Monthly Archives: July 2008

Google counts a trillion URLs

By Michael Becker | Published: July 25, 2008
Google reported today that its Web index now con­tains a tril­lion unique URLs. On its blog, Google said that this is more a sta­tis­ti­cal mile­stone than any­thing — the com­pany has no way to visit all tril­lion sites to see how many of them offer unique con­tent, for exam­ple, nei­ther should this be taken as [...]
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Joseph M. Williams, 1933–2008

By Michael Becker | Published: July 25, 2008
It’s amaz­ing what you learn if you do a sim­ple Web search these days. This morn­ing I typed Joseph M. Williams into Google and found out that the author and University of Chicago pro­fes­sor died in February. I didn’t know Williams but through his books, yet he has been a con­stant com­pan­ion with me since [...]
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Trolling Knol

By Michael Becker | Published: July 24, 2008
There’s one thing I’ve noticed so far after play­ing with Google’s Knol, the company’s so-called Wikipedia killer. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol doesn’t spec­ify whether it wants us to write in an ency­clo­pe­dic style. You can already see the dif­fer­ence between arti­cles sam­pled at ran­dom. The arti­cle on lung can­cer is writ­ten like an ency­clo­pe­dia entry, a long [...]
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ALA pushes privacy awareness

By Michael Becker | Published: July 24, 2008
Ars Technica reports today that the American Library Association has begun a new push to teach peo­ple about per­sonal pri­vacy in libraries — mak­ing sure patrons know that what they do in a library could raise red flags with law enforce­ment and, then, mak­ing those patrons into advo­cates for pri­vacy pol­icy reform. The ALA’s beef: “Law [...]
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Prefer the hyperlink

By Michael Becker | Published: July 24, 2008
A les­son of sorts for me today: I was read­ing through a few old posts on this site and came across one that referred read­ers to a link in the left-hand col­umn. Of course, there is no left-hand col­umn any­more. I think that was removed one or two site redesigns ago. The les­son is that [...]
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