Domain registration services are now jumping into the private domain registration market, offering workaround to ICANN policies:

ICANN, the international governing body for domain names, requires every Registrar to maintain a publicly accessible “WHOIS” database displaying all contact information for all domain names registered.

Of course protecting personal information has advantages, all of which go with marketing of these services:

• Stop domain-related spam
• Deter identity theft & fraud
• Prevent harassers & stalkers
• End data mining
• Protect your family’s privacy

…

The service is offered for an additional fee, and the market is huge..

What concerns me though is how these services are used by spammers. I recently stumbled across illegitimate use when looking up a couple of domains (1, 2) associated with spam blogs/splogs. On further investigation I noticed that these services are in use by a host of other splogs.

I just submitted a report to DomainsByProxy about some questionable domains. Are they responsive to such reports? Well, I don’t know. Stay tuned.

Today’s New York Times has an article on vulnerabilities of new credit cards with RFID tags. The article, Researchers See Privacy Pitfalls in No-Swipe Credit Cards, says that researchers have found that some new RDID credit cards have the card holder’s name and the cards number and expiration date in plaintext.

“Tom Heydt-Benjamin tapped an envelope against a black plastic box connected to his computer. Within moments, the screen showed a garbled string of characters that included this: fu/kevine, along with some numbers. Mr. Heydt-Benjamin then ripped open the envelope. Inside was a credit card, fresh from the issuing bank. The card bore the name of Kevin E. Fu, a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was standing nearby. The card number and expiration date matched those numbers on the screen.”

Professor Fu and grad student Heydt-Benjamin are part of the RDID CUSP (RFID ConsortiUm for Security and Privacy), an NSF sponsored effort involving UMASS, JHU and RSA.

What I found somewhat surprising is that each MasterCard issuing bank decided how much security they wanted to implement. Apparently some are less security oriented than others. I can just imagine the conversation I would have if I called up my bank and asked them about the encryption algorithms used in the new RFID card they might try to get me to take.

Protege remains one of the most popular editors for ontologies and including Semantic Web ontologies and RDF and OWL data. The Protege Community of Practice) community has a wiki that includes an interesting section on modeling tips and tricks. Many of the entries are not specific to Protge or even to OWL and RDF. It looks like a good resource to watch and also to contribute to. (Spotted in a SWIG IRC Scratchpad comment by Dan Brickley.)

Just noticed this in our Akismet comment moderation queue –

I felt good about this post. It confirmed for me some of the things I’ve been thinking about.

It appears quite authentic (contextually broad) unless you investigate where it links to (spam blogs : splogs). This comment has now infiltrated major search engines. Google lists 714 results.

I am interested in analyzing signatures of such comments. Please share similar comments by either e-mailing me (kolari1@umbc.edu) directly or through comments to this post.

Just got back from CASCON 2006, the 16th in the series of what is arguably the largest technical conference in Canada. I demoed our work on IBM’s internal blogosphere in the exhibit program, had a talk on Enterprise Blogging, and was part of a panel on Web 2.0 in the Social Computing Workshops. Yelena Yesha and Milt Halem organized an SOA workshop.

The event was very effective, thanks to a very well organized program, involving keynotes, paper sessions, exhibits and workshops. A couple of highlights from the keynotes I attended:

• Jerry Cuomo — Websphere will feature a big set of Web 2.0 capabilities, what Jerry terms Web SOA. He had a nice unifying theme — Enterprise SOA + Web SOA. (Jerry stopped by our exhibit earlier and liked some of the work we have been doing.)
• John Cohn — IBM is the leader in gaming chips, and almost all consoles feature them now. He says … humble that IBM is, gaming consoles don’t come with a “IBM Inside”.

The workshop I participated in was quite successful, thanks to a highly receptive audience. I finally got a chance to meet Aaron Kim, Jen Nolan and Peter Finn, Web 2.0 specialists within IBM. Also spoke to Laurie Dillon-Schalk who now works as a branding director at Great Gulf Homes. We have had great Web 2.0 “marketing” conversation in the past. Our presentation on Enterprise Blogging went well, so did the panel. Stephen Perelgut has a comprehensive summary of the entire event over at the CASCON blog.

I also had some great conversations in general with: Ian Spence, Mark Chignell, Munindar Singh, Gabriel Mansour, Sacha Chua, Alvin Chin, Sadek Ali, Antonio Cangiano, and IBMers.

Smart people.

Great event organization by Kelly Lyons and company. CASCON 2007 is just a year away.

Here’s an interesting application of RFID: Australia Post is using tagged test letters to monitor the performance of its services and to discover potential problems within its delivery network. As reported by the Australian Post and in articles in CNet and ZDnet the Austalian Post system will trace the tagged test letters as they make their way through the various processing systems, allowing for more detailed monitoring.

