I have always been fascinated with data visualization techniques. If you are not familiar with digg labs you should take a look. Tim Showers collected some nice text cloud like visualizations. Science News has an article on how mathematicians attempt to visualize higher dimensional objects. An interesting example can be found in the seedcamp blog.

The rumor that Pandora may be forced to close down has come back to haunt us. For those of you who still don't know Pandora is an interactive personal music streaming service. You seed it with a few artists or songs you like, and it starts playing. As the songs are played, you can either thumb them up or thumb them down.

I have been a big fan of Pandora for a long time. The thing I like most about Pandora is that it allows you to expand your musical horizons without feeling ignorant. I got to know Hendrix, blues and metal better through Pandora. Another cool thing is there is very little crud: once you log in and tell it an artist or two, just type in pandora.com and it immediately starts playing. So Pandora is great, why isn't making enough money?

Well, in order to make money you need to spend a little and make a lot. Pandora is currently haunted by the evil RIAA. It is being charged more than satellite radio stations do, and certainly more than terrestrial stations that apparently pay nothing. The way it makes money is through visual ads and through affiliate marketing (I'm guessing those links are not just for our convenience). The design of the advertisements are very smart, you hear nothing but music but if you want to give Pandora feedback, when you look at the screen the ads change, grabbing your attention. That's really smart. So what's the problem?

Apparently, with the inflated rates the RIAA, these ads are not enough to cover them. So what can they do? Either lobby their way to lower rates or make more money. How about both?

I argue that if apple buys Pandora they can achieve both. Hoping for unlimited music from Apple may be too optimistic. However, Apple's pull with the music companies can still get Pandora a good deal. Integration with the iTunes music store will sell more songs. Having Pandora pre-installed on all iPhones and iPods can get it to a greater audience. Having Pandora on iPhones will sell more iPhones. Everybody wins. But I think there's more money to be made here.

I always thought Pandora is not reaching their full potential with the visual ads. Are audio ads such a sin? Podcasts do them? Is that so wrong? In case you really want to have uniterrupted music, add an additional 1 dollar a month to your monthly bill and you get ad free Pandora goodness.

No need to thank me...well...

There's this cool tool called wordle which creates cool keyword cloud like visualizations of blogs. Check out some search engine related examples.

What I admire is truly creative research that also has practical implications. This image viewing work I think qualifies. Checkout the video explanation here.

So there is 92% chances I'm male according to this site. Go there and check for yourself, just to make sure. They also can magically tell you your browsing history. It uses a something that can be viewed as a security bug in most modern browsers. Cool though and creepy.

Scarbulous is apparently shutting down their facebook app. I was mid-game and as far as I can recall winning too. You can still play on their site which I find weird.

This is not the first time companies kill potential cash cows. A thing I find silly to do at best. An analogy will help clear things up.

Say someone grew a whole field of corn on your land, better crops than you ever managed to grow on the land in the last five years. What do you do? Do you:

1. Chase him off, sell the corn and enjoy a one time profit.
2. Reach some agreement with him and let him continue successfully growing corn on your land while you collect a monthly check.
   
3. Burn the corn and shoot the other guy torture his family and swear vengeance will be yours forever.
   
4. All of the above

There is no "correct" answer but I'd go with number 2.

Nice little article on how to avoid vision overload.

Mashable has a nice article on alternatives sources of revenue for web companies. First of you've got to clarify what's wrong with the current ad based model?

What worries me about ads is their reliability. The article suggests donations instead. I think a more reliable sources of revenue would be good for companies since it gives you a source of income you can plan on. Personally, I like the two service level subscription model. The first level is free the second one is premium. The dating industry is big on that model. So why can't other web companies adopt that model?

It's the VC's fault really. Any web company that would start charging subscription fees would face competition from VC funded free services. Then data portability gets thrown in the mix. You end up with a business where the user can switch to another service as easy as switching to a different brand of toothpaste, only the other toothpaste is free and just as good. How can anybody build a sustainable business this way?

For those interested in web design checkout this list of thirty websites to follow.

Check out these insightful tips for college student productivity.

Checkout this readwrite article describing a site called gwap, a nice timewaster that harnesses the power of the people to characterize images, find objects in images and learn world facts. A lot of it is due to the captcha guy also of Carnegie Mellon. Very nice execution and good buzz for Carnegie Mellon.

