From the article:

Unlike user-generated content sites like Wikipedia, Wikia aims to delve deeper into subjects by grouping experts around specific topics to post and edit. It’s named after wikis, a term for a group of web pages that can be easily edited by members. Despite sharing a founder and part of a name, Wikia has no financial or editorial relationship to Wikipedia. Wikia was funded with $14 million so far, $4 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and individual investors and an estimated $10 million from Amazon.com. Wikia makes money through online advertising while Wikipedia is funded by grants from the public through the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. The company declined to share revenue.

Source: SF Business Journal

Fast Forward: Tech Giants Scramble For Bigger Piece of Growing Online Ad Market

So if the U.S. economy is in such bad shape, and print advertisers are hurting, why has the online market until very recently not shared in the pain? “What happens is that the current economic crisis puts pressure on advertisers to save money and find more effective marketing channels,” says Karsten Weide, IDC’s program director for digital marketplace and new media. “Effectively, the crisis accelerates the shift of advertising budgets from traditional media into new media.”
…
Wharton economics professor Devin G. Pope looked, not at spending, but at numbers of ads and effectiveness during his research into the impact of Craigslist, the online classified ads service. Pope and University of California Berkeley collaborator Kory Kroft found that the online classified ad site Craigslist, where it was available, reduced by nearly 10% the number of newspaper classified job listings between 2005 and 2007. “It not only crowds out those classifieds, it appears to be more efficient,” with significantly shorter listing periods for the Craigslist ads versus the newspaper classified ads, Pope says. For example, rental vacancies for Craigslist-listed apartments were shorter than those not advertised on Craigslist.

If online advertising can make such a big dent in the venerable newspaper classified, what might it do in other ad sectors? Here’s a look at the likely developments in online advertising’s biggest sectors….

Source: Knowledge@Wharton

From News.com

Yahoo has begun sharing some future plans it has for Groups, its service where people with shared interests can get together online through mailing lists, calendars, polls, and other features.

Source: News.com

A new article by search expert Avi Rappaport.

From the summary:
Avi writes:

I’ve just posted an article on the Long Tail, Short Head and Search. Every site, intranet and enterprise search log I’ve analyzed fits the model of the Long Tail, with a very few very popular search terms, then tailing off very quickly to unique queries (the Long Tail), creating a Zipf curve.

The Short Head — the few most frequently used search terms — is the best place to start in analyzing search engine usage. My article also gives some suggestions for taking the information and using it to improve a search engine.

Source: SearchTools.com

Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”
…
David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.

“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”

Source: New York Times

What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

Source: New York Times

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, spoke at Syracuse University today.

+ Android and iPhone will be quite different. No details.

+ Google has NOT found a way to make “significant” money from YouTube to this point.

Schmidt also said he believed that social networks will “eventually” figure out how to sell advertising on their pages. Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace have both struggled to develop an advertising model that appeals to advertisers and social network users.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Update (June 2008 issue)

In this issue:

-Information about a recent GIS tutorial at the Library of Congress

-The release of a new transfer format: BagIt

-An announcement about a recent kick-off meeting for the Minnesota Historical Society project to preserve state and local government information

-A link to a digital preservation interactive presentation produced for the National Bookfestival at the Library of Congress

Source: Library of Congress

From the article:

Employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now use the lab’s search engine to find some useful resources: each other.

Lab employees, information technology personnel and experts on various subject matters can all be located with a few key words.

“[We’re] making the data more contextual and personal,” Scott Studham, the lab’s chief information officer, said at the Gartner InFocus Day gathering today.

Source: FCW

From a report/news release from MS Research:

That long-awaited vacation is almost here—just you, your spouse, and your teenage son, all eager to embark on a leisurely adventure to sunny climes for some much-needed R&R.

But your planning has not kept pace with your anticipation. There is work to be done: hotels to book, flights to schedule, activities too consider. You need to research and collaborate to reach a decision. Time is growing short, though. How will it all get done?

Well, you could try SearchTogether, a research project from the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. The team recently released a beta of SearchTogether, a free Internet Explorer plug-in that enables groups of people to collaborate on Web searches.

Source: MSR

What is Autonomous Search?
by Youssef Hamadi; Eric Monfroy; Frederic Saubion.

From the abstract:

Autonomous search is a particular case of adaptive systems that aims at improving its solving performance by adapting itself to the problem at hand. We propose a general definition and a taxonomy of search processes w.r.t. their computation characteristics. This formalism is expressed by some computation rules between computation states. The sequence of application of these rules (i.e., the strategy) then characterizes the search process itself. Using these rules we then classify some well known solvers and try to answer the question that was raised during the first workshop on Autonomous Search: “What is Autonomous search?”

Source: Microsoft Research

Widgets to the rescue — USASearch.gov aims to make agency info easier to find with new spotlight tool

The rise of widgets on the Web has spawned a virtual industry of plug-in capabilities. Now a Web services group in the federal government is entering the fray with a new set of search widgets aimed at improving government Web sites.

The new plug-in applications, developed for USASearch.gov by Vivisimo, are in final testing and due for release next month. They are designed to address a frequent failure of search engines tethered to agency Web sites: getting often-sought government information and services to appear prominently in the search results.

The widgets aim to solve that problem by giving agency Web managers new tools to spotlight selected information and extend the capabilities of USASearch.gov, a customized search engine launched three years ago by USA Services, a unit of the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications.

Source: Government Computer News

Via an email:

With the CLEF Flickr Challenge, now you can prove that you are also a great searcher in the context of a challenging retrieval task, where you have to find images without a-priori knowledge of the language(s) used to annotate them. You can go straight to:

http://soporte1.lsi.uned.es/flickling

and start testing your search skills.

The challenge is simple: you will be given raw (unannotated) images, and your goal is to find them in the Flickr.com image repository, using textual search facilities. The more images you find (and the less hints you need), the better you score in the ranking.

The Flickr challenge is an initiative of the interactive CLEF (http://www.clef-campaign.org) track. Visit http://nlp.uned.es/iCLEF for details.

The (anonymized) logs of your search activity will contribute to a log analysis task in the context of interactive cross-language search studies.

The latest new and modified LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings) direct from LC.

Abbreviations used on the list:
UF= Use For
BT= Broader Term
RT= Related Term
May Subd Geog = May by Subdivided by Geographic Location (Baseball–Chicago, IL) is an example.

Note: Lists from earlier in 2008, along with 2007 and 2006 lists can be found via the drop-down menu at the top of the page.

Source: The Library of Congress

A monthly rundown of the most popular and interesting searches using the search engine on ESPN.com.

Each article/list is compiled by Maalek Marshall, ESPN.com’s Search Editor and contains the Top 25 search terms/phrases for the past month.

Year-end lists back to 2005 are also available.

Btw, ESPN.com search results are available as an RSS feed. Look for the XML box near the top of every search results page.