I suggested in the last post that privacy and the internet don’t really mix very well and people should stop worrying about their personal information flowing online (this is inevitable!) or getting used in murderous or malicious ways (unlikely in most cases).

In keeping with this idea I shall share something from the “that is more than we needed to know, Joe” department: A Flexible Sigmoidoscopy is not as uncomfortable as you’d think it would be! If you are putting off a procedure like this, or the more comprehensive version – a colonoscopy – don’t put it off any more – early detection can save your life!

Why a Sigmoidoscopy, you ask? Because my wife was the “lucky winner” at our Unitarian Church’s silent auction where the very generous Gastroenterologist Dr. Walker put up the service. “Here, look what I got for you”, said Kathy. At the office the doctor walked into the exam room with a very big smile on his face “So, you are the lucky winner!”.

At least he got the irony of it all.

My daughter asked this morning: Dad, how are they going to get the camcorder to go up your …. ?

I told this story to the doctor and without hesitation he said “inch by inch”.

I think the field of Gastroenterology probably confers upon the practitioners a rather unusual sense of humor.

Probably an unusual sense of other things as well.

You made it this far??

Thanks for caring. Yes, I came out with a clean bill of health.

John Battelle and fellow blogger Bruno have been waxing somewhat dramatically about the implications of a Google-ized information world, where the massive data stores create all sorts of problems as employees or entire companies go gonzo in a sort of WMD-style information attacks on the world.

Me to the bartender:
“I’ll have what Bruno and Battelle have been drinking”

These scenarios are fun but totally unrealistic. These guys either have much more provocative, interesting and easy-to-compromise secret lives than most people or they are out of touch with Joe public, who has very limited information of interest to all but close family and friends.

A quick scan over the sea of blogged personal information demonstrates this clearly, especially when you reasonably assume that bloggers tend to be more interesting than …. average peeps(!?)

Most people – and I think most businesses – would not necessarily even be adversely affected in a “total information awareness” world. Some aspects of that world would be akin to the (on balance) positive changes affecting music and publishing industries as barriers to entry, copyright, ownership, and rights are all getting redefined at the speed of cash and enthusiasm.

Frankly I see more advantages than disadvantages – secrecy tends to reward the wrong groups. Transparency is destabilizing in a good way.

Viva la Revolucion Informacion!

.community is the .key ? You can bet your I.T. department on it.

Perhaps a critical distinction between Web 1.0 and 2.0 is the degree to which 2.0 has (finally) embraced as essential *community* and *participation* as cornerstones of a quality relationship between technology and the people served by technology.

The process has a long way to go, but it’s very encouraging to see the *big* players working hard to seduce the *key* players in the online equation – the users.

I’m not a Microsoft basher, especially since the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has heroically challenged the idea that the rich ignore the poor. However it’s also true that Microsoft has been by far one of the worst culprits when it comes to ignoring the community in favor of the needs of corporate dominance.

For years MSN kept the broad user community at bay – we were chained to MS out of necessity and not loyalty.

A few years ago this all changed and MS dominance is quickly slipping away. The open source movement has grown in strength, Microsoft’s adoption of the internet as the central theme of all things computerized remains sluggish, and Google and Yahoo continue to innovate and provide free and excellent programs to users and developers.

Of the big three in search Yahoo seems to be understanding this community factor the best. Yahoo Answers, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Maps, Aquiring Del.ico.us are all in line with the focus on people more than technology. Google, as the newest, hippest, and coolest kid on the block, gets a LOT of mileage from these factors despite the fact users are serving them even more than they serve the users who have made Google what they are today.

As the big three’s search quality converges the advertising revenues will be distributed more evenly across the search landscape. Yet advertising money will also increase dramatically as slow adopters figure out the overwhelming power of online advertising. Everybody can win in this scenario, but the one who wins the most should be the one who best serves the online community.

The search landscape sure changes fast.

Yahoo’s purchase of del.icio.us is yet another indication that they intend to highly leverage the participation of the web community in the rankings process. Google remains very confident in their algorithmic approach, perhaps because they see any forms of user participation as too spammable. Yet Google appears to be under the greatest attack by spammers due to their high market share for search.

Google’s brilliant “pagerank” innovation counted on an indirect form of community “voting” through site links, but del.icio.us is a much more robust voting system, especially when Yahoo redesigns the interface to be less geeky.

The search battles are REALLY getting interesting now – MSN Search pretty much let’s the computer decide. They have what is perhaps the largest Neural Network in the world and appear to be moving towards a system where humans only intervene in the program to fix serious problems. Google’s approach is also algorithmic but appears to involve more “programmer participation” and site filtering than MSN’s.

Yahoo, with a history of being the first major web directory along with extensive editorial oversight, has adopted a hybridized algorithm plus editor model, and with today’s aquisition of del.icio.us they’ll enlist the community in direct voting for sites.

MSN’s recent discussion indicates they may soon be paying people to use their search. They also will soon compete with Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher network to pay for content based ads.

The search landscape, built almost entirely on advertising revenues, is changing at the speed of cash.

