Category Archives: Google

To Twitter or not to Twitter

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Thanks to Pete Cashmore for answering my question about wazzup with Twitter, the new and skyrocketing-in-popularity social networking tool that really does not seem to make much sense … unless … you want to throw out little tidbits to friends and to the world every so often and see what others are doing or thinking about. Pete calls this “talking about your cat” and I think he’s hit the nail on the head. Most of us, as humans, like some attention, and bloggers are usually hungry to interact with as many people as possible, superficiality be damned. Enter Twitter, which allows you to follow friends or the Twitterers at large who are throwing out a little piece of their life every so often. Unlike long, often boring or repetitive blog postings the twitter stuff is a quick look into the lives of others, and that’s always a fun thing even if they are having a boring life/day/twitter posting.

I’ve been playing with Twitter for the past day and although I’m not hooked (yet?) I can understand why this is taking off in the digital community so fast. In fact I’ve already made friends with John Edwards, Presidential Candidate dude. That’s pretty neat, right?

Twitter also has another thing going for it – founder Evan Williams also brought Blogger.com to fruition as a Google buyout, and as such was one of those who really helped bring blogging to the mainstream as a simple way to share.

I’m not even sure I understand what Ross Mayfield is saying about Twitter Tipping the Tuna, but it’s a nice alliteration. Perhaps he’s suggesting it’ll be a flash in the pan after initial surge of adoption? That’s possible, but I think Twitter’s got a long life ahead, though not sure if that’s good for the world or just another goofy internet thing to keep uninspired levels of productivity … as high as possible.

Alexa – Beware the Satanic Statistics?

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Peter Norvig over at Google has published a quick little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics are if you want to know about website traffic. Thank you Matt for pointing out this Peter paper, which is very intriguing as it demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

I’ve realized the problems with Alexa for some time based on Alexa comparisons to sites where I knew the real traffic, but 50x is a rather spectacular level of error. So great in fact, given that these sites are both read mostly by technology sector folks, it suggests that Alexa is effectively worthless as a comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A recent, larger, and simply superb comparison study by Rand over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons. Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Rand told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with log files. My experience with Analytics has been superficial but seems to line up with my log stats well.

Viacom to Google – YouTube aren’t the boss of me now!

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Viacom’s ditching YouTube, and says they are glad they did.   This  FT story suggests that we may seeing the beginning of what could become a monumental shift in content distribution online.   Viacom has forced YouTube to delete Comedy Central and other popular clips, and says these deletions have resulted in people heading over to the Comedy Central website to find the content rather than YouTube.  This was exactly what Viacom wanted.

Key questions are shaking out about online video:
*How much  of the video traffic is to the “professional” content like that produced by  Viacom vs amateur content?

* How important are search engines / major video sites to finding clips?    The Viacom statement suggests that people will seek the clips they want away from YouTube.   However if they are using Google search to find the alternative locations of the clips Google may have successfully covered both these bases with the YouTube aquisition.

* The most important question is about $money$ and it is simply this – can video be monetized well?   Nobody knows yet.   I predict the answer is going to be somewhat complex, but basically no, you can’t monetize it nearly as well as pay per click advertising, where the information experience can be integrated well with the buying experience.    With Video this match is going to be more difficult and usually impossible.   Somebody watching a “Daily Show” clip is primarily interested in a quick laugh, and seems unlikely to wind up clicking off on an advertisement and almost totally unlikely to buy something as part of the Comedy Central clip watching experience.

Sure there will be some room to market clip specific advertising like Comedy Central hats, but that type of thing is not much of a market for the burgeoning video content industry.    Even junky clips take a lot more time to produce and and bandwidth to distribute than text content, so the revenue equation is simply not as favorable and probably will always be a challenge.

I think a major challenge with Video is that many think the online video experience and advertising will be similar to Television content and monetizing.   It won’t.   Decentralized control and the fact almost anybody can and will produce content are changing things rapidly and globally.

The video fun, junky content, and advertising experiments have only just begun.

Blinkx

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Blinkx is a brilliant video search program that allows people to search *within* videos for specific content.  This has become one of the holy grails of search because the internet is now awash in video content. Tastes vary but almost everyone would agree that most of the clips out there are garbage. With routines like Blinkx users can rapidly search the tidal wave of video that pours online every day for things that interest them.

Check out the Blinkx home page with it’s “wall” of tiny video clips reflecting content they have recently indexed.   It’ll keep the attention of even the most stubborn A.D.D. sufferer.   Some cringe at the sensory overload of dozens of videos, but massive input reflects the new ethos of the internet, and I predict we’ll see desktops and applications become increasingly overwhelmed with content.    As a superb tool that will manage the most rapidly growing and complex part of the digital maelstrom – video clips – Blinkx has a rosy future indeed.

The New York Times reports on this today.

The Global Search continues for a great Local Search

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Techcrunch reports that Insider Pages, a local search, has been aquired, probably for just a little more than it’s initial investments of something like 8.5 million.

For about 2 years now there’s been a huge amount of talk about how important local search will be to the search landscape, yet no local search really stands out as a great tool. Even Google’s local search leaves much to be desired and I think was recently listed as a Google project that has failed to live up to early expectations.

