Did you know that flatuence is a leading cause of greenhouse gas? Cows lead the way, indeed Cows emit 20 pounds each (10 kgs) of greenhouse gas every year. Cats are also apparently a leading cause of “global warming”, but all is not lost.

A Sydney (Australia) based company Easy Being Green will now allow you to offset your cats greenhouse emissions for $8 (AUD) a month. No longer will Kitty be a burden on the planet. Your moggy will no longer vote for George W Bush nor watch Fox News with the Easy Being Green Package, or fart for that matter, at least in this world :-)

(via The Spin Starts Here).

Originally posted on February 20, 2007 @ 5:03 am

On Friday the Amazon owned Alexa rolled out some interesting new free traffic analysis additions to their long established traffic ranking/ rating service. According to Alexa’s blog, the new tools include the ability to track where visitors to a site come from, traffic rank via country and reach percentages.

The great news for the owner of this blog, David Krug, is that 901am is huge!…in Australia:

Mind you, it could be that I’m one of only a handful of Alexa users in Australia and my use of the Search Status plugin for Firefox is skewing the figures.

On a more serious note though, it’s interesting to note how the traffic differs per country. Unlike comScore and Compete which only track US traffic, for all it’s arguable flaws, Alexa really does have the best global tracking reach of any service out there. Consider this, as I write this post 901am has a 3 month average traffic rank at Alexa of 30,827, and yet in the 4 biggest English speaking markets (US, UK, Canada and Australia), the average 3 month traffic rank rank is 9309. If you ignore the fact that for some reason the English don’t love the site as much as the other 3, take that figure out, you get an average 3 month traffic ranking of 6047…and yet the overall site ranking is 30,827.

What this all means? probably not a lot to most people. What it does do however is highlight the need to gain a broad international audience to do well in Alexa. Also given the regular use of Alexa by advertisers as a way of measuring a sites worth, expect to see a huge switch over time (possibly months once some one works out how to pull the new figures from the site via its API) of advertisers moving away from using the over all Alexa site traffic ranking to using country specific rankings, particularly the US figure, given 95% of all advertisers are based in the US, or are marketing to that market.

Tags: Alexa

Originally posted on February 18, 2007 @ 12:38 am

In a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page let slip with a truth we all suspected:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

Yep, you read that right, Google is trying to build real AI. The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to Page it isn’t that far away either. The term Googlebot is about to take on a whole new meaning, and in the not to distant future as well.

But Google is a good company, you may well say, after all Do No Evil is the company mantra. But true artificial intelligence not only has serious ethical and moral implications, self aware intelligence may also not be controllable, after all it thinks for itself and makes decisions based on that reasoning, as we all do. What if Google creates AI with the logical reasoning of Hitler or Stalin? or even George W Bush?

Food for thought…literally :-)

(in part via News.com, photo credit kth.se)

 

Tags: Google, Artificial Intelligence

Originally posted on February 18, 2007 @ 7:12 pm