I’m not easily impressed with technology. Most of the time new “inventions” are crap – most are designed to be easily sellable, convince people to invest in them, or satisfy the bizarre or odd whim of the designer.

Today, however, I ran into one and used it – probably for the last time in my life – yet I was really impressed. In fact I liked this invention more than the (justifiably well reviewed) Treo 650 phone I got earlier this year and have yet to figure out enough to make it worth the cost.

Oh yeah – the invention was an “insulation blower”, used for cellulose blow in insulation we just blasted into the playroom/office we’ve been remodelling for the past 300 years or so. The device is sort of a reverse vacuum that blows shredded bits of paper through a 50′ hose that you swing around up in your attic. The cleverness is in how robust the blow fan was combined with twirling metal bars that chopped up the tightly packed insulation. I’d throw in chunks, break them up with my hand, and the machine would finish off the process and blow it up the hose.

It only took my wife and me about 3 hours to do over 500′ of ceiling, the material cost far less than bat insulation and this was much easier than installing it, and now we’ve got a cozy playroom.

Kudos to pragmatic, effective technology!

Wow, Yahoo is coming up with some great stuff these days:

Yahoo has just launched a very interesting search experiment, and I predict it will be hugely successful. Yahoo Answers lets you type in a question which is publicly posted, effectively broadcasting it to thousands of people online. Google answers was a “good” idea but it cost money and had a limited pool of responders – a departure from Google’s ‘free is best’ philosophy.

Yahoo trumps this with free answers and plans to actually pay publishers with a history of good answers to questions. This cost structure will not only reward the community members who create quality content but it will reward Yahoo as the system becomes more robust. This is a powerful combination.

Why do I have a hunch Jeremy Zawodny had a lot to do with this concept?

Yahoo Answers

Post and picture move to Technology Report

Stupid Primate!

We all are. Some less than others, but many, if not most, issues of human consequence resolve to this simple equation: human primate = not very bright. Perhaps the best example is the current debate suggesting, basically, that we are NOT stupid primates. Only a stupid primate could arrive at that conclusion based on the overwhelming evidence available to suggest that in fact we . . . . are.

Now, you might suggest “hey, we invented spaceships, computers, and toasters – you call that NOTHING!?” That’s something for sure – but more a legacy of the fact we have a sense of history and a feel for technology than because we are really, really different from, say, a mountain gorilla.

To get a sense of how we’d live without shiny tech history, just check out the lives of aboriginal folks in Borneo or South America. They live pretty much like the rest of us would live but for our “developed world” history of lots of shiny things like cell phones and cars. But more important than shiny things is our tendency to carry on as if thousands of years of observing the world and people around us were for naught.

I’m not a doomsayer and think things are slowly improving in the world, largely thanks to clever innovations in shiny technology, but I’m really frustrated by our inability to solve – or even think much about – the serious problems that face most of our fellow stupid primates ….

…Whoa! Gilligan Island reruns are on – gotta go…

Sure, I like Google a LOT …. but Gooogle Golly Gee ….

I’m getting tired of people explaining how Google will take over the internet and then the world of commerce. This is the nonsense we heard back in 1999….except they were saying AMAZON was going to take over the world.

What’s Amazon? Oh… right…. it’s a book selling site.

True, Google’s innovations are far more profound, their people are brilliant, and they have approached things in incredibly innovative ways. But there is a challenge for Google that is rarely discussed even though it’s the most significant thing about the company:

Almost ALL of THEIR MONEY comes from ADVERTISING!

Google-y eyed analysis seems to miss the fact that Google is not making money because they are profoundly innovative in search and internet, they are making money because they came online at the right time with the best search to date. They combined this with the brilliancy of contextual advertising invented more by Bill Gross of Overture than Google. Read “The Search” by John Battelle for this interesting story as well as a great history of search with a strong emphasis on Google.

With Yahoo now equal in search quality and MSN and AskJeeves equal within months or a year at most, the division of advertising revenues will challenge Google, making it hard to grow faster than the rate offline advertising money pours online.

Sure they are GREAT, but the key questions relate to how they adapt to the ever changing marketplace as much as the ever changing search landscape.

FOX News is good entertainment but terrible journalism. I tend to watch it more than CNN because it’s more entertaining to hear Bill OReilly or Sean Hannity (not to mention some of the news anchors!) ranting about “those darn lib’rals!” than the somewhat more balanced and thoughtful reporting I find on CNN. The BBC is better than either by far but it’s on the radio and I’d miss the car chases.

“THIS IS A FOX NEWS ALERT –
A POLICE DOG HAS BEEN FOUND TO BE SNIFFING MICHAEL JACKSON’S BUTT”

But what REALLY intrigues me is that during the MONTHS of coverage of a news story such as the Peterson murder or the WEEKS of Natalie Halloway in Aruba, hundreds of thousands died from horrible diseases caused mostly by the lack of abundant clean water in the poorest countries. A fool will suggest “well, that type of ongoing, tragic, and catastrophic death is not really NEWS”. Oh, really?