Digg recommendation engine- July 4, 2008 Kevin Rose writes that Digg is launching a recommendation engine that "uses your past digging activity to identify what we call Diggers Like You .. and suggest stories you might like." Good to see it.MG Siegler's posts at VentureBeat (1 2) include some early reviews of the feature.Please see also my previous posts on Digg, especially "Digg struggles with spam" and its discussion of how recommendations could reduce spam by mitigating the winner-takes-all effect.http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/07/digg-recommendation-engine.html Hadoop and scheduling- July 2, 2008 A VLDB 2008 paper out of Yahoo Research, "Scheduling Shared Scans of Large Data Files" (PDF) looks at how "to maximize the overall rate of processing ... by sharing scans of the same file ... in Map-Reduce systems like Hadoop".I felt the model used for simulations in the paper was a bit questionable -- seems to me the emphasis should be on newer data being accessed by many jobs simultaneously, most often by smaller jobs -- but the specifics of the solution probably are of less interest than the.http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/07/hadoop-and-scheduling.html Amazon page recommendations- July 2, 2008 Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar points out Amazon's new page recommendation widget in his post, "Amazon's Page Recommender: Foreshadowing A New Web Service"Put the widget on your website and, for any page it is on, Amazon can learn what people visit that page, where they go on your site, and then, from those behavior patterns, generate recommendations on where people might want to go from each page.It could, for example, be used on a news website to generate news recommendations or, on a...http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/07/amazon-page-recommendations.html Microsoft, big computation, and big data- July 2, 2008 In his post, "Inside Microsoft's Internet Infrastructure & Its Plans for the Future", Om Malik highlights some interesting "facts about Microsoft-owned data centers":Microsoft is adding 10,000 servers a monthNetwork backbone ... soon ... will be 500 Gigabits.Data in the near future will soon approach 100s of petabytes.All the computation you could want and all the data you can eat. Perhaps now it makes more sense why I am at MicrosoftPlease see also my April 2006 post, "Microsoft is building a.http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/07/microsoft-big-computation-and-big-data.html Website personas- July 2, 2008 Netflix has a feature called Profiles that allows multiple people to use the same Netflix account while keeping their queue and recommendations separate.Recently, they attempted (1 2) to remove the feature because "too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website."It's an interesting example how difficult it is to allow people to maintain multiple personas on a website. At Amazon, the second biggest complaint about..http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/07/website-personas.html |