Improve freshness using tweets?

Yahoo! Search Blog » Blog Archive » Q&A with Vik Singh on Yahoo! Search BOSS and Open Web Search

This is a really interesting approach.. quoting the Y! architect featured in the article:

When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.

From credit default swaps to a bad case of recession

Some interesting reads about the current economic,.. ahem.. crisis.

1. Revenge of the glut
2. This white paper by a couple of professors at the NYU Stern School of Business
3. The paradox of thrift in today's Marketplace edition
   

One thing that is certainly emerging is this: it is not just a bunch of bad mortgages. In the last 20 years, American household debt has increased to around 13 trillion, which is almost the size of the GDP!