[HT to Gonzalo]
[HT to Gonzalo]
Picking up Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, you might be forgiven for thinking ‘another book about goldfish jumping from one bowl to another?’ I’m currently through the first chapter, and while the authors don’t go far enough in terms of setting the scene for their work in terms of basic social network theory and where it comes from (Barabasi is not mentioned until page 265), they do offer some interesting anecdotes about the type of information that passes between the socially connected.
With a clear focus on avoiding the obvious and well trodden paths of those that have gone before them, the authors pull their stories from their own work and other accounts of things like cascades of emotion (someone 3 degrees away from you can cause you to be happier or sadder) and epidemics of laughter (mass psychogenic illness).
I’m enjoying this book (provided by the publisher) more than the previous book that I attempted to review. This may be entirely due to my frame of mind, or being a better fit for the audience. Or – perhaps someone three degrees away from me read it and liked it.
I’ll write more when I’ve finished.
Like many, my reading habits and channels change over time. However, having read some of the literature and science behind how things propagate through social networks, the differences between how informative something is and how popular it is, and the distinction between influence and authority, a world in which I’m as informed those other guys is not compelling.
Perhaps we would do well to remember that an anonymous one way tie (e.g. following someone on Twitter) is not the same as a weak tie.
Will we continue to move towards socialized content because it is good enough without trying to find the best picture of the world?
hyperlocal news (n): information gathering about a geographically-specific community that is part or was once part of a broader coverage area or focus.
(to which Max continues to find distraction in the elements composed in the term - ‘hyper’ ‘local’ ‘news’). Christopher’s definition is somewhat limited in that it is relative (and subservient to) all the other media stuff. As it focuses on the news part, it is constrained to information gathering (though surely it would include the dissemination of that information as well). My own thinking on the topic has focused on the term ‘hyperlocal’ in general with the following thoughts:
Thus: Hyperlocal is [data, behaviours, technologies] supporting the business of being a resident in a community. In other words, I no longer think of hyperlocal in terms of news alone.
I’m very happy about this:
but if that is not your thing, could I tempt you with a bit of PeepShow (in which Johnson recommends Vista). Of course, BlogPulse has the stats on the past 10 hours of blogging on Windows 7:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be working right now, but here’s a capture of what the Bing/Google Twitter break looked like:
The first two are required but to me not especially interesting. The third is really what I think the basics of real time search are all about – except that I would call it attention search: searching what people are paying attention to.
At any rate, I think the significance of Bing producing something like this is important. In addition, it has been produced in a manner that perfectly fits the data. Pushing out of the standard search experience to deliver something that is driven by the data model is a direction that Microsoft is clearly making with all things Bing. This should be contrasted with Google’s hot-on-the-heels announcement of their Twitter integration:
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
If the implications of this are that the Twitter data will be somehow blended into the SERP then Google is being a slave to its simplicity at the expense of leveraging the nature of the data. We’ll see when it surfaces. TechCrunch also points to this, although with what look like different expectations:
It’s worth noting that while Bing’s Twitter search
is live today, it sounds like Google will be working Twitter’s data into its search results over the next few months.
It is also interesting to take a look at the media reaction. Search Engine Land gives a reasonably comprehensive overview. Techmeme is currently showing Bing getting a lot more attention on this (with a real product) compared to Google (with no real product). Of course, the real issue of attention is: how are Google, Apple, etc. going to rain on our parade tomorrow…
Richard Brandt’s new book outlines the rise to success of Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the Google founders. The title of the book is, however, misleading. It provides no real insight into the psychology or radical thinking of the subjects, but is rather a flattering account of their trajectory coupled with a sympathetic account of their origins. Missing is any comparative analysis of their competitors, or any criticism of business decisions that would appear un-brilliant (like trying to sell their baby to the first taker before realizing what they were really onto) – missing too is one of my favourite topics: survivor bias
The positive and uncritical approach to the subjects leads to some light weight accounts of their success. For example, page 170 reports:
Google has figured out how to make money off all these new forms of entertainment, while every competitor is struggling with that issue.
