The Washington Post has an article on a popular new web diversion — AIMFight — that lets you compare the popularity of two AIM screenames. It feeds off a combination of the importance of social networking and our urge to compete by framing the issue as a one-to-one comparison between the social networks of two individuals. Your AIMFight score is just the “sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees”. The metric is simpler than that used by PageRank in that it doesn’t divide a buddy’s contribution to your rank by the by number of other buddies he has. The idea is clever, though, and admits lots of possibilities to explore better algorithms for ranking individuals in social networks. For example, a natural extention would be to integrate information from many social networking systems — AIM, MSN, FOAF, linkedIn, etc. FOAF could be the glue to help do this.

President Bush’s first Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson, former Governor of Wisconsin, is getting an RFID implant. Thompson has joined the board of Applied Digital, which owns VeriChip, the company that specializes in subcutaneous RFID tags for humans and pets. Thompson will get chiped to help promote the concepts behind the technology. If all of Applied Digital’s board members are required to get chipped it should make taking attendance at future board meetings much easier. (Link, spotted on Boing Boing)

The Semantic Web And Policy Workshop (SWPW) will be held on 7 November 2005 at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference in Galway, Ireland. The workshop will cover policy-based frameworks for the semantic web as well as the use of semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for other application domains such as multiagent systems, grid computing, networking, and storage systems. Ora Lassila will give an invited talk entitled “Applying Semantic Web in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing: Will Policy-Awareness Help?”. Papers should be submitted electronically by 25 July 2005.

Mike Davidson has a mini-tutorial explaining how to make your site mobile-friendly in two minutes. He lists four simple steps that can dramatically improve your site when viewed on cell phones and PDAs. His steps assume you use PHP, though they can be easily adapted to other server-side scripting languages.

Yahoo! Research Labs - Berkeley is a new research partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and the University of California at Berkeley to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web. The joint lab is expected to open in August 2005 and will be led by Marc Davis, UC Berkeley professor of information management and systems. Yahoo is hoping the new lab will aid its efforts to use emerging search technologies to allow users to access and share information from any location that has an Internet connection.

Technorati: A New Public Utility
By Adam L. Penenberg, 02:00 AM Jul. 14, 2005 PT

When former Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael K. Powell watched television coverage of the London bombings last week, he noticed that most of the significant pictures didn’t originate from professional photographers employed by news agencies. They came from witnesses at the scene using cell phones and digital cameras to document the tragedy.
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Before, blogging was largely fixated on the failure of mainstream media. Now it has become a necessary supplement, and in some cases, a substitute. But Powell takes this a step further. To him, London showed that blogging has morphed into the art of raw, personalized storytelling.
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Powell was far from the only one who turned to the blogosphere for perspectives on the London terror attacks. David Sifry, founder of Technorati, a real-time search engine for blog content, reports that traffic to the site in the hours after the attacks was so heavy that its servers had trouble handling the load, causing performance problems. The number of posts on blogs tracked by Technorati increased 30 percent, from about 850,000 a day in July to 1.2 million on the day of the attacks. Nine of the 10 most popular search requests involved the unfolding tragedy in London. If you think about it, Technorati has become a public utility on a global scale.
…

Researchers from five EU universities are creating a Sims-like virtual world to study how human societies evolve. The IST sponsored New and Emergent World Models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social Learning project is headed by A.E. Eiben of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. NEW-TIES will have a thousand independently-behaving agents capable of moving around the world, interacting with each other, and building simple things. The agents will be rendered with the Counter Strike graphics engine. See this New Scientist article. (Spotted on Boing Boing).

Recently both Yahoo! and Google released their Map APIs. Both have interesting and unique features - while Google map is easy to customize and embed in your website or application, all you need to do with Yahoo Map API is provide it with the XML formatted data for
plotting information on the map. The nice thing about Yahoo API vs Google API is that you do not need to specify the exact latitude and longitude information and it does the geocoding for you using the address.

Having played with both a little, I hacked up an application that would extract the latest news from Yahoo! US News website and display on the map. You can view it in action here and it has also been added on the yahoo developer network’s featured application list here.

These APIs provide a simple way for anyone to visualize geospatial information and I hope that such nifty applications would motivate people to provide metadata information such as OPML or geocoding in images.

Following up on RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices and Danny Ayers’s post on blogging hosts — here’s our attempt at ranking blog hosting websites. These statistics are based on Technorati’s index. Software used (MT, WordPress etc.) are not part of the statistic.

Technorati API allows 500 queries per day. We picked query words randomly from an english dictionary. We then collected the top 100 results (most live blogs) between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST over a period of the last 18 days. We eliminated duplicate blog home pages to create a list of 173192 unique blogs.

Note: Technorati ranks results by freshness — our statistics are hence for the “Live Blogosphere”.

We do not claim our statistics to be representative. These are the biases –

1. Technorati index.
2. US Blogs, given our query time-frame.
3. Blogger — spam blogs are very live.
4. Self hosted blogs. Our numbers only use URLs to classify blogs. For instance, a blogger weblog hosted at a personal website is not classified with blogger. Blogger blog’s are identified by “blogspot.com” being part of the URL.

Even with these biases, our numbers should give a good estimate of blogging host popularity.

Based on our collection here’s how blog hosts compare.

Technorati API also provides inlink information of blogs. We normalized inlink for these blog hosts to find the the number of inlinks/blog for each of these hosts. Total inbound links in our collection is 1.8 Million. The mean inlink/blog is 10.64

The impact rating - inlinks/blog

The Rest .. includes many blogs which are self-hosted. Self-hosted blogs, as is evident are the most popular.

Thanks to Jim Mayfield for suggesting the use of technorati.

Just when you thought you might actually have to pay attention to that talk at AAAI (you know the one), along comes the AAAI 2005 Word Search Puzzle. It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned, and ‘AI’ is particularly easy to find (more than once if you so desire).

As with each of the previous puzzles (such as this one, this one, or even this one), the terms (generously provided by Tim “Rack-Mount” Finin) were interlinked using a heuristic best-first search that favors shared letters, small diagrams and a uniform distribution of word directions. The empty cells were filled using a character 4-gram language model derived from the entries themselves.

Sort of. QRIO, a Hobit-sized entertainment robot from Sony , threw out the first pitch of the Nationals-Mets game at RFK Stadium last night. I’d say it was an accomplishment, give that it’s less than two feet tall. I wonder how far the throw went? I’ll bet Honda’s ASIMO can throw much harder. Link

AAAI-05 Blog is a student blog about AAAI’s 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) and 17th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-05) held 9-13 July 2005 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. A group of students attending the conference will post daily blog items describing their observations, experiences, reactions, and thoughts and upload photos to an linked photo blog. We welcome everyone to participate by adding comments to existing posts and photos and submitting photos they’ve taken for possible inclusion.