Category: Uncategorized

From “Brand Mentions Preferred over Ads” in eMarketer:

Compared with banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links, articles that include brand information were most likely to lead US Internet users to read—and act.

In addition to making a product so compelling it demands coverage, this requires a more natural, PR-focused strategy of getting the word out. Or in some cases, tailoring ads so they look like articles.

I’m no champion of advertising, but at least ads are (usually) honest about their nature. And I am very much in favor of marketing campaigns that aim to earn “natural” name dropping in articles. But it seems eMarketing is either advocating a strategy of pushing advertorials, or neutrally reporting that the strategy is effective. Either way, I find it disturbing. I know we’re a long way from a utopia of transparency, but I thought we were past the infomercials-pretending-to-be-news stage.

I discovered belatedly that the Microsoft Word template my publisher had given me was suppressing spelling correction. My bad, I should have realized something was up as I was putting the draft together. In any case, if you are one of the people reviewing the manuscript, please return to the download page and grab the much clean-up copy there. My apologies to those who already suffered througgh the typos.

On Friday, shortly after sending a copy of my Faceted Search manuscript to my publisher, I put out a call for volunteer reviewers. The response has been overwhelming, and I am personally overwhelmed to see this validation that my online “friends” and “connections” truly live up to the meaning of those words, volunteering their offline cycles to help out. It’s a wonderful reminder of community.

Given the diminishing return on feedback, I feel it would be irresponsible for me  to continue soliciting reviewers to take time away from their day jobs to help me. I am already working to incorporate the feedback I’ve received, and on track to a June 15th publication date.

Thanks again to all who have reviewed the draft, are in the process of doing so, or were about to volunteer before reading this. Of course, you all be the first to hear when the book is available!

By now, #amazonfail seems like old news (yesterday’s detwitus?), though apparently Amazon’s PR folks are still doing damage control.

But what intrigues me was something in Clay Shirky’s nostra culpa post comparing the collective outrage against Amazon to the Tawana Brawley incident. While the post on a whole did not move me (perhaps because I don’t have any guilt to atone for), I did see a valuable nugget:

The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began. Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act. Amazon would love to avoid those problems if they could – who needs the tsouris? — but they can’t. No one gets cataloging “right” in any perfect sense, and no algorithm returns the “correct” results. We know that, because we see it every day, in every large-scale system we use. No set of labels or algorithms solves anything once and for all; any working system for showing data to the user is a bag of optimizations and tradeoffs that are a lot worse than some Platonic ideal, but a lot better than nothing.

Indeed, perhaps the problem is that Amazon relies too much on algorithmic cleverness when it should be taking a more transparent HCIR approach. Perhaps not what Shirky was after, but it’s consistent with all of the versions I’ve heard of what went wrong.

While I’m all for eco-friendly goods and services, I don’t usually think of my work as helping to save the environment. But this post from Vivisimo Chief Scientist Jerome Presenti about “Recycling the Information Wastelands” reminded me that making information more accessible is like recycling on steroids:

The same piece of information can be consumed an unlimited number of time. Using it does not degrade it. Sharing it does not involve any sacrifice. In fact multiple usage often increases the value of information and sharing it often benefits both ends.

While of course I see information access–and information technology in general–as a way to increase productivity and reduce waste, I had never thought of it in terms of literal recycling. It a nice thought–or, dare I say it, a convenient truth.

Posts like this one from Gene Golovchinsky make me feel sad that I didn’t actually attend CHI, though I’m glad I did get to hang out with the exploratory search clique that Wednesday evening. As I’m helping get the HCIR ’09 workshop together, it’s nice to see so much interest in the subject on the HCI side of the house.

I try to keep this blog apolitical, but this is just too funny and sureally on-topic to pass up. According to The Register, the British Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) “plans to train government-approved groups in search engine optimisation techniques” in order to flood the internet” with propaganda.

Perhaps this is just a stimulus package for SEO consultancies. Or perhaps I vastly underestimate the power of information warfare. In any case, I was amused, and I thought it was the right thing to share.

Ron Miller, Contributing Editor at EContent Magazine and Editor at FierceContentManagement, just released a free eBook on enterprise search:

I’m pleased to announce my new eBook: Unlock the Power of Enterprise Search. I created this eBook in conjunction with Michelle Manafy, who is Editorial Director, Enterprise Group, for Information Today, Inc. The content in the eBook comes from articles I’ve written for EContent Magazine and the Enterprise Search Source Book.

I wrote the foreword, and I’m delighted with how the book came out.

I’m a few weeks late to find this flow chart in Wired to tell you which blowhard you are (I’d only seen a small subset of it before). Find out if you are Chris Anderson, Dave Winer, Jason Calcanis, Jeff Jarvis, Mark Cuban, Mike Arrington, Nick Carr, or Seth Godin. Enjoy!

As regular readers know, I’m ambivalent about advertising in general, but very clear when it comes to shill marketing campaigns. So it’s with pleasure that I see Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb outing Magpie clients in his post, “How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying“–including Apple, Skype, Cisco, StubHub, and Box.net.

But be sure to read through to the comments: some commenters note that it may not be that Magpie’s clients are not the big brands themselves, but rather their affiliates. Still, I see some legitimate guilt by association even if that is the case. After all, a brand should provide and enforce ground rules about how its affiliates behave, especially when their behavior directly affects the brand’s reputation.