Just a heads up that Danah Boyd has published her PhD dissertaion entitled “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics“. Danah is a rock star in the social networking research community; you might have noitced that I cite her Master’s Thesis from time to time. I’m looking forward to reading her latest work, and to welcoming her to the Boston area, where she’ll be joining Microsoft Research New England.
Author: Daniel Tunkelang
High-Class Consultant.
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Google Improves Personalization
Today was a harsh news day for Google, with TechCrunch posting a leaked thread of internal emails on why Google employees quit. The emails are intriguing if highly redundant; the schadenfreude comments are merely predictable.
But the more interesting piece of news is that Google is moving beyond its initial SearchWiki efforts to offer more meaningful personalization to users. Their new feature is called Google Preferred Sites. According to the unofficial Google Operating System Blog:
Preferred Sites is a new experimental feature for Google Search that lets you personalize the results by adding a list of sites you want to appear more often when you search. Based on your search history, Google suggests some frequently-visited sites, but you can add any other site.
As regular readers know, I have little love for SearchWiki. But Preferred Sites seems to be a real step, albeit a small one, towards allowing users to meaningfully–and transparently–personalize their search experience. I say “seems” because I haven’t had a chance to try it out. Perhaps someone with a lucky cookie who’s gotten to try it can comment on his or her experience.
Jeff Dalton recently updated articles he maintains on open-source NLP and machine learning tools and open-source search engines. Check it out, as well as the discussion about the pros and cons of open source enterprise search on LinkedIn.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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…
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