What’s the best thing that I (and others) learned at D10 this year? (Other than the fact that Steve Jobs used to own a peacock, of course.)

Onstage at D10, Google SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki revealed, in answering Walt Mossberg’s question about the sad state of ad relevancy, that Google calls its machine learning smart ad targeting technology “Smart Ass” internally.

Aside from those self-driving cars, this is probably the coolest thing happening at Google at the moment.

Wojcicki then told Mossberg that a “huge amount” of Google engineers were working on improving “Smart Ass,” “There are all kinds of amazing things on the Web. Advertising is not one of them,” she said. “Display ads are very crude, there is a really high CPM price for the value being extracted.”

“I’m not against advertising, I just don’t understand why it’s not good.” Mossberg replied. “How come I’m not seeing the things that I might like to spend money on as I’m traveling around the web?”

Wojcicki agreed with him, hoping that one day Mossberg ideally would be served ads about new tech products and not a trip to Iraq when reading a news article about the Iraq War for example. “We’re getting better, we’re evolving from a user standpoint,” she said.

And I’m still picturing that “huge amount” of Google engineers chuckling every time they say smart ass instead of smart ads. Amazing.

Photo via: @karaswisher

@bhankes Might be the best single thing I learned at D10. #ATD10—
Eric Savitz (@savitz) May 31, 2012

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s impossible to throw a rock at a media outlet today without hitting a story about Wikileaks. And to make the rock throwing even easier, the subject of this week’s Why Is This News is: Wikileaks – ‘enemy of democracy, just plain fact of life… or both?’

In it, Sarah argues that, for good or ill, the leaking of several hundred thousand diplomatic cables simply reflects today’s reality that no information is ever truly secret in the Internet age. The US government, like major companies before them, simply need to adapt to that reality – improving their behaviour, but also getting better at locking down the truly secret stuff. Paul, on the other hand, just hates everything about Wikileaks, describing it as one man’s pathetic ego trip which reveals almost nothing useful and which, if anything, will massively set back the site’s stated goal of ‘transparency’.

In many ways, we’re both arguing the same point from different angles. But, hey, at least we’re arguing – which always makes for a fun episode. Video below.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Photos just keeps on getting better and better. A couple weeks ago, it started supporting high-resolution uploads. And now there’s also drag n’ drop for when you are organizing your photos. The drag n’ drop feature brings Facebook Photos closer to the look and feel of a desktop app, as do some of the other advanced features.

Facebook Photos also has a better photo viewer now, which no longer requires you to open a new browser tab when you click on a photo in your News feed. The viewer box pops open in-line. These last two aren’t new features, but the drag n’ drop appears to be new. Taken together, however, you can see where Facebook Photos is going—from a social repository of images to a fully-functioning photo app.

Here is a video highlighting some of the new features (it’s funny that they put this on YouTube so that people could share it. Perhaps Facebook should start tackling videos next and adding basic features like embedding) :

Article courtesy of TechCrunch