I had this idea to write a ping-pong application for the iphone. But I had not idea how to figure out what the distance was between the iphones. Anyway checkout multi-iphone-pong for the iphone.

Check out this article from readwriteweb covering some of the more disruptive changes to "the web".

I've been making certain advances in my personal productivity and I wanted to share one of the more amusing realizations with you.

Consider the following situation. You have two open ended projects, you could spend hours, days or years on each of them. The first is you research project. If you do a  good job on it, a really good job, it might get into a leading conference, that will later help secure some job offer you really want to get.

The second project is a project in a course. Nobody expects it to be published. If you do an excellent job you'll get an A, a mediocre job will still get you an A, and if you do a really bad job you'll get a B. Sounds simple so far, right?

Alas the story gets complicated. And like any good tragedy you the main character have a flaw that will doom you. You want to excell. You really hate doing a bad job. Some might even try to insult you and accuse you of being a perfectionist. How do you overcome this tragic character flaw. The answer lies in strategic procrastination.

These two words that seemingly should never go in the same sentence come together to help you get over yourself. First step, assess the number of hours the average team will spend on the class project. Let's say the number is 30 hours. Step two, wait until deadline - 30 hours. Remember to factor in sleeping into the equation. Step three, procrastinate.

Some of you will read this and laugh. That's o.k. To you I say... ha ha ha... I'm being funny. Some of you just don't get it. Since I am a polite guy to you I say... ha ha ha... it sounds funnier in Yidish. To the rest of you, I sincerely hope that at some point in your life I'd have helped you,

What I blog is not always exactly news. For this reasosn, you already know the "right answer" to the question asked. Facebook VP says Facebook is analogous to a cable company. I say, really really bad analogy. So who is is analogous to a Cable Co.?

Maybe it is Hulu? I was all excited to see TV commercials on-line. They certainly can become an on-line "cable company". But they post incomplete seasons, trying to tease the users I guess. Tease them into what? Going back to the television maybe? That is a bad recipe towards becoming an on-line cable company. We want new content. We don't want to have to buy a cable box. We have the eye-balls, don't you want them?

The current analogous to a cable company is sidereel.com. No, strike that they are the tv-guide. The back-end, the pipes are sites like 56.com, megavideo.com, tudou.com. These sites cannot be simply dismissed as youtube want-to-be-s. They host videos longer than 10 minutes, some of them have nice features like being able to play several episodes in a row automatically. Should they be dismissed as simple pirate sites?

Compare Hulu to sidereel. Hulu just re-posted last weeks episode of house. sidereel on the other hand has above 17 links to the full episodes. Granted, sidereel's links are sometimes too slow and that is annoying. The fact that they don't include commercials doesn't make me too happy. I would prefer a source that would deliver the stream fast enough and would be happy if I can watch commercials to help sustain the model. Hulu needs to be better than sidereel.

Take southparkstudios.com, the official southpark site. They make the content available immediately after it finishes to air. They get it.

Youtube thrived on illegal content as well. They proved that illegal content, with brilliant business peoplel, can make business sense. The next cable company is somewhere out there, I am highly skeptical of it being Facebook, Hulu? Maybe.

Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries. That's what's claimed by http://www.corporations.org whoever they are. I find that amazing.

The people closest to you in culture can most likely be found on-line, very likely in a different country. Could this change the country's part in people's life? Can digg.com declare itself a country? How about having a Limited Land Country (LLC)?

A semantic opinion aggregator named swotti is definitely intreresting and worth checking out. Searching for the MacBooc air gives you summaries of specific opinions regarding its design, weight, battery life as well as general comments. The site seems slow these days, probably due to unanticipated or premature popularity. Sign of things to come.

Some youtube news checkout TubeSpy, as covered by readwriteweb. An amusing lively way to see what youtube users are currently viewing. Apparently this was implemented using jquery and the youtube api. cool.

Also, if you are a youtube fanatic, checkout the youtube awards.

google face search

1. obtain training data site specific
2. learn site specific templates
3. try to learn a global detector for templateness.

• Limited storage: You can only write so much on one page and you can only do some much in a week.
• Easy Access: It is very easy to clear your mind GTD style.
• My horrible hand writing: For some reason it is easier for me to read my horrible hand writing.