Considering YouTube, the first statement is hard to swallow (read technovia’s summary of the $470 million that the site will lose this year). Considering the second, plenty of other companies are making money from social sites, blogging platforms and so on.
One of the distinct advantages of being so slow to finish a book for review is the benefit of reading the reviews of others. Strangely, I can’t find the correct page on Amazon – the page I link to above is to the book with the additional text (Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese Edition). This page has only 1 review which is a collection of review snippets provided by the author.
Traffick’s review has this interesting paragraph:
As someone who has watched the ad auction and the search products, in particular, emerge, I'm struck once again by just how far behind and how dismissive Yahoo and Microsoft were at various stages of innovation, on key areas like how the paid search auction worked, but also, in how much to prioritize search and paid search in overall company priorities.
This seems to be missing the innovation that was going on at Overture, well known to be the inspiration behind quite a bit of Google’s approach. As TechUser.Net summarizes:
Google always had excellent search engine indexing technology, but Google's search technology by itself never generated profits for the company. Google's profitability comes from its search technology combined with text ads and an ad placement mechanism that allows advertisers to bid for the placement of their ads (bid-for-placement mechanism). From a profitability perspective, the bid-for-placement mechanism is as valuable as Google's indexing technology. In the absence of the bid-for-placement mechanism, ad pricing can at best be inefficient. The bid-for-placement mechanism frees up extensive resources that would otherwise be required to set ad prices, and it allows Google to charge ad sponsors in proportion to the value Google is delivering to the sponsors.
The bid-for-placement mechanism was pioneered by Overture, a paid search specialist company. In July 2001, the US patent office issued Overture a patent covering the mechanism. Patent 6,269,361 also known as the '361 patent was bad news for Google: it threatened Google's core business model. It was imperative for Google to have access to the '361 patent, but Google never managed to negotiate a satisfactory licensing agreement with Overture. Consequently, in April 2002 Overture sued Google over patent infringement.
Brandt has (page 96):
A company called GoTo.com (later renamed Overture) had come up with the idea of an online Yellow Pages system, where users would type in search words and be taken to advertisers who bid to have their ads appear when people searched for those words. (In 2002, after Google started showing the way, Microsoft and yahoo both considered buying Overture. Yahoo won the bid).
Silicon Beat has very positive things to say about Brandt at the expense of Janet Lowe’s Google Speaks.
As a result, Brandt gets a number of things right. Most notably Brandt, manages to avoid easy cynicism, which is the first trap of any newbie reporter or book writer who takes on the company as a subject. And as a long-time technology writer, he knows the difference between cloud computing and client computing and doesn’t let technical details get in the way of his story.
In contrast, the newly published “Google Speaks,” by Janet Lowe, appears to be based almost entirely on other articles, which led the veteran author to such bizarre assertions as the patently wrong claim that Flickr was bought by Google and the more puzzling statement that Hewlett Packard once owned the Altavista search engine. (Flickr was bought by Yahoo, and Altavista was created by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was sold to Compaq in 1999, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2002. In 2003 Altavista was sold to Overture which was then bought by Yahoo. So Lowe is technical correctly about the chain of ownership while simultaneously appearing totally confused about which facts are relevant in Silicon Valley’s complicated corporate histories.)
Well, now I’ve read a good number of reviews of the book (by searching for it on Google, of course) and the strange thing is, like the book on Google, I can’t find anything but glowing, uncritical comments. With Occam’s razor in hand, I have to assume that this is something to do with me, not the book! Perhaps I’m the wrong audience, or perhaps I took too long to read the thing. At any rate, I’ll make two final comments. The first is that I’d recommend John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture for those interested in a (slightly dated) account of how we got here. The second is the final paragraph from Brandt’s book:
With Google and their sudden wealth at their disposal, Larry and Sergey now have enormous power to [change the world], and they will continue to do so for decades to come. They’re like Harry Potter after he discovered he was a wizard and got his wand. you can expect great things from them.
Yup.
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