Non-Stop News

My work colleagues and I just spent an intense day and a half effectively locked in a room, talking about our work together and vision for where we want to be. I was reminded of this piece by Ken Auletta on the current state of the media vis-a-vis President Obama. A lot of what he has to say about the impact of the internet, the pace of the news cycle and the breakdown of the 20th century business model around journalism is part of my daily grind.

File under new yorker/ Fri Feb 26 20:44:56 CT 2010

History in smells

David Owen's piece The Dime Store Floor is a bit of nasal nostalgia. The sense of smell is a vivid memory evoker. A couple of summers ago I walked into a lumber yard's warehouse and had a sensory hit so vivid that for a moment I was 8 years old in my great-grandfather's woodshop/garage next door to the house where I grew up. Something about the old wood and sawdust and heat. The force of that memory surprised me. Owen's piece is like that too.

File under new yorker/ Fri Feb 26 20:32:30 CT 2010

Yahoo! Learning to Rank

Yahoo! has announced a learning to rank contest and has put up some actual dollars in addition to some data sets.

File under search/ Fri Feb 26 19:55:02 CT 2010