links for 2009-12-13

Nice visualization of how wikipedia entries are edited by country.

Well content and link farms in particular are not new; over the last year I've had phone calls from numerous companies offering me content to "aid SEO".

Clearly Google need to work on filtering content providers into tiers and also tweak their algorithm so they can potentially identify more detailed trends in the frequency of links "content farms" receive. IMHO whilst Google has a Web Spam team, I think it now needs verticalized content curation teams that focus on the specific task of identifying quality over quantity.

Another move from Google to help speed up the web. Some crazy stats: "The SJC is set to break records by allowing up to 17 terabits of data to be sent every second – the equivalent of around 250m telephone lines, and large enough to allow the contents of every single book in the British Library to be transferred 20 times per second".

What will be interesting to see is how Google now contributes to greater WiMax/4G adoption.

Now I use both LastFm and Genius in iTunes to discover new music. Whilst there is a lot of speculation about why Apple has acquired Lala, I hope the outcome results in more sophisticated use of data and collaborative filtering.

iTunes and genius both do a great job of recommending music that's similar to your interests and this data seems to come from user history, and communities tagging and curating different types of music. As CBS now own LastFm, Apple probably have no commercial relationship with Apple – outside of sales referrals.

With any luck, once there is some kind of integration between Lala and iTunes, we will have an Apple service that rivals LastFm. With iTunes being one of the most popular pieces of music management software, due to the success of iPod, it only makes sense for Apple to provide a platform for iTunes users to network online.

I've been waiting for ages for Lala to be available in UK!

Nice web zeitgeist from Guardian Tech that summarises what's been in, out and growing. Shame there's no mention of the some the favourites: Boing Boing, Google Maps and Delicious.

Also Amazon purchasing DP Review is news to me. The acquisition of DP Review is probably tactical as this will do wonders for Amazon's affiliate sales, visibility within Google and sites where DP Review's content is syndicated.

Another one that's also new to me Listorious; I can't believe we already have "list curation". All good stuff, will be great to see what rolls out next year.

I know @ciaranj has already said this but I agree: the list is great link bait!