John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 10, 2012

Perusing my feeds today, I saw this post from Google’s blog: Search, plus Your World. In the post, Google extols the virtues of incorporating results such as “your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met.

IT 111

IT 111

Collaboration 2.0

JANUARY 13, 2012

The W3C are getting more involved with defining standards around ’social business’ - this is a very good thing IMO

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Hunton Privacy

JANUARY 12, 2012

On January 6, 2012, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted Michaels Stores, Inc.’s (“Michaels”) a motion to dismiss against a customer-plaintiff who alleged that Michaels’ in-store information collection practices violated Massachusetts law. Although the court ruled in Michaels’ favor, it found that customer ZIP codes do constitute personal information under Massachusetts state law when collected in the context of a credit card transaction.

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IT Information Security Security 40

John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 12, 2012

( image ) I’ve just been sent an official response from Google to the updated version of my story posted yesterday ( Compete To Death, or Cooperate to Compete? ). In that story, I reported about 2009 negotiations over incorporation of Facebook data into Google search. I quoted a source familiar with the negotiations on the Facebook side, who told me “Senior executives at Google insisted that for technical reasons all information would need to be public and available to all,” and “The only

Search queries 108

Search queries Privacy IT Insurance 108

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

John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 9, 2012

Amidst all the chaos, tragedy, and tumult that was 2011, I noticed one very clear theme: Most of us are struggling with the role corporations play in our society. The 14th Amendment (yes, the one that banished slavery) established corporations, in the US, as “persons” in the legal sense. In 2010, Citizens v. United sanctified corporations as equivalent to you and I in terms of political speech; in 2011, we began to see the impact of that decision on our political process here in the

IT 101

IT Government 101

John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 9, 2012

( image ) As promised, here are all my predictions in one place. I’ve written a brief overview of each as well. Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media. Twitter will become a force as a media company, not just a platform for others’ media. To do so, it will improve its #Discover feature and roll out something like Flipboard. Predictions 2012: #2 – Twitter As Free Radical, Swiss Bank, Arms Merchant…And Google Five Years Ago.

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IT 91

John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 9, 2012

This year I tried something new with my predictions, writing deeper posts on each one. I got to six, but I underestimated how long it would take to write 1,000 or so words for each post. I’m pushing past 10,000 words for the past week, and “predictions season” is pretty much over. I think it’s about time I gave all of us a break, and just got down to some rapid fire predictions.

Marketing 76

Marketing IT 76

Hunton Privacy

JANUARY 12, 2012

According to a spokesperson at the European Commission, the publication of the proposal for the review of the EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) has been postponed until late February or March 2012. The draft proposal was scheduled to be officially released in late January after it was leaked in December 2011. According to various sources, the proposal received negative responses from several Directorates-General over the course of the “inter-service consultation,” some of whom have voiced

Communications 40

Communications IT 40

Hunton Privacy

JANUARY 9, 2012

On January 5, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement with Upromise, Inc. , a membership reward service that gives cash rebates for college savings accounts to members who purchase products and services from its partner merchants. The FTC alleged that the “Personalized Offers” feature on the Upromise TurboSaver Toolbar (1) collected far more information about users’ browsing behavior than was disclosed at the time of installation, and (2) contrary to representations in

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Privacy Encryption Passwords Information Security 40

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 11, 2012

( image ) In today’s business climate, it’s not normal for corporations to cooperate with each other when it comes to sharing core assets. In fact, it’s rather unusual. Even when businesses do share, it’s usually for some ulterior motive, a laying of groundwork for future chess moves which insure eventual domination over the competition.

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