpress folksonomy progress

February 15, 2008

The experiment of adding Scott’s WP_Folksonomy plugin to my blog has been a success so far. My blog, haibane.info, is by no means a giant traffic draw but it does have enough that the userbase has been adding some tags of their own. I have at least one user (Scott himself?) who reliably adds tags [...]

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Foldershare

February 13, 2008

I’m starting a new category, called “cloudware” which is how i intend to refer to software that runs in the cloud. This will be my way of documenting what cloudware I actually use and fine useful. Fitting then that the first entry here is for Foldershare, a beta service from Microsoft that is stunningly simple [...]

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