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Showing posts with the label critical thought

Where is Dennis Ritchie's day?

It's now a week since the creator of the C programming language, and co-creator of the UNIX operating system, Dennis Ritchie , died after a long illness. I still have the distinct impression that Steve Jobs' charisma and Apple's links to pop culture have generated far more hype than the former's profound contributions to technology. A few days ago I'd shared the New York Times obituary on Ritchie, which garnered comments from my loyal readers (thank you, Klaus and Mick!) Since then, I'd been looking at various media sources to see what more would be said about him. However, I see announcements instead like this (Californian governor declares October 16 Steve Jobs Day), and threads like this (Google has neither created a doodle nor provided a hyperlink to Ritchie, despite doing the latter for Jobs). It seems there must be many more people who share my disappointment and outrage that Ritchie's passing has been eclipsed so effectively by the timing of J

Correlation, Causation and SEO

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Much speculation abounds when it comes to reverse engineering which criteria are prioritized in search engine ranking algorithms. In the SEOmoz ranking factors summary  from this year, the correlation of higher page ranks to greater Facebook "like" numbers was noted. As my team lead (co-author of Audience, Relevance and Search - here's its companion blog ) and I discussed, it was clear that there was an implication that people were likely to interpret this correlation as causation - that is, cum hoc ergo propter hoc.  It's a very easy trap to fall into: thinking that we can rely on a quantifiable factor such as SNS-driven endorsement counts to predict how high up a SERP the page would be likely to be found. However, if one examines the use case scenario of a "popular" page, here's what I would easily envision happening: Something that is useful, very entertaining or plain memorable is published. News of its existence begins to virally spread - t

Response to "Ethics of personalized search" SEOMoz blog post

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The Ethical Issues of Personalisation Online  asked the following questions, so I thought I'd present my views here: But, is it rea sonable to expect a corporate entity to act for the greater good? Particularly if providing users with a more balanced SERP results in them high-tailing it straight into the warm embrace of the competition? In any case – wasn’t it always this way? Before the internet people consumed news only via whichever media sat comfortably with their own political affiliation. Plus of course, even if a more balanced mix of results are shown, you can’t *make* people click through to read something they don’t want to. So, what do you think? Should we be afraid of personalisation? Should we push for easier ways to turn it off? Should there be more ‘balanced’ results for certain types of queries? Should I get myself a tin foil hat, cancel my broadband, flush my smartphone and hide under my desk?   First, while I would imagine a for-profit organization would consider

Link bait thoughts - Infographics

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I have a love-hate relationship with Infographics. For those who haven't seen many examples, they're concise sources of information presented with plenty of visual aids. Here's a source of a self-referential infographic, followed by 49 great examples. I love them, because my first language uses a logographic script, kanji , and as I grew up with manga , I'd always known that practically any subject, ranging from history to arithmetic and even abstract concepts such as those covered in philosophy, could be learned via a mix of graphics and text. As an aside, when I mention manga to non- Otaku , invariably I receive two questions: "Aren't comics for kids?" (Answer: not in Japan - there, manga exists for every age and demographic.) And, "What subjects do non-kid manga cover then?" (Answer: what do you think "novels" cover?) However, the concise presentation of information found in many cases also reminds me of "executive summarie