blog.cankoklu

What a news sources tell you may be just as important as what they don't tell you. 'Tell me more' is a system that, given a seed news story, looks for similar ones in other news sources and automatically detects meaningful differences with respect to the seed story. The system presents snippets of text that make these differences visible.

Sounds very promising..

Gooogle is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search
Photo: Mauricio Alejo

The story of Google's algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in 1997 by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page's now legendary insight was to rate pages based on the number and importance of links that pointed to them - to use the collective intelligence of the Web itself to determine which sites were most relevant. It was a simple and powerful concept, and - as Google quickly became the most successful search engine on the Web - Page and cofounder Sergey Brin credited PageRank as their company's fundamental innovation.

But that wasn't the whole story. "People hold on to PageRank because it's recognizable," Manber says. "But there were many other things that improved the relevancy." These involve the exploitation of certain signals, contextual clues that help the search engine rank the millions of possible results to any query, ensuring that the most useful ones float to the top.

Web search is a multipart process. First, Google crawls the Web to collect the contents of every accessible site. This data is broken down into an index (organized by word, just like the index of a textbook), a way of finding any page based on its content. Every time a user types a query, the index is combed for relevant pages, returning a list that commonly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. The trickiest part, though, is the ranking process - determining which of those pages belong at the top of the list.

Read the rest of the article to understand the awesomeness of Google.

We believe that the Browser Choice screen is an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives — and we hope for the conversation to become broader and deeper. We’ve set up opentochoice.org as one place for you to discuss what this choice means to you — and we hope that you’ll add your own voice to this conversation and those to come.

Whether or not you decide to keep your current Web browser, we encourage you to learn more about your browser and the impacts it has on the way you see the world, and to make your own choice.

Firefox's browser choice site..

- eMarketer Staff

With the effective mixing and mining of audience data becoming increasingly important to online advertisers, the role of behavioral targeting has grown more central, according to eMarketer.

To give behavioral targeting some perspective, 14.2 percent of all display ad spending in 2010 will use some form of consumer behavior data indicating interest or intention to target ads.

By 2014, nearly one in five display ad dollars will be linked to behavioral targeting. Display advertising includes banners, rich media and video units.

U.S. online display ad spending with behavioral components that look at audience interests and intentions will reach more than $1.1 billion in 2010.

Behavioral targeted ad spending will rise to at least $2.6 billion by the end of 2010.

Businesses have two options to leverage targeting technologies:
a: Pay Google or another similar company to target off-site behaviors of users.
b: Implement targeting on their own site; for which a nearly flawless web analytics system is a prerequisite.

This was going to happen sooner or later and it is a BİG DEAL.

Internet users in Turkey have found an interesting visualization to highlight their numbers, connect with one another, air their grievances and hopefully reach their goals using Google Maps and shared documents.

A reader wrote to us tonight saying that his fellow citizens have been "struggling with cencorship for several years just like their Chinese counterparts. Prominent websites are banned in Turkey, such as youtube, lasf.fm and google pages mostly because of political reasons." In protest, many of them are virtually lining the streets using a shared interface, creating what is becoming a fascinating, non-violent and hopefully effective visualization.

Sesimizi böyle duyuracağız demek..

Love the format..

Bank of America's latest online effort is a personal finance educational site at <learn.bankofamerica.com> that includes consumer polls, money savings tips, videos and articles. Bank products are sprinkled throughout but the marketing is relatively restrained.

It's a solid effort. Good, concise copy married to an attractive graphical layout. And for a bank the size of Bank of America, it makes perfect business sense. The site moves a little product, builds the brand, shows off the bank's consumer-friendly side, provides material for PR campaigns, and gains some CRA credit (note 1). 

But I'm not sure how much usage it will get other than the curious driven to it from banners within online banking. That's how ended up there today after paying my BofA credit card bill online (see second screenshot below).

Given Bank of America's 30 million online banking customers, they must not be driving much traffic to the site yet. According to Compete, traffic surpassed 100,000 for the first time in October. July was the first month that traffic was registered at the site.

Unique monthly visitors to BofA's personal finance tips site (July through October, 2009)

Source: Compete

Other than enabling an RSS feed for article updates, the site has no Web 2.0 or social media features. No blog. No forum. It's just a very pretty face on personal finance 101 material. It will be interesting to see where they take it.

Learn.BankofAmerica.com homepage (link, 13 Nov. 2009)
Note: I completed the poll on the middle of the page, so the results are shown rather than the poll question.

Logoff screen (13 Nov 2009, 3 PM Pacific)

Note:
1. CRA = Community Reinvestment Act which requires banks to help meet the financial and credit needs of low- to-moderate-income consumers.