Linked List: February 18, 2011

Friday, 18 February 2011

Xydo 

My thanks to Xydo for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Xydo is a new social news site, aggregating news on topics like Apple, Android, programming, iOS, politics, and 1,500 other topics created and curated by users of the service. It combines Twitter, RSS, and your social graph to generate custom news feeds based on your interests.

Sign up for the beta to get Xydo via the web and your favorite apps and news readers, including Flipboard, Twitter, Pulse, and Tweetdeck.

Leaving AOL 

Paul J. Miller:

I’d love to be able to keep doing this forever, but unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution. It doesn’t take a veteran of the publishing world to realize that AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content. As detailed in the “AOL Way,” and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive.

The AOL Way.

Ken Jennings on Playing Jeopardy Against IBM’s Watson Computer 

Ken Jennings:

I expected Watson’s bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer’s techniques for unraveling Jeopardy clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson’s case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels “sure” enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.

Mike Monteiro on The Pipeline 

Speaking of interviews with my friends, Mike Monteiro was on The Pipeline with Dan Benjamin this week. Solid gold.

MacTalk Podcast at Webstock 2011 

Speaking of podcasts, I was interviewed alongside Michael Lopp by Peter Wells of the MacTalk Podcast. Peter interviewed a slew of speakers from here at Webstock — a great list of interviews.

The Best of The Talk Show 

No new episode of The Talk Show this week, but Dan Benjamin assembled a “best of” clip show. I’m listening now, and it’s cracking me up. Good stuff. Thanks to our sponsors, Shopify and Rackspace.