By Eric Goldman In my last post on Wikipedia, I mentioned that my personal Wikipedia page had been tagged “article lacks information on the importance of the subject matter.” Shortly thereafter, things took the inevitable turn for the worse–the page…
By John Ottaviani (Eric Goldman is away until the New Year. He left me the keys to the blog. I warned him that this may be like leaving the teenagers the keys to the house when the parents go away…
By Eric Goldman and John Ottaviani [Eric’s Note: I will be in Israel for the rest of the year. So while it’s a little premature to publish an end-of-the-year recap, this may be my last post for the year. John…
By Eric Goldman The website and blogs had a 4+ hour outage today. My web host pulled the plug (sadly, without warning me) because “it was crashing the server with 250 other customers on it. Something on your website is…
By Eric Goldman No one is better at coughing up legislative hairballs than Congress. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (grafted to the end of the SAFE Port Act) was passed over 2 months ago, but my repeated…
By Eric Goldman [UPDATE: I put together a more formal assessment of Wikipedia’s challenges in my 2010 article, Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and its Consequences.] About a year ago, I predicted that Wikipedia will fail in 5 years. My logic: *…
By Eric Goldman Many people thought the era of cheap electronic communications would spell doom for junk mail because of the cost advantages of printing and distributing electronic solicitations over dead trees solicitations. But instead, over the past year, marketers…
I am participating in an intriguing conference on search engine law being sponsored by the Haifa Center for Law & Technology on December 21. See the conference website. If you’re going to be in Israel between December 17 and 27,…
By Eric Goldman My monthly roundup of noteworthy tidbits: * Yesmail, an email outsource vendor, was busted by the FTC under CAN-SPAM for failing to honor opt-out requests because Yesmail’s incoming email filters blocked those opt-out requests as spam. This…
By Eric Goldman Exactly 1 year ago, I started using Google Personalized Search. Since then, Google Personalized Search has recorded 6,700 searches of mine–an average of over 18 searches a day, every day (including weekends and vacations), or over 1…