Tapping into a $28.7-million round of fresh venture capital, Digg.com will embark on a major expansion over the next year, with plans to double its staff from 75 to 150 as well as relocate to a San Francisco headquarters roughly three times the size of its current offices. Among the site's development plans will be the addition of international and multilingual interfaces to the existing site and a renewed shift in personalizing content for individual users.
Adelson was not specific about Digg's next round of features, but in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo, Adelson spoke at length about what he called "Hyper-personalization," a model that, instead of showing users the most popular stories, would make guesses about what they'd like based on information mined from the giant demographic veins of social networks. This approach would essentially turn every user into a big Venn diagram of interests, and send them stories to match.
Adelson said Digg had not yet deployed local views of the content, but that it was in the planning stages. "We do believe the implicit groupings of users and interests that we use in the recommendation engine will certainly play a role in the future of Digg and how we can address localities and topics."
On the Ridiculousness of Wrathful Reaction to Swell Ideas
Topic: Arts
6:52 am EDT, Oct 20, 2008
My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh, I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.
A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all. -- Louis Kahn
I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.
Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.
Overhead, the sun is a wrathful god. It is made to ravage a dying land.
The boy stands in a dry gulch. He tilts his hat to the sting of the wind.
These men are patriots, says The Coach.
I reckon.
Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.
Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new.
It has been a historic few days. We have been reminded of a simpler time.
Mourners include those who are looking for answers to the pressing questions being asked in our country today.
They seem to be asking, What can we do about our country now?
Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone.
Indeed, charisma, intelligence, and ambition, tempered by a self-deprecating wit, are the particular hallmarks not so much of a great black politician as of any great one.
SIR – Can it really be a coincidence that within weeks of the Large Hadron Collider being switched on for the first time (“Off into the wild, blue yonder”, September 13th) a financial black hole has appeared in the universe?
Barclay Price Edinburgh
See also, this letter to the editor, published in the September 2008 issue of Harper's:
I am a new subscriber, and I find myself perplexed by the lack of context for the doomsday scenario related in the June Readings section ["Fear Review"].
The Reading presents what appears to be a factual affidavit [from one Luis Sancho, about the chances that the earth will be destroyed should the Large Hadron Collider be activated]. Is this a misapprehension on my part? Is this an inside joke that is funny to the editors because you don't believe a word about the danger described? Is your magazine so sophisticated that you would simply report, without comment, the possibility of the careless destruction of the world by a group of scientific researchers?
If this is an example of "tongue-in-cheek" entertainment, I don't find it very funny, and I think you owe it to your less sophisticated readers to explain just what the hell is going on in that laboratory and at Harper's Magazine.
