Vladan Djeric -- October 17, 2006

1. "Joining the Party, Eager to Make Friends"

Summary:
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As social networking sites start to build up advertising sales operations, they are starting to develop offerings that let marketers take advantage of some of their features.  Marketers have created Facebook and MySpace profiles for characters featured in their TV advertisements.  

The article discusses a VW commercial that was placed on YouTube by a marketing company and was  watched by only a few people.  When an ordinary user uploaded a grainy version of the same commercial, it has resulted in more than 1.7 million views.	

Idea:
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-How to identify communities of users on blog and video sites
-Investigate what properties of online social networks of users are necessary to make a video a hit

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2. "55 Million Blogs, and Now a Service to Track Them"

Summary:
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Corporations are growing increasingly conscious of the power, and potential pitfalls, of blogging. A favorable review from an influential blogger can help generate the kind of buzz around a new product that traditional advertising struggles to achieve. A negative write-up can help doom a product before it even hits the market.  Marketers are starting to include blogs in their marketing campaigns and are increasingly turning to tools like Technorati (a blog search engine) to monitor public opinion about their products.

Implication:
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Tools like Technorati attempt to associate specific keywords with the content of blog posts (like any search engine).  

Idea:
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-Build a blog news service based on popularity (number of referring links)
-Figure out how to adjust weight of a link to the post based on the popularity of the referring blog within its subject-matter community (PageRank for blogs)
-Adjust weight of a link based on relationship (distance in links?) to blogs that the user reads
-How to solve the problems of link spam and keyword stuffing?

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3. "Defending a Blurred Line: Is It Spam or Just a Company Marketing by E-Mail?"

Summary:
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Spamhaus is a company that specializes in the publishing spam black lists.  As a result of the outcome of a recent lawsuit against Spamhaus, the Spamhaus domain name may be suspended.

Observation:
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Lawsuits are only one way to attack publishers of spam black lists.  The hosts used to distribute spam blacklists could also be attacked with DDoS attacks.  This has happened in the past.

Problems:
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How to architect a resilient peer to peer system for distributing spam black lists with trusted authorship, high availability, low latency and frequent updates?