Amazon Margins Drop, Stock Tanks, Amazon offers Cheaper Express Shipping? , John Battelle Interviewed, AIRWEB Conference

Amazon:
Amazon reported their quarterly results, which fell well below expectations due to lower margins.

They then announced a new program by the name of Amazon Prime, where you get unlimited express shipping for the whole year for a one time $79 fee.

John Battelle:
Interviewed

Interesting Sounding New Conference?
First International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web

from an email I got

The attraction of hundreds of millions of web searches per day provides significant incentive to content providers to do whatever necessary to rank highly in search engine results. The use of techniques that push rankings higher than they belong is often called spamming a search engine. Such methods typically include textual as well as link-based techniques. Like e-mail spam, search engine spam is a form of adversarial information retrieval; the conflicting goals of accurate results of search providers and high positioning by content providers provides an interesting and real-world environment to study techniques in optimization, obfuscation, and reverse engineering, in addition to the application of information retrieval and classification.

The workshop solicits technical papers and synopses of research in progress on any aspect of adversarial information retrieval on the Web. Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

- search engine spam and optimization,
- crawling the web without detection,
- link-bombing,
- reverse engineering of ranking algorithms,
- advertisement blocking, and
- web content filtering.

Papers addressing higher-level concerns (e.g., whether 'open' algorithms can succeed in an adversarial environment, whether permanent solutions are possible, etc.) are also welcome.

IMPORTANT DATES

11 February 2005 E-mail intention to submit (optional, but helpful)
25 February 2005 Deadline for submissions
25 March 2005 Notification of acceptance
8 April 2005 Camera-ready copy due
10 May 2005 Date of workshop

The real question of course, is why would you give away spam white papers to a conference where many current search engineers are part of the program committee?