John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 24, 2011

In the past 12 hours, about ten friends (and counting) have sent me a copy of this ad on Facebook for a company called "AppSumo." I have nearly 5000 "friends" on Facebook, a problem I've written about in the past , but seeing this ad threw me. Apparently, this is *not* part of Facebook's social ads, where people can buy ads targeting friends of particular people on third party sites - after all, this appears on Facebook.com.

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Collaboration 2.0

JULY 4, 2011

Google’s pivot from search to social technologies occurred last week and my early impressions of their new service Google+ are very positive, particularly around their efforts on allowing you to group your contacts. The giant global advertising company have many years experience analyzing your search and email history, and often display eerily accurate recommendations contextual [.

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Elie

JULY 28, 2011

EDIT (Tuesday 2nd August) Microsoft Statement is available from here EDIT (Sunday 31th July) The flaw is fixed: I had a phone call with some people from Microsoft yesterday (yes on a Saturday) and they told me they fixed the problem. I will update this post with their response as soon as it is out.

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Robert's Db2

JULY 15, 2011

Many of you have probably heard (I've said it a number of times in presentations myself) that starting with DB2 9 for z/OS "pure" sequential prefetch (what we just called sequential prefetch before dynamic prefetch came along) would only be used for table space scans. In all other situations if DB2 utilized prefetch to access pages of a database object it would be dynamic or list prefetch.

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Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

IT

Hunton Privacy

JULY 11, 2011

Last month, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed a health privacy bill into law that imposes new obligations exceeding the requirements in the HIPAA Privacy Rule. The law, which will become effective on September 1, 2012, incorporates the expanded definition of the term “covered entity” in Texas’s existing health privacy law and could have a broad impact on many non-HIPAA covered entities.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 1, 2011

( image ) Last night I got to throw a party, and from time to time, that's a pretty fun thing to do. To help us think through the program and theme of the Web 2 Summit this Fall, we invited a small group of influential folks in the Bay area to a restaurant in San Francisco, fed them drinks and snacks, and invited their input. (Here are some pics if you want to see the crowd.).

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Mining Healthcare Retail IT 111

Collaboration 2.0

JULY 28, 2011

Like accountancy software and spreadsheets, HR Technology has been around as long as business computing. Recruiting, payroll, tracking work time, performance appraisals, employee benefits administration, managing training and learning and performance reviews and records…and of course the funeral parlor like world of ‘off boarding’ may not be the sexiest of software spaces but they form [.

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Elie

JULY 21, 2011

While the standard technique to track users across multiples sites / visits is to use cookies this is by no means the only way to do this. Last year Samy, with his famous evercookie application, showed that in fact many browser storages (Flash, locale storage) can be used to store a unique identifier.

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CGI

JULY 1, 2011

It takes two to innovate. ravi.kumarv@cgi.com. Fri, 07/01/2011 - 08:00. Numerous surveys of clients and suppliers all agree – collaborative innovation is important and desired. Especially in outsourcing. But why is it still not ‘business as usual’? Two research projects recently completed by the National Outsourcing Association in the UK and Warwick Business School (WBS) explored how innovation is included within outsourcing contracts and how it is subsequently managed.

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Risk

Hunton Privacy

JULY 29, 2011

As reported in the Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives Blog , Connecticut recently became the latest state to pass a law regulating employer use of credit reports. The law , which goes into effect on October 1, 2011, prohibits employers from requiring employees or prospective employees to consent to the employer requesting their credit report as a condition of employment.

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Access Privacy 40

JKevinParker

JULY 4, 2011

Very recently, I upgraded to Firefox 4.0. That's why I was surprised when I began getting bugged to upgrade to Firefox 5.0. Wait, huh? Did someone fat-finger the subversion commit? It seemed to me like it was time for a minor version release, especially considering some of my favorite plugins have not been upgraded for 4.0 yet. Apparently, I'm not alone.

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IT 40

John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 13, 2011

It's hard to not voice at least one note into the Morman Tabernacle of commentary coming out of Google's first two weeks as a focused player in the social media space. I haven't read all the commentary, but one observation that seems undervoiced is this: If Google+ really works, Google will be creating a massive amount of new "conversational media" inventory, the very kind of marketing territory currently under development over at Tumblr and Twitter.

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Mining Sales Marketing IT 102

Collaboration 2.0

JULY 18, 2011

The conventional wisdom about personally leveraging the ’social’ web has been the idea that promoting your attributes and sharing ideas will make you more visible online, and therefore attract more business success or job offers. Now that we have hit mass understanding and use of tools that make it simple to publish online, have we [.

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IT 80

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Security

Scary Beasts Security

JULY 3, 2011

[With thanks to Mathias Kresin for being the first to notice] An incident, what fun! Earlier today, I was alerted that a vsftpd download from the master site (vsftpd-2.3.4.tar.gz) appeared to contain a backdoor: [link] The bad tarball is (sha256sum): 2a4bb16562e0d594c37b4dd3b426cb012aa8457151d4718a5abd226cef9be3a5 vsftpd-2.3.4.tar.gz And, of course, the GPG signature notices: $ gpg.

