NYMetro has a report on Linkology on the Blogosphere. This is based on Technorati’s index of over 27 million blogs.

To discover how they [blogs] relate to one another, we’ve taken the most-linked-to 50 and mapped their connections. Each arrow represents a hypertext link that was made sometime in the past 90 days.

Edge colors reflect topic of the link. A cursory examination suggests that political blogs (in blue) show a relatively higher tendency of interlinking, which brings us to an interesting question - Are inlinks (only) a good way of ranking A-Listers?

Over a period of time these inlink based ranks are bound to bias the A-List (the way we define it now) to Political blogs. This also reflects in Technorati Top 100 viewed in the Wayback machine (November 26, 2002, December 5, 2003, November 30, 2004, April 1, 2005, today), as linked by Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere: Part 2. It appears as though David Sifry is right on the mark when it comes to mining the “Magic Middle”.

NOTE: Niall Kennedy has made higher resolutions of Linkology accesible.

The Semantic Web in Opera blog is for people in the Opera community who are interested in the Semantic Web. Spotted in a note from Kjetil on the SWIG Scratchpad.

Remember cold fusion? I sure do. When Pons and Fleischmann announced their results in 1989, I was working at the Paoli Research Center and we all felt like excited children. We thought humankind had found a free and safe source of unlimited energy. The future was going to be great! Finally, the age of Aquarius was about to really arrive!! When the experiments could not be duplicated, the disappointment was bitter. Now this.

“Double Crystal Fusion” Could Pave the Way for Portable Device
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.

The fine print, though, says that you don’t get out more energy than you put in. But still, maybe there is hope.

Taint suggests that blog spam identification should be thought of not as classification but as adversarial classification:

In other words, he is noting what we noticed in email anti-spam; that what works well one year, is likely to degrade over time as the spammers attempt to evade it, and one has to keep working to keep up. The best term for this appears to be adversarial classification. Anti-spam activities fall into this category, and it often means that classic text classification algorithms aren’t suitable — after all, the Reuters-21578 dataset never tried to evade your classifier

A cyber storm hit the Internet last week, but was fended off by the US Department of Homeland Security. Cyber Storm was a DHS run exercise “to examine response, coordination, and recovery mechanisms to a simulated cyber-event within international, federal, state, and local governments, in conjunction with the private sector.” An AP story reveals an interesting component:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government concluded its ”Cyber Storm” wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers, and bloggers.

Bloggers?

The worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose ”Web logs” include political rantings and musings about current events.

Ouch!

CityWatcher.com has implanted Verichip RFID tags in two of its workers.

US group implants electronic tags in workers

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them. CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.
…

More details are here

… Six Sigma Security, Inc, announced yesterday the installation and integration of the access control module of VeriChip Corp’s VeriGuard Security Suite, including VeriChip’s human-implantable RFID microchip, as part of a project for CityWatcher.com. Dr. Jim Scott with Doctor’s Urgent Care of Milford, Ohio performed the application of the implantable microchip. Doctor’s Urgent Care has 10 physicians available at their facilities to implant the microchip, which is used for both medical, as well as security purposes. …

But, it turns out to be easy to skim and clone a verichip, as cq.cx demonstrates:

… “Verichip markets their product for access control. This means that you could have a chip implanted, and then your front door would unlock when your shoulder got close to the reader. Let us imagine that you did this; then, I could sit next to you on the subway, and read your chip’s ID. At this point I can break in to your house, by replaying that ID. So now you have to change your ID; but as far as I know, you cannot do this without surgery. …”

Oh well…

Tim Berners-Lee will give the keynote talk at AAAI-06 on July 18th, 2006. This year’s conference will Celebrate “Fifty Years of Artificial Intelligence” and be held at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston 16-20 July 2006. Papers for the regular track and the special AI and the Web track are due by 16 February (abstracts) and 21 February (full papers).

The AI and the Web track is especially interested in receiving papers on: (i) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (ii) developing and exploiting Semantic Web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas involving both AI and the Web are also encouraged.

IBM announced its new blade lineup featuring Intel’s Xeon, PPC, and Cell processors. Sony will be using the Cell processors in the PS3 due to released by end of this year (Thanksgiving?). Addition of Cell processor blades to their mainstream lineup, leaves me to wonder, what supercomputing applications require functionality of Gaming; these are not general purpose processors. Several of these blades would make a Super PS3 ;), albeit a very pricey one at that.

CNET reports.

Some shocking pictures of how Technorati got spammed by porn sites. I’m really angry at those people who abuse the tagging feature of Technorati. This is completely unacceptable behavior.

Peter Patel-Schneider gave a talk on the Semantic Web at Google several weeks ago and you can see the video here. The abstract:

“The Semantic Web has been attracting considerable attention the last few years. From the point of view of Knowledge Representation, the Semantic Web affords opportunities for both research and application. However, several aspects of the Semantic Web, as it has been envisioned, cause problems from the Knowledge Representation viewpoint. Overcoming some of these problems has resulted in a more formal basis for the Semantic Web and an increase in expressive power in Semantic Web languages. Other of these problems still remain and need a new vision of the Semantic Web from a Knowledge Representation viewpoint.”

Spotted on the SWIG Scratchpad.

FON (Wikipedia article) is “a global community of people who share WiFi.” The idea is intriguing and has potential, so much so that the Madrid-based startup behind just raised $22M from investors that include Google, Skype and eBay. Here’s how it is supposed to work.

“In order to become a Fonero, you go to FON, to download software that you install in your router, you place your antenna by a window and you share bandwidth with other Foneros from anywhere in the world. You can also buy the FON Ready router from our web site, plug and play. FON creates a free WiFi roaming environment for those who contribute WiFi signals, namely those who have already signed up with a local ISP and downloaded our software into their WiFi routers.”

FON currently provides software for the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS routers. Since launching three months ago, they have added 3,000 Foneros to the network, but US coverage is still quite sparse (and nothing in the Baltimore DC area!).

Like all VC funded startups, there has to be a business plan, so what is it? If you are not a Fonero you pay to use a hotspot, probably with some kind of prepaid scheme like Skype’s. Foneros will come in two varieties: Linus’s who benefit by getting free access via any FON node and Bill’s, who don’t get free access but do get half of the payment for the users who go through their routers.

It remains to be seen how ISPs will react to this if it catches on. Most ISPs prohibit bandwidth sharing in their service agreement. Speakeasy is the only ISP who is listed as welcoming FON.