“Whereas the previous system measured our overall postal performance, RFID technology will also provide intermediate measurement points throughout the journey of test mail items.”

RFID tracking systems have been installed in its nine metropolitan letter processing facilities, as well as in 21 country mail centers, 23 delivery centers and in 16 mobile units.

This is a nice application for RFID in that has few of the problems that come up in many applications. I don’t see any privacy issues. This is not on critical path for the key mission of delivering mail. Tag readers can be deployed in key places, such as letter sorting machines, to ensure a good environment for reading. Relatively large tags can be used. Tags can be recovered and reused, lowering cost. The number of reading systems required in manageable.

We’ve been working on developing model of influence and information flow in social media. I noticed on Data Mining a link to a very relevant and interesting paper paper on the dynamics of viral marketing.

The Dynamics of Viral Marketing, J. Leskovec (CMU), L. Adamic (Michigan), B. Huberman (HP).
“We present an analysis of a person-to-person recommendation network, consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a million products. We observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. … While on average recommendations are not very effective at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, we present a model that successfully identies communities, product and pricing categories for which viral marketing seems to be very e®ective.”

This image from the paper shows very different recommendation networks for a first aid study guide (left) and a Japanese graphic movel (right).

The paper’s key points, as summarized by Eric Kintz are

• Viral marketing does not spread well. In epidemics, high connectors are very critical nodes of the network and allow the virus to spread. In recommendations networks, a few very large cascades exist but most recommendation chains terminate after just a few steps.
• The probability of viral infection decreases with repeated interaction. Providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend actually weakens the credibility of those links. …
• Viral effectiveness varies depending on price and category. Social context has a high influence on the potency of viral infection. Technical or religious books for example had more successful recommendations than general interest topics. Smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing.

The second point speaks to an issue that we’ve been trying to get a handle on — how and why influence varys over time.

The Washington Past has a story about web sites that use a “wisdom of crowds” approach to predict the outcome of sporting events and stock performance. PicksPal, featured in the article, has an interesting business model.

Last month, PicksPal began identifying the 30 most successful players over the previous five weeks. Whenever these experts together place enough of their accumulated points on a specific bet, it qualifies as a “genius pick” and is offered to the public for $19.95. Jessiman said the genius picks, which average five a day, are hitting 70 percent of the time.

For $20 a month you can subscribe to market predictions aggregated from Marketocracy the 100 best performers in their fantasy market.

Marketocracy Data Services is a research company whose mission is to find the best investors in the world and then track, analyze, and evaluate their trading activity. … Marketocracy has recruited over 55,000 people to manage over 65,000 model portfolios at www.marketocracy.com that compete to become the best investors. For over 3 years we have tracked, analyzed, and evaluated their virtual trading activity and have accumulated a massive database; following over 10,000 stock positions at any one time and more than four million trades.

SocialPicks, which is not yet launched, will combine social networking with stock picking

SocialPicks is a community for stock market investors to share investment ideas, exchange market research, and track peers’ investment performance. Sign up if you’d like to explore what we’ve built thus far and find out when we officially launch.

All of this relates to James Surowiecki’s 2004 book Wisdom of Crowds about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. Of course, I always thought that was how the stock market and paramutual wagering worked in the first place.

Boorah is an alpha site of Palo Alto Web 2.0 startup that extracts information from online reviews to help users find restaurants. Shorter version: an automated Zagat.

“Boorah.com makes it easy to find a great restaurant by presenting a summary of user and professional reviews in a way that has never been done before. Our service offers a unique, searchable database of restaurant locations, cuisines, cost, and hours of operation coupled with the ability to make online reservations. Boorah simplifies the process of dining out whether you’re a “foodie” or just an average Joe looking for a fresh new place to eat.”

If you want to try Boorah you have to get an invitation or signup to request one. I noted a post on Boorah on matthew Hurst’s Data Mining blog and asked for one. Having just gotten it, I was able to explore the service a bit and have a few comments.

Boorah gets its reviews from papers, general review sites like Yelp, topical review sites like restaurants.com, and directly from Boorah users. An important dimension to Boorah’s service is location, and restaurant review sites tend to organize reviews by cities and actual reviews typically give an address — so the geotagging works well here.

Boorah has Zagat style review summaries which consist of a handful of comments selected from reviews. For example:

“Plutos is one of my favorite places to grab a delicious salad.” …. “Also, for 25 cents you can get a slice of fresh baked bread.” …. “The bread that came as a side was fresh.” …. “This is the one place where your salad bar is fresh and there isn’t a chance that someone has sneezed all over your toppings.” …. “Seriously, the sliced steak on top is delish.”

