According to comScore, social network Hi5gets around 35 million uniques per month, putting it at a roughly similar size to Facebook. Alexa ranks Facebook 8th in the world -- Hi5 is 10th. However, Facebook gets all the ink. Hi5 barely registerson Google Trends -- especially for news references, and a search for "Hi5" on Technorati generates only about 1/4th of the posts that a search for "Facebook" returns. So what gives?The answer is that much of Hi5's traffic originates outside of North America. While Alexa pegs Facebook 5th in the US, Hi5 doesn't crack the top 50. Much of Hi5's traffic comes from Latin America -- Alexa has the site ranked first in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras, and second in Guatemala and Peru. The site is also popular in many other non-English speaking countries -- first in Portugal, third in Romania and Thailand, for example.It is with that in mind that we can understand why news last week that Hi5 is planning the launch of its own developer platform caused just a small reactionon Techmeme. Hi5 actually launched a developer APIin August to very little fanfare. With 35 million users, though, Hi5 is the 3rd largest social networking site on the web, so perhaps we should take a bit more notice.Based in San Francisco, Hi5 raised $20M Series A venture round last July to support its growing operation. Hi5 is a "traditional" social networking site, that resembles MySpace or Friendster more than it does Facebook and has more than 60 million registered accounts according to internal figures released to the press.A look around a typical Hi5 profileindicates a site that is already home to popular social networking widgets from companies like Slide and RockYou (who Hi5 has a close relationship with). But Facebook really shouldn't be worried, in my opinion. Hi5's platform, while likely inspired by Facebook, is gunning for MySpace.Hi5 profiles more or less imitate MySpace (albeit generally a bit more sanitized in terms of flashy auto-playing blinking doo-dads), to the extent that I believe they can even utilize profile design codes created for MySpace with little to no modification. There is certainly cross over between social networks, but many people initially joined Facebook because it was perceived as the anti-MySpace. It has a clean, consistent design, it has more finely tuned privacy filters, and it seems to encourage contact between your existing social networks more so than the creation of new social connections.Because Hi5 more closely resembles MySpace, I think MySpace really has more to worry about with a Hi5 platform than does Facebook. We've oftenarguedfor a MySpace API, but because MySpace and Facebook have such different cultures, the Facebook platform may not have been much a threat to MySpace. Now that one of MySpace's closer rivals (at least in terms of culture) have plans to launch a platform, MySpace really needs to stop resting on their laurels and start embracing widget developers. Hi5 may have mostly international traffic, but they are still a major force in social networking and are quietly positioning themselves to make a real run at MySpace.

  BitTorrent today announced their content delivery network acceleration service, BitTorrent DNA. DNA will add their peer-to-peer file sharing technology to any CDN to speed up download and streaming services for videos and files.BitTorrent essentially works by harnessing unused network capacity on end-user computers. Anyone downloading or streaming a file also distributes the file to other users, which is broken into smaller chunks and reassembled upon delivery. BitTorrent has long used the distributed peer-to-peer approach for file sharing, and the same idea is employed by companies like Joost for streaming media.DNA's first client is Brightcove, a CDN that powers video streaming for companies like CBS, Fox, the Discovery Channel, Buena Vista (Disney), Reuters, Warner Music Group, Sony-BMG and others. It's mildly amusing that BitTorrent, thought by many in the music and film industry to be an enabler of illegal file sharing, should now be providing a technology backbone for the legit delivery of industry content.Image courtesy BitTorrent.Aram Sinnreich, a media industry analyst with Radar Research, told Forbesthat just a year ago dealing with BitTorrent would have been anathema for industry execs, but now they realize that the company can save them money by turning downloaders into distributors.CNET seesBitTorrent DNA has a competitor to existing CDNs writing, "BitTorrent DNA will square off with industry leaders like Akamai Technologies." But that doesn't seem to be the company's goal. According to BitTorrent, their DNA technology compliments existing CDNs rather than replaces them.BitTorrent has been taking strides recently to repaint themselves as a legit business. In February, they partnered with companies like Fox, Warner Brothers., MTV, and Paramount to create a download storethat uses their P2P technology to deliver paid downloads. Now, with their new DNA service, they're hoping to get cozier with Hollywood and avoid the type of anti-piracy litigation that caused Napster to close down in 2002.