H/T to Ina Steiner once again. As you read, notice that this was snuck into and hidden within, legislation without any of “us” knowing it! Thanks to Adam Brandon at Freedomworks.

Senate Housing Bill Requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and All Credit Card Companies to
Report Transactions to the Government

Washington, DC – Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd’s 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America’s small businesses. The provision, which was added by the bill’s managers without debate this week, would require the nation’s payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.

Call Congress and Tell Them to Oppose The eBay Reporting Provision in the Housing Bill: 1-866-928-3035

FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey commented: “This is a provision with astonishing reach, and it was slipped into the bill just this week. Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction in America, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay’s PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout that are used by many small online businesses. The privacy implications for America’s small businesses are breathtaking.”

“Privacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology and small business organizations like the NFIB sharply criticized this idea when it first appeared earlier this year. What is the federal government’s purpose with this kind of detailed data? How will this database be secured, and who will have access? Many small proprietors use their Social Security number as their tax ID. How will their privacy be protected? What compliance costs will this impose on businesses? Why is Sen. Chris Dodd putting this provision in a housing bailout bill? The bill also includes the creation of a new national fingerprint registry for mortgage brokers.

“At a time when concerns about both identity theft and government spying are paramount, Congress wants to create a new honey pot of private data that includes Social Security numbers. This bill reduces privacy across America’s payment processing systems and treats every American small business or eBay power seller like a criminal on parole by requiring an unprecedented level of reporting to the federal government. This outrageous idea is another reason to delay the housing bailout legislation so that Senators and the public at large have time to examine its full implications.”

Outrageous doesn’t quite cut it – Big Brother sounds and feels more appropriate. When the hell are we going to come to our senses??? When it’s too late???

Post from: EveryJoe

Bush Administration Wants To Track All Your Electronic Transactions!

“Made up in 1938 by the nine year old Milton Sirrota, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner.”

???

The number 10¹⁰⁰, written as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

The significance of this? Googol. No. it isn’t misspelled, yet. Googol.

****************************************

“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”

“This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.

We have built a large-scale search engine which addresses many of the problems of existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional structure present in hypertext to provide much higher quality search results. We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10¹⁰⁰ and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”

Which brings me to the topic is was searching for – Page Rank. [Hat tip to Court]

(All of the following is quoted directly from Sergey and Larry’s paper!!!)

System Features

The Google search engine has two important features that help it produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank and is described in detail in [Page 98]. Second, Google utilizes link to improve search results.

2.1 PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web

The citation (link) graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps containing as many as 518 million of these hyperlinks, a significant sample of the total. These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page’s “PageRank”, an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps a great deal.

2.1.1 Description of PageRank Calculation

Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows:

We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper.

2.1.2 Intuitive Justification

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank. And, the d damping factor is the probability at each page the “random surfer” will get bored and request another random page. One important variation is to only add the damping factor d to a single page, or a group of pages. This allows for personalization and can make it nearly impossible to deliberately mislead the system in order to get a higher ranking. We have several other extensions to PageRank, again see [Page 98].

Another intuitive justification is that a page can have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at. Also, pages that have perhaps only one citation from something like the Yahoo! homepage are also generally worth looking at. If a page was not high quality, or was a broken link, it is quite likely that Yahoo’s homepage would not link to it. PageRank handles both these cases and everything in between by recursively propagating weights through the link structure of the web.

Technorati Tags – googol google_search_engine quality_search_results page_rank

Post from: EveryJoe

The Power Of Ten

• Sexerati
• Damn I’m Cute
• It’s Useless
• A Man’s View

Oh my god, what happened?! Everyone has left Fine Fools! Well, not really. When 2006 rolled around I had a lot of time to sit down and look at everything that I am responsible for and what direction that I wanted to take things. When looking at Fine Fools I saw a Network that more and more people were talking about and one where I admit to not helping reach its full potential because it had simply outgrown me and broke so many rules that I myself had established for blog networks. What I had was about 10 great blogs with 10 writers who were doing an excellent job of writing content, but every topic was different. The 9rules brand (in my eyes) is quality content and helping readers find it, but I had no idea what the Fine Fools brand was because every site was so different.

sidenote: Argue all you want about the importance of design and branding of a whole Network, but I would always much rather have those as an advantage than not have an advantage at all.

Looking at the sites I realized that if they weren’t part of Fine Fools I would still put them into the 9rules Network based on their content and they would thrive even moreso in those conditions because they would have communities that they would fit in more appropriately than what Fine Fools could provide. If Fine Fools became known as an Entertainment Blog Network (or whatever) what role would a cooking blog have in it?

Finally, I admit to not liking the payment structure of the whole deal. I love being able to give up 100% of the revenue on the writers’ pages, but when a site is starting off that 100% amounts to nothing. I wrote Why Blog Networks Will Fail This Year with the mindset of being a writer within a Network. Really what’s the difference between starting a blog of my own vs. starting one in a network where the revenue is shared? The difference lies in the community and what resources are made available to you. If you can’t provide those the writers are better off going the independent route.

With all of this in my head I came to the decision that to make both Fine Fools stronger and the sites of the other writers more successful that I would shrink the network and help it develop a brand, while giving ownership of the sites to the writers (if they stay in 9rules for 1 year) and helping them out with the 9rules Network where their potential of growth is up to them.

I enjoy both the WIN and Gawker models, but love the Gawker model more simply because the brand is so strong behind it and I don’t think that would be possible with a WIN-sized network. That’s the direction I would like to take FF. Interestingly enough both It’s Useless and A Man’s View had their highest traffic days yesterday partly due to the reduced Network list. Granted “highest” isn’t that much, but I found it interesting to see. Honestly this is the first time I have felt that FF is a real Network now, not because of the writers or sites (almost impossible to find such talent), but because of the focus I am able to put into it now. 9rules offers strength in numbers, while Fine Fools will be able to offer strength in its focus.

Post from: EveryJoe

Getting Stronger By Getting Smaller

The Fine Fools site has more details on the plans for the case studies, how to join and the Member’s Agreement.

It Makes No Sense

If I were to start a group of sites owned by 9rules, Inc. why wouldn’t I just follow the conventional model set by Weblogs, Inc and b5media? Sit back and relax because this may take a while.

First these sites are not owned by 9rules, Inc. and for now the only connection between the two is that I am running both of them and Fine Fools sites were initially created to help out the members of the 9rules Network. And to be honest following their model is just a hassle for one person. Accounting and making sure every writer is writing a certain number of posts per day is a job upon itself and god knows that I have enough jobs as it is.

The setup I have now will involve some interaction with the writers, but nothing that I am going to see as tedious. The writers that I have talked to have set their own writing requirements with regards to how often they write. If they don’t live up to that they have broken their own contract and are not living up to the standards they set themselves.

Ignoring Hassles Why Pay 100% Google/Yahoo Revenue?

As I mentioned when I first brought up this project these sites were meant only for me to write on. However, if you want to make money from a content site and you are starting from scratch with the intention of building up quickly you have two options:

1. Steal Darren Rowse’s DNA and infuse it with your own so you can blog 37 hours a day
2. Have others join you

That still doesn’t explain the revenue split though. I guess it just seemed like the right thing to do and a good way to encourage new writers with great content. The more people who get on board, the more content will be produced, which allows for more chances of getting the sites linked and making money.

A foolish idea indeed.

Post from: EveryJoe

Introducing The Fine Fools Community