StumbleUpon | Naruwan's blog posts

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/25570611/

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:48:31 -0700

Rant:
I don't get people saying podcasting is dying. I subscribe to a long list of quality podcasts and I am constantly discovering new ones. The audio vs. video debate is very much a case of apples and oranges. People tend to watch while they're at the computer and listen while they're out and about.

And these podcast lists like podcast alley really don't capture the true picture of the podcast world. There are many hugely popular podcasts which don't make the lists because they don't beg for votes on every episode. I find the best way to discover new podcasts is to subscribe to something like wikio using a key word like podcast, then subscribe to the feed. ( http://www.wikio.com/news/Podcasts )
ok, done....

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/12533205/

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 06:07:45 -0700

http://photo.beholdsearch.com/search.jsp

Can't get the review page up for this site, strangely Here's the low-down from the About page: "BeholdTM is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images -- at the pixel level. It offers a completely new way to search for images. It is different to standard image search engines, such as Flickr or Google, because those search through images using only image tags and filenames.
Behold is capable of recognising a number of visual concepts in pictures. You can ask Behold to return images that look like one of these concepts. This new type of search can be flexibly combined with regular text-based search. For example you can ask Behold to return images tagged with the word 'london' that look like pictures of buildings (try it!). You can also filter text-based image search results based on what the images actually look like."

This is their blog page for updates:
http://beholdsearch.blogspot.com/

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/10506552/

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 05:53:06 -0700

If only I had (a) the skill to make this and, (b) too much time on my hands in which to make it !

This is weird - I can't remember where the heck this came from. I know it's via SU but where on SU? I'll post a link to the original site if anyone can provide it for me (?)

Stumbler clickmonkey ( http://clickmonkey.stumbleupon.com/ ) found the link for me. Many thanks. http://steampunkworkshop.com/

Mr steampunk has pages here at SU.
http://vonslatt.stumbleupon.com/

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/9578119/

Fri, 04 May 2007 17:46:58 -0700

[read post below first - continued here]

".....So, friends, please help me out here. Spread the word. Internet search has become too central to all our lives to be put in the hands of noble amateurs. A "people-powered" search engine staffed by a militia of anonymous volunteers will only compound the opacity of the supposedly "democratic" Internet. Jimmy Wales' faith in open-source communitarianism and the natural goodness of volunteers is childish and self-serving.

Let's all grow up here. On the Internet, as in life, you get what you pay for. And I, for one, don't want the responses to my daily search requests determined by a horde of faceless volunteers.

Andrew Keen, Author, The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday, $23). "

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/9578103/

Fri, 04 May 2007 17:45:43 -0700

Down With Internet Democracy - Forbes.com [from this page - free registration required: http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0521/038.html]
"On My Mind
Down With Internet Democracy
Andrew Keen

Why you don't want anonymous volunteers powering your search engine.
Late last year, two days before Christmas, Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of the people-powered encyclopedia Wikipedia, posted an evangelical message on his Web site, Wikia.com. "Help me out," he wrote. "Spread the word."

Six years earlier Wales' cofounding partner at Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, had posted a similar message. "Humor me," Sanger's January 2001 electronic missive had said. "Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes." These were the three sentences that, unfortunately, changed the information world. Today Wikipedia is a top-ten Internet destination, with 7 million articles in 251 languages and a volunteer militia of several hundred thousand editors.

Wales' newest new thing is Wikia Search--a so-called people-powered search engine. Having upturned the knowledge business, he is gunning his revolutionary energy on search. So what, exactly, is Wikia Search? As Wales wrote in this magazine earlier this month, it is "open-source software" that hands over "full editorial control" of its algorithms to its users. Trusting the "human touch" over scientific truth, Wiki Search replaces Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people )'s purely mathematical (and largely secret) rules with open-source search code written by volunteer programmers. This is an attempt to dress Google up as Wikipedia. As Wales put it in his 2006 posting, he was looking for "community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for Web search." The missive immediately drew 1,000 volunteers.

If, like me, you believe that Wikipedia has spawned a mountain of unreliable, unprofessional and often corrupt so-called knowledge, then Wales' radical new search venture is of deep concern.

According to Wales, search is "broken." It lacks "freedom," "community," "accountability" and "transparency." He argues that Google can be gamed by spammers, marketers and other Internet cheats who have learned to outwit the algorithms, thereby earning their products or services inappropriately high rankings. So Wales' solution is to staff Wikia Search with unpaid programmers who will develop algorithms that can sniff out the spammers and challenge the cheats.