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Acquires_Microblogging_Service_Jaiku';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Finnish short messaging and microblogging service Jaikuhas been acquired by Google, the company says. That Google bought this competitor of Twitter, the service founded by Blogger founder Evan Williams, instead of Twitter is notable. Jaiku may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price.Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - I think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use. For background on Jaiku, I recommend this video interviewby the new European outfit Intruders.tv with company founder Jyri Engestrom, trained as a sociologist and formerly from Nokia.RedMonk analyst James Governor, who has blogged extensively about the business value of Jaiku competitor Twitterand whose Twitterfeed I learned about the acquisition from, has some interesting thoughts on the news. Governor says he'd like to see RIM buy Twitter but thinks Yahoo! is much more likely. He says the Jaiku mobile download could be a key addition to the Google Phone kernel but fears thatall the leading microblogging services will be quickly overrun with commercial messages. I think that's a valid concern and worry that ads could drown out the links I Twitter promoting my blog posts. (Joking.) All of Twitter is lit up with conversation on the acquisition, according the the tracking service Twitterverse, the hottest word across Twitter in the last hour is Jaiku. There's more good discussion there than I can post here.With easy group creation, RSS import and threaded conversation, amongst other features, Jaikuis probably a superior service to Twitter. Twitter's API and large US community offers its own advantages for some users. Unfortunately, new accounts have been throttled at Jaiku with news of the announcement. That seems like a move that's a bit hostile to the early adopter types who are following this news now and a real lost opportunity.Update: Here's the official Google statementabout this exciting news.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Adam_vs_Eve_Does_The_Blogosphere_Have_A_Gender';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Sharon Brogan has been publishing the Watermarkblogfor the past four years. She keeps a page, aptly titled "Here Are the Women Bloggers," which features other blogs written by women. In an email exchange with Sharon, she told me that she feels that the blogosphere is often unfair.Sharon thinks that male bloggers are more likely to link to other male bloggers rather than to blogs written by women.Could this be true? My gut feeling was no, but I was not sure. Perhaps that was the case with tech blogs simply because there are more men writing about technology? Intrigued by this question, I also wonderedwho blogs more: men or women? If tech is dominated by men, perhaps other types of blogs are written predominantly by women. Politics, food, entertainment -- the blogosphere covers more than just technology, does it have a gender?Female Factor in Technorati Top 20 BlogsFirst, let's take a look at the gender breakdown among the top 20 blogs on Technorati. In the chart below, we considered the gender of each blog's founder, as well as the split between the male and female contributors.It appears that the top Technorati blogs are dominated by men. The explanation is likely to be a combinationof two factors: time and focus. The mega popular blogs are mostly the ones that have been around since the early days,and the early-day focus of blogosphere was technology, which is a field that seems to have traditionally attracted men more than women.Female Factor in Recent Wordpress Blogs by TagNext we headed over to Wordpress.com and looked at recent blogs by tag and checked the gender of the blogger who made the tagged post. Note that this does not meanthat the blog is focused on a particular topic, it simply means that an entry was tagged that way.For the chart below we sampled a few popular tags.This sample tells a different story. The chart suggests that non-tech topics, such as books, arts, and travel, have a much more even split between male and female bloggers.Female Factor in Blogger, Typepad and Vox BlogsBlogger has a cool feature that allows you to sample through blogs at random, which was very handyfor our investigation. The ratio of male to female blogs that we saw during our random sample was 11:7. Note that with some blogs we could notdetermine what gender the author was, and some had multiple authors which made it hard to quantify.Next we looked at Typepad's Featured blogs. The split between the 10 recently featured blogswas exactly 5 to 5.The front page of Vox, however, was a completely different scene, confirming that not all platforms are equally attractive to everyone:So What Do We Make Of All This?We can draw a few conclusions from the data we gathered above. First, the blogosphere does not have a gender. Males and females are both writing passionately about topics that matter to them. There are however trends that we see:The Top Technorati blogs are dominated by men. The likely explanation is that they are generally focused on technology.Since people blog about what matters to them, gender breakdown will be more sharp around topics (i.e. men appear to write more about gadgets, women seem to write more about family).Different platforms may attract one gender over another depending on