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IT 31

John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 7, 2011

I'm looking for someone with whom to work on my next book project, What We Hath Wrought. The person I'm looking for is probably impossible to find, but I'm going to try anyway. Why impossible? Because I haven't met someone like the person I'm imagining, at least not in the right context. Back when I needed a partner to help me get FM off the ground, I wrote a post looking for an office manager/person friday.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 21, 2011

Even before I was a few pages into The Information , a deep, sometimes frustrating but nonetheless superb book by James Gleick, I knew I had to ask him to speak at Web 2 this year. Not only did The Information speak to the theme of the conference this year ( the Data Frame ), I also knew Gleick, one of science's foremost historians and storytellers, would have a lot to say to our industry.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 15, 2011

One last thought before I hit the hay after a long, satisfying evening with the people who gave me the chance to start FM in their garage , the Shores. And that is this: Google killed its earnings earlier this evening thanks in part to is algorithmic approach to display advertising (not that profit was easily broken out, I'm sure it contributed in the way most mature brand businesses do, which, as a mature business, must be looking way better than it did a few years ago.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 4, 2011

I fell out of the habit, but here are the Signals from last week. If you want to get my daily roundup of stories worth paying attention to, get the RSS here , or sign up in email at the top right of the page here. Monday Signal: Is Google Too Big? Tuesday Signal: Will Big Data Save Us? We Can Pray. Weds. Signal: A Good Day for the Open Internet. Thursday Signal: So Many Links, So Little Time.

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Big data 66

John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 11, 2011

I know I've been a bit quiet here on Searchblog of late, and I've promised that will change shortly, as I ramp up on the new book. But one faction of Searchblog has not been quiet: the comment spammers. So I am turning comments off for a while, in the hopes it will make the spammers go elsewhere for a bit. I'll be redesigning the site over the summer, moving it from this antiquated (and pretty much abandoned) Moveable Type codebase to WordPress, and doing a number of other key upgrades.

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 29, 2011

Read the Dallas Business Journal’s DBJ Confidential blog post discussing Hunton & Williams partner Lisa J. Sotto’s thoughts on how companies should approach privacy issues in the United States. Sotto was interviewed while in Dallas giving a privacy law presentation for in-house counsel.

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 28, 2011

As reported in BNA’s Privacy Law Watch , on July 25, 2011, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a new federal law amending Russia’s personal data privacy law, “On Personal Data.” The amended law, which was made public on July 27 and is effective retroactively from July 1, 2011, imposes new rules on international data transfers.

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Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

Customer Experience

Hunton Privacy

JULY 28, 2011

As we previously reported , the Mexican government has developed draft regulations for the implementation of Mexico’s Federal Law on the Protection of Personal Data in the Possession of Private Parties ( Ley Federal de Protección de Datos Personales en Posesión de los Particulares ). The U.S. Department of Commerce recently circulated an English translation of the draft regulations.

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 27, 2011

On July 25, 2011, Netflix stated that it will hold off on the launch of its Facebook integration in the U.S. due to legal issues related to the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”). The new Facebook feature would allow Netflix subscribers to share their movie viewing information with friends online. Netflix indicated in its second quarter shareholder letter that it supports House Bill 2471 (“H.B. 2471”), a proposed bipartisan amendment to the VPPA intended to clarify the consent requirement f

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 25, 2011

As reported in BNA’s Privacy Law Watch , on July 19, 2011, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Maureen K. Ohlhausen to the Federal Trade Commission. Obama sent his official nomination to the Senate on July 21, 2011. If approved, Ohlhausen will serve a seven-year term beginning on September 26, 2011, replacing Commissioner William E. Kovacic.

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Data breaches Privacy Cybersecurity Government 40

Hunton Privacy

JULY 22, 2011

A putative class action complaint filed on June 22, 2011, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that the popular cloud-based storage provider Dropbox, Inc. failed to secure users’ private data or to notify the vast majority of them about a data breach. According to the complaint, Dropbox announced in a blog post on its website that it had “introduced a bug” on June 19, 2011, which allowed users logged in to its system to log into other users’ accoun

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 20, 2011

The Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner has issued a document soliciting comments regarding a proposal to require a wide range of data users to submit information about their activities to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data. The proposal would be carried out pursuant to the Hong Kong Privacy Ordinance, which authorizes the Privacy Commissioner to require certain data users to submit data user returns.

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 15, 2011

On July 14, 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee convened a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade (chaired by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA)), and the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology (chaired by Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR)), to launch a comprehensive review of Internet privacy. The series of hearings began with testimony from officials representing three agencies with jurisdiction over consumer privacy issues: FTC Commissio

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Hunton Privacy

JULY 15, 2011

On July 13, 2011, the Article 29 Working Party (the “Working Party”), adopted an Opinion on the concept of consent as a legal basis for processing personal data, which includes recommendations for improving the concept in the context of the ongoing review of the EU data protection framework. The Opinion also analyzes the conditions for valid consent under EU data protection law (that consent must be “freely given,” “specific,” “unambiguous,” “explicit,” “informed,” etc.), and clarifies the obli

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Personal data Privacy IT 40