The Cuban Cyclone the Polish Magician and the Kiev Killer will defend their title in a championship match in Washington DC later this month under the direction of our good colleague and master impresario Professor Alan Sherman. It won’t be pretty for the other guys.

I thought this cartoon from this week’s New Yorker captures the current reality well. We know what Eleanor is doing on her laptop — Googling.

Gartner reports on the blogosphere peaking in 2007. (Yahoo News via Steve Rubel).

The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

Duncan Riley, and others don’t seem to agree. The arguments made are about India and China where Internet penetration is still in the low percentages, but growing fast.

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and only 123 million have internet access (Internet World Stats) with various reports putting the broadband number of those at between 70 and 80 million users. Less than 10% of the population of China currently has internet access
..
Let’s look at India. According to IWS, there are 40 million internet users in India, out of a population of 1.1 billion. I was unable to find a growth figure for India, but you’d guess from such a small base as a percentage of the population, that internet access would be growing.

However, I think Gartner might be right. Two aspects to this growth:

• Growth is still limited to Internet Cafes, not to homes, where users are charged by the hour. Such users are generally on e-mails and chats, not on blogs which require higher time investment. Look at Internet Time Spent (if available), not penetration.
• As Internet Time Spent moves towards healthy percentages, a new social communication medium might take over. Note that Gartner refers to Blogging, not Social Media.

WOMMA Research Blog reports on a talk from Howard Kaushansky, founder of Umbria. He was speaking at the WOMMA Research Symposium

Because so much time and energy has to be put into blog monitoring to thwart their efforts, splogs are a drain on resources. Instead of working to make the blog world better and more deft, time and attention has to be spent (wasted) on splog control.

This also brings out what is lacking today in the fight against splogs. While spammers continue to collaborate on obscure forums and tune their techniques, the community fighting it is not working together sufficiently.

Thanks to Howard, this talk would have increased exposure to the general threat.

Researchers at Yahoo! Research Lab - Barcelona are hosting a collection of labeled web spam hosts, which they call WEBSPAM-UK2006. The dataset consists of around 2725 hosts that have agreements across atleast two labels.

The goal of our dataset activity is to make available reference collections that should be:

• Large: the collections should include many examples of spam and non-spam content.
• Clean: the collections should contain little classification errors.
• Uniform: the collections should represent a uniform random sample over a set of pages or hosts.
• Broad: the collections should include as many different Web spam aspects as possible.
• Open: the collections should be freely available for researchers.

We came across similar problems while creating a a labeled dataset on spam blogs late last year. The creation of this new collection has made important contributions to address some of these issues. A paper describing the collection is also available online[PDF].

AAAI 2007 (July 22-26, Vancouver CN) will have a special technical track on Artificial Intelligence and the Web. The track seeks research papers on AI techniques, systems and concepts involving or applied to the Web. Papers should describe Web related research or clearly explain how the work addresses problems, opportunities or issues underlying the Web or Web-based systems. Relevant deadlines are:

• Jan 25: student abstracts
• Feb 1: technical paper abstracts
• Feb 2: doctoral consortium applications
• Feb 6: technical papers
• Feb 27: nectar and senior member papers
• Apr 3: intelligent systems demo proposals

Friday’s Baltimore Sun has a story (Simulating surgery for med students) on the opening of the Maryland Surgical Simulation Training and Technology Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. UMBC PhD students Patricia Ordonex and and Palanivel Kodeswaranwere at the opening demonstrating their work on pervasive computing, along with Drs. Yesha and Joshi. The Sun article leads with the METI human patient simulator Stan (Standard Man).

“Stan lies on a seventh-floor surgical table, his chest rising and falling with each breath. His eyes blink as doctors approach. Prone to fevers, muscle aches and chest pains, Stan is hooked to a monitor that tracks his blood pressure, heart rate and other vitals. But no one at the University of Maryland Medical Center worries much about Stan’s health. That’s because he’s a mannequin - albeit a very expensive one. He’s one example of the high-tech teaching tools the medical school unveiled this week to train students, residents and doctors without risking the health of patients.”

We know Stan well, as it was used as a source of data as part of our research on developing pervasive computing system for the future operating rooms. See this technical report for more information.

Today’s Washington post has an intriguing story revealing how the US State Department turned to Google to identify bad actors in Iran.

“When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft. Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way — by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.”

What does this amazing story mean? (It gets more amazing as you read the rest, btw.) Is it about infighting between State and CIA? Or the rise of importance of the Web? Or the predilection of the young to turn to Google for answers? Or the fact that The Google has become our collective giant brain? I’ll take all four, if you please.

On GigaOM, Allan Leinwand posts (Can personal cellular sites boost cell service) about a proposed solution to a common problem with mobile telephony: dead zones.

Mobile operators are on the verge of asking you to help them solve one of their biggest problems – how to get more signal strength where you need or want it most. Their plan? Allow end users to buy personal devices that act like Wi-Fi routers, providing nearby cellular bandwidth in hard-to-reach places like offices and homes.

Even though I live in the midst of the Baltimore-DC megalopolis, my neighborhood doesn’t get acceptable cell service from any provider. We live along a river valley with steep hills of solid granite on either side. I have to go to the second floor of one corner of my house to get even a roaming signal. This is the main reason why I don’t make more ubiquitous use my mobile phone — you can only reach me on it about half of the time.

I could sure use a femto cell at home.

These next type of cell sites, named femto cellular (femto being smaller than pico, the term used by mobile operators that refers to smaller cell sites) are setting out to solve carriers’ often-expensive problem of providing complete coverage. … The forthcoming femto solution? Having end-users buy a small femto device, similar in concept to a Wi-Fi access point, that is a personal cellular site. The femto cellular device has a cellular antenna to boost the available signal as well as an Internet connection. The device uses your Internet connection to connect to your mobile provider’s’ network and route your phone calls.

Here’s a femto access point one that is already for sale, though I think this is marketed to mobile service providers rather than end users.

I’m not sure how these differ from cellular signal repeaters. But I have the impression that those tend to be expensive and marketed to the owners of large facilities who want their employees to have service deep inside their buildings where as the femo cell will be affordable by a single customer. If the femto cells allow for an external antenna, I might just get to use my mobile phone at home.

Today’s Baltimore Sun has a front page story (Yes, in fact, there is accounting for taste) on recommendation systems that are critical for many online retailers to predict consumer’s interests. The article mentions the research of two UMBC Ph.D. students, Marc Pickett and Sandor Dornbush.

Marc’s applying ideas from his dissertation to try to solve the Netflix challenge and win a million dollars.

Marc Pickett wants to take luck out of that equation. And win a million dollars in the process. Pickett, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is trying to perfect a “recommender.” That’s a computer program designed to analyze your cinematic tastes and predict what movies you’ll like. … The program is particularly critical for Netflix, an online mail-order movie-rental giant whose livelihood depends on keeping customers happy enough to pay $5.99 or more every month for the opportunity to watch its videos. In October, the company offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could develop a program 10 percent more accurate than its current recommender, known as Cinematch. A chance at that chunk of change set thousands of programmers around the country, including Pickett, to work on the problem.

Sandor has been developing an idea that originally came out of a group project done as part of Professor Zary Segall’s wearable computing class.

Too busy to tell a recommender what you’d like to hear? Sandor Dornbush, another UMBC graduate engineering student, is working on a mood-sensing MP3 player to free you from that task. The portable player, for now dubbed the XPod, will monitor physiological signs such as heartbeat and skin temperature to determine what kind of music to play, Dornbush said. “It could find, for example, that when you run you like upbeat music,” he said. But like all recommenders, human or digital, Dornbush’s prototype needs to spend time with a person to get to know him. “If you don’t give them any feedback,” Dornbush said, “they have a tough time figuring out what you like.”

Matt Hurst has a great example illustrating why measuring influence as inlinks (what Technorati does) is too simple. Here are two blogs, their inlink rank as computed by Technorati, their average daily visits as computed by Sitemeter, and the trend in visits over the past year.

blog	rank	visits	trend
Michelle Malkin	~19	~120K	steady
pink is the new blog	~117	~200K	increasing

As Matt pointed out, measuring readership with tools like sitemeter is problematic. As I write this I realize that I read Matt’s post through his feed in Bloglines, so his blogs will not have registered a visit.

Of course, it all depends on what you mean by influence which is mostly a function of why you are interested in it. For example, if your goal is to sell shoes, ads in “Pink” probably have more impact. If you want to push your new book “Taxes are evil” then Malkin’s blog is the way to go. So influence also has to be measured with respect to the community you want to influence.

There are lots of other factors of course. Not all links are the same. Some are from pages that are highly ranked and others not. Links may also have a sentiment associated with them. For some purposes, e.g., placing our ad for our new book on taxes, we may want to ignore those with negative sentiment in computing Malkin’s influence.

Finally, some blogs are mavens and some are connectors. Mavens are trustworthy sources of information whereas connectors are good at passing on information and ideas, but don’t originate it.

We’re developing a model combining all of these factors, and some additional ones and will have some papers out soon.

The NYT is reporting that Wii is just too much fun. Here’s the warning that is now on their web site.

“Even while wearing the wrist strap, make sure you don’t let go of the Wii Remote during game play and do not use excessive motion. For example, in Wii Sports bowling, the proper way to let go of the ball while bowling is to release the “B” button on the Wii Remote — DO NOT LET GO OF THE Wii REMOTE ITSELF. If you are having so much fun that you start perspiring, take a moment to dry your hands. If you use excessive motion and let go of the Wii Remote, the wrist strap may break and you could lose control of the Wii Remote. This could injure people nearby or cause damage to other objects.”

Eventually, these will be illegal. Like the Happy Fun Ball.