Category: Uncategorized

While outsourcing the halting problem might not get you very far, outsourcing PR may be the next new thing for retailers. Saul Hansell at the New York Times reports that Amazon is now promoting “user-generated public relations“:

The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who are particularly active in writing product reviews that it has offered to reporters to discuss gift picks. (They also contribute their recommendations on a page on Amazon’s site.)

Amazon says that members of the team are “real people giving unbiased advice to fellow consumers. They are not employed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.”

As Hansell continues, though:

That’s not quite the whole story.

Some team members have been flown to Seattle to conduct broadcast interviews on behalf of the company. Moreover, they have been given free products to review and keep.

Cynical as I am about advertising, I’m actually in favor of people learning about products through sincere reviews, and I can even see a way that companies might favor their biggest fans, a la Steve Jobs. But, to coin a phrase, information wants to be transparent. I expect Amazon to see a backlash if these “unbiased” reviewers turn out to be shills.

Michael Mitzenmacher has a great post this morning on a humorous attempt to outsource the undecidable halting problem to GetACoder.com, complete with advice from Georg Cantor.

Ryen White and Eric Horvitz just published a tech teport on “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search“:

The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and disease, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms. However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a large-scale survey of 515 individuals’ health-related search experiences. We focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms. Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.

Google just released some nice enhancements to Street View. It’s tempting to make Clippy jokes about their mascot, Pegman, but the Google Maps team clearly understands how to make an avatar non-invasive.

Video tour below (narrated by Pegman, of course):

Since I’m taking a week off after Thanksgiving, I thought I’d be clever and schedule a week’s worth of posts to appear daily while I’m gone. What I didn’t count on, however, is that a bug in TwitterUpdater would post tweets as soon as I scheduled the posts, rather than when they were published. My apologies to Twitter followers for the broken links. But now that you know what’s coming, I hope you’ll come back soon and read the posts as they appear!

I just ran into an intersting post by Vidsense CEO Jaffer Ali entitled “Has Online Advertising Lost Its “Schwerpunkt”?”. Its premise : “Creativity and strategic thinking and planning have become subservient to technology under the guise of analytics.” Part of his evidence includes the how marketers evaluate advertising agencies:

In 2005, those marketers surveyed listed the order of qualities they looked for in their agencies:
1. Quality of Creative Content
2. Price/Cost
3. Innovation and Strategic value
4. Traditional print, offline services
5. Sophisticated analytics/measurement
6. Proficiency in emerging/interactive

In 2008 the results of the same survey were quite different:
1. Sophisticated analytics/measurement
2. Proficiency in emerging/interactive
3. Price/Cost
4. Quality of creative (virtual tie with price/cost)
5. Traditional print, etc.
6. Innovation and Strategic value

It’s a bit of a curmudgeonly piece, but it rings true. In the heat of web analyitics, we sometimes forget that attention isn’t just a commodity, but represent real human beings exercising free will. Nice to see this coming from someone who sells ads on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis.

When I saw the post over at Peter Morville’s findability.org blog featuring this slideshow, I could only think of Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady“. It’s a nice presentation, enjoy!

Daniel Lemire has been on a tear arguing in favor of diversity in recommender systems, and now he’s assembling a bibliography on the subject. The post is a good start, and the comment thread is already elaborating on it.

As regular readers know, I’m also in favor of diversity in recommender systems, but I’m more concerned with their transparency.

Google may be reactionary when it comes to information seeking approaches, but they are at the cutting edge of systems research. Their official blog post today on sorting a petabyte in six hours using MapReduce was a reminder of the impressive caliber of their systems team. You can learn more from their Technology RoundTable Series.

I’ve made a few changes lately that I hope readers will appreciate, but please let me know if you have complaints–or suggestions:

• The front page now shows the 10 most recent posts, rather than just 3. That was Jeremy’s suggestion.
   
• I’ve stopped using the “Popular Posts” widget because of doubts about its accuracy and utility.
   
• The “Recent Posts”, “Recent Comments”, and “Similar Posts” widgets now show 10 entries each rather than 5.
   
• I’ve eliminated my “Blogroll” widget. I will continue posting “Blogs I Read” entries, which I believe are more useful than just links.