Mark Milian's Posterous

Still reading “Googled,” and hit a passage about Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin dismissing Google’s mathematical approach to things.

It brought up memories of a phone call I had last year with someone from Sirius. We had gotten in an argument about music discovery.

I said I was a big fan of Pandora. He said something along the lines of, Oh, you like computers telling you what to listen to?

Of course, the heart of Pandora is the Music Genome Project, a very effective way of breaking down songs into a variety of classifications (done so by people).

I find this much more effective than satellite radio’s system of obnoxious DJs playing the same several songs on repeat. Dare I say, Pandora’s approach is more personal.

Picture: GoJeffrey

You grab your iPad off of the coffee table, saunter down to your local café and order a coffee (or a pot of tea, if you're cultured). Lounging on the leather couch (and a little stoked that you were able to get a spot because everybody always goes for the couches, always), you fire up the iBooks app and do some light reading.

The bing indicating new e-mail (not a Microsoft search engine) interrupts your daze, and you switch over to the Mail app. A message from a coworker alerts you that he needs your input on a report.

Acknowledging that typing on a screen is stupidly inefficient, you get up from the couch, survey the room and sit down at a table. On it is an iPad Keyboard Dock.

Viola. Your 1.5-pound, ultra-portable tablet thing is now a computer, sort of.

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Classmates.com plans to digitize yearbooks, charge to view online
(via Instapaper)

For half a decade, as Facebook has become the valedictorian of social networking, Classmates.com has continued to exist. This, I cannot comprehend.

And the company has been able to continuously alert me that it still exists — often through the means of popup ads. How any of this occurs baffles me.

But this idea — to scan and digitize yearbooks and charge for access — is smart. Capitalize on nostalgia. People will pay for memories. People won't pay for people (prostitution excluded).

How this idea eluded Classmates.com for so long, while it was trying to charge for what Facebook was doing better, is beyond me. But here's an opportunity to improve upon yearbooks — by categorizing and organizing them.

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"When [Matt Cutts] joined the company in 1999, among his first tasks was to figure out how to block pornography searches, which accounted for one of every four queries. His solution was to assign a lesser weight in the Google algorithm to the words commonly used in porn searches... First he had to figure out the pertinent words. He spent hours poring over porn documents. Then his wife came up with the idea of baking cookies and awarding one "porn cookie" to each engineer who discovered a salacious keyword. Porn search traffic plummeted."

— "Googled" by Ken Auletta, p56

This book is full of good(gle)ness.

A picture says a thousand words. This is a screen shot of Digg founder Kevin Rose's site profiles.

Image via Charun