Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them. OpenID, which was born at Six Apart less than two years ago, was successful by embracing a similar philosophy: no one company should own everyone’s online identity. An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.

Six Apart: We Are Opening the Social Graph

Say goodbye to the Information Age. It’s already over.

Ok, not over, completely. These things take time. You don’t just end an “Age” in an instant. But take a look around you and you’ll start to see the beginnings of the end, just about everywhere.

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Take a look around you, in your own life and work. You might be surprised how often you find yourself craving less information and culling the dead bits from your data (can you say “Spam Filter?” I knew you could.). As you do, savor the end of the Information Age and the beginning of something new…

This is rather anecdotal and trendy, but whatever...

Leaving the Information Age

Several papers of interest here:

The Netflix Prize
James Bennett and Stan Lanning

Improved Neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering
Robert M. Bell and Yehuda Koren

Variational Bayesian Approach to Movie Rating Prediction
Yew Jin Lim and Yee Whye Teh

On the Gravity Recommendation System
Gabor Takacs, Istvan Pilaszy, Bottyan Nemeth, and Domonkos Tikk

Full text is available for all.

KDD Cup 2007

Google is planning to expand its staff by a third, with most of the new hirings in Europe, as the internet search company tries to avoid being seen as an aggressive American multinational.

“We are not seen correctly in Europe,” Mr Mattos said. “My impression is that Google is seen as a big US company that is here to make money."

Well, now they'll be seen as a big US company that either doesn't understand itself or can't tell the truth.

Would they rather be seen as a company that is "here to lose money"?

Presumably the logic is, we want to do great things, and if the money shows up, well, that's just gravy.

Google sets sights on Europe growth

Automatic Bob Herbert:

According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. “For several months now,” Kruh writes, “as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon.”

What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert’s columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column is just a random recombination of wording from earlier columns.

I spent about fifteen minutes writing software that can generate Bob Herbert columns while using a minimal amount of our Earth’s precious resources.

Behold “Automatic Bob,” the Bob Herbert column generator.

Why Is Bob Herbert Boring?:

The first thing you need to know about New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is that he's always right. No, not in the way a drunk in a bar is always right—Herbert's genuinely right, or at least close enough that it'd be petty to look for exceptions. When the majority loses its bearings, Herbert sticks with the sane minority.

He reports on the disadvantaged and disenfranchised of America, about whom he will tell you things you didn't expect.

Bob Herbert is a sensible person who usually assesses things more accurately than his colleagues, regularly hits the streets to report on the world outside, shines a light on people and issues that deserve far more attention than they usually get, and tells you things you really ought to know but don't. But here's the catch: you don't read Bob Herbert. Or, if you say you do, I don't believe you.

Bob Herbert is the only national columnist at a major newspaper who consistently writes about the issues in our country that matter most yet seem to be covered least.

But, honestly, I don't read him either.

The point is that some columnists are influential because they're interesting, while others are interesting because they're influential.

I asked Herbert why he thinks his columns draw less attention in blogs and other media outlets than those of his colleagues. "The media tends to be drawn like a magnet to power," Herbert said. "Stories about power will generate more chatter." He added: "I think people who are in privileged positions either don't think a lot about people who are not, or don't care about them."

Clearly, then, Bob Herbert is at a disadvantage before he even puts pen to paper. Poor people plus statistics equals boring—we've got the science to prove it.

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Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it. So does Panasonic, BASF, Bayer, American Airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, BellSouth, Hapag-Lloyd and any number of other firms that use it for their logos and as their house font.

...

I had one little side room we called “the pi room,” because on its walls were 53,000 digits of pi, done in pale green on black, a “Matrix” homage. But a very funny thing happened once it was up — people would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed — to the point where if someone was getting stressed about the installation deadline, we’d say, “Go stand in the pi room.”

Douglas Coupland: I Luv Helvetica

Kevin Kelly:

My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

What are your Big Things?

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

For years now, WHOIS has been a battlefield between privacy advocates who want to change the system and commercial and law-enforcement interests who want to keep it as is.

The most recent attempt at compromise, involving a large ICANN working group, ended in another and perhaps final impasse last week:

“Finished off” might be a better term. Despite flirting with the kind of compromises and reforms that might actually reconcile privacy rights with identification needs, in the final weeks of the process trust and agreement among the parties broke down completely.

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net's heart - the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved - or not resolved - will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

Nicholas Carr, on the WHOIS deadlock

A variety of programming accidents, i.e., models and methods, including extreme programming, are examined to determine that each has a step that programmers find painful enough that they habitually avoid or postpone the step. This pain is generally where the programming accident meets requirements, the essence of software, and their relentless volatility.

The Inevitable Pain of Software Development

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born, the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik was heard round the world. It was the sound of wonder and foreboding. Nothing would ever be quite the same again — in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species.

... Neil Armstrong struck a note sure to resonate with many of his contemporaries. “We were really very privileged,” he said, “to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go.”

With Fear and Wonder in Its Wake, Sputnik Lifted Us Into the Future