Month: January 2009

Categories
Uncategorized

Sell Your Integrity for $0.65

Everyone has their price, but who knew it was so low? First, we see Burger King persuading people to trade 10 Facebook friends for a Whopper (suggested retal price: $3.69). Then some are suggesting that Twitter might create a business model offer companies a sort of pay-per-click (PPC) approach to friendship where they might pay $1 for each “friend” who follows a sponsored invitation.

But apparently Belkin may have read Ben Kunz’s “Modest Blogging Proposal” and not recognized it as satire. According to The Daily Background, a Belkin employee used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to pay people to write positive reviews of Belkin’s products–65 cents for each review. The scandal has received wide coverage through a post by John Biggs on CrunchGear.

I can’t say I’m shocked (shocked!) to find out that there’s payola going on here. And, by way of an “I told you so,” a big part of the problem is that reviews are anonymous, and anonymity doesn’t play well with information accountability.

But I am disappointed that people’s integrity is so cheap. Even Esau was able to swing a mess of pottage, which by my best guess would go for $5 in 2009 dollars.

Categories
Uncategorized

Is journalism screwed?

Ethan Zuckerman wrote a thoughtful and provocative post entitled “Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age?“.  He worries:

If I’m right and print advertising costs are fundamentally irrational, then it’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the United States can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.

The article justifies and elaborates this concern. It’s sobering stuff: we may be experiencing yet another bubble bursting, this time in the valuation of advertising. But, as Zuckerman points out, the stakes are huge, since practically the entire media business relies on an ad-supported model. If this model is broken, then journalism as we know it is truly in a fight for its life.

I’m no fan of the ad-supported model, but I’ve accepted it as a necessary evil to sustain the media industry. Now it sounds like the need to come up with alternative models may be more urgent than I imagined.

Categories
Uncategorized

Introducing The Noisy Community

The other day, I asked for feedback on ideas to build community at The Noisy Channel.

Based on that feedback, I’ve gone ahead and created a directory of people whom I believe to be regular readers, largely because they are also contributors. There is a link to the directory on the front page, labeled “The Noisy Community“.

If I included you and you want to be removed, I apologize in advance and will of course remove you immediately. Or, if you’d like me to make any changes to your entry, please let me know.

If you are not in the directory but would like to be, please let me know, and I’ll remedy that as soon as possible. You don’t need to have contributed comments to be included, but I do expect that you are regular reader. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz!

As I noted earlier, this process is manual. While it’s a bit tedious, I much prefer to avoid any possiblity of abuse. At this scale, the manual process is quite tractable. I hope you all enjoy this first step towards building more community at The Noisy Channel.

Categories
General

Open Calais at the New York Semantic Web Meetup

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=opencalais-release-40-1232126721137134-2&stripped_title=open-calais-release-40-presentation

Tom Tague, who leads the Calais initiative at Thomson Reuters, delivered an excellent presentation this week at the New York Semantic Web Meetup. While the slides hardly do justice to this highly interactive session, they’re still worth a look. More importantly, Calais itself is worth a look if you are interested in semantic tagging. For free.

Categories
General

The Influence Economy

There’s an interesting convergence of two ideas in recent days. On one hand, there’s been a lot of attention to the problem of measuring Twitter authority / influence. On the other hand, there have been efforts, some more serious than others, to monetize the connections established on social networks like Twitter.

Of course, these are flip sides of the same problem: measuring and optimizing value in a social network. Or, as I like to think of it, the influence economy.

I recently proposed a way to measure influence on Twitter–or, more generally, in an asymmetric social network. While the measure is simplistic, it has the virtue of modeling attention scarcity, thus making it resilient to the inflationary effect of people following more people in the hope of reciprocity. I’m quite bullish about it, and looking forward to seeing someone implement it.

Given such a measure, let’s turn to the question of buying and selling friends. If we can measure influence, then we can monetize it, much as content providers monetize their audience’s attention by selling it to advertisers. But, just as content providers destroy their value by spamming their audiences with ads, influencers stand to destroy their own value by selling out.

But, as the saying goes, everyone has a price. It may be crude, but we can certainly compute how much influence X gains from Y following X–as well as how much Y’s value as a follower decreases through the dilution of Y’s attention. Thus, if X wants Y as a follower, perhaps X should offer Y compensation that reflects X’s gain and Y’s loss.

I haven’t yet worked out the math, but it seems straightforward. And it might even translate into a business model for Twitter and other social networks. By supporting real value creation in the network, an online social network is in the best position to demand a cut of that value as a commision.

Categories
Uncategorized

The TunkRank Implementation Challenge

The other day, I proposed a sort of Twitter analog to PageRank that readers generously dubbed “TunkRank”. I know that some readers started looking into implementing it, so I wanted to put out an offer.