Perhaps part of the problem is that local information best rests in the hearts and minds and “word of mouth” of locals. It’s not clear to me that a critical mass of local “voices” is available yet to tell the local story, which is often more nuanced than, for example, the type of descriptive information that is easy to find.

For example it’s easy to map Chinese restaurants in Chicago, but hard to determine which one has the best Kung Pao chicken, let alone which of these restaurants are the best. For that, ideally, you’d be able to interact with locals who frequent Chinese restaurants in Chicago.

Yelp is having some success in Bay Area but I’m not convinced their “virtual+real social networking” model is scalable to the whole country.

So, the search for great local search continues.

Larry Page – Artificial Intelligence attainable.

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Over at Battelle’s there is a good AI discussion. I’m always amazed by how reluctant we humans are to realize that our intellectual abilities are neat, but generally overrated. In the evolution debate you see folks unwilling to recognize the obvious fact that humans are *almost certainly* an evolutionary extension of simpler organisms. In the AI debate even many who agree that humans are the product of evolution seem reluctant to assume that machines will ever attain consciousness.

Sure, there are significant computational and possibly biological hurdles in the quest for a fully conscious machine intellect, but there’s little reason to think these can’t be overcome within at most a few decades and hopefully sooner.

Hey – maybe I’m just sucking up to the intelligent machines so they’ll like me when they start reading the internet stuff written before they were conscious. Shame on me!

Page to scientists – get marketing, PhDudes!

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Google Founder Larry Page spoke to the American Scientists Friday and encouraged them to market science projects better and also to look for solutions to pressing problems.    Good advice indeed.    I’m frustrated to see so much of the innovation and brainpower of American science go to the study of obscure or abstract things when it would be put to better use solving the pressing problems of out time like global health, infrastructure improvements, etc, etc.

Come on PhDz, let’s move those intellects into practical problem solving gear!

Battle Robots + AI = Trouble?

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Although I’m very confident that artificial intelligences will be complimentary to humans and extremely beneficial to humanity it did give me pause today to combine the following two news items:

1) Larry Page of Google notes that he feels the brain’s algorithms are not all that complex and seemed confident that the Google folks now working on AI will have a quality intelligence developed soon.

2) Pentagon funds semi-autonomous battle robot project at Carnagie Mellon.

I wouldn’t want to have that robot’s machine gun staring down at me on the day when the robot decides humans are too irrational to deserve the planet.    Of course for this project the robot will drive itself but a human will be operating the gun.

“hey, says the battle robot, would you mind plugging me into the network jack over there … for just a few minutes ? ” 

Polish Poets to Google: A domain by any other name won’t smell … as sweet.

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A group of Polish Poets are holding out their gmail.pl domain name from the Google legal juggernaut. I’m torn between 1) seeing this for what it most likely is, where the poets saw a great opportunity to nab a name that would become a key part of the Google Mail branding strategy and did it and 2) the more entertaining view which is that “do no evil” Google is bulldozing poetry websites to make way for gmail parking lots.

Obviously the best way to resolve such disputes is a poetry contest. I submit this entry:

The Polish Poets, silently
Sat on their small domain

Then mighty Google shouted
“ON YOUR PARADE, WE SHALL REIGN!”

Na zdrowie! Said the poets, raising high a glass of beer
This ain’t no joke, solemny spoke, the Google legal tier

“But we all think it’s funny”, said a thousand blogging fools

Get off your Google ass
Give them some Google cash
And call it all … just … cool

——

Meanwhile, back at the Plex, Google says “Good relationships are built on good communication”. Heh – as long as you don’t use any POETRY!

Phil’s got more and a fine choice of title.

Google News? Not!

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Today’s big news is that Google is not allowed to put out the news from a European news outlet that sued them. As usual, silicon insiders are 1) waxing argumentatively in favor of the virtuous wonder of Google and 2) forgetting the big picture which is *long term content control*. Here is the story, and here’s an example of the siliconized logic from TechDirt. Here’s Google’s view on the case.

Of course it’s probably stupid and shortsighted for the Belgian newspapers to insist Google remove them because they’ll lose reach and they’ll lose some potential for advertising revenues. This is especially true for an American audience that, without online exposure, is far more likely to encounter a Belgian waffle than a Belgian newpaper.

However, the news flash that Silicon Valley is always so reluctant to read is that Google’s spectacular success has not been primarily a function of *Google’s* own efforts, rather it has been their brilliance monetizing *other people’s content*. Google, as they themselves are fond of reminding us, does not do content. That’s fine and even appreciated by those of us who do do content. [Hmm – I said do do as in “Yes, I doo doo content” said Chico the Wonder Dog].

However the key question about content remains – how should content cash be divided between those who produce it, those who monetize it, and those who expose it to the world? Google can reasonable suggest that they are now doing much of the monetizing and the exposure and therefore deserve most of the cash. That fits well with the fact they are *getting* most of the cash. Google might also note that they are providing publishers with adsense program and then sharing about 70% of that revenue with the content producers themselves.

On the other hand, Belgium papers or other content providers can reasonably argue that when Google pulls up snips of their stuff and shows them in Google search results page, and the a user winds up clicking an advertisement at the side, the content folks don’t see a dime of that even though they were a key contributor to the Google profit equation.

Who is right? I say let the market decide.