Powerset seems like an interesting concept, but reminds me a lot of the NLP projects I saw while I was in college, in that they produce output that almost makes sense, except not really. China "took: actions, actions, and steps", shark "eats: Samuel L. Jackson" (!!!), or my favorite, "computer clogs: system and government".
It seems to do better on phrases that represent very specific concepts like 'Emacs' or 'calendar'. In general though, it combines very specific and very broad concepts (presumably because it can't tell the difference), for instance "Electricity reaches: village and Drewsey".
Still, kinda neat, especially if they can pull in information from other sources and cross it with the Wikipedia data. e2, perhaps?
(Edit: Oh, and apparently they got bought by Microsoft today)
posted 2008/07/01 16:45 [category: bitbashing / net]
My #1 Most Wanted Google Reader Feature (Right Now, At Least)
Mark all as unread
I just discovered Arch Robison (formerly of KAI C++, now at Intel) has a blog, and I'd like to work through all of his posts since it looks like he has some good stuff to say. But short of going to each post and marking it as unread, I just have to remember which ones I have or haven't gotten to yet. :(
Update: Google Reader won't let me mark posts in Arch's blog feed as unread. Weird. I neatly solved the problem by reading all of his past posts in one go.
posted 2008/07/01 15:16 [category: bitbashing / net]
Artwells, a gentleman, scholar, and taker of many interesting photos, has a new project by the name of nshrine. If you have ever desired to make an online shrine commemorating your eternal love for Christina Ricci, or perhaps one in memory of that expired houseplant in the corner: now is your chance.
posted 2008/05/09 11:21 [category: bitbashing / net]
For quite a while, since about November 2005, I've been running Google AdSense on a number of pages on randombit.net. I've certainly never planned to make a living on AdSense, but I figured it might be interesting to give it a try, and anything to offset my hosting costs (around $65 a month) couldn't hurt.
Since that time, I've made more money through companies donating to Botan to get a link (see the donation page for the list) than I have through AdSense. I find it very interesting that while as an ad-driven property this site isn't worth much of anything, the site does have enough Googlejuice to be worth paying for a simple link on a completely unrelated website. It wouldn't be too surprising if a company building networking or crypto hardware wanted a link (their ads often show up through AdSense), but if you check out the companies that are actually donating they're pretty much across the board, and have nothing to do with crypto, security, or computers at all.
In some ways this is the kinder, gentler form of link farms. In addition to (likely as not) being cheaper than paying someone to set up a million pages on blogspot, it's got to be a lot less likely to get Google riled up.
posted 2007/02/05 14:28 [category: bitbashing / net]