The always-provocative Arnold Kling suggests in an email that we take a look at the Semant-o-Matic site that uses latent semantic indexing to search blogs. The current site is an open source test bed, indexing only 11 blog sites, but the idea is provocative. Here’s how I understand it, from the site’s readable and informative explanation of searching and LSI.

When you click on the “Find more like this one” button on a search site (= “Similar pages” at Google), the site does an analysis of the word usage pattern on that page and runs a query to find other pages with similar patterns. LSI does this not when a user presses the button but as it’s indexing the page so that it always knows other pages that are similar to the first one. So, when you do a LSI search for, say “French Impressionism,” it finds not only pages that contain that phrase but also pages that are similar to ones that contain that phrase. Thus, an LSI search might turn up a page that talks about 19th Century painters concerned with the play of light in paintings of haystacks even if it never uses the phrase “French Impressionism.” (Of course, it may also turn up a page about Haystack Calhoun, the old professional wrestler. playing with the lights in the arena.)

One of the very cool things about this approach — whether pre-computed or done on the fly — is that it lets a computer find two pages that are about the same thing simply by analyzing the way words are arrayed on the page, without making amighttempt to understand what those words mean.

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Thanks, Steve Himmer, for your improvement on the TIPS campaign.

One suggestion for a link on the RATS page: “How to Tell an Arab.” America needs to know!

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David Gallagher, author of the article that proposed the Google First Name Top Ten Award says that there’s some “back story” to his article. (E.g., apparently there’s a photo he is suppressing.) He also has an entry about the Making Of his piece on Mahir “I Kiss You” Cagri that ran in the NY Times. His blog has lots of pictures, too, including one of a handlettered sign advertising “Waterbaloons already filled – 10 cents” — it could be a New Yorker cartoon if it weren’t already a photograph.

Anita Rowland writes:

I took action to add a blogroll to my site when I was shocked, shocked, to find Anita Bora ranked higher than me! Always before the only Anita ahead of me was Santa Anita Racetrack.

We’ve been teasing each other about it since: http://www.anitarowland.com/gmarchives/00000384.html

On an unrelated note, Euan Semple (who is moving The Obvious weblog to http://www.theobviousblog.net/blog/) writes:

I thought of you as soon as I saw this:

I assume this street guide to sign language reminded Euan of me because of the UnFuck forgiveness gesture I have initiated, trademarked, copyrighted, legally adopted and cryogenically frozen.

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In the righthand column you’ll see a little face drawn in blue. That’s my “blogchalk,” Daniel Pádua’s attempt to provide some semi-standard metadata so we can search for weblogs more precisely. The metadata goes like this:

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Boston, Brookline, David, Male, 51-55!

There are complete instructions on how to enter your own blogchalk here.

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David Gallagher has written a very amusing article in Business 2.0 about his attempt to get his full name moved up Google’s hit list, a challenge complicated by the fact that there is a teen actor named David Gallagher ahead of him in the listings.

At the end of the article, he gives himself a new challenge: Move himself up the list when you search just for his first name.

I had never searched Google for “David” but, guess what? I’m Number 8, baby! Woohoo! I am introducing a new award for myself:

Feel free to copy and reuse the award. But, remember, it’s the honor system, so cheating will be ignored.

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Mark Dionne points out (via Ray Kurzweil) that Crash Bandicoot, one of the most popular Playstation games, was written in Lisp. Why would a modern game be written in a dead language? Because it ain’t dead. The power of Lisp isn’t in its conspicuous use of lists and parentheses. As Andy Gavin, the co-founder of the gaming company, explains:

With lisp one can rapidly develop meta constructs for behaviors and combine them in new ways. In addition, lisp allows the redefinition of the language to easily add new constructs, particularly those needed to deal with time-based behaviors and the layering of actions. Contrary to popular belief there is nothing inherently slow about lisp. It is easy to constuct a simple dialect which is just as efficient as C, but retains the dynamic and consistant qualities that make lisp a much more effective expression of one’s programming intentions.

Paul Graham has argued in favor of Lisp in a more systematic way (as I blogged in February), raising the question of what constitutes a “higher level” language. (Here is a keynote Paul gave.)

