Coral Hess

Muddiest Point: My muddiest point from last week didn't get answered. Since it directly impacts the homework that's due on Monday, I'd be really grateful if somebody could help me out: I'm not sure I understand what an attribute is in XML. We saw a schema and how to set an attribute up in it, but not how it would look in the XML that fit the schema. (Apologies for imprecise terminology.)

Reading Response: I hadn't thought all that hard about how beefy a web crawler would have to be, given the volume of information the Big Three search engines index. Those are some mighty big numbers. And, you know, now that I'm thinking about it, of course they could shut down an entire domain if they did not have politeness algorithms in place. That they could shut down an entire country, I am still wrapping my head around. (To be fair, I still picture them as little spiders that "grab" links and report back information to big servers.)

I didn't see any mention of ill-mannered search engines, who ignore robots.txt files; I'm curious how search engines other than Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft work. Probably similarly, but with lower ethical standards (due to less public attention ... or the need to get more of it?).

It seems as though there's quite a lot of research going on in the digital information retrieval area, particularly in multimedia. I wish I were a better programmer; it sounds really interesting.

Really, I just wish everyone would just use metadata and be honest about it.

In support of Honest Metadata, I present to you Eleanor Rubidium Chinchillington (who just goes by "Ella"):

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