Year: 2015
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Ghost in the Machine
There are at least two sides to every story. The Planned Parenthood videos were a polarizing topic that monopolized the news cycle several weeks ago. How do you teach an algorithm a point of view? How do you optimize for discovery and strike the right balance for diversity while avoiding duplication? SmartNews is a news aggregation app driven…
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SmartNews Pro Tip: Save it for Later
SmartNews is focused on today’s news. Because of this the app is optimized for showing you the most important stories of the moment. The idea is to get you up to speed on what’s going on and then on with your day. If we do our job well there, the thinking goes, you’ll be back.…
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Back when News was Physical
etaoin shrdlu are the first line of letters on a linotype keyboard, arranged based on frequency. The phrase is used to mark the end of a column. It is also the title of a short documentary about the last run of the linotype machines at the New York Times on July 2, 1978. There are all…
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Recycled Gear Goes to Africa
One of my volunteer activities is to serve as the Webmaster (I love that retro-cool title) for the Alameda Soccer Club. It’s a pretty large organization serving the 1,300+ kids in our neighborhood, completely staffed by unpaid volunteers and it does a great job of getting the kids excited about the sport. This Summer we received a…
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Hiroshima, 70 years on
Last year, on July 4th, I visited Hiroshima with Izumi and the kids to see first-hand the city and the memorial. Hiroshima (literally means flat island) was one of two sites bombed by atomic weapons. It was chosen because it was relatively unscathed by previous bombings and military scientists wanted to measure the effectiveness of an aerial…
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Italian Foo Fighters Fans Wishes Granted
1,000 Foo Fighters fans gathered in a field in Cesena, Italy to play Learn to Fly to get the band’s attention and to listen to their plea to play a concert in Italy. Maybe you’ve seen the video which was all over the ‘nets. It’s pretty awesome. The band noticed, later posting Ci vediamo a…
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Spotify’s Mixtape Algorithm
With the launch of Apple Music’s “For You” feature, Spotify hand has been forced to unveil it’s own personalization engine in response. Discover Weekly was launched today via a series of well-timed pieces published today across the tech press. The PR push is on to explain to everyone currently evaluating Apple Music on a 3-month trial. Spotify…
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Fun with Google Trends Real Time
Google Trends announced last week that they’ve upgraded their service to be real time. Using their tools, I created a dashboard so you can quickly see who’s trending in Google Search for the past 7 days. If I did this right, this page should continually update. I’ll manually add/remove names as the list of candidates…
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Presidential Candidate 404 Pages
As the 2016 US Presidential Election gets going, each candidates website 404 pages give us a rare glimpse into the personality behind each campaign. Let’s have a look. Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton – her page looks like a misplaced snapshot and speaks to the basic, simplistic style of her Middle American base. Look what we…