The recent study by Intelligent Positioning showed Wikipedia ranks on Google UK for 99% of searches. But the study only used one-word nouns, and as we know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia — in large part, a repository of information about nouns. Meanwhile, most search queries are longer than one word nouns. Matt McGee explains how he’d like to see a new study conducted that uses words that mimic actual search behavior instead.

futurejournalismproject:

We’re on Tumblr. If you’re reading this you’re (probably) on Tumblr.

And if you’re on Tumblr and we’re on Tumblr we have a shared history of great times, fun people and… unfortunate downtimes.

These don’t happen as much as they used to in our neck of the woods.

And that’s because Tumblr is scaling… everywhere.

As in, it gets 15 billion page views a month, has a peak rate of 40 thousand requests per second, collects more or less three terabytes of new content a day, all running on approximately one thousand servers.

And they’re doing this with about 20 engineers.

If you’re a geek, a friend of a geek, or simply sympathetic (and/or empathetic) to geeks that build platforms and keep them running so that the rest of us can do what we do, read High Scalability’s article on Tumblr’s architecture, its goals, and the hurdles it’s facing as it tries to reach those goals.

In it, Blake Matheny, Tumblr’s Distributed Systems Engineer, guides us through stats, software, hardware, architecture and lessons learned.

It’s mesmerizing, in a geeky sort of way.

In the meantime, it’s Valentines tomorrow. Consider sending the Tumblr crew a slew of hugs and kisses.

smarterbits:

Tim Cook, speaking about the Apple TV at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference:

So, with Apple TV however, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there. If we kept following our intuition and kept pulling the string, we might find something that was larger. For those people that have it right now, the customer satisfaction is off the chart. We need something that could go more main-market for it to be a serious category.

Nothing new to learn here. Indeed, my Apple TV is probably second only to my iPhone in satisfaction and enjoyment of an product I own.¹

Cook again, on preserving Apple’s culture:

We should stay extremely focused on a few things, rather than try to do so many that we did nothing well. We should only go into markets where we can make a significant contribution to society, not just sell a lot of products.

I don’t want to run wild with Apple Television (iTV?) rumours, but something stood out for me reading this article. First, it’s all too easy to read the first quote and decide that the iTV is in fact the main-market product that could turn Apple’s television business into a stool as large as iOS and the Mac. Too easy.

But reading the second quote and thinking about both together, it seems that an Apple Television set has no role in what makes the Apple TV great and has no relevance to Apple’s culture. Even in our wildest fantasies about an iTV, the revolutionary part isn’t the display or even the display in conjunction with the Apple TV software. It’s just the software.

So if I play ball with Apple’s philosophy of wanting only to make significant contributions to society through their products, it would seem that focusing on growing the Apple TV’s content library and developing relations with distributors will make much more of an impact than some expensive LED display ever could.² Access to better, cheaper and more diverse ways of enjoying their favourite content is what’s truly going to stoke the fires of the main market crowd and draw them away from cable providers.

That’s the significant part. ³

1. Though my Blue Microphone Yeti is getting up there. Is this where I’m supposed to stick an affiliate link? ↩

2. And for what it’s worth (not much), I think a $100 stone sized box you can stick on any HD capable display is the way to go to reach the broadest audience. But I’m biased because I love my $100 stone. ↩

3. I think I made it through this without making a prediction. Whew. Ok fine, the title is pure SEO. Stone me I guess. ↩