High-Class Consultant.
I’ve been excited to see some of the material from this blog making its way into the wider world. Here are some recent mentions I’ve found:
Sharing ideas is what blogging is all about, and I’m delighted that others are finding some of these ideas worth citing.
Recently I’ve starting using Twitter Search to find people talking about topics that interest me. One of my serendipitous finds was Gabriel Weinberg, who is reported to have single-handedly built a search engine called Duck Duck Go. I’ll suspend judgement on the name–after all, Beyond Search blogger Steve Arnold proudly calls himself an addled goose.
Regular readers know that I’m highly skeptical of quixotic attempts to take on the web search market. And I have no reason to believe that Duck Duck Go will achieve meaningful market share in our lifetime.
But Weinberg has truly done more with less. For example, when I do a query for SIGIR , I get a disambiguation dialog that bootstraps on Wikipedia. Yes, these are also the top two hits on Google, but with a dialog that implements clarification before refinement.
Unambiguous queries like Endeca or Warren Buffett need no clarification and instead return clean pages of top results from the major content types.
I supsect that Weinberg is heavily leveraging Wikipedia. But why not? Why work hard when you can work smart?
And Duck Duck Go can go off the rails, particularly for harder queries. I haven’t tested it enough to scientifically compare its quality to that of the major web search engines.
Still, it makes a strong first impression and have a great interface. At the very least, he’s raising the user experience bar for the common web search use cases. Check it out!
Thanks to Gwen Harris at Taxonomy Watch for calling my attention to James Kelway’s two-part article on creating user-centered taxonomies. It’s a great introduction to the subject.
A colleague of mine just pointed me to an article in Freedom to Tinker by Luis Villa entitled “Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom“. It’s a nice analysis of some of the ideas that motivated two of my recent posts: “The Future is Mostly Cloudy” and “2.0 Means Give-to-Get“. Enjoy!
I’ve been living in a kaleidoscope of “2.0”s recently: web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, government 2.0. I know some of those are already shedding 2s in favor of 3s. But I wanted to reflect on the core tenet of these 2.0 visions: give-to-get.
First, let me give immediate credit to the folks at the Greater IBM Connection, who put the phrase in my head at a recent summit. Those who have studied pre-2.0-history, may recognize give-to-get as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t know of any other precept that has achieved such a universality across cultures.
What does give-to-get mean in the context of these 2.0 approaches to technology?
Web 2.0:
Enterprise 2.0:
Government 2.0
Some people who are far more expert than I have written about this stuff:
What I hope is clear is that, despite the overplaying of “2.0” as a buzzword, the real value of this trend is in promoting one of the cornerstones of our success as a species: enlightened altruism.
And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, I’d like to call attention to my own efforts to give credit where it’s due on this blog. I’ve consciously reduced internal linking, only using it to refer to earlier posts. But, as you’ll see, this “altruism” is quite self-serving. I’ve been delighted to see folks link to this blog in order to cite its ideas.
Because what 2.0 is ultimately about is better information sharing for all of us. And for that, we all have to give to get.
The other day, I was ranting about how Google is conflating the goals of search and advertising. One of the questions that we discussed over at Greg Linden’s blog was whether the difference between search and advertising is push vs. pull. But, as we concluded, that isn’t quite it. The difference is not the means, but rather then end: meeting the user’s needs rather than those of advertisers.
And, indeed, the perfect example of a user-driven push interface is alerting. In a typical alerting system, users specify a running query that triggers whenever matching content is published. Certainly this is more akin to web search than to advertising.
But, like web search, alerting runs into the challenge of adversarial information retrieval. If SEO is about maximizing exposure to users through high rankings in search results, there must be an analogous concept of maximizing exposure to users by triggering their alerts.
For example, I happen to know that Gartner analyst Whit Andrews, like many of us, has an alert on his own name. By placing his name in this post, I am quite confident that he will read it.
But why go after individuals when you can spam wholesale? Including the name of a company in a blog post is certain to attract the attention of a fair number of employees. Including the ticker symbol of a publicly traded company in a document will trigger stock tracking alerts. Et cetera.
Others have noticed the ability to spam through alerting systems. I imagine that alerting systems will eventually engage in similar strategies to search engines to inhibit spam and decide what is relevant. And perhaps those same systems will include ads.
