Group items tagged

Ever wonder how big the Internet is? Or how much data is being transferred at any time? This website measures it for you

Potential problems with data collected by a web-crawler that would not, in theory, be present if the data were collected by hand.

This article discusses how US telephone companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc) constantly send phone records to the government without questioning their motives.

That term "metadata" (data about data!) is more interesting than you might think, and this article shows why ...

Interesting article of secrets of Google and its creation

Here is a good little video that explains RSS ... all of these Common Craft videos are good, in fact.

A more recent article (from 2011) reporting the results of a study showing that Wikipedia is indeed usually accurate. The author writes: "In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia's coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omissionare extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia's political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics."

AP Late this month, Google went "dark" in terms of providing publishers with free information on which words led people searching in Google to click on their sites. The move came as Google seeks to reassure users following the NSA/PRISM domestic surveillance scandal.

Wow, I hadn't even heard about that, Emily. Terrific story. That's a bummer, though -- I use Google Analytics on some of my sites, though I probably should make more use of it, and it was always interesting to see what keywords people were using to get to my site. Sometimes the keywords were weird.