julianhopkins.net - Technology

New search engine – is Cuil cool?

nospam@example.com (julian) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:15:09 -0700

There’s a new search site that claims to be better than Google because

The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests (BBC)

It’s founded by some ex-Google engineers, so I thought I’d check it out. They say

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. (Cuil)

One thing not ‘cuil’ (it’s pronounced ‘cool’ apparently) about it, is that my name doesn’t come up first! I’m quite sure how, but I am first on Google, which is rather nice.

OK, but that’s a rather biased test, I have to agree that I’m not the most important ‘Julian Hopkins’ around… on the other hand, why does this result, where there are unconnected ‘Julian’ and ‘Hopkins’ in it come up before me?

I came across this though, someone referring to something I wrote in an email list in 2000! Another reminder that ‘the internet does not forget!’ Don’t put anything online that you wouldn’t want your parents, (future) employers, or even your children to read!

On page 8, some links to the Air-l list which I have contributed to.… At page 10 I stopped looking, the last one did not even have ‘julian’ in it …

It seems a bit slower than Google (not good). Although the pages don’t seem to have as much info on them, they do – returning 10 results per page which is the same as Google. Cuil has little pictures which are not necessary, if you ask me. Here's a screen shot for a search for "Malaysia Today". It comes up with RPK as you'd expect with Google, but a problem here is that 6 out 10 results are from the same website - not very useful...

Continue reading "New search engine – is Cuil cool?"

Testing - Flog Blog

nospam@example.com (julian) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:14:14 -0700

I've been told that I can use the Flog Blog application in Facebook to have my blog appear there too... Here goes for a test of the automatic ping...

**Update 17/7/08**
OK, that seems to work, but it's not exactly what I wanted. My newsfeed says I've done a new post, but you can see it unless you click on it...
There used to be an application called 'Blog Friends' that would show the whole post. Unfortunately, that closed down in March - an explanation by the developers here.

**Update 17/7/08 AGAIN**
Ah, it does display in the profile, it was just hidden down below... will have to check if it does pictures, etc.

When Google fails…

nospam@example.com (julian) — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:00:26 -0700

Sometimes the wonders of the internet hit me again. Reading an article on BBC about Google I noticed a picture of the Android with a Pacman game on it…

I suddenly had a desire to play PacMan: so, I typed ‘play pacman’ into Google, and the top hit was just what I needed on online, free, Pacman!

As a kid, I remember cycling across town to put a few saved coins in a Space Invaders machine. PacMan came a bit later, so I had a bit more money, so we would spend hours in a local ‘milk bar’. Now, I just type in a few words, and I’m sorted… I couldn’t have dreamed of that when I was a kid.

But what about when Google fails us? Yesterday, I searched for something and this came up:

at first I thought it was the terms I used, so I tried different ones to no result. Then I tried a different computer, same result. Browser? Also the same. So I guessed it had to be the network.

I had to turn to something else, so I tried Yahoo! which was OK but the Google interface is nicer. It reminded me of pre-Google days when I used to use a meta-crawler, or try different search sites to see the different results; I had settled on Copernic which was the best thing before Google came along. Maybe it’s still better, to be honest, but I didn’t try it ever since someone suggested Google to me in 2000.

Internet as actant

nospam@example.com (julian) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:32:21 -0800

Source

“The internet” doesn’t have any information. The internet (‘INTernational NETwork’) is the collection of hard and software that enables the storing and transmission of data. Basically, a massive version of the network in your office. You access the information, which is created and stored by individuals.

In practice, apart from people actively involved in its governance (The Internet Society), and network engineers of various types, ‘the internet’ – as an empirical material reality – has no practical prosaic reality for people (unless of course it stopped working…). However, simultaneously, millions of people around the world (as in the comic strip above) interact with ‘the internet’ – objectively, that is what they say is giving them information; so empirically we cannot ignore this. Just as if a person was to say aliens made her assassinate the president – we can’t locate those aliens, but ‘they’ did make her shoot the gun.

I think this is what Latour means by an ‘actant’: it is assigned agency by actors, and is ‘enrolled’ – brought to bear as part of their active engagement with others. Miller & Slater also use that approach in their classic - The Internet - An Ethnographic Approach.

Predicting hyperbole

nospam@example.com (julian) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:12:41 -0800

A quote from a blog post dated 2 June 2006:

The CEO of the world's second-largest media company, Publicis, say "In a couple of years, most of the information you share, most of the advertising you read, most of the messages you send and most of the music you listen to, will transit through your cell phone." (Ahonen)

Note that we are now February 2008 and I have yet to notice the demise of television, internet, billboards, mp3 players, the radio, etc...

You have to wonder what planet that guy is living on? I suppose it's the planet of high-flying advertising agency directors who spend their time convincing themselves and their clients that their 'vision' is the next 'blue ocean', 'flat earth', 'synergistic competitive collaboration', 'strategic pro-active pre-positioning preparation', 'glocal event horizon', or whatever term required to seem different from what was 'the future' six months before...

Social software – social intelligence?

nospam@example.com (julian) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:30:20 -0800

Some thoughts…

Consider this quote from Castells, talking about the difference between data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and judgement:

"we must consider how much the recurrent interaction between computers’ programmed decisions and the feedback from their environment can influence future programs, thus modifying the information base and, with it, the knowledge base for decision. In other words, is there self-evolving programming capability?... this does not seem to be the case nowadays. However, there is a co-evolution between the human brain and the computer, learning from each other, but learning from an individual human brain, so that the co-evolution is always specific to a given personality system. So a computer cannot become a subject in its own right, but I could have (actually my grandchildren may have) a computer as an extension of the mind, whose reactions and help affect the mind, inducing individualized co-evolution between people and their machines. So knowledge-management software is a low-level application for routine operations that can be truncated and distributed, but cannot respond to an evolving context, where the critical decisions have to be made.” (Castells 2003:137)

Source

Interesting, and it makes sense to me. My computer has become like an extension of my memory: my memory is not very good, but one could argue that depending on computers has made it worse. How many of you out there know another person’s telephone number off by heart? Apart from your own that is; you probably know a few, but not many. Maybe the ones that you do remember are the ones you have to physically dial a lot (at the office, on the home phone). If you had to depend on your memory for numbers, and didn’t have autodial and all that on your handphones, you would probably remember a lot more. And when your brain has to do the same thing a lot it actually physically changes, different connections are made, and so on – especially when you are younger (see this interview with Jay Giedd, for example).

Therefore, the more we use computers to extend our brains, the more our brains will become less able to perform those functions that the computer takes over. The pessimistic possibility is that we just develop the skills of using a computer (like when you spend ages trying to fix a bug in the wireless connection just so you can send an email…); the more optimistic option is that our brains get liberated from the more mundane tasks and reach ‘higher levels’ – whatever they might be…

Anyway, to get to the social software part. If there is such a thing as ‘social intelligence’, i.e. a form of consciousness that specifically develops with and through dynamic social interaction, then as we use more software to manage our social life (from the contacts function in Outlook, to dating via social networking sites, where ‘compatible’ potential partners are selected for us), what ‘social intelligence’ that we now take for granted will become atrophied? What will replace them? Will it make any difference?

Works cited
Castells, Manuel, and Martin Ince. Conversations with Manuel Castells. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Giedd, J. (n.d.). Interview with Jay Giedd. frontline: inside the teenage brain: interviews: jay giedd, m.d. | PBS. Frontline. Retrieved 27 July 2004, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/interviews/giedd.html