Superfastmatch on OS X · 82 words posted 09/17/2011 06:23 PM
Sunlight Labs and Media Standards Trust have released Superfastmatch, a tool for detecting similarities between texts.
My iMac is about two years old, with a quad core and 12GB RAM. Superfastmatch still taxes my machine. One minor quirk: the thread_count flag doesn’t seem to actually cap the number of threads, at least according to Activity Monitor.
But I’m happy to report it runs right out of the box on OS X. What a great tool for comparing texts. Thanks Sunlight Labs!
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Wall Street Journal finds social bookmarking sites follow a power law curve · 129 words posted 02/14/2007 05:04 PM
The Wall Street Journal reports on the Wizards of buzz behind social sites like Digg and Reddit and finds that a few influential users generate a hugely disproportionate share of the content (via).
Although the words power law distribution don’t appear in the article, that’s precisely what the WSJ has uncovered: a small number of highly linked tastemakers are the hubs at the center of a scale-free network. Blogs are a classic example of the power law distribution at work: for every Gruber and kottke there’s hundreds of, uh, me.
See:
- Shirky on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
- kottke on Weblogs and power laws
- Million Dollar Murray, Malcom Gladwell’s report on how a few homeless people in Reno consume a large share of resources; and
- Linked, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
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