Sunday, June 05, 2005

It's been a long time since my last entry. Ok, two things to put down here.

1) Why my interest to blog (seems to be) decreased? (If not interested, jump to 2)
Everytime I think of something to write a blog entry, I sort of undergo a filtering process, judging whether this idea or thought worth to be in the blog entry or not. As time passes, I start to feel that let's do some other stuff, this crappy thing will just sink to the bottom without being noticed. This reason is also becuase I have read so many "JUNK" blog, I feel so disgusted (but still keep reading) why people (including me, yes I am a POS) keep putting useless content on the web, exactly like part of the lyrics in "the sound of silence"
people talking without speaking,
people hearing without listening,
people writing songs that voices never share.
Perhaps the last sentence should be re-written as
people writing blogs that thinkings never share.
But anyway, it's just like academia, having publications is at least better than no publication, a blog is still a blog.

2)Is my posting pattern predictable?
I HAVE BEEN working on modelling the posting pattern of bloggers for a while, what I have used is a periodic inhomogeneous Poisson model (sounds geek?). It basically said that people write blog in a quite regular pattern, usually at night 2AM when they are lonely, sleepless, best time for individual thinking and shit, thus we should learn this pattern and schedule to retrieve them for supporting a live-feed news alert. However, is my posting pattern predictable (or at least periodic)? Absolutely not, period. So, what to do with it? Seems having the bloggers (or blogging software) to notify others that they have new entries is a elegant solution. Olston et.al have proposed similar ideas in the paper "Best-Effort Cache Synchronization with Source cooperation". Though it seems to me that such large-scale cooperation in Internet scale seems infeasible, the world is changing so fast, google has just enrolled this webmaster sitemaps service. Basically, as a webmaster, you like your website to be visible, well use this service and google can guarantee your site get crawled whenever you have new things added. If you don't do this, fine, no one care about your website then. Come on, give me a break, is this a really win-win situation? Seems yes, websites get visibility, google can provide better service, everyone is happy. Yes, it is really a win-win situation, but I feel a bit worry. This reminds me of the documentry called "the corporation", In modern world, there is something called the corporation, they gather a lot of human resource as a giant machine, they sort of posess human rights (they can own land and properties, they can sue people and shit), we are living with these giants together, if we are not inside one of these giant machine, basically, we are dead meat, not competitive at all, waiting to be eaten (or be converted to some part of them). I hope I am not jumping too far away, but what I worry about is that search engines in general have become so influential that you'd better work closely with them, otherwise, you are out of the game. Returning to this new Google "service", webmasters creates content and provide information to Internet user, who is the eventual benefitor of this "service"? Google of course, they can provide more updated information, improving the search result, attracting more users.... why not webmasters get paid for using this "service"?