aesthetics and ease-of-use.Returning to Sharon's concern that men link mostly to other men, I would guess that it probably isn't true. More likely, it just appears that way because of gender splits by topic. If less women are blogging about gadgets or technology, there are simplyfewer opportunities to link to them on these topics. The reverse is likely true as well -- if more women have blogs about literature, then one might expect to see more links between female lit blogs than male blogs in that topic area.ConclusionThe blogosphere is a wonderful jungle. Flipping through it gives you a sense of wonder, marvel and humbleness.So many people are out there blogging, writing, discovering truths and sharing their lives - it's just amazing.The blogosphere is inhabited by both men and women, young and elderly, of all nationalities, religions, and professions. It is a creative commonthat does not belong to anyone. It offers a truly global and genderless voice that forms the beat of our human experience.Help us celebrate the blogosphere by adding a link to your favorite blog in the comment section of this post.

  I'm at the Graphing Social Patternsconference in San Jose for the next two days. I'll be covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews on Read/WriteTalk. This morning Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & CEO of SocialMedia.com, gave a presentation etitled Appvertising: The Future of Social Advertising.I also sat down with Seth after his presentation and recorded a quick interview for Read/WriteTalk. Seth Goldstein is a serial entrepreneur, who has been in the Internet business since 1995 - when he created SiteSpecific, one of the early Internet advertising agencies. Seth was also a Co-Founder of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit group that explores and explains many of the issues around the attention economy. (For more information on the Attention Economy, check out our coverage here). He also helped start a company called Root Markets, that focused on commercializing many of the Attention Trust themes.Seth's slides are available on SlideShareand embedded at the end of this post. The issue I want to focus on in this post is his vision for SocialMedia.com, which Seth described as an 'app network'. The slide below explains: At this level, it is tempting to describe SocialMedia as 'Yet Another Facebook Ad Network'. After all, this is a very risky business due to the rumors that Facebook will create their own ad network. Seth had a great response to those concerns, drawing an analogy to FeedBurner - who he said is a "hero" for him. FeedBurner remember started up with no proprietary advantage or secret sauce to compete with Yahoo! and Google. Despite that, Goldstein credits Dick Costello with having a "clear vision for what he wanted to do with FeedBurner." The Feedburner team kept innovating and understanding their customers better than the big companies; ultimately creating something very creative and valuable. Next Step in Attention Economy? So what is Seth's creative vision as an analog to Dick's vision for FeedBurner? I think it ties back to his Attention Trust work. So in my interview, I asked Seth how SocialMedia related to his past work with Attention Trust. He responded: "Attention Trust is a non-profit, so there is really no connection between commercial things that I or anyone else might pursue. At the same time, I'm one person I'm one person ... I think what ties a lot of my recent experience together is the way in which consumer data is seen as something expressive not something passive. And so the takeaway here is when you click on something, search for something, fill out a form, leave a trail of websites that you have visited. All of that in one regard is a passive residue of your historical behavior. But increasingly, web technologies and tools are enabling publishers and I hope increasingly individuals themselves to turn that data back into real end-user benefit. Whether that be personalized recommendations, better targeting things like that that really benefit and leverage that historical data. That is really where the attention data hits the pavement and we get some really good traction. Where I have been focused recently in terms of SocialMedia is trying to capture all of this user generated content and user generated response to create forms of advertising and other engagement tools to create better and more sustainable applications on the social media architecture." Conclusion I don't know if SocialMedia will ultimately be successful or not. It's early and this space is very crowded with players like VideoEgg, RockYou and App Fuel. Plus, as we already mentioned, Facebook is rumored to be creating their own ad network. I find the analogy to FeedBurner compelling - but it remains to be seen if Seth's vision will be enough to drive market innovation (as FeedBurner did).Here are all of Seth's slides from his presentation today: Note: Seth Goldstein photo credit B D Solis Flickr

