Searching for Spy Recruits
May 19, 2009
I can’t quote from this news report. You will have to click here and read the Associated Press story “Israeli intelligence Issues Facebook Warning.” The AP stringer Ian Deitch reported that intel pros in Israel believe that bad guys from Al-Qaida are using Facebook.com to recruit helpers. Why search the old fashioned way by asking people and hanging out in certain restaurants? Use Facebook’s zippy new features to round up potential operatives. Social search has a fresh use case. Is this true? Not for me to say.
Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2009
Another YAGG Gags the Google
May 19, 2009
ComputerWorld here reported another service outage for Googzilla, the world’s most widely used search system. The subhead is quite pointed: “Déjà vu all over again: Four days after widespread outage, Google News hiccups.’”
The author, Sharon Gaudin, who wrote:
Google confirmed this morning that its Google News news aggregation site went down between 8:35 a.m. EDT and 10 a.m. EDT today. Some users trying to pull up the site received a 503 Server Error message. It’s not clear how many users were affected or how wide a geographical area was affected.
Not much for the addled goose to add. Outages speak for themselves.
Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2009
DARPA and Language Translation
May 19, 2009
Network World ran a story with the fetching title “Inside the Bad Ass World of Military Research Projects”. For me, the key passage in my opinion was:
Real-Time Accurate Language Translation: real-time machine language translation of structured and unstructured text and speech with near-expert human translation accuracy.
What puzzled me is the disconnect between what Google offers and this DARPA initiative. i heard last year that Google has performed quite well on real time translation tasks in trials sponsored by various government agencies. When I read the Network World piece, asked myself, “What’s Google not delivering?”
Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2009
Harvard Journalism Majors Unhappy with Job Prospects
May 19, 2009
The story in PaidContent.org did not ring true for me. You will have to judge for yourself. Read “Harvard Students Now Embarrassed to Say They Want to Go into Journalism” here. These future Web loggers and Tweet producers seem to feel uncomfortable at job fairs. I thought the Harvard seal of approval granted prompt employment regardless of major. The story originated with the Harvard Crimson, a publication that should know what’s up with journalism majors.
Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2009
Boye 09 Overflight Awards
May 19, 2009
The Overflight Award for Excellence, created by ArnoldIT.com and JBoye.com, was presented to Volker Grünauer, head of E-marketing at Wienerberger in Austria, at the JBoye Conference: Philadelphia 2009, http://jboye08.dk/]http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/, May 5-7, held at the Down Town Club in Philadelphis.
The award recognizes the best presentation at the conference on digital media, which featured more than 50 speakers from around the world.
Grünauer offered a relevant talk called “Developing a customer centric web strategy.” This presentation discussed smart web strategy for promoting real brick and mortar products, including how Wienerberger defines the four elements of web success and how customer behavior has become the trigger for every eMarketing decision. Slides of the presentation are available at http://jboye08.dk/downloads/download.php?file=1226063851.pdf. He was awarded an engraved Lucite trophy and 500 Euros.
Volker is responsible for the marketing strategy of all websites at Wienerberger, the world’s largest manufacturer of bricks, clay roof tiles and clay pavers. In this function he also developed a new brand and domain management strategy. Together with the IT department he managed the rollout of the CMS into new Wienerberger markets. See his profile athttp://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/speakers/volker_grunauer.
An honorable mention went to Donna Spencer, a freelance information architect and interaction designer, a mentor, writer and trainer from Australia, who presented a discussion on the user experience track called “Getting Content Right.” She was awarded an engraved Lucite trophy. Her profile is at http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/speakers/donna_spencer.
Stephen E. Arnold and Janus Boye created the award to permit the community attending the conference to identify presentations that met the following criteria: information that would be useful to delegates upon returning to work; research supporting the presentatio; quality of the delivery and examples; and importance of the speakers’ topics at the time of the conference.
A panel of distinguished attendees and information practitioners had the task of assessing the presentations and determining the winners. The judges were Dana Hallman, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Karen Rosenzweig, Novartis;Peter Svensson, Lund University; and Troy Winfrey, University of Baltimore.
About ArnoldIT.com
Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his office in Kentucky. He works with colleagues worldwide on a wide range of online and content-related projects. The company’s Web site is http://arnoldit.com, and the Beyond Search blog is at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/.
About JBoye.com
J. Boye, a digital media enterprise, is frequently contracted to help with strategy and governance, project planning, requirement specifications, vendor and software selection, project management and ROI optimization. They also produce industry reports and organize educational conferences. Contact the company at info@jboye.co.uk or info@jboye.dk.
Jessica Bratcher, May 19, 2009
Cloud Comparison – Amazon, Google, Microsoft
May 18, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me this weekend a link to an article that appeared about a month ago here. The write up was “Amazon, Google, Microsoft – Big Three Cloud Providers Examined” by Brandon Watson. His approach was to describe the cloud services of these three Web powerhouses.
My reading of his article left me with the impression that Amazon is the big dog in this kennel of pit bulls. He wrote:
AMZN is, essentially, in the load management business. They are a low margin retail operator that is running a hugely expensive infrastructure for which they are seeking maximum utilization. They would like nothing more than to be noise in their own system. AMZN is relentlessly metrics driven. As such, they have a pretty good idea of how much money to expect off of traffic that walks through their front door. They know how much to expect from traffic ending up at one of their marketplace partners. With the addition of AWS, they have a new way to monetize their capacity, and with their predictable pricing model, they know exactly how much money they are going to make off of customers who deploy applications to their service.Traffic on their network makes them money. It may not make your app money, but it makes them money, so they are happy. It more than likely saves you money, so you are probably happy too.
