Category: Uncategorized

I’d just like to announce a few small changes for long-time readers.

• Previous protestations notwithstanding, The Noisy Channel will become a corporate blog. The next post will be a press release announcing that “Endeca Social Media Guru Dr. Daniel Tunkelang Launches Online Thought Leadership Channel!”
• Since a healthy discussion of the issues has convinced me that the ad-supported model is here to stay, I will start augmenting my income with advertising, especially designed to subvert ad blocking software. Your attention is valuable, and I’d like to cash in!
• In order to effect these changes, I am writing off my personal integrity. I encourage you to do the same, and will offer a small reward to anyone who posts positive online reviews of this blog.

Normally I’d consult the community before making such changes, but, hey, it’s not like you’re going to protest a few minor tweaks, right?

Jimmy Wales is shutting down the struggling Wikia Search. Via CNET.

With all of the excitement about Aardvark and Hunch, I’ve been meaning to write a big-picture post about social search. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ve decided to defer to the experts at FXPAL. Here are three recent posts on the subject that I recommend:

• Gene Golovchinsky: Social Search
• Gene Golovchinsky: Communicating about Collaboration: Synchronization
• Jeremy Pickens: Social Search Redux

I’m sure many readers will recognize the authors, as both Gene and Jeremy are regular contributors here.

The website for the Girls Scouts of the USA clearly states:

Q: Can I buy Girl Scout Cookies online?

A: Girl Scouts of the USA does not currently allow online sales, but its cookie site GirlScoutCookies.org can help you locate girls selling in your community. Simply visit www.GirlScoutCookies.org

So perhaps one can forgive Amazon.com, “the world’s best retailer“, for not having any in stock. Still, it’s hard to forgive the results they return when you search for girl scout cookies on their site. It’s safe for work, but not for the faint of heart. Via window office.

I hope that Amazon resolves this issue quickly (Note: they already have, though not before making headlines all over the web and blogosphere), and perhaps offers an explanation of this unsual relevance ranking result. In any case, I have saved a screen shot for posterity here.

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet offers an amusing comparison between how Barron’s wrote off “Amazon.bomb” in 1999 and how they dubbed Amazon “the world’s best retailer” in their current issue’s cover story.

Check it out: “What a difference a decade makes: Barron’s proclaims Amazon best retailer“. Makes me wonder what cover stories about online media and social networks will look like a decade from now.

Those of you who have been enjoying our recent debate about the future of online advertising should check out TechCrunch, which is offering a “Steel Cage Debate On The Future Of Online Advertising: Danny Sullivan Vs. Eric Clemons“.

For those who haven’t been keeping up with this fight:

• Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, recently wrote a guest post on TechCrunch entitled. “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet” (I blogged about it here).

• Then Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand, flamed back at him on his own blog, in a post entitled “For Your Sunday Bullshit Reading: Search Ads Are “Misdirection” Advertising“.

I can’t promise that all of the TechCrunch commenters will be as civil or thoughtful as those who comment here, but I am sure they’ll make up for it in quantity. And yes, I’m covet that readership–but the least I can do is make sure everyone here gets a good seat for the prize fight.

Just saw via this article on Techmeme that my friend Vitaly Shmatikov co-authored a paper on “De-anonymizing Social Networks“.

Here’s the abstract as a teaser:

Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc.

We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate.

Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy “sybil” nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is small.

Ron Miller has just published his first volume of interviews with content management experts in a digital book, which he’s made available for free online. Since I’m featured in this book alongside Google Search Appliance product manger Nitin Mangtani as the experts on enterprise search (see the history of our sparring match here), I thought I’d do the self-serving thing and promote the book here. Enjoy!

I blog a lot about the virtues of exploratory search and the narrow-mindedness that Google and others exhibit in their focus on ranked search result lists, as well as about my skepticism about the value and longevity of the ad-supported model. I think it’s safe to say that I’m largely preaching to the converted–if anything the comments often amplify rather than challenge my premises, or even go further, arguing that I’m understating my arguments.

On one hand, it’s reassuring to hear validation for deeply held but hardly uncontroversial views. On the other hand, I’d love to find passionate advocates for the other sides of these issues who are interested in debating them. I’d like to believe I’m open-minded, even about the beliefs I hold most deeply, and in any case that I’ll offer an opposing argument a fair hearing and serious consideration. I trust that readers here would be just as fair-minded.

The problem is that those advocates don’t seem to show up, even in the comment threads. Perhaps that is because of my incredible powers of persuasion, but I imagine that no one wants to be a lightening rod for criticism, so those with opposing views lurk quietly or simply take their eyeballs elsewhere.

What to do? Is there any chance that someone who strongly disagrees with me on at least one the aforementioned points would be interested in writing a guest post? I’d even be willing to post it anonymously. I just want to make sure we’re not getting into the intellectual rut of a mutual admiration society.

Please contact me if you are interested; this is a serious offer, and I’m quite open to suggestions on how to make it work.

Just a reminder that readers here can, at no extra charge, ask to be part of The Noisy Community. It’s a great way to reinforce that so much the value of this blog comes from you, the readers, who collectively contribute far more content to it than I do!