  I'm at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose for the next two days. I'll covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews on Read/WriteTalk.This morning Charlene Lifrom Forrester Research gave a presentation entitled 'Big Brands & Facebook: Marketing Case Studies & Best Practices.' The theme that she came back to a few times was: Facebook marketing requires communication not advertising.Assuming that advertising means 'interruption', I think anyone who has been using Facebook for anytime would agree with that assumption. Some of the implications around best practices were quite interesting, so in this post we'll explore those.What Are Traditional Advertising Options on Facebook Charlene's goal was to encourage the audience and advertisers (who didn't seem to be many in the audience) to think beyond traditional advertising. She started by establishing different appraoches to advertising on the Facebook platform. Specifically she outlined three approaches to buying advertising on Facebook: You can purchase IAB standard ad units. As has been the case since August 2006, Microsoft handles the sale of these advertisements. Another option is buying targeted messages to be placed in Facebook news feeds. According to data Charlene has received from Facebook, the click through rates on these ads are between 4 and 26 percent. While that is certainly a big range, the performance is impressive and actually closer to search advertising click through than I would have guessed. Finally, any user can create purchase Facebook Flyers, whichare totally self service advertisements. How do you communicate not advertise? Going back to Charlene's opening theme of communicating and not advertising, she revisited the statement and started exploring effective ways to communicate. She specifically talked about Sponsored Groups. For clarification, while anyone can create a Facebook Group, the sponsored groups provide additional functionality including:Group page provides customized navigation, look & feel.Going back to the more traditional advertising, this usually includes a significant media buy to drive traffic to the sponsored group page. As an example, the screen shot below is the Jeep Sponsored Group on Facebook. Sponsored Group Best Practices Charlene laid out five best practices for sponsored groups: understand how similar groups meet / don't meet the needs already crate a unique experience that really is engaging people enable discussion board, the wall, photos, etc ... read and respond to comments be transparent about your role & perspective Brands That Can't Afford Sponsored Groups For perspective, while this is certainly a compelling way to communicate with users, it's important to realize that only large brands and companies are able to afford creating sponsored groups. According to Charlene, the costs are usually in the six figures for a three month engagement. However, any company can setup a traditional group for no cost at all. For example, here is a link to the Read/WriteWeb Facebook Group. Branded Applications Charlene also touched on branded applications, although in her opinion there weren't any good case studies yet. Someone in the audience asked: "What is a good example of a facebook app that is true to its brand?" Charlene answered: "None, I keep waiting but there is a long way to go." Conclusion It was repeated a number of times today that it's the 'Summer of Facebook' (see Dan Farber's post). As the community continues to discuss new opportunities for building on top of the social platform of Facebook, it's important to realize that involving big brands will be crucial. Hopefully, some of these best practices will be helpful for not just the brands looking to engage, but also all of the developers looking to build those experiences. Note: Charlene Li photo credit B D Solis Flickr

  MoFuseis a new service that many publishers today have a need for. MoFuse stands for "Mobile Fusion" and it enables you to create a mobile version of your website. It's similar to Winksite, a mobile conversion and community service that counts BoingBoingamong its customers. However MoFuse is simpler, in that it doesn't offer community features. If anything it's like "Feedburner for mobile", because all you need to do is provide your RSS feed and then MoFuse automatically converts it to a mobile version. Also like Feedburner, MoFuse is starting off by targeting blogs.MoFuse is currently invite-only, but Read/WriteWeb has exclusive access to invites. Simply go to http://snapple.mofuse.com/register/RWWEBand enter your details. There are 200 invitations available, on a first-come first-serve basis.Here is the test mobile version of Read/WriteWeb: http://m.mofuse.com/readwriteweb. The screenshots below shows how it looks:HomepagePost pageThe screenshots show a fairly simple layout, but it includes essential images and neatly displays content for reading on a mobile device. Essentially MoFuse cuts out all unnecessary images, formats the text for mobile, makes it easily navigatible -- and generally presents a much better reading experience for mobile.You can customize the look of your MoFuse mobile site using an AJAX color picker, as well as uploading a custom logo/header image file. You can also make some money by implementing AdSense mobile onto the pages, if you wish.Testing my MoFuse Page in ready.mobi With help from Mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele, I ran my new MoFuse page through the ready.mobitesting tool - which "evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards." The resulting test report was 4.95 / 5, or "Good". The 8kb download also puts the Web version of R/WW to shame!ready.mobi reportMoFuse AdminThe admin part of MoFuse is slick -- and seems to be influenced by Feedburner's UI: MoFuse admin screenConclusionMoFuse is still in early beta, but already it's shaping up to be a very useful tool for bloggers. Winksite is pretty stiff competition though and I'm sure other startups will emerge in this space too. Indeed it's a service Feedburner itself should be providing, so it wouldn't surprise me if they get into the game soon too.Let us know what you think of MoFuse and how it compares to similar services. Remember you can go to http://snapple.mofuse.com/register/RWWEBand get an invite.