Google UK PR Challenge: Amoral Menace Assertion
April 5, 2009
Short honk. Navigate the the Guardian (UK) newspaper’s online essay “Google Is Just an Amoral Menace” by Henry Potter here.You will find another example of what I call Google’s UK public relations challenge. Mr. Potter wrote:
Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.
I am no wordsmith of Mr. Potter’s caliber. I am also an addled goose. It does not require a rocket scientist IQ to figure out that Mr. Potter and his publisher are annoyed with the GOOG. The only problem is that the horse—or rather the Googzilla—is out of the gate. In fact, over the last three years, Google has mellowed. Mr. Potter is clueless about Google’s newer technology. Forget the bespoke motherboards. Nope, Mr. Potter may want to pay a bit more attention to what is coming instead of looking at Google activities reasonably well stated in my 2005 and 2007 Google monographs here. His annoyance—possibly, fear-induced realization—that it is now too late to adapt to the Google-sphere reminded me of the Associated Press’s Board of Directors’ reaction to my briefing about Google opportunities. When I gave that talk, the door in my opinion was open but the established dead tree mavens chose not to see an opportunity. The dead tree crowd saw something about which it was too much effort to think. Nicely written diatribe, on the other hand.
Too late now in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
Twitter from Gmail
April 5, 2009
Short honk. Nice story from Steve Rubel here called “Bring Twitter Right Into Gmail with the Amazing TwitterGadget” here. Not much point in my summarizing the well done write up. If you want Twitter at your fingertips, this is the gadget for you.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
Alert Face Off: Google vs Microsoft SharePoint
April 5, 2009
I am not a big fan of search. The main reason is that most users want an information access system to think for the user. The user thrives on alerts, suggested queries, and automatic displays like those generated by Congoo.com. Not me. I like to craft multi term queries, use Boolean operators, and have the luxury of search set querying in order to narrow results. I like other old fashioned search methods, but forward truncation and on the fly set deduplication is not cocktail party chit chat.
The alert method for Google is easy. Navigate to Google News. Run a query. At the bottom of the results page, click the alert link and you are done.
How can one do this in SharePoint? Navigate here and download the code and explanation. The how to was the work of Erwin who explains his method in “How To Create Alerts Programmatically. I know there are other ways around the barn, but I want to contrast the differences between Google and Microsoft. To business: In order to set up an alert, a developer is going to have to do the job. For example, get ready to set switches like this:
Google makes an alert a mouse click and an email address. Microsoft SharePoint requires a script, figuring out a workaround, and insertion of the script into the SharePoint environment.
I am all for keeping developers employed, but what about users? Make work is frustrating to an addled goose like me, annoying to end users who just want an alert which can be turned on and then killed with a click, and to the developers who have to navigate around issues.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
SharePoint Online
April 5, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Tobias Zimmergren’s SharePoint Online—A First Look” here. On premises SharePoint installations are tar balls that become tar pits. The hapless information technology dinosaurs caught in these traps will struggle and probably die. Uncontrollable costs pull down even the brightest SharePoint wizards in a lousy economic climate.
Mr. Zimmergren’s article makes a very strong case for hosted SharePoint or what the trophy generation consultants call cloud based SharePoint. The idea is solid. Let experts figure out how to make SharePoint behave and maybe perform some useful content related tricks. The users access the needed SharePoint services via a broadband connection.
He does not talk about finding information in the SharePoint system, which is a major weakness of hosted SharePoint. If you can live with the limitations of Microsoft’s approach to indexing, then you are going to be happy. If not, you will have to pursue some other options.
I urge you to read Mr. Zimmergren’s write up. He explains how cloud based SharePoint works and provides useful information to those who may be singing the on premises SharePoint blues.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
KXEN: Data Mining Automation
April 5, 2009
A reader sent me an email asking about real time data flows and making sense of them. Good question. At the goose pond, we use our own Overflight services to figure out what’s useful and what’s not useful in content feeds. We also use some commercial systems; for example, the goslings like Googzilla’s tools. One useful one is the Google App Engine. We don’t think the person writing us wanted to venture when the ArnoldIT.com tech geese wander, so I wanted to pass along a short comment about KXEN, a robust data mining automation vendor.
