Hate The Grind

Algorithms are at the heart of Google’s continued success with its search relevancy algorithm being the most noteworthy. However, other services that Google provide such as Google News require equally complex algorithms to search for, sort and display the latest news from around the world. The Google News algorithm is so well written that it can scour the internet for the latest news and have it appear within minutes of it being published all without any human intervention.

However, as with any algorithm there is potential for mistakes to be made and a few days ago a tiny mistake quickly exploded into a huge problem for several companies. United Airlines was the biggest victim as its share prices began plummeting before recovering when investors realized there was a mistake.

What happened was back in 2002 the Chicago Tribune published an article about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy which ran in the Florida Sun-Sentinel. The story was then dropped into an archive never to be seen again (or at least that was the plan). A couple days ago, the article resurfaced on the website via a widget that featured the most popular stories. For those of you who are familiar with how crawlers work you already know how this is going to end!

The Google News crawler eventually spidered website of the Florida Sun-Sentinel and in its “Popular Stories” box in the right navbar was the article about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy. The crawler saw this as new content and the article was added to the Google News index for everyone to read including an investment analyst who noticed the story and promptly posted the breaking news onto the bloomberg system. A quick sell off quickly ensued before Nasdaq halted trading of UAL stock.

The story only lasted 13 minutes before someone noticed the problem but by this time United Airlines share price fell from $12.16 to about $3. After Nasdaq resumed trading, it recovered part of the loss climbing back up to $10.92.

Now, computer geeks around the world are salivating at the opportunity to alter news archives to get another old story to appear on the front page of Google News to manipulate the stock market. What a crazy world we live in. Be careful with your money and don’t believe everything you read because it might not be the truth. Even if it is, it might have only been true 6 years ago! :)

They gathered to watch an MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) cage fight while enjoying $1 beer, but the only thing the crowds got to see at the Four States Fair Grounds was a prank that walked the line of morality. Two men wrestled in the ring ripping away each other’s clothes down to their underwear. This is when they locked in a romantic embrace, stunning the crowd. The crowd soon became enraged lobbing their beer (which were thankfully in plastic cups) at the “fighters”.

The prank is suspected to be the work of Sacha Baron Cohen for his next movie, due out sometime next year. Matt Labov, a publicist for Baron Cohen said he had no comment about the faked fights.

Holland said it took officers about 45 minutes to clear the convention center, as the two actors sprinted away through a specially set-aside tunnel.

Those in attendance were told by several signs on display that they’d be filmed, Holland said, and signed waivers before the event. Convention center sales director Karin Hobbs declined to name the event’s sponsor Monday.

Hey, next time you hear of a cheap cage fight (tickets were only $5), be very very careful! ;)

I found this site today, and it seems pretty neat. Next time I am in the situation where I ask the question: “Is gmail down for everyone or just me?” I’ll hit up this site to find out the answer!

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

So you just saw/read something that suddenly gave you the urge to write a blog post. The whole process from the original thought that sparked your urge to blog, to when readers read your blog post has been documented by Wired in a pretty snazzy flash animation.

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

Go check it out:
http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/ff_secretlife_1602

New for 2008, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) added a new badge designation for attendees of the show. In addition to Press badges, they introduced a new Blogger badge. In recent years, bloggers that were accepted were given out Press badges giving them access to press only areas of the show. While it may seem like a great idea to distinguish bloggers from the press, it seems as though the badges were arbitrarily assigned with some bloggers getting press badges, while a journalist that writes for the New York Times was given a blogger badge because he also contributes to a blog.

Personally, I think all bloggers should be considered bloggers. Writers for large, well known blogs are still bloggers and should not be given press privileges. After watching a video of a juvenile prank by Gizmodo at CES you’ll probably agree. I’m all for having fun, and playing innocent pranks but theres a line, and it was definitely crossed in this prank and I wholeheartedly agreed with CEA’s reaction.

Richard Blakeley has been banned from all future CES events by CEA as revealed in a blog posting at CNET staffer Rafe Needleman posts CEA’s official response:

“We have been informed of inappropriate behavior on the show floor by a credentialed media attendee from the Web site Gizmodo, owned by Gawker Media. Specifically, the Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event. The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of CES media credentials and caused harm to CES exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future CES events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker Media are under discussion.”

I guess the half-assed apology by Gizmodo’s editor wasn’t enough for CEA ;)

I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope 2008 is a year of success and prosperity for everyone! If you haven’t made plans to do so already, head down to your local gym and sign up for that yearly membership that you’ll never use! ;)

I started this blog about a year ago, and its been fun. I plan to continue blogging about anything that piques my interest, and I hope that someone out there find my random ramblings entertaining.

Happy New Year!

I setup a quick test of the new AdSense Video Units as soon as it became available in Canada. I admit I have not done too much tweaking to see if I can improve the performance of these new video units but the initial results are not promising. The click through rates on the video units are quite poor, but I guess that is to be expected because users are there for the videos, and the ads are not intrusive at all.

I’ll post an update after I make some changes and I hope I have more positive news regarding the new video units. What about you? Has anyone out there had any success with these video units? The video units launched on October 9th for the US publishers, but I haven’t seen too many people posting positive results yet.