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Here_Comes_the_Money_YouTube_Videos_Coming_to_AdSense';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';According to early reports from the Associated Pressand Variety, Google is set to make a major announcement tomorrow concerning YouTube integration with AdSense. Selected YouTube videos will be available to AdSense publishers and will appear wrapped in banner ads.The AP offers auto websites selecting topical videos from YouTube about cars to run along with AdSense banner ads on their sites. If the report is correct, there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.Monetization of YouTube has always been the big question since Google Acquired the site. While other video hosting companies sought content first and then tried to build out their ad networks, it's only logical that the biggest online ad network in the world would fold the best content from the biggest video site in the world into its offerings. For more industry background see Liz Gannes's post at NewTeeVee.Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web. Google has run very limited video advertising already but nothing like what it could do with YouTube's huge catalog. The ads will be persistent banners outside the frame and fading in-frame overlays. It's a simple story, but if it is true it is going to blow the world of online video and advertising wide open.Update:Google has confirmed this: "AdSense isn't just for ads anymore; it's also a place to get video content for your site -- and earn extra revenue at the same time." There is an accompanying video:

  Facebook has contacted all the application developers that have applied for a new grant program announced at the TechCrunch40 conference, called the fbFund, and told them they all submissions have been deleted and must be resubmitted. The first attempt at this unusual financial plan to support the most over-hyped online phenomenon of the year (the FB platform) had to be reset and tried again. Applications were originally accepted by email, which quickly proved to be an unworkable solution. Allen Stern has posted the full email from Facebook at CenterNetworks.Standard statements were added to the grant program concerning privacy and competition; Facebook won't guarantee that your application will be kept private or that they won't build the same thing themselves. Those may not be shocking revelations but the risk that Facebook may develop the same functionality that you have is something that the top app developers have to live in fear of. Facebook is clearly learning as they go. The platform and company in general are likely to someday be seen as far less revolutionary or effective as they are often said to be today. The newsfeed is just RSS without the acronym and less functionality; the platform is just a highly controlled API effectively leveraged by only a handful of elite apps on an otherwise airtight social network. None the less, stay tuned for more Facebook posts on all your favorite tech blogs!

  Search guru-supreme Danny Sullivan got an answer out of Google this weekendconcerning the search engine's long-suspected practice of punishing websites in search results when they are alleged to have sold outbound links not including a nofollow tag. It's a controversial policy that has an unclear impact on the search landscape.As critics point out, however, Google still allows advertisements for paid links to be run through the Google Adwords service. Though they don't pass on pagerank, AdSense ads themselves are of course paid links that do deliver traffic for a fee. Perhaps Google just doesn't like paid links that they don't get a piece of the payment for.Links bought with the intention of increasing not just traffic but conferring pagerank authority from the seller to the buyer may in many cases give artificial authority to the sites of link buyers. Punishing this practice, though, may hurt the pagerank of reputable sites that the public fully expects to appear high in search results but whom happen to sell links.Like any system for determining worth, counting inbound links is now as open to gaming as anything. Where the line lies between gaming Google and engaging in legitimate commerce is ultimately subjective. Google is in all likelihood not even going to try to go after all sellers of paid links; just the most "egregious violaters." As Sullivan says, though, it is Google's search engine - none of us have a right to any particular treatment in it.For extensive and informed discussion on the topic, see Sullivan's coverage at his group blog Search Engine Land.

