Author Archive

What do you do with your online community when things get hot?

10:05 am - February 9, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

The Washington Post recently closed down a message forum after getting 700 heated posts in response to a story about the Abramoff scandal. Last June, the LA Times' short-lived Wikitorial experiment shut after quickly succumbing to vandalism. Two months...

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Topix.net Conversation Map

3:25 am - February 15, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

We're getting thousands of local posts on our new geographical forums on Topix.net. Talk-back-to-the-news and local online community sound wonderful but is hard to visualize. You can punch random ZIP codes into our site and see the message threads...

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Guardian Copying Topix Forum Geolocation?

4:10 pm - February 22, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

Assistant editor Neil Macintosh of the Guardian writes: We are also thinking of revealing on the site every commenter's rough geographical location; information not exposed to the public before. Experiments on other sites suggest debates are more civil when everyone...

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Every word in every document is already a tag

11:20 am - February 27, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

Back when web directories were still cool, AOL had an effort to build their own based on the Dewey Decimal System. They had 60 contractors in Arizona typing in web urls and assigning DDC numbers to them. This didn't work....

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Topix.net @ SES NY, Year 3

2:59 am - March 1, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

My first SES show was for dmoz, back in 2000, before it got huge, and I love that show. The seedy mix of top-tier search engines, portals, evil SEO sharks, searchy schwag, and red-shirt throwaways from the DMA create a...

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Work at Topix, Build a Better Informed Society

7:01 pm - March 3, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

In 1998, when Bob Truel and I wrote the prototype for dmoz.org, it took us 2 months to finish the first version of the code. We launched, signed up lots of volunteer editors, and 5 months later Netscape acquired...

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Topix Tags Photos

6:14 am - March 10, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

Thanks to a feed from the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Wire, Topix.net is now categorizing news photos based on their caption text into our 30,000 geographic and 300k+ subject feeds. We're hosting the full size photos, along with zippy thumbnail...

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Vast.com launches credit card search

2:29 pm - April 1, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

Heh......

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Local News for the World

11:10 pm - July 31, 2006 in Topix.net Weblog

Topix.net adds 5,000 International Cities to Local News Aggregation We've been working on adding international local news to Topix for nearly a year. The first challenge was to obtain the digital map data to drive our local Knowledge Base,...

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