NYT Archives - The Silicon Underground

The New York Times’ dialect map can’t figure me out

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 16:02:56 +0000

My first semester of college, one of the copy editors for the student newspaper either minored in linguistics or just enjoyed the subject. He could peg where all of us were from–except me. The New York Times‘ interactive dialect map struggled

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CISPA is trying to solve a legitimate problem

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:01:25 +0000

I read yet another anti-CISPA piece today. I’m not comfortable trying to read it and decide whether it’s a good or bad piece of legislation, but I do understand the problem it’s trying to solve. Those who have tried to

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On content farms

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:19:27 +0000

It looks like Google has taken action against content farms, low-quality sites that publish articles about anything and everything quickly, and try to make money from the ads. I can’t tell yet if this has really affected my traffic any–my

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Misspelling for profit (or lack of it)

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 22:42:10 +0000

I read an interesting story today on several sites, quoting an article that originally appeared in the New York Times about misspellings on eBay and people who get bitten by them--and others who exploit them. (This particular link is registration-free.)

Executive summary: A lot of people can't spell, and that means items sell for much lower prices than they would otherwise, if they attract any interest at all (one has to be able to find them, after all).

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