  Tim O'Reilly and team have done some interesting researchinto the rise of Facebook as an application platform. They released a report entitled The Facebook Application Platform, which we've been looking at in the virtual offices of Read/WriteWeb. One of the findings in the report is that Facebook apps follow the now familiar power law of popularity - a point also made by Alex Iskold in a R/WW post at the end of September. As the O'Reilly report put it: "a Facebook developer needs to build a huge viral hit to get anywhere near the top. As the aggregator, the company that benefits the most from niche applications is Facebook itself."Top 10 Facebook Apps Usage; chart by Alex Iskold, 27 Sept 2007As Alex Iskold put it, "the rationale behind the rush to build Facebook applications is that new applications have a potential to spread virally across Facebook's already mammoth user base." However Alex says that there's "a big flaw in this argument", which is that it has brought too much clutter and overwhelming choice into Facebook.Alex's suggested solution was controversial - it got some kick back in the comments - but in light of the O'Reilly report it is worth considering:"Could Facebook do a bit more filtering for us?That might make the site more useful. Why can't there be a relevancy algorithm that cleans up the mini feed? Why can't there be fewer applications that do the same thing? Maybe there should be a standard profile view, which would arrange things on people's profiles in the way that I like - that would surely make it easier to comprehend things. And most importantly, maybe Facebook should refocus on what social networks are about - communication."[emphasis mine]We are hearing a lot about recommendationand other filteringtechnologies today, so why can't Facebook use some of those technologies to make it simpler for users to choose suitable web apps? And it needn't be based on popularity either - there can be ratings for quality and usefulness, similar to Netflix and Amazon.Incidentally, if you are looking for recommendations for Facebook apps, check out Read/WriteWeb's series of posts on the bestthird party apps on Facebook. R/WW's Josh Catone picked 50 top apps, across 5categories:Top10 ExtensionTop10 UtilityTop 10MediaTop 10PlayTop 10Work

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Champagne_at_the_Googleplex_GOOG_Above_600_share';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Google gained 15.57 today to close at $609.62/sharetoday, breaking the 600 point barrier for the first time. That puts the company's market cap at over $190 billion, and means Google is worth more on paper than companies like Wal-Mart (the world's largest retailer) and Coca-Cola (the world's top brand).Google is trading more than 7-times its IPO price of $85 per share and went from $500 to $600 per share in months less time than it took to go from $400 to $500. Accordingto the Associated Press, the average target stock price for Google is at $614.64, though some analysts predict it will cross $700 per share by the end of 2008.While Henry Blodget's $750 billion target market cap may be far fetched, Google's stock price continues to rise with few signs of slowing down. Still a darling of the Valley and still trouncing all comers in its primary (and most profitable) business (search), Google has pleased investors by consistently beating earnings estimates since going public in 2004. The company's stock has risen 30% so far this year and earnings are expected to rise 40% according to Thompson Financial.Who benefits most from Google's meteoric stock price the most? Why, top Googlers, of course. Google has already minted at least 4 billionaires (founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt, and sales exec Omid Kordestani), while Sequoia Capital's initial $12.5 million investment in the company has also returned billions. Hundreds of the company's employees are multi-millionaires due to Google's Wall Street success.Image credit: sevenblock.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/hardware/Google_and_IBM_Bet_the_Server_Farm_on_Cloud_Computing';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Google and IBM are betting the (server) farm on cloud computing. The New York Time is reportingthat the two tech giants are investing up to $30 million to develop programs to help teach cloud computing concepts to students at six American universities. Google is building a 1,600 processor data center that will run both Google and IBM machines and open source software (including Linux, XEN virtualization software, Apache Hadoop, and open source versions of Google's own internal systems including the Google File System). IBM is also supposedly working on a data center.For the six universities involved in the project, that means access to a small scale version of the type of data center that runs Google's own search engine and applications on which to teach students about cloud computing. Distributed computing works by creating clusters of commodity hardware that run on an interconnected grid and allow web applications to scale without the need for expensive, large-scale server farms."This project