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Malcolm Gladwell

November 16, 2004 by Michael Boyle

continues to impress with a very personal story that looks into copyright, plagiarism, and art: Something Borrowed in the New Yorker.

The Wired News interview

November 15, 2004 by Michael Boyle

with Jeff Tweedy is great: Music Is Not a Loaf of Bread.

WN: You don’t agree with the argument that file sharing hurts musicians’ ability to earn a living?
Tweedy: I don’t believe every download is a lost sale.
WN: What if the efforts to stop unauthorized music file sharing are successful? How would that change culture?
Tweedy: If they succeed, it will damage the culture and industry they say they’re trying to save.

between politics and geography interesting you’ll want to take a look at Robert David Sullivan’s Beyond Red and Blue, a geographic analysis that posits 10 regions of the US, distinct demographically and in terms of their voting history. You’ll also be interested in his analysis of the 2004 election results.

MSN Search Update

November 12, 2004 by Michael Boyle

I re-checked the search I put the Beta MSN through yesterday and interestingly – expectedly – it included more returns than before – though the total was still just 10% of Google’s number and no more relevent. But I think it’s important to guage how MSN and a couple of the others change over time. I think people have an instinctive feel for Google by now, but a new entrant like MSN Search should be given the opportunity to improve over time, to get up to speed, so to speak. Anyhow – over the weekend I’m going to write up 3 or 4 queries and develop a schedule to see how each responds and compare the results. I’ll include Google, MSN Search Beta, and Yahoo! Search. Any suggestions anyone can offer will be more than welcome.

It looks like MSN Search

November 11, 2004 by Michael Boyle

is on now, so a comparison is possible. I thought I’d compare using a very relevant search using the terms “alberto gonzales” at the senate.gov site. The results from MSN were shocking in their sparseness – it only returned 6 hits. The results from Google turned up 112 hits. Just in case, I used the graphical tuners to make sure MSN wasn’t just presenting me with a subset based on my initial (default) settings, but that didn’t change anything. From where I sit, turning up but 5% of the results is quite a failure for the Microsoft search.