Trusting Human-Powered Search

Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 2:22am

Jason Calacanis today writes that Mahalo's challenge is breadth rather than depth. Fair enough, but to me currency, and by extension accuracy, are of even greater importance for their sustainability. In search, accuracy = trust = user retention1. Google's trust model is based on a broad acceptance that their crawlers do a good job of finding pages and that their indexers and ranking algorithms are likely to lead you to the most relevant results for a given search. Certainly there are flaws in the model and room for improvement, from which the category (of one?) of human-powered search draws its raison d'être, but ...

Knuckle Yummy: Dony Wynn’s New Band

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, October 8th, 2007 9:22pm

Dony Wynn, the percussionist extraordinaire who drove the beat behind Robert Palmer for so many years, has just launched his latest project: Knuckle Yummy. Dony's been working with band mates Lizzy Lee and Pehr Smith for less than a year, but the collaboration is just as tight as the music is edgy. Congratulations, buddy. See you at the next SXSW in March!

Resolving Poor Mac OS X Samba Performance with D-Link’s DNS-323 NAS

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, October 8th, 2007 3:02pm

A few months ago I bought a couple of D-Link's DNS-323 low-end network attached storage devices as part of my ongoing mission to reduce and simplify the hardware in my home. For about $375 ($175 for the DNS-323 and $100 each for two 500GB hard disks) and almost no setup effort†, you can have 1/2 TB of redundant storage in a small, quiet, Gigabit Ethernet-capable server with some pretty nifty features out of the box. And if you're a tinkerer with some Linux experience, you can draw from the thriving hacking community supporting it. For the money, I love these little things. But while my Windows machines communicate with them ...