Month: January 2009

Perhaps Amazon has had this feature for a while, but today, for the first time I noticed a section labeled “Customers Who Bought Related Items Also Bought” as seen in the screen shot above. I was looking at an unreleased book, which might explain why they couldn’t show me information based on customers who actually bought the item.

Has anyone else noticed this? Am I just late to the party? I tried to find more information online, but nothing showed up. I assume they are using some item similarity measure to assemble a set of related items, and then are basing collaborative filtering on the purchase history associated with that set.

I’m very curious to hear more from anyone who is familiar with this functionality.

I’m a long-time fan of ad blocking software, from the Siemens Webwasher plug-in in the early days to the Adblock Plus and CustomizeGoogle Firefox add-ons today. I know that some people view the use of ad-blocking software on ad-supported sites as anti-social or unethical. My personal view is that it is no different from physically obscuring the ads, or muting a television set during an advertising break. In any case, the technology allows it, and I’m am a very satisfied customer.

But I’m delighted to see that mainstream sites are finally starting to understand that advertising should not be coercive. Check out a post by Marisa Taylor in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Turning the Ads Off“. There she notes that some high-traffic sites, including wikiHow, AboutUs and, Kayak.com, are allowing users to opt out of ads.

Most users apparently aren’t opting out. According to Jack Herrick, founder of wikiHow:

“‘Opt-out’ ads are the good netizen thing to do for users,” he said. “It doesn’t actually hurt revenues that much anyway. And users love it. So why not do it?”

The other day, I asked a friend at Google if, given the option, she’d opt out of Google’s ads. Since she’s an employee, I imagine she might take the site’s terms of service seriously, or at least have more moral qualms about violating them. But she said that she found value in the ads, and wouldn’t opt out of them. Indeed, Google claims that the ads are valuable to users, not just advertisers.

I’d love to see Google put its money where its mission is, and make it easy for users to opt out of ads. That would show true leadership, as well as a confidence in its most sacred principle: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” But I’m not holding my breath.

According to Wikipedia:

Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into an environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the physical systems or living organisms.

Wikipedia does not supply a definition for “cyber pollution”, but Ragy Thomas offers one in a recent post: “the waste of time and energy created by the inconsiderate use of commercial and personal electronic communication.” Thomas is no stranger to the subject: he has held advisory and leadership positions at Epsilon Interactive and Goodmail Systems, which makes him familiar with both the creation and prevention of cyber pollution.

I’ve advocated for attention bond mechanisms (ABM) in the past, and I still feel they are the most promising weapon against cyber pollution. In fact, Goodmail is a step in the direction towards implementing an mainstream ABM. But Thomas cites a service that is truly an ABM: Rupeemail. As per the Rupeemail FAQ:

Merchants and advertisers send RupeeMail to recipients like you seeking your attention. RupeeMail can only be sent to recipients who have explicitly agreed to receive RupeeMail by either registering at the RupeeMail website or permitting a specific sender to send email to them.

Merchants and advertisers send RupeeMail either to a list of willing recipients selected from the RupeeMail data base or to their own list of customers that have opted to receive email from them. If the recipient opens the the RupeeMail, then the recipient collects the value of the stamp attached to the RupeeMail. The sender (advertiser) decides the value of the stamp paid to recipient as a gesture of appreciation for recipient to open the RupeeMail and hopefully read their message (advertisement, news letter, survey etc.)

I’m thrilled to see people employing approaches like these in the war against attention terrorism. Spam filtering, despite its successes, is neither sufficient nor necessary. What we really need are communcation mechanisms that reflect true attention scarcity and ensure the negotiaton of attention costs between the sender and the recipeint is mutually satisfying. Otherwise, as with all pollution, we have a tragedy of the commons that buries us all in crap.

What happens to a stream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? No, it eventually makes it on to YouTube! Despite some early difficulties, Google has managed to make my recent Tech Talk, “Reconsidering Relevance”, available on YouTube. My apologies to all for the delay. Slides available on SlideShare.

After the big news in the enterprise search space about Autonomy and FAST last week, the announcement of Lucid Imagination raising $6 million may seem anti-climatic. That’s nothing compared to the $775M Autonomy spent to acquire Interwoven, let along the $1.2B that Microsoft paid for FAST last year. And can Lucid Imagination really succeed as the Red Hat of enterprise search, making money by supporting open-source Lucene and Solr?

Perhaps. Lucene is certainly popular among folks looking for a free search engine. Moreover, for people who want to tinker with it, its being open source is a big plus.

But Lucene deployments require extensive customization. This is often the downside of open source, and the reason that industrial use open source software often involves a significant transfer of funds from enterprises to consultants. In contrast, closed-source solutions tend to come with more tooling, integration support, etc. Those are the sorts of details that don’t necessarily excite open-source developers but are crucial for enterprise software.

Will Lucid Imagination revolutionize the enterprise search market by providing low-cost services on top of free software? Perhaps, though I’m skeptical–and not just because they are a potential competitor to my employer. If they are to be more than a body shop, they’ll have to productize their customization efforts.  But I’d imagine that, if Lucid Imagination were to build such products, it would contribute them back into the Lucene code base. That might be great for customers, but it’s not clear how it translates into a sustainable revenue model.

It’s also worth noting that Lucid Imagination isn’t the first company pursuing this model. Sematext, founded in 2007, is another company implementing solutions on top of open source software, including Lucene. In fact, its founder, Otis Gospodnetic, is a regular at The Noisy Channel. Perhaps he can comment on the space.