Who needs another social network?

Here is an excerpt from Miguel Helft's April 25th blog article in Bits - The New York Times.

When it comes to becoming a force in social networks, Google and Yahoo have tried and largely failed .... So now Google and Yahoo are taking another tack — turning themselves into social sites without building a social network.

What does that mean? It means that Yahoo [and Google] will attempt to bring the kinds of features that are common on Facebook and MySpace to its own sites. Users may be able to share photos, videos, news reading habits or calendars with their friends and receive alerts about what friends are up to ....

For the complete article go to Who needs another social network? 

Newspapers Argue For First Amendment Right to Snoop on Readers

Here's an excerpt from a new Bits Blog entry by Saul Hansell on April 14th.

The newspaper industry is now arguing that the First Amendment protects its right to follow users around the Internet so it can charge higher prices on advertising.

This argument was made in a filing by Newspaper Association of America commenting on the Federal Trade Commission’s proposal that the companies involved in advertising that uses what is called behavioral targeting create a self-regulatory code that limits their use of sensitive information.

To see the full article go to Newspapers Argue For First Amendment Right to Snoop on Readers.

How Should I.S.P.s Tell You if They Want to Track Your Surfing?

This was published by Saul Hansell in The Bits Blog to The New York Times.

The term “unavoidable notice” has been bandied about by a group of Internet advertising executives recently as they explored whether to endorse proposals for Internet service providers to keep track of where their customers surfed and what they searched for ....

To view the full blog entry go to How Should I.S.P.s Tell You if They Want to Track Your Surfing?

Starting Making Sense - The Semantic Web

The Economist.com published this on April 9th. 

"SOME new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company ....

The idea is that any website can send a jumble of text and code through Calais and receive back a list of “entities” that the system has extracted—mostly people, places and companies—and, even more importantly, their relationships. It will, for instance, be able recognise a pharmaceutical company's name and, on its own initiative, cross-reference that against data on clinical trials for new drugs that are held in government databases. Alternatively, it can chew up a thousand blogs and expose trends that not even the bloggers themselves were aware of.

The system is free to use, for Reuters' objective is to create a “clearinghouse of meaning” that financial-service companies will be able to exploit as a new type of search engine. How the firm will make money has yet to emerge, though selling insights gained from applying the system's own methods for Reuters' benefit is one possibility ...."

For the full article go to Start Making Sense. 

Are Food Labels Reliable?

When 0 trans fats doesn't mean zero ....