What will Wikia Search be like? I fear it will resemble Wikipedia. Rather than gang up against the gamers, it will compound the corruption by giving search-engine editorial power to anonymous volunteers. This is exactly what has damaged Wikipedia's reputation as a people-powered encyclopedia. How many supposedly altruistic programmers will really be in the pay of Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) or al Qaeda or the millions of other organizations that could be tempted to pay to have their products and services better positioned?

Is search too important to be left to fallible human beings? No. But Wales has chosen the wrong type of human to build his open-source search software. Yes, he's right. Purely mathematical algorithms on search engines like Google can be and indeed are gamed by spammers and other electronic scammers. But to create real community and real accountability you need accountable programmers, rather than anonymous and thereby intrinsically untrustworthy volunteers.

If you want to supplement artificial intelligence with real human intelligence, you need to reward the real humans with real money in exchange for their services. Because real people have real mortgages to pay off and real families to feed. A genuinely people-powered search service should, therefore, employ and pay a professional staff to check the accuracy of its entries. Traditional media have a word for these gatekeepers. They are called editors. [..continued in post above]

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/8524744/

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:57:44 -0700

Computer-generated outline? Nope. It's real.

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/3012416/

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 03:01:26 -0800

Well I am back - sort of. Ha, that didn't last long did it!

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/2846676/

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 16:02:32 -0800

Taking a break from SU for a while.

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/1150711/

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 21:20:44 -0700

This is funny, from New Scientist:

"One rainy afternoon last February I decided to find out. I switched on the computer in my study, and logged on to http://www.intellibuddy.com, home to one of the leading artificial intelligences on the planet, to see what the state-of-the-art has to offer.

Intellibuddy: Hi, I'm Intellibuddy!
Nice to meet you.

JM: I'm writing an article about artificial intelligence.

Intellibuddy: Will you include me in your essay?

JM: I will if you can persuade me you really are intelligent.

Intellibuddy: Would you recommend this action to a friend?

JM: Errr...are you intelligent?

Intellibuddy: Ummm I am highly intelligent. I have many intellectual functions.

JM: What are your intellectual functions?

Intellibuddy: Thought, reason, intelligence, logic and deduction.
JM: What is your IQ?

Intellibuddy: My IQ is about 250 in human terms.

JM: Wow, you're cleverer than my editor.

Intellibuddy: I'm glad your [sic] impressed, User.

You think I am cleverer than my editor.

JM: No, cleverer than my editor.

Intellibuddy: I'm glad your impressed, User.

You think I am cleverer than my editor.

JM: No, cleverer than my editor.

Intellibuddy: I'm glad your impressed, User.

You think I am cleverer than my editor...

So much for today's artificial intelligence. Intellibuddy is a version of one of the world's most successful chatbots, called ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and invented in 1995 by Richard Wallace, an independent researcher based in San Francisco. You can find versions of ALICE all over the web; the software is free. But whichever version you choose to chat to, the results are disappointingly similar. While some conversations have promising starts, all descend into the type of gibberish that only artificial intelligence can produce...."
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18624961.700

http://Naruwan.stumbleupon.com/review/968855/

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 19:12:14 -0800

Some hilarious snippets from a guardian article about Prince Charles and his sons muttering to each other during a photo op on a skiiing trip. It's like something from a comedy:

"I can't bear that man anyway. He's so awful, he really is. I hate these people," Charles added as a not so sotto voce running commentary to his sons when Mr Witchell ruthlessly probed the prince's feelings about his forthcoming wedding. For public consumption, he merely said: "I am glad you have heard of it."
The mumbled exchanges began with Charles asking his two sons: "Do I put my arms around you?"
Prince William replied: "No, don't, but you can take the horrible glasses away."
Charles said: "Do not be rude about my glasses, I couldn't bear it if you were."
Urged by a member of the press to "look like you know each other", the two princes leaned into their father, who put his arms around them.
Charles then muttered: "What do we do?"
William replied: "Keep smiling, keep smiling."

Oh, and this - talk about out-of-touch, ivory tower man. How can he never have heard of a stag night or get the joke about being tied to a lamppost? [shakes head in disbelief] Read on.

....His father's claims to connect with modern life were further dented when his sons had to explain to him, in answer to another question, what a stag night was. Asked whether they had chained their father to a lamppost, the princes laughed loudly while Charles was heard wondering why they would have done that.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Through gritted teeth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,2763,1449922,00.html?gusrc=rss
Link doesn't work - f*ck it - use google "Through gritted teeth guardian" or something.