You may want to take a look at the company’s predictive business intelligence software. With that component you can:
- With Predictive BI from KXEN you can:
Discover leading indicators that actually predict performance
Plan with forecasts that are financially sound and reliable
Explore less and act more on indicators that really impact your business.
KXEN’s approach eliminates some of the manual tasks required to crunch data with such tools as SAS or SPSS. Combining KXEN with a robust data management platform like Aster Data, you can acquire and process real time data flows. There will be some latency but the delay will be measured in seconds or minutes, not days or weeks. You can watch a walk through of the model building tool available from KXEN here.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
Murdoch vs Google: Don Quixote Redux
April 5, 2009
Quite a thrill to read “
Murdoch Wants A Google Rebellion” by Dirk Smille in Forbes here. Forbes is the business magazine with the wacky Web site that befuddles me. This article has a subtitle that was almost a throwback to what made newspapers war fun to study. Either Mr. Smille or his editors wrote:
The media mogul says Google is stealing from publishers. It could be the call to arms that newsrooms need
I like the softening of the “newspaper war” metaphor to a “call to arms”. I waddled into this story with goose-like anticipation. Mr. Smille asserted:
Rupert Murdoch threw down the gauntlet to Google Thursday, accusing the search giant of poaching content it doesn’t own and urging media outlets to fight back. “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ” ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “
You will be hearing more about this challenge in my opinion. At one time, Mr. Smille upgrades a newspaper owner’s lament into a shotgun blast:
Barrel one: Google is stealing content. Keep in mind that the word “steal” means, according to my online and free dictionary
to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
The use of the word creates a nifty duality—right wrong, black white, up down.
Barrel two: the phrase “fight back”. Google is in my opinion is on the wrong side of truth, justice, and the newspaper way. I have joked that Google is Godzilla, but Mr. Murdoch is taking this viewpoint and apparently using it to defend the traditional media empire from the predations of the GOOG.
Mr. Smille wrote what I think is an interesting sentence:
For now, newspapers’ attempts at gaming Google remain “rogue efforts,” says Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor of the Dallas Morning News Online and a director of the Online News Association. “I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do.” Sounds like an idea Murdoch would endorse.
In my opinion, Mr. Murdoch has embraced the spirit of Don Quixote. The problem is that Google can move and windmills cannot. Another goosely thought: young folks are not too keen on traditional media in my opinion. Perhaps Mr. Murdoch will go ?after those folks too
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
Hiding SharePoint Sins
April 5, 2009
Satan may be in the room, but I just learned I can make him invisible with plumbing. Read Robert Bogue’s “Using Infrastructure to Hide All Sins” here and learn how yourself. The core of the idea is that SharePoint will misbehave; that is, sin. To absolve the software of its misdeeds, the savvy SharePoint wizard will use hardware to hide the problem. Mr. Bogue wrote:
You see, I architected the system to account for a fairly high probability that the developer code would randomly and inexplicitly cause a server to crash, run out of memory, blue screen, or just generally go dark from time-to-time. With that in mind, we put two servers in that should be able to cope with the load from everyone. The third server in the farm was just there to be the token server that was in the process of crashing and coming back. Load balancing can hide almost any server stability sin that you can come up with. Simple Network Load Balancing (NLB) included in Microsoft Windows Server operating systems can hide problems. Tools like F5‘s BigIP can hide them better.