This looks like straightforward opinion mining at the sentence level, though they may be drawing on the last decade’s work on automatic summarization.

“The Boorah summary is made up of quotations excerpted from the full reviews of restaurants. Our summary strives to pull the most relevant, most representative comments from the many reviews we index to give you a quick, informative take on what reviewers like and don’t like about a particular restaurant. Of course, you can also see excerpts of the actual individual reviews, and link directly to the source of each of these reviews.”

One of Boorah’s differentiators is its use of more sophisticated language technology.

“Our system uses patent-pending Natural Language Processing technology to find, summarize and present information from across the web in a way that is far more useful than it’s ever been before.”

This is the most interesting aspect, IMHO. NLP usually implies parsing, or at least part of speech tagging, and mapping the results into some kind of meaning representation. Restaurant reviewing is a great domain for more sophisticated NLP techniques. (Recall Roger Schank’s restaraunt script?). But the domain model for food is really deep. We all know a lot about food, and the kind of people who write reviews know vastly more. A tart sauce on duck is good, but a tart server isn’t. I like coffee with a naturally bitter edge, as long as it isn’t due to being over cooked. It is probably easy to get the low hanging expressions of sentiment, but much knowledge will have to be used to do a really good job. I’d like to learn more about what technologies they are briging to bear on this problem.

All in all, Boorah looks like a promising start.

MIT has rebranded and expanded its Center for Coordination Science as the Center for Collective Intelligence. Where the CCS studied

“how oordination occurs in a variety of different systems, including human organizations, markets, and computer networks”

the CCI will focus on the study of

“How can people and computers be connected so that — collectively — they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before.”

The new CCI is still based in Sloan School of Management, with Tom Malone directing, but has faculty from CSAIL, the Media Lab and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Oh, and Jimbo Wales is on their advisory board. The CCS has done a lot of good work over the years, but ideas and opportunities change and evolve. I think this new focus is an excellant choice.

One project the CCI is engaged in is developing a collectively written book We are smarter than me.

“We Are Smarter Than Me is a business community formed by business professionals to research and discuss the impact of social networks on traditional business functions.”

The project is lead by and hosted at SharedInsights, a company whose slogan is “leveraging the power of collaboration, content and community to drive better business and IT decisions.” I like this project idea, although when I signed up to be a participant, I found the following clause in their privacy policy a bit offputting.

“We may, however, provide our corporate members with your name, title, company, address, phone number and e-mail address. Corporate members are industry-leading companies who supply products and services to your industry.”

Well, I guess this is a project coming out of a business community.

Niklaus Wirth has an interesting and provocative article on the theme of once promising Computer Science ideas that have become obsolete, or at least have not delivered on their initial promise.

Good Ideas — Through the Looking Glass. IEEE Computer, Jan. 2006, pp. 56-68.

“An entire potpourri of ideas is listed from the past decades of Computer Science and Computer Technology. Widely acclaimed at their time, many have lost in splendor and brilliance under today’s critical scrutiny. We try to find reasons. Some of the ideas are almost forgotten. But we believe that they are worth recalling, not the least because one must try to learn from the past, be it for the sake of progress, intellectual stimulation, or fun.”

He starts with computer architecture but has the most to say, not surprisingly, about programming, programming languages and programming paradigms. This comment on the introduction of perators with side-effects in C is amusing.

“The ugliness of a construct usually appears in combination with other language features. In C, we may write, for example, x+++++y, a riddle rather than an expression, and a challenge for a sophisticated parser! Guess what? Is its value is equal to ++x+++y+1? Or is the following correct?

x+++++y+1==++x+++y     x+++y++==x+++++y+1

One is tempted to postulate a new algebra! It is indeed absolutely surprising with which eqanimity this notational monster was accepted by the world-wide programmer’s community.”

Most of the questionable ideas he identifies will meet with general agreement. But when discussing programming paradigms he is particularly hard, unjustifiably IMHO, on the paradigms of functional, logic and object oriented programming. The short version is that he sees he first two as failed experiments and the last as a re-branding of traditional procedural programming techniques. It’s true that Lisp and Prolog did not change the way we all program, but I am amazed at how many people continue to use these languages with great success for serious work. When they fit the problem at hand, you can not beat them. The same is true for OO languages as well, but they seem to be doing quite well without any kind words from their supporters.

While I can’t agree with everything in the article, which I spotted on LTU, it’s certainly worth reading and thinking about.

As facebook’s valuation gets more publicity, here’s one other perspective — a social vote on social tools. While some might argue about demographics of their user bases I still think this view is valuable.

There might also be answers here on the Google/YouTube deal. The recent growth of YouTube has just been astounding.