Thanks to Greg Linden for alerting me to a talk by Google Fellow Jeff Dean on Research Challenges Inspired by Large-Scale Computing at Google. Click through the link to stream or download the talk in your favorite media format.
Today’s news: newspapers’ web revenue is stalling.
No wonder: Google is mixing up search, advertising, and publication, while newspapers are responding to this competitive pressure by sliding down the slippery slope into becoming aggregators.
This is a tough game, and I’m not sure how it plays out. I understand how media players fear Google commodifying their content, but I don’t think the best strategy for them is to accelerate this process.
On one hand, the increasing dependence on Google for traffic degrades brand loyalty, since it leads to hit-and-run users. On the other hand, Indeed, the increasing dependence on ad networks means that, as Paul Iaffaldano of the TWC Media Solutions Group suggests, “the publishers commoditize their own inventory”.
I use Google News and Techmeme to get an overview of general news and technology headlines, but I am still loyal to several sites and feeds. I’m probably more of a news junkie than most. Even so, if publishers sacrifice their differentation as a short-term survival tactic, they will ultimately lose everything.
It’s a bit late, but I think publishers need to figure out how to renegotiate their balance of power with aggregators and even search engines. If economics of publishing on the web reduce to an SEO war, it ain’t gonna be pretty.
I just read an article in the New York Times by Brian Stelter describing how mainstream news outlets like NBC and the New York Times itself are starting to link to other sites . This is a pretty radical change, since these sites have historically aimed to by sticky and thus maximize their customer exposure to their content and their ads.
The article quotes Scott Karp, chief of the Web-based newswire Publish2, justifing this “link journalism” approach by relating it to Google’s success: “It’s all about sending people away, and it does such a good job of it that people keep coming back for more.”
Blogger Jeff Jarvis (who is also involved with the Daylife news aggregator) offers a “golden rule” of links: “Link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff.”
As a blogger, I find a lot to agree with in the above. But I’m operating a niche site aimed at a highly targeted audience. And, while I aspire to have hoardes of readers, I am not counting on them for my likelihood. I’m not even monetizing my readership by selling their attention to advertisers!
But I’m not sure how well this approach will work for broad media outlets. As the article states, these news organziations are acting in effect like aggregators. So much for “content is king”. I exaggerate–I assume that none of these media companies are planning to dump their own content and reduce themselves to branded aggregators. Still, it is a slippery slope, and it’s hard to resist the lure of free content.
I’m curious to see where this all goes. As a user, I’ve moved from media loyalty (I grew up receiving the New York Times on my doorstep) to using media commodifying aggregators (Google News) to pulling together RSS feeds into my own reader. I suppose most people lack the patience, inclination, or technical sophistication to put together personalized newsfeeds. Still, I’m not convinced that it’s a good idea for media players who have valuable content to turn themselves into aggregators.
Rather, I think they should follow the advice of Dan Farber, vice-president of editorial at CNET Networks and editor in chief of ZDNet:
At CNET we link to our stories and to others. Generally if it is a standard news item that everyone has, we link to our version. If someone has the seed of a story or a take that helps to carry a story forward or deeper, we link to whatever. A challenge for all of us is finding and linking to content that we should point our readers at…often we don’t have the time to go figure who has the best take or where a story came from before it got refactored by the blogosphere…so we continue to improve on it every day.
I think this advice confirms Jarvis’s “golden rule”, but doesn’t go as far as Karp’s “link journalism”. If you are a media outlet, you should send your readers away if you don’t have what they want. But you should try to do a good job of having what your readers want. After all, you are a media outlet, not an aggregator or search engine.
In response to my various calls to action here at The Noisy Channel, I’ve gotten a fair number of requests from readers asking me for specifics on how they can help. I’d like to offer some concrete suggestions. I’m hoping to make them bite-sized enough that we can make a task queue that volunteers will pick up.
Proposed projects:
I also encourage people here to add to this list, though I suggest to those same people to consider contributing more than just work for others. And, to be clear, some of the entries in this category are excellent, e.g., the entry on stemming. We should aspire to raise all of the entries to this level, and at least to promote high-quality entries so that they are not buried by their lower-quality brethren.
The Noisy Channel 