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conflux

Wired Magazine Inside the Soul of the Web

"Mankind's questions unscroll day and night on a computer screen in an office hallway in Mountain View, California.

Workers here at Google were once fascinated to watch the queries climb up and off the screen, two per second, 173,000 per day. But they rarely stop to glance anymore. Most Google employees long ago lost interest in the words and the astonishing numbers they represent: Each of these questions, culled randomly from six giant server farms scattered around the world, represents 1,500 inquiries, totaling 260 million Web searches per day."

redux [12.27.02]
News.Com Hot links, cool trends on the Web
"Schatz said search terms also are reflecting the increased Web activity of teenage girls. Anything related to the prom or a young, male actor is on the rise, he said. "It's really amazing how many searches those heart-throbby actors get," said Schatz, who lists "Hulk" star Eric Bana and high-school basketball star LeBron James as hot commodities for the coming year."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

Ananova Internet searchers 'stuck in the nineties'
"The UK's internet users are stuck in the nineties, according to a new survey."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

redux [12.08.02]
The New York Times Postcards From Planet Google
[requires 'free' registration]

"Google is taking snapshots of its users' minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story."

"Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads."

The New York Times Magazine Approximating Life
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"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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