combines IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer of IBM in a press release. "We're aiming to train tomorrow's programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day."The SETI@Home project is probably the most famous distributed computing project, but many of the online services we use today utilize data centers with thousands of commodity servers operating in tandem using the same basic concept. Last year WIRED published an articleindicated that Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, and IAC (Ask.com) were all turning toward cloud computing concepts to save money while still scaling their hosting platforms to support their massive numbers of users. Amazon already offers access to their compute cloud as a service.Google and IBM are betting that cloud computing will continue to be important on the web and by training future engineers on their tools they can ensure themselves access to the top minds in the field.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_deals/Are_Recommendation_Engines_a_Threat_to_the_Long_Tail';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Two Wharton academics released an interesting paper last week that asks whether online recommendation services are a threat to the aggregate diversity of items discovered by their users. The study is titled "Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity" and I found it via a good summary article at PaidContentthis weekend.All indications point towards a rise in importance by recommendation engines, so this argument deserves examination. From eBay's acquisition of StumbleUpon to the CBS acquisition of Last.fm to this weekend's MSNBC acquisition of Newsvine - recommendation engines are big money. We've covered quite a few startups in this space and I'm sure it will continue to grow in prominence.Perhaps more importantly, the "Long Tail" of diverse discovery is an important part of the meritocratic and democratic promise of the new web. Good recommendation engines are also just plain fun.After just a little consideration, the Wharton study seems more meaningful as a cautionary tale than as a critique of the inherent nature of recommendation engines. In discussing this with others I've found that most people swing quickly from believing the study is either obviously wrong or obviously correct. It's a more complex question than it might seem.Recommendation engines should strive to be smarter than simply finding that "there is a high correlation between people who liked X and people who liked Y." I would argue, for example, that recommending other users of a system and highlighting their less popular discoveries could be a good way to solve the problem. Getting it right is probably easier said than done, but it seems there's still plenty of potential for recommendation engines to expand the long tail. The study's arguments are important to consider, though.What the Study SaysA Wharton summaryof the paper excerpts the following to explain the study's conclusion: "Because common recommenders recommend products based on sales and [consumer] ratings, they cannot recommend products with limited historical data, even if they would be rated favorably," the authors write. "This can create rich-get-richer effects for popular products and vice-versa for unpopular ones, which results in less diversity."There's also some discussion of the Facebook app landscape, arguably an environment where the long tail doesn't hold up. See also this related discussion at TechCrunch.The authors argue that individual users may consistently be exposed to items that are new to them, but we're all exposed to the same new items - resulting in greater individual diversity but less aggregate diversity.Counter ArgumentsThe study includes a counter argument from Greg Linden, who helped develop Amazon's recommendation engine. Linden says "recommendation algorithms easily can be tuned to favor the back catalog -- the long tail -- as Netflix does."The role played by early adopters, "cool hunters", taste makers and advertisers relative to recommendation engines would also be interesting to look at.My personal fantasy for recommendation engines is this: I want del.icio.us to look at my bookmarks and recommend not just other URLs I might be interested in, but also other users whose tastes are similar to mine. I'd also like to see which of those recommended users tend to find items of interest earliest, so I can prioritize following them. Repetition, perhaps another way to describe popularity, will probably always drive consumption - but if I can see all of the things that are discovered by people recommended to me then I can use their less popular picks as guidance.If other metrics are considered, and surely they are in any sophisticated recommendation engine, then what's called "Attention Data" can help augment recommendations beyond merely what's most popular among people with similar interests. (Need an intro to Attention Data? Here's onethat could work for you.)It would be ill advised to reject recommendation engines as dumb popularity machines based on this study, but it is also important to take its arguments into consideration.