Now that I have a hard drive recorder at home, I can really relate on the great appeal of my personal, pre-recorded channel compared to live programs. Pre-recorded TV is the future as Vinton Cerf explained at a recent conference:

“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”

Link

On a side note, whoever doubts the quality of user generated content should be forced to go through the 200+ channels I get at home, and tell me in all honesty how many they think qualify for something else than “total crap”. My count: 10, a mere 5%.

“The problem most people have with Wikipedia’s quality and accuracy seems to have more to do with their knowledge of how it is made, rather than any observed problem with the end results.”

Timo Hannay in Nature Magazine blog

Great point. Anyway, “Wikipedia is like a sausage” said the encyclopedia’s founder, “you might like the taste of it, but you don’t necessarily want to see how it’s made”.

Interesting theory on how people tend to resist the wisdom of crowds effect because of “culturally embedded religious belief”. The authors goes into details about how intuition makes us miss the point. Wikipedia’s greatness does not depend on edit quality, but on edit selection.

The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is […] is not due to the average quality of the edits […], it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought “I doubt I could improve this much,” and chose not to try. Each of these can be considered a “selection event”, and the number of such events vastly outnumbers the actual edits. Selection is the heart of what makes Wikipedia — as well as Darwinian evolution — work.

Link

Just like in Darwin’s theories, success of crowd sourced systems is achieved by turning “countless random mutations into sophistication”. Perfection helps the process, but it is in no way a mandatory condition. And that is the part our Cartesian brains have a hard time understanding.

Asia is the continent where most internet searches are made, ahead of - surprise - good old Europe, then North America.

The Asia-Pacific region […] saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. Link

Google is serving 60% of searches and Yahoo 14%, with Microsoft already behind Baidu (China) and about to be surpassed by NHN (South Korea). Results that don’t compare with a recent blind test where users preferred Google 51% of the time, ahead of Microsoft (35%) and Yahoo (30%, the other services were not tested). This clearly shows that branding, usability or design do have an impact on users’ perception of search results quality.

What was the last time you saw something that dropped your jaw on the Internet? I’m not talking about the evolution of dance or laughing baby youtube video, I am talking about new apps, new ideas, new business models. What’s exciting these days? As we are putting the finishing touch to the LIFT08 program, that’s the question I am asking around here at Picnic.

Amazingly this question puzzles most of my interlocutors, triggers a long silence, and usually ends with a unenthusiastic “Facebook” answer. It seems Techcrunch is filled with clones of clones announcements these days (that’s not a knock on Techcrunch but on all of us, the entrepreneurs and innovators).

Where is the excitement? Where are the digg, twitter, facebook and second life of tomorrow? Nova (LIFT’s editorial manager) and me have some ideas, but I’d like to know what the readers of these blogs think.

The Swiss press is intrigued by Facebook, articles are coming in about the social networks phenomena.

 Vous voici propulsé dans l’univers étonnant des réseaux sociaux du Web. Un monde où les gens de votre entourage courant ne sont pas là, mais où des demi-inconnus ou même de parfaits étrangers semblent pouvoir devenir, par contacts interposés, vos nouveaux meilleurs amis. En affaires comme dans la vie.

Tribune de Genève

Here is the talk Bruce Sterling gave at Korea University last week about the Estonian Cyberwar.

In this eye-opening presentation, Bruce explains what happened to Estonia earlier this year when the country’s infrastructures got down following by a massive DDOS attack. He shares his theory that a Russian group of hackers called the Zhelatin gang might be behind the attacks, and were actually only flexing the muscles of the world’s largest and most powerful botnet.

Anybody who is involved in the infrastructure side of a large business should watch this. We’ve been warned.

I am sure the clicking ratio for that spam mailing is pretty high. Ego is such a powerful conveyor of traffic.

Dear Laurent,
Someone searched your email address “laurent.####@#####.com” on Rapleaf.

To view (or update) your profile, check out:
http://www.rapleaf.com/pub/2/Laurent-Haug

Why does this matter?

* Someone is interested in learning about you for business or personal reasons.
* You are now aware of what information about you is publicly available on the internet.
* You now have the opportunity to take control of your information and privacy online.

At Rapleaf, you can find such information as age, location, history, social network links, and more on over 60 million people. And you can make all or some of the information about yourself private.

-Your friends at Rapleaf.com
www.rapleaf.com

I got an invite to try the Mahalo extension the other day. Mahalo is a human powered search engine, hand picking the best results for the worlds’ top 10000 queries. I installed the thing and so far I can’t say I am impressed.

• Web search is all about long tail. Google is so powerful that is teaches us to make more precise queries. More words = better results. But more words also makes it less likely the query will belong to the top 10′000. I wonder how many queries of my Google search history would be covered by Mahalo but I expect a very very limited number.

• Aren’t the top 10′000 searches the ones where a human search engine is the less needed? Aren’t these searches the ones for which Google has the most material to make good rankings? What’s the point of having a human search engines on terms like “nfl” or “mtv”, surely some of the most popular queries in the world?

• The Mahalo extension runs the query to Mahalo, then when there are no results (99.9% of the time) it goes to Google. It goes with the principle that Google is a complement of Mahalo, but all signs point toward the exact opposite. Mahalo is, at best, a complement to their “friends at Google”, because of the simple fact their processes don’t scale.

• Isn’t Mahalo feeding Google? If I am the guy doing pagerank in Mountain View, I use Mahalo to make the Google rankings better, piggybacking the human search engine to refine the machine rankings.

• What’s new compared to Yahoo or About.com? That’s the most puzzling aspect maybe. What’s new?

• How can you pretend to be a serious search engine when you don’t even cover the world’s most searched term ;) ?

I really wonder how this thing will play out. Jason Calacanis is a bright guy, he might have a master plan we can’t see yet. But it’s hard to see Mahalo becoming a major player at this point and with this model.

Ouriel has posted my article on the Swiss web on Techcrunch.fr. Head there if you speak French. I am looking forward to see what will come in the comments.

I have been asked to do an English translation and will do so as soon as I find a bit of time.