An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

It occurred to me that next year marks twenty years since I first began to use email. Since then I've registered and deactivated well over a dozen addresses. Now I have ten active ones, most of which filter and forward mails into two inboxes: one business, and one personal. If I become more adept at tapping - or Swyping - perhaps I'd want to use my smart phone for most personal communiqués. However, I think it will take considerable time before becoming comfortable using "text message orthography" in business contexts, including instant messaging. This is why I'm not even going to address the basics of formal writing rules such as capitalization, punctuation, and writing out words fully, in the following tips. Use the subject line effectively: differentiate and justify why you're sending the email by summarizing its primary topic clearly. I'd also recommend attempting to be concise at the same time, but it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to d

It should be unsurprising to my readers, that this blog itself has been an experiment in SEO. From its inception (e.g. which service I selected to host it), to its traffic analysis, thus far I've learned a bit and questioned much. For interests' sake, the all-time visitor breakdown by country (which could be skewed by anyone spoofing their IP, of course) is the following: United States         250 Canada                   92 Austria                    74 France                    74 Australia                 45 Japan                      18 Germany                 13 United Kingdom        9 Russia                       8 India                         5 Some counts make perfect sense: I can trace back the majority of Austrian and Australian visits to people whom I know. In the US, I can thank Mick for being such a faithful reader and commenter, although not all the American traffic is likely to be solely attributable to him

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

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

The New York Times covered Google+ recently, as did Reuters: their walk-through is worth a look, and has its funny moments too. Thanks to my MIT affiliation, I was one of the early adopter/invitees for this service, so I've had a day now to peruse its UI (by the time this post is published). Due to the aforementioned privilege, I was an early user of other Google services. For instance, I've had a Gmail account since summer of 2004, and it wasn't generally available until early 2007. Which is why I can vividly recall how Buzz and Wave flopped (although NYT lists Orkut as another instance of defeat, I understand it's still quite a popular SNS in Brazil). The Buzz functionality is still extant despite what some of my colleagues seemed to think: my tweets are forwarded to it along with my networkedblogs -driven automated blog post summaries. However, my audience on Buzz is 6, despite my Gmail contact list which exceeds 250. Speaking of SNS, Orkut, Friendster and My