If anyone implements this measure or one that preserves its fundamental principle of representing attention scarcity, I’ll promote it prominently on this blog (e.g., a link on the front page). It has to be a web application that anyone can use, and you have to explain how the measure works. No need to share the source, though I won’t complain if you do. And I’m not asking for any rights to the work.

If you have questions, contact me or just ask them in the comments here.

Categories
Uncategorized

Can’t Buy Me Friends

The Beatles may have sung that you can’t buy love, but, as we learned last week, you can certainly sell friends. And now it seems that companies will be able to buy them. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes that “Twitter May Have Found Its Business Model“:

Professional hustler turned CEO Jason Calacanis spelled it out on Twitter tonight. The new Twitter “suggested friends” feature (first blogged by Pete Cashmore) is a natural place to sell friend connections between users and companies wanting to communicate with them.

I suppose it isn’t any crazier than selling your opinions. Oh wait, that was supposed to be satire…

Categories
Uncategorized

The Noisy Community

One of the great things about blogging is that it’s given me the chance to assemble a community of people who interests overlap with my own. But so far that community only becomes interactive through the comment threads and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

I’ve wondered if it would be worthwhile to invest in cultivating more sense of community at The Noisy Channel.  I have no desire to replicate social network  functionality available elsewhere, and I trust that most readers use some combination on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

But I could do some things here that might be helpful:

  • Create an opt-in directory page that lists readers with a short tagline and a contact URL. For example, mine would be:

    Daniel Tunkelang
    Chief Scientist, Endeca
    https://thenoisychannel.com/

  • Post job descriptions targeted at readers, along with contact information.
  • Institute a regular appearance of guest blog posts.

Do any of the above appeal to people? The directory strikes me as the simplest first step. I’d love to find out more about who my readers are, and hopefully I can make it worth your while by directing some traffic in your direction. Conversely, a list of Noisy Channel readers with short descriptions sounds like just what the SEO doctor ordered. Of course, it would only take off even enough people are interested in being on this page.

I’m intrigued by the possiblity of posting targeted job descriptions, but that’s only worthwhile if there are enough of them. I have no desire to compete with the large job sites!

Finally, guest posts are something I’ve talked about before, but that somehow have never taken. But a directory might make it easier for me to know whom to ask.

If any of the above interest you, please give me feedback in the comments. I’ll take silence as a lack of interest.

Categories
Uncategorized

Forums for Enterprise Search Practitioners

Since a substantial fraction of readers here are involved with enterprise search (in its broadest sense), I thought it might be helpful to share links to three online forums targeting this field.

  • The search_dev Yahoo group,  “a technical and business discussion group for developers, consultants, IT people and managers who work with Enterprise Search engines”.
  • The Enterprise Search Engine Professionals LinkedIn group, which welcomes “product managers, developers, designers, buyers, business developers etc. working with Enterprise Search products and platforms”.
  • The Information Access and Search Professionals LinkedIn group, which welcomes “specialists in Information Retrieval, Knowledge Management, Natural Language Engineering, Image, Audio and Video Analysis, and related areas of Human Computer Interaction and User Studies”.

If you are aware of other valuable forums and resources (preferably ones that are vendor-neutral), please let the rest of us know!

Categories
General

A Twitter Analog to PageRank

A few weeks ago, there was a flame war about Twitter authority, and I was all too eager to throw fuel on the pyre. But now that the blogosphere has calmed down a bit, I’d like to propose a ranking measure that I think might work. My apologies if it isn’t original. In fact, if you’ve seen it elsewhere, please point me to it.

Let me start with the assumptions about the model:

  • Influence(X) = Expected number of people who will read a tweet that X tweets, including all retweets of that tweet. For simplicity, we assume that, if a person reads the same message twice (because of retweets), both readings count.
  • If X is a member of Followers(Y), then there is a 1/||Following(X)|| probability that X will read a tweet posted by Y, where Following(X) is the set of people that X follows.
  • If X reads a tweet from Y, there’s a constant probability p that X will retweet it.

This model is obviously simplistic in all three assumptions. But I think it’s a reasonable first cut. In particular, it accounts for the inflation that occurs from people who follow in the hopes of reciprocity. There’s less value in being followed by someone who follows a lot of people, because that person is less likely to read your messages or retweet them.

Of course, there’s room for adding more realism to this model, but I hope it is at least close enough to the truth to be interesting.

From this model, it’s easy to measure someone’s influence recursively, assuming that we know the constant retweet probability p:

equation1

The recursion is infinite over a graph with directed cycles, but rapidly converges as high powers of p approach zero. I would think this measure wouldn’t be hard to compute to a reasonable accuracy.

This measure strikes me as a PageRank for Twitter or any system with similar properties. There’s more room for nuance, but I at least find this approach more plausible than the ones I’ve seen. It also strikes me as hard to game, since it isn’t counting retweets, and it’s hard to add much influence through followers who don’t have any influence themselves.

What do folks think? Has anyone tried this? If not, is there anyone who’d like to try hacking an application to compute it? Either way, please let me know!