Cody Taylor

blackbearnh writes “Jeff Holden spent a decade at Amazon, where he was involved as Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites with the recommendation engine, Amazon Prime, and the product review system. He’s left now, and has started Pelago, a company that wants to help mobile users turn their lives into stories they can share on the web. Among the interesting effects he discusses in this interview for O’Reilly Radar is that users of their product, Whrrl, have talked about changing their lives to make more interesting stories. Holden also talks about some of the work he did at Amazon, privacy issues that arise when social networking starts to become ubiquitous, and why he thinks the Apple App Store review system is seriously broken. ‘One of the things that happens with an iPhone is when you uninstall an app, it asks you to rate it. And it defaults to one-star. … The problem is … there’s no kind of qualification. Anybody just downloads it and checks it out or doesn’t check it out, right? And I think a number of people run it and they see that you have to sign in and they just delete it. And you get a one-star rating out of those experiences.'”

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megamerican alerted us to a leaked document (PDF) from a Virginia Fusion Center titled “2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment.” The document is marked as “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” not to be shown to public. Citizens for Legitimate Government has a write-up. Slashdot gets a mention on page 45 — not as a terrorist organization itself, but as one of the places that member of Anonymous may hang out: “A ‘loose coalition of Internet denizens,’ Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. Other social networking sites are also utilized to mobilize physical protests. … Anonymous is of interest not only because of the sentiments expressed by affiliates and their potential for physical protest, but because they have innovated the use of e-protests and mobilization. Given the lack of a unifying creed, this movement has the potential to inspire lone wolf behavior in the cyber realms.” According to the report, cell phones and digital music players have been used to transfer plans related to criminal activity, and therefore presumably could be grounds for suspicion. Podcasting is also suspicious.

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Cisco Systems Inc. announced on Thursday it was buying Tidal Software Inc. for 105 million dollars in a move aimed at enhancing the US networking giant’s next-generation data centers.

At the end of March The Pirate Bay added new functionality to reach out to millions of Facebook users. Just over a week later and the world’s largest social networking site has blocked all links to torrents on the world’s largest and most infamous BitTorrent tracker.

Still having trouble boarding the social media bandwagon? You’re not alone. They’re a rare breed, some might even say an endangered species. But as social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter continue to build populations surpassing those of many countries, the last of the Web 2.0 holdouts remain proud to be freewheeling free agents.

WayHomer was one of several readers to point out the 40th birthday of an important tool in the formation of the Internet, and a look back at it by the author of the first of many. “Stephen Crocker in the New York Times writes, ‘Today is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th anniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments (RFC).’ ‘RFC1 — Host Software’ was published 40 years ago today, establishing a framework for documenting how networking technologies and the Internet itself work. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.”

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Documentary on the early stages of social networking on the web.

zxjio writes with this excerpt from a New York Times article about just how much networking infrastructure costs vary between the US and Japan: “Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: per home passed. … Verizon is spending an average of 7 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another 6 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. … The experience in Japan suggests that the major cable systems in the United States might be able to increase the speed of their broadband service by five to 10 times right away. They might not need to charge much more for it than they do now and they would still make as much money.”

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