The value of protests in the algorithm age
Those 29 likes on your funny Instagram sign are not “fighting the establishment” just yet. Continue Reading
Algorithms
Facebook as an echo chamber isn’t breaking news, dipshit
This seems to have confused people more than it probably should. Continue Reading
‘How do consumers find our product?’ has become ‘How do algorithms find it?’
Many marketing and sales types — as well as high-level executives — often worry about how potential consumers will find their products, and rush around screaming about KPIs and ROI and deliverables and optimized lead generation programs, all of which… Continue Reading
You over-inflate your intelligence when you use Google
If you like this post, feel free to share it. Someday I will move the social share buttons to the top, I swear. (It’s good to admit your failings now and again.) If you like some of my thoughts on… Continue Reading
Netflix’s success isn’t really about algorithms
We live in this algorithm-dominated world now, and part of the reason that emerged — aside from simply better technology and people focusing on it — was because for generations, a ton of big decisions were made on the gut… Continue Reading
The most important people on Wikipedia might be Carl Linnaeus, Jesus, Michael Jackson, and Hitler
If you use two approaches to ranking web pages — PageRank (Google-developed) and 2D Rank (which measures how many external sources cited) — and you apply those ranking systems to Wikipedia, here’s what you learn about the “most important people… Continue Reading
On Eli Pariser and the algorithm bubble
Eli Pariser, who’s currently the chief executive of Upworthy, wrote a book in 2011 called The Filter Bubble. A nine-minute TED Talk on many of the same topics is embedded above, but essentially, the idea is that personalized search — i.e. the… Continue Reading