Just wanted to let readers know that I’m attending Times Open, learning about how the New York Times is opening up its APIs to better engage the developer community. Follow the day remotely (or non-remotely) in real time on Twitter!
If you’re not in the public relations industry or have not been emailing me your story ideas for The Noisy Channel, please feel free to skip the rest of this post.
To those of you who have been sending me pitches for your companies or your clients, this post is for you. I’m flattered that I make it onto your list of target media outlets–I can’t deny it’s cool to be so valued when I’ve been blogging for less than a year. And I’m sure my readers are flattered that you value their eyeballs enough to seek them out. But your approach–well, it just isn’t very effective.
Like most bloggers, I’m pretty quick to tune out press releases, or similarly fluffy sales / marketing pitches. It’s pretty easy to identify them from their tone, from the immediate sensation that someone pasted “Dear Daniel” onto a message that was sent out in bulk. As soon as I detect that impersonal tone, I conclude that you have no idea what might interest me, and that you are talking at me rather than with me. While I used to feel guilty about not responding to email with my name on it, I don’t feel the same qualm about ignoring–or even reporting as spam–emails that clearly were sent to a distribution list I didn’t sign up for.
Moreover, bear in mind that blogging is not my day job–in fact, this blog generates zero income for me. Perhaps some reporters are grateful to be spoon-fed content that they can use to fill empty pages. Not me–I’d rather go dark for a week than post content that would annoy my readers. My credibility is my coin.
So please, if you are one of the folks who has been filling my inbox with PR pitches, unsubscribe me from your lists. If you think that I or my readers want to know more about you or your products, write me a personal email to persuade me. I can tell the difference. If writing a personal email is too much investment for you, then reading an impersonal one is surely too much investment for me.
Finally, I can relate to your challenge. When I started this blog, I sent out scores of emails to let people know about it. But I didn’t email in bulk, and every message I sent out was clearly meant for its recipient. It took me much, much longer to write those messages than if I’d simply written one and sent it out to everyone. But the success of this blog is a testament to the human approach.
The other day, I was shocked to hear that Google was employing a pay-per-post stategy in Japan–precisely the sort of strategy they’ve historically condemned. I was certainly among those crying “hypocrisy”.
Well, to his credit, so was Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. In fact, he didn’t just complain–his team did something about it. Via “Google Penalizing Google” at Google Blogoscoped:
head of Google’s anti web-spam team Matt Cutts via Twitter writes, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.”
Matt Cutts blogged about it himself today, saying “To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize that this happened.” I haven’t met Matt yet (I’m looking forward to meeting him at the SIGIR ’09 Industry Track!), but I’m delighted to see this preview of his integrity.
OK, I’ve just started reading it–in fact, they’ve just started writing it! But, given the quality of comments on this blog from FXPALers Gene Golovchinsky and Jeremy Pickens, I’m expecting great things from the FXPAL Blog.
Check out their recent post about “Recall-oriented search on the web“.
Whatever else you might say about Google, they understand how to engineer web-scale systems. Check out Greg’s notes (or Michael Bendersky’s via Jeff’s Search Engine Caffe) about Google Fellow Jeff Dean‘s keynote at last week’s WSDM 2009 conference.
Here’s the teaser from Greg’s notes:
Jeff gave several examples of how Google has grown from 1999 to 2009. They have x1000 the number of queries now. They have x1000 the processing power (# machines * speed of the machines). They went from query latency normally under 1000ms to normally under 200ms. And, they dropped the update latency by a factor of x10000, going from months to detect a changed web page and update their search results to just minutes.
This is no small feat, and it gives you a sense for the bar that Google has set in the web search market. Students of the Innovator’s Dilemma take note: if you want to beat Google, you’re not going to do it by stuggling to incrementally outdo them on their own turf. For the use cases it addresses, Google is surely good enough. And damn fast.
About a month ago, I added a page to this blog called The Noisy Community, a directory of people whom I believe to be regular readers. It’s easy to identify those of you who contribute comments. But I realize many more of you are lurkers (the logs tell all!), and that’s OK too. All of you are welcome members of the community, and including you in the directory is the least that I can do to show my appreciation for your making this blog a worthwhile enterprise.
Plus, it’s win/win. You get visibility, referral traffic, and all of that other good link economy stuff. The Noisy Channel gets to boast of your readership, and perhaps even gets a little extra search traffic. And all of us get to have a better idea of who else is hanging out here.
So, if you’re not listed there and want to be, please let me know, either by commenting here or by emailing me. Or tweet to me!
Hot of the presses: Twitter raises $35M in funding!
As reported on the Twitter Blog:
Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it’s obvious that we have the world ahead of us.
I know that people are getting tired of the relentless Twitter coverage in the online technology press–even in the mainstream media. But the hype–and even Twitter’s lack of a sustainable revenue model–don’t seem to be impeding Twitter’s very real growth. They’ll have to grow up someday, but I wouldn’t be quick to short on them. $35M may well keep them going long enough for them to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.
And, hey, I’m not just an observer, I’m also a user.
Jeff Dalton didn’t attend WSDM 2009 (the second ACM International Conference on
Web Search and Data Mining) in Barcelona this week, but that hasn’t stopped him from blogging about it!
Check out his excellent notes:
In lyrics whose authorship seems disputed between Barrett Strong and John Lee Hooker, we learn:
The best things in life are free
But you can keep ’em for the birds and bees
Now give me money, that’s what I want.
Well, the good news from Yahoo is that, judging from today’s announcement, they seem serious about Yahoo! Search BOSS as one of their few remaining differentiators from Google’s relentless squeeze on the web search market. The bad news, for anyone who has been using it to power their applications, is that it won’t remain free. Use Duck Duck Go while you can!
This isn’t a surprise–they warned everyone from the start that their intention was to charge a usage fee. Everyone has a mortgage to pay–even Twitter–and I’m glad to see Yahoo trying to build a sustainable revenue model for this valuable service. I just hope they’ll be ale to make it work. Life can be pretty tough under the tyrnanny of free.
I’ve been slowly telling friends and family about my upcoming project, but now that it’s published online, I thought I’d share the news more publicly: I’m writing a book about faceted search. It will be part of the Morgan & Claypool series of Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, edited by none other than Gary Marchionini.
I discovered this series a few months ago, when Gary recruited me to review another book in the series, a lecture on exploratory search by Ryen White and Resa Roth. Perhaps my most significant contribution was to suggest the subtitle they ultimately used.
In any case, I was impressed with the book and more generally with the series, so I humbly asked Gary what might be involved in contributing to it. The next thing I knew, I was signing a contract to write a book on faceted search!
I’m very excited about this book, even though I’m aware that it will take a toll on the rest of my personal and professional life as I work on it. I’m grateful to Gary and to the folks at Morgan & Claypool for giving me the chance to write it. I do ask your indulgence as readers if I slow down a bit as I divert some of my cycles to writing rather than blogging. I’ll try to make up for it by sharing some of my observations about the differences between blogging and old-fashioned writing.
The Noisy Channel 