Rand's speculation on elements of a social ranking algorithm.

Quoted: At work today, Matt noted that he found Digg's algorithm far more interesting than Google's. I was shocked - after all, Digg isn't nearly as complex or widely used as Google, but with its rising popularity in the tech space, I could, at least, empathize with why he might feel that way. I also took it as a challenge to expose all the possible elements that might be in an algorithm at ...

Nothing too surprising here...but that's what makes it useful. Helps you understand the free tools that are generally used in operating scalable Web services.

Quoted: Ask Ron - our Systems Engineering Lead - the exact number of servers we have in production and he’ll probably respond with, “I don’t honestly know.” I can say we’ve got dozens of web servers and dozens more DB servers. I can say with certainty it takes six specialized graph database servers to run the Recommendation Engine and we have another six to ten machines that serve files from MogileFS

click to play

A new video by the creator of The Machine is Using Us. This one is long (1 hour).

Quoted: presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to ...

Winningtheweb.com asked for opinions from some of the most active SEOs and SMOs on Sphinn about the Google Digg deal.

Quoted: The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations were in full swing as of last Tuesday, had passed the term sheet stage and the two companies were in final negotiations in the $200 million range. But sometime this last week Google decided to walk from the deal. Digg was notified on late Thursday or Friday. Google was in the due diligence stage of the deal,

Quoted: Google's on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we've heard from ...

Amazing. I have no idea.

Quoted: Japanese companies are always looking to meet the needs of the "niche-ist" of niche markets. Now there's a DVD for VERY lonely/VERY weird men who like their women to just look at them. And maybe blink a couple of times. The Avex Group is trying to reach such men (Hikikomori) with a new DVD - 'Just Looking' - as "corporate social responsibility"

John Oliver on the Daily Show.