Who is alisyn camerota and why are so many people suddenly interested in her?
Pundits often describe the Web as humanity’s giant, collective brain. So what are we thinking about today? Yesterday UMBC PhD student Akshay Java launched a new service, Wikimatix, that shows the Google’s 100 hot search terms for the past hour and tries to explain each with information extracted from Wikipedia.
The Arbutus Times reports that a 140 pound black bear was caught in an area adjacent to the UMBC campus. The bear was apprehended while eating apples from a resident’s tree. Maryland officials had been tracking him for a month as he wandered across the state:
In a post about the recent cyberattack of Georgian computers from Russian sites, the shadowserver site asks, “Is it possible the same thing that happened to Estonia is happening to Georgia? To put it quite simply, the answer is yes.” They offer the following as evidence.
In an article in Wednesday’s New York Times, Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks, John Markoff describes how the Russia-Georgia conflict broke out on the Internet weeks before the troops engaged.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article, Antipiracy Campaign Exasperates Colleges, on how Universities are begining to resist increased requests by the RIAA to fight music file sharing.
Using Google’s Insights for Search, Pingdom has “looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple, but highly interesting question: Where are they the most popular?”. In their post, Social network popularity around the world, they surveyed MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter. Their technique was simple: search for MySpace and use the “regional interest” estimates. Here are some observations they made:
In a NYT article, Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren’t a Good Defense, author Randall Stross lays out the case against password-based authentication for the Web and argues for approaches that use public key certificates, like Information Cards.
My colleague Marc Olano recently blogged about the new Larrabee chip from Intel, which will be described in a SIGGRAPH paper in a session he is chairing. This chip, with multiple old pentium type cores running at 1GHz, seems a logical culmination of the recent multi/many core trend.
There is an interesting panel to open the Microsoft faculty research summit featuring Rick Rashid, Daniel Reed, Ed Felten, Howard Schmidt, and
Google reports (We knew the web was big…) that its crawlers have hit a new milesteon in finding their trillionth unique URL.
The tutorial program for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) has been announced. It includes includes two full-day and nine half-day tutorials to be held on October 26 and 27 in Karsruhe.
Here’s a Google suggested walk from London to Paris: 246 miles in 2 days 12 hours. Well, maybe five days if you are in good shape but need to sleep. Check out the part in the middle! Leave a comment with your favorite walk!
After several months of procrastination, we’re on a new server. Nicer, faster, hopefully more secure. Thanks to Filip, who helped make the transition painless!
Sometime within the next 30 minutes we will switch over to a new server. Strange things may happen. If you see this note after Noon on Friday 7/11 (for good luck), either the switch failed or your cache is still resolving ebiquity.umbc.edu to the old server. In the latter case, eventually your cached entry should timeout and your computer will get a new one from the DNS.
During the past year, the Journal of Web Semantics was added to the list of journals indexed by Thomson Reuters. Their most recent Journal Citation Report (2007) gives the JWS an impact factor of 3.41, which is the third highest out of the 92 titles in its category — Computer Science, Information Systems.
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