The history of Microsoft
1 minute read
A brief story of everyone's favorite company: Microsoft. A great video, 9m15s of pure joy.
Blog
Spreadsheets reborn
1 minute read
Dabble promises to be a friendly and powerful way to share, manage and explore your information over the web. Watch the demo in video (7 minutes) and start drooling (via maik)
C.R.A.P.
1 minute read
DRM is a load of CRAP, ZDNet dixit.
DIY planners
2 minutes read
Following my previous article on productivity tips, I now intend to write about some tools that can help you stay organized and focused. Normally, people think PDAs, but in this article my intentions are not to talk about Palms and iPaq, but to point some personal assistants implemented in paper. That's right, plain old paper.
Nature vs Nurture
1 minute read
I have just read an excellent article about the differences between Pandora and Last.fm. Both, as you know, are services that gives you a radio stream with musics selected for you, that is, a personalized stream. But they are totally different in the way they select your musics, and that difference is the inspiration for this post title.
Pandora uses a nature approach since Pandora's recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. So you will get similar musics, or as Pandora likes to call it, music with similar "genes".
On the nurture side (as in, it's all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs' inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.
The article brilliantly explains the differences in these two different approaches, as some of the problems that can occur in each other. It ends with some results for different tests the author has made, it seems Last.fm is better.