The Nasdaq Stock Market said it will cancel some of the late trades in Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), whose shares appeared to plunge as low as 1 cent at the close of North American markets on Tuesday.
For those who prefer pictures:
Much as traditional journalism has given way to a world where everyone can be a publisher, traditional journalistic notions of “off the record” conversations have given way to a norm of unbridled exposure. As Mark Evans writes in “Is Anything Off the Record?” that “everything you say/write is public, even casual conversations over a coffee, is on the record.”
We have finally realized a perfect storm where anything can be published and everything can be found. Privacy through difficulty has given way to unintentional broadcasting.
For those of you who think this vision is melodramatic, let me share the following examples from recent personal experience:
What does this all mean? I think we need to get used to the more efficient flow of information. The propagation is neither total nor instantaneous, but it is still sufficient to overturn many assumptions that held only a few years ago. It will be fascinating to see how our social norms adapt to this new reality.
John Battelle posted a plea to Google today to increase the granularity of PageRank, which he calls “the unofficial, and official, and semi-official, arbiter of value on the web.” Alternatively, he proposes that Google “just go dark and don’t tell us anything.”
I have an another suggestion: stop worrying about PageRank. It’s not even clear how much Google cares about it anymore. Recently this blog’s PageRank has been even more volatile than the stock market, going up from 0 to 5 and back down to 3 over a period of a few weeks. I haven’t seen any correlation between PageRank and traffic, and I find that this blog often appears in the top search results for appropriate queries. It seems to me that PageRank only matters to the ego of the page’s author–and surely we can find other ways to inflate our egos.
I know that competition is human nature, and I’ll confess to grade grubbing in my early school years. But reducing all pages to a static authority score is literally one-dimensional. Even Google seems to have de-emphasized static authority in favor of query-dependent relevance.
A decade ago, PageRank was a revolutionary measure, a secret weapon against spammers who were gaming the traditional information retrieval measures that most search engines used to rank results. But the past ten years have reminded us that relevance has many facets. PageRank is still valuable as a static indicator. But, if anything, we should ask for it to be coarser-grained rather than finer-grained, since static authority is more useful a spam filter than as a total ordering on the billions of web pages.
In any case, it’s unseemly to grub for grades. Let’s show some dignity.
Just noticed this Jon Udell interview with Scott Prevost, General Manager and Director of Product for Microsoft-acquired Powerset. I’m as skeptical as ever, but I thought readers here might appreciate the link.
I don’t know if Dan Bauhaus reads this blog, but hats off to him for adding a list of acquisitions to the List of Enterprise Search Vendors Wikipedia entry. He even does a respectable job of disclosing the undisclosed sums for some of the aquisitions.
Check out Jeff’s post about a presentation that Dave Jensen and David Smith recently gave at UMass entitled Myths of Research in Computer Science I particularly like his take-away:
The code you write today won’t run in five years. Get over it. What will be used? It is the understanding derived from running the code.
Just saw this piece in the New York Times entitled “You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge Is Power.” The lede: “Are patients swimming in a sea of health information? Or are they drowning in it?”
No earth-shattering revelations, but a sober reminder that, for all of the health information available on the web, we still have a major information access problem. Information availability is clearly not the same as information accessibility.
No, I’m not talking about a faceted search interface for Wikipedia, though that would be a great idea! Rather, I’m talking about the Faceted Classification Wikipedia entry, which until recently contained a list of faceted search vendors, including Endeca. I removed this list for two reasons.
First, I’ve seen how a list of vendors on a Wikipedia entry can become something of a vendor battle for prominence. From what I understand of Wikipedia guidelines, the best approach is to have a separate entry for a vendor list, as per my recent edit to the Enterprise Search entry.
Second, faceted search is not the same thing as faceted classification, and I don’t think it makes sense to talk about “faceted classification software”. We really need a Faceted Search entry, and then we could point from there to a list of vendors, analogous to that for Enterprise Search.
I’m posting these thoughts on the talk page for Faceted Classfication. I hope that folks here will chime in and perhaps even contribute an entry on Faceted Search. This entry may have been a well-intentioned start, but we need one that meets our and Wikipedia’s standards.
GNU and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman told The Guardian that cloud computing is a trap. Like Nicholas Carr, I think Stallman is a bit late and a bit paranoid. I agree with him and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison that cloud computing is overhyped to the point that the term has lost meaning–at least I always assumed it was just a sexier term for web-based utility computing. I also think that both consumers should be wary of committing their information to proprietary platforms–web-based or otherwise.
But there’s no question in my mind that the average user benefits from divesting IT responsibilities to the cloud. After I had played my filial tech support role one time too many, I moved my mother to web-based email. I would have uninstalled Microsoft Office if Google Docs could have met her needs–and I’m sure it will someday. And what’s good for my mom is probably good for most users, whether consumer or enterprise.
I try to avoid partisan posts about my employer on this blog, but a recent blog post I read was so out of line that I feel the need to respond here personally.
In a post entitled “The Future of Search is Simpler“, the Enterprise Search blog states that
Google provided a clear vision: you can be up and operational in one day and search everything….While other companies are marching to that vision. Dieselpoint’s OpenPipeline, Endeca’s simple administrative controls, Fast’s navigators, Autonomy’s categorization, Google is providing the vision.
I’ll let other companies speak for themselves, but I can state with certainty that Endeca is not marching to Google’s vision. As I’ve discussed here repeatedly, enterprise search is not a problem that can be solved by just plugging a box into your intranet.
Google is entitled to its vision of enterprise search, and I wish them the best of luck in their efforts. But please don’t accuse Endeca of following that vision.
The Noisy Channel 