Very interesting article on the fact that there are no "neutral" markets or auctions (in the sense of not producing a prejudiced outcome)

Leads to and ties with a Tim O'Reilly on automated vs. human decision making

(hat-tip : SJ)

I'm not, myself, particularly entranced by all the "human improvements on automated search" (Mahalo, Knol, Squidoo) etc. I don't find myself thinking "I must find out about X but I don't trust Google to give me the right answer, I'll go and see if there are any experts over at ..." What I tend to do is start with Google, and find it's almost always sufficient for my requirements ... or at least starts me browsing in the right direction.

What Google *is* pretty lousy at is product recommendations (which is what so many of the rivals point out) but frankly going to a search engine and saying "what should I buy?" is pretty stupid. And ignores the fact that blogs do a pretty good job of that.

So I'm just not seeing all this "pain" that people claim to be having from Google being gamed by the SEOs.

Very obviously a PageRank type algorithm, even if it was working perfectly, wouldn't be the place to discover idiosyncratic, offbeat resources. The only way you're likely to find those is through a skilled editor / curator or interesting social network. But, again, blogs are already great for editor-curators. And maybe some other social networking services handle the social routing. In particular, one thing I'm noticing is that I'm getting a *lot* of good links flowing to me through Twitter.

Update : Wikia's problem is that no-one is going to understand it (I mean the process) in time for it to get useful or interesting.

michael parekh on Google's "Click to Call"

Interesting story.

Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).

Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.

michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising