Category: Uncategorized

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.

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.

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.

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…

Since a substantial fraction of readers here are involved with enterprise search (in its broadest sense), I thought it might be helpful to share links to three online forums targeting this field.

• The search_dev Yahoo group,  “a technical and business discussion group for developers, consultants, IT people and managers who work with Enterprise Search engines”.
• The Enterprise Search Engine Professionals LinkedIn group, which welcomes “product managers, developers, designers, buyers, business developers etc. working with Enterprise Search products and platforms”.
• The Information Access and Search Professionals LinkedIn group, which welcomes “specialists in Information Retrieval, Knowledge Management, Natural Language Engineering, Image, Audio and Video Analysis, and related areas of Human Computer Interaction and User Studies”.

If you are aware of other valuable forums and resources (preferably ones that are vendor-neutral), please let the rest of us know!

In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that she’s “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Well, it’s a good thing I read this post about the environmental impact of Google searches before breakfast. It cites physicist Alex Wissner-Gross as saying that the average Google search generates 7g of CO2, using up half as much energy as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

I ate some breakfast after reading it, and now I’m feeling appropriately skeptical again. If nothing else, I doubt Google reveals enough about its internals for anyone to come to such a precise calculation.

[Note: Google explains here that the calculation is off by a fair amount–the average search generated 0.2g of CO2. Thanks to Jeremy for the heads up. Also, Jason Kincaid criticizes the Times Of London’s reporting here.]

Nonetheless, there may be something worth exploring in this argument. Even if the environmental cost of Google is far less than this research claims, it’s still a cost. Perhaps we should think about information seeking systems not only in terms of efficient use of human attention, but also in terms of other non-renewable natural resources.

In the automobile industry, we (at least in the United States) made the mistake of assuming the customer was always right, thus favoring SUVs over more economical and energy-efficient alternatives. Hopefully we’ve learned our lesson, though that’s still to be determined. In any case, perhaps there’s a similar lesson to be learned in the world of search engines.

I get pinged from time to time by colleagues and recruiters looking to hire IR / NLP people, for everything ranging from short-term contract work to CTO-level roles. Unfortunately for them, I’m very happy in my role at Endeca, so the best I can ever offer is to route them to colleagues.

That’s where you come in. If you’re in this space and want to be on my radar, please let me know, either by commenting here or by sending me email. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best to play matchmaker when I see a potential fit.

Alternatively, if there’s a good existing forum to bring together employers and job-seekers in this space, please let me know, and I’ll encourage everyone to congregate there.

I know it’s unseemly to brag, but I’m very excited about the feedback I’ve gotten about the “Reconsidering Relevance” presentation, and I wanted to share that excitement.

Here’s some of the whuffie I’ve received:

• Selected as the Top Presentation of the Day on the SlideShare homepage
• A nice review by Ken Ellis, Chief Scientist at Daylife
• Picked up by Gwen Harris at Taxonomy Watch

I’m looking forward to posting the video, which I’m told will be available early next week,

Jeremy Kirk reports in Computerworld that:

Amazon.com Inc. has rolled out a new option for its Simple Storage Service (S3) that lets data owners shift the cost of accessing their information to other people or entities.

This may not seem like a big deal; all they’re doing is offering data owners the opportunity to shift costs. But it strikes me as counter to the general industry trend, which is to offer all online information for free and make it up in the volume–I mean, in advertising revenue.

Will Amazon’s retro move overcome this inexorable trend? Perhaps not, but perhaps they don’t have to. It may be enough to capture a small segment of the market that is willing to have those who access data pay for it. And there’s certainly a lot of opportunity for such a model in the B2B space.

Personally, I’m hopeful at any sign that someone is seriously pursuing a non-free business model for content access. Once upon a time, that was a cultural norm, and it’s not clear that the “information wants to be free” approach has done much to preserve the value of information. Perhaps Amazon is just tilting at windmills, but I’m hoping that the 2008 CTO of the Year knows what he’s doing.