Wikipedia turns out to have distinct division into communities. Communities in Wikipedia turn out to contain more semantically similar Wikipedia articles. Within such communities, the highest PageRank score typically gets assigned to the article that gives in its title the topic of the whole community.

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams.

Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose these to our users. He raises good points about ‘scammy’ advertisers and the bad user experience they create. I agree with him and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry.

This book describes the important ideas in data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees, and boosting–the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book.

A feed fetching and parsing library that treats the internet like Godzilla treats Japan: it dominates and eats all. Feedzirra is a feed library that is designed to get and update many feeds as quickly as possible. This includes using libcurl-multi through the taf2-curb gem for faster http gets, and libxml through nokogiri and sax-machine for faster parsing.

Thanks to Steve Souders I had the opportunity to speak about CouchDB at Google. Here are links to the video and slides.

The goal of the django-calais project is to help manage the complexity involved in retrieving, storing, and processing Calais results for your Django models. Essentially it lets you submit any Django model to the Calais service for analysis, then automatically parses the results and stores them in a set of semantic models.

Django-Supertagging is an automated tagging application. It is based on Django-Tagging and uses Open-Calais to retrieve the data. Vist the wiki for more information.

Our new custom RSS tool is intended for all Times readers — not just developers. It provides a simple way to query the Times Article Search API and a standard way to consume the results. The options for creating a feed are intentionally limited — there’s no way to create a feed for one term OR another, for instance, only combinations of terms — in order to keep the application simple and approachable.

Zoie is a real-time search and indexing system built on Apache Lucene. It's a mature open source project and has been deployed at LinkedIn.com handling millions of searches as well as hundreds of thousands of updates daily.

Four approaches to playing MUDs are identified and described. These approaches may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. An account of the dynamics of player populations is given in terms of these dimensions, with particular attention to how to promote balance or equilibrium. This analysis also offers an explanation for the labelling of MUDs as being either "social" or "gamelike".

Today, at the Semantic Technology Conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times announced together that the Times will soon be publishing its copious index as Linked Data.

I run DecentURL.com, and many people have found it pretty useful to date, but the problem is that now most of the URLs submitted are spam. I don't like the fact that 95% of the links in my growing database are spam.

If you are are interested in user interface design for faceted search, then be sure to check out this free book chapter by Moritz Stefaner, Sébastian Ferré, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren, and Yi Zhang.