So, do I program in Lisp? Nah. It’s such a pain in the ass for someone like me who writes mainly little utilities for himself like a tiny text processor that automates the production of HTML tuned specifically to the needs of this blog. (Well, actually — he says with a little pride — it also stores the blog entries in a text base, lets me browse through them, and automatically assembles and formats selected blog entries for inclusion in my newsletter, JOHO.) So, what’s the choice of a non-manly hobbyist programmer like me? Um, Visual Basic.

And now you write to me to tell me to switch to Squeak and I tell you that I’m good enough at VB that the switching costs are too high and then you lose all respect for me, so then I spend two years in a Zen monastery eating wheatberries and mastering C++ and come out and marry Uma Thurman. Thanks! That’s just the nudge I needed!

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Have we (well, S. Lamb) found the most pointless use of the Google API? It’s a Google mirror in case Google is running too slowly. But, you’ll have to go there to understand…

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Here are a couple of answers to the question I posed about Verisign’s attempt to own the “Domain Waiting List” market. Right now, you can sign up with various companies to claim existing domain names if and when they are not renewed. I wondered in my blog what happened if two people both claimed, say, “amazon.com” using different services and that domain became available. Who would win? And is that the problem that Verisign is proposing to solve, enriching itself in the process?

Udhay Shankar says, yes Verisign’s solution would solve the problem “for those people who don’t have expensive lawyers, and who can’t move WIPO or whatever. This would probably exclude Jeff Bezos. ;-)

The One True b!X writes:

Verisign is attempting to regain too much control. As it stands right now, what you sign up for with waiting list services as they currently exist is a service in which the company will TRY to snag your desired domain once it returns to the pool of available domains.

Verisign’s proposal creates a waiting list service (provided soley by themselves and SnapNames) which will take precedence — if someone “reserves” a domain thru it, they are guaranteed to get it when it becomes available, because it doesn’t return to the general pool of available domain names, where it can be competed for.

You can register your opinion at ICANN until the end of July, and you can sign an online petition against the Verisign proposal here.

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A federal judge has ruled that the lawsuit trying to force Bush-Cheney to list who they met with when crafting the administration’s “energy policy” can go forward. The judge found a pattern of deception in the administration’s arguments to the court that can’t be explained by mere incompetence. According to the article by the Environmental News Service:

In his opinion, Judge Sullivan wrote that Cheney and his co-defendants were seeking a ruling from him that “would eviscerate the understanding of checks and balances between the three branches of government on which our constitutional order depends.”

The judge chastised the Justice Department lawyers for attempting to mislead the court, writing that, “the fact that the government has stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existing controlling law in at least two cases, does not strike this Court as a coincidence. One or two isolated mis-citations or misleading interpretations of precedent are forgivable mistakes of busy counsel, but a consistent pattern of misconstruing precedent presents a much more serious concern.”

[Thanks to Gary Unblinking Stock for pointing me to this.]

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Dotster, which has been my favorite place to register domain names, is circulating a letter to all its users asking for us to tell ICANN that we don’t like Verisign’s proposal for the “secondary domain market.” As far as I can tell from this, Verisign is proposing that SnapNames be the only authorized provider of the “Domain Name Wait Listing Service” that lets a user grab an existing name as soon as it becomes available. So, if I want “www.amazon.com,” I can pay a service a subscription fee so that if Amazon forgets to renew its registration of “www.amazon.com” it goes to me. Verisign — the owner of Network Solutions. which is the monopoly ICANN was established to break up — apparently would be the only one entitled to offer this service, which is currently widely available on the Net. It would charge $24/year whether or not the name came available, whereas other services charge less and only charge if the user succeeds in getting the name.

Now, here’s what I don’t understand. If two people register for “www.amazon.com” with different services, and Jeff Bezos forgets to put “Renew domain name” in his Palm Pilot, which of the two wins? Is this the problem Verisign is attempting to solve?

Let me know how I feel about this so I can register my opinion at ICANN by the end of July, and so I know whether I want to sign the online petition against the proposal.

Thank you.

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