If this approach makes sense to you, then Mr. Bogue’s write up is just what the witch doctor ordered. For my money, I prefer appropriate infrastructure (low cost, reliable, scalable) and solid code. Call me old fashioned but I think at Judgment Day throwing hardware at a SharePoint problem won’t gain admission to digital heaven.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
The BBC and Google: Keeping on Top of the News
April 4, 2009
Short honk: When Sergey Brin’s name appears on a Google invention, my research suggested to me that the technology is important. You can track down Mr. Brin’s inventions any number of places, including the Arnoldit.com, my Google monographs, or (heaven help us) the USPTO. If you are the BBC, you discover this information that dates today and make it news. To see Mr. Brin’s interest in search, read Voice interface for a search engine – Patent 7027987. The BBC news story is here. The BBC will want to look at Mr. Page’s inventions. These are indicative of Google’s interests as well.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
Time Warner, AOL, and Online News
April 4, 2009
I don’t think too much about Time Warner, AOL, and news. Renay San Miguel’s “Battle for News Eyeballs: AOL Scrapes the Bottom of the Barrel” here caught my attention. I use www.aol.fr for certain types of queries. I am accustomed to this type of splash page:
Mr. San Miguel’s article suggested to me that AOL has become a tabloid news service. Interesting idea. He wrote:
It should be as clear as a paparazzi’s lens that AOL really wants your eyeballs, and tosses together a heady mix of grabby headlines (“New Conficker Virus Strikes” — uh, actually, no), links to its celebrity-trolling corporate siblings like TMZ and Pop Eater, and an overall sense of desperation in order to capture them. It’s been going on for a while now, as parent company Time Warner made it clear early last year that it wants to make its stand against Yahoo, MSNBC/MSN and Google in the War of the Portals.
i suggest you read this article. Because I don’t pay much attention to real journalism, I was surprised at this view. The word “desperation” may be an apt one when talking about traditional media and the digital Gutenberg.
Stephen Arnold, April 4, 2009
Endeca and the McKinley Release
April 4, 2009
Information Today’s Paula Hane has approached search and climbed Mt. McKinley, at least journalistically. She provided an enthusiastic endorsement of Endeca’s most recent enterprise search release of the Endeca system here. She provided a good run down of Endeca’s new system, including a plug for “massive scalability” and Endeca’s tie up with the Financial Times for the Newssift service here. Endeca, along with Autonomy, is one of small number of search and content processing vendors with a high profile among system administrators and information technology professionals. Information
Now that’s a mountain. I see Mt. McKinley, and I think “really big”, challenging, and for an addled goose like me, daunting.
Today’s write up features quotes from search gurus and integrators. I did notice a couple of points that I found interesting:
- I was hoping to get some indication of the pre-deployment work required; for example, consulting, customizing, data tuning, etc. I did not see that information in the discussion. I was hoping that one of the search gurus would provide a bit more beef to complement the sizzle that was evident in their quoted remarks. I wonder why the zip and snap of this important part of a new system was not touched upon.
- I was fascinated by the reference to “massive scaling”. The data about the Financial Times suggests Google- or Aster Data-type capabilities, but details were not included. One of the thorns in most search and content processing systems is that any system can be made bigger and faster. The issue I have encountered is the cost of scaling. With data flows and user demands for more timely index refreshes, I wanted to know what is the reference plumbing. Any information on this topic would be helpful to me here in the pond filled with mine run off water.
- The inclusion of an ecommerce vendor as a source for a new enterprise search system caught me off guard. Endeca is pretty good ecommerce service. The thought that went through my mind was, “Maybe this Michael Gabriel is an enterprise search and content processing guru as well as an ecommerce integrator with deep multiprocessor experience?” Last time I checked the New York Times’s system it worked, but it was a massive hassle. I’m a subscriber to the dead tree version of the paper and the Web site seems to be content to follow, not lead.
You can get more information from Endeca here. I am sure one of the trophy generation consultants will be able to provide the type of detail that an old goose such as I want to know. Getting hard data about the time required to deploy, ratio of consulting fees to license fees, and the on going scaling methods will take some extra digging. My beak is tired. If you have some of this information about the new Endeca release, use the comments section to share. I will learn, and I bet you one tasty water bug that Autonomy wants to know the facts about McKinley to figure out if that competitor needs to pack more pitons and crampons.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