The Google warrants some tough love. Mr. Watson expressed his love for Google “guys” and then offered:
Applications on GAE are mostly CRUD apps, storing structured data into big table. As a developer, building an application on GAE, you are essentially feeding the GOOG beast. While they have not yet released final pricing, allow me to put on my pointy tin foil hat and talk about what might come to pass. GOOG knows exactly how much it costs to run their infrastructure, and as such could hand developers a bill for the resources which they consume. However, GOOG doesn’t have AMZN’s problem. Their traffic is mostly linear, and going up and to the right. It’s probably logarithmic at this point, but who’s counting? In any event, since they have little variability in their traffic patterns, they don’t have to get into the load management business. By allowing developers to build applications on their infrastructure, they are incurring unnecessary costs. Their motivations, however, are driven by their business model. Each new app that is plugged into the infrastructure ads new data to their data set, and creates new opportunities for page monetization.
For the Redmond giant, Mr. Watson opined:
As for MSFT, there are plenty of things I could say, but let me simply state what I believe to be our motivations. We are a platform company. We very much believe that we are in the business of delivering the best platform and tools to developers to build great applications. Our on-premise stack has proven to be extremely successful over the last several decades. With the release of the Azure Services Platform, one of the core design tenets was that we would like to achieve parity between our on and off-premise stacks. The entirety of the Azure Services Platform is designed to enable experienced MSFT developers to be combat effective on day one.
I enjoyed the article. With Amazon the king of the cloud kennel, can it hang in there with Xen and the economical approach to next-generation computing.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
UK Military Security
May 18, 2009
I am not sure if this Web log post is true. If it is, a rethink of security in the UK’s Ministry of Defence is likely to be forthcoming. The article “MoD Loses 28 Laptops This Year” here reported:
The laptops were lost between January 1 and 11 May 2009. The Ministry of Defence also admitted to losing 20 flash drives and 4 PCs in the same period.
Not much need for exotic search and retrieval when you have the gizmo in your possession. I wonder if the security method was developed at Los Alamos National Lab?
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
PR and High Tech
May 18, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who pointed me to this video and the text snippets from it. The video is an interview with Own Byrne, the fellow who allegedly coded the Digg.com site. You can find the write up here. For me the most interesting comment in the interview was:
It’s a bit of a myth that it’s all young coders. There actually lots of people in their late 30s and their 40s. I’ve been a programmer for 25 years and I’ve actually worked hard to keep up with new technology.
Yes, a vote for those who are getting long in the tooth.
Stephen Arnold, May 17, 2009
SharePoint Search to Get Facets
May 18, 2009
The facetization of SharePoint may become a reality. I found the article “New Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Details Start to Emerge” here interesting. The eye candy means nothing to me. For me, this comment caught my attention:
There’s a new feature, known as “faceted search” coming in the 2010 SharePoint release. No details available yet.
The next item I found suggestive was:
A new version of FAST Search for SharePoint will be made available at a lower cost. Meanwhile, according to contractor and SharePoint blogger Lars Fastrup (whose blog entry is the source of a lot of this post), “the SharePoint team have scrapped their efforts to make the SharePoint search engine scale beyond 50 million documents in a single index. The argument will be to move to the FAST search engine instead.”
My hunch is that whatever Fast Search & Transfer becomes, Microsoft wants to create a Google and Endeca killer at one go. Will search be bundled? Odds are tough to call, but I think the predators will be out and about when pricing is discussed. Will this revamped system work? Does Fast Search ESP work now? UX or user experience is the big deal according to the Microsoft collateral I have reviewed. So what’s “work” mean? Clearly SharePoint’s existing search solution doesn’t work when the collection numbers more than 50 million documents. Surprised?
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
SEO Guru Reveals His Inner Self
May 18, 2009
I found the article “Dammit, I’m A Journalist, Not A Blogger: Time For Online Journalists To Unite?” here quite interesting. The reason? It makes clear that “real journalists” want more respect than a “real blogger” gets. The schism will ignite a firestorm of Tweet and probably lead to the formation of a not-for-profit organization, a certification program similar to that required of medical doctors and air craft pilots, a Web site, and maybe a movie deal.
The author of the “Dammit” essay is Dan Sullivan, who is the oft-quoted expert in search. The distinction between search as in marketing and search as in the enterprise is not usually made. I have seen Mr. Sullivan’ statements about Google, online marketing, and other aspects of the online world, I associate him with search engine marketing, conferences chock full of ad executives and stressed Web site managers, and newsletters that explain the intricacies of getting a Web page to be trim and fit for indexing.
You real digital journalists, fall in, hustle, hustle, hustle.
The “Dammit” essay turns on a different color spot light. Mr. Sullivan wrote:
Bloggers got bumpkiss. We have no lobbying group. We have no organization designed to help members learn the intricacies of uncovering government documents. We can’t get government agencies to call us back at all, at times (I know, been there and done that). And we’ve got a newspaper industry increasingly portraying us as part of an evil axis that’s killing them. Blogs steal their attention, and Google steals their visitors.
But the gravel in the craw is that existing associations are not doing what needs to be done to preserve the reputation, professionalism, and statute of digital journalists. He asserted:
I want online journalists to get organized. Yes, there’s the Online News Association, but that seems an extension of “traditional” journalists working in mainstream organizations with digital outlets. I think we need an “Online Journalists Association,” or a “United Bloggers” or whatever catchy name you come up with.
The author of “Dammit” then shifted into what struck me as “plea bargaining mode”. He wrote:
But while I love newspapers, came from them and hope they continue to find a place (more on their future later, short story, expect 4-5 “nationals” to survive), I’m begging them to stop seeing bloggers as enemies. Many bloggers are journalists, part of the news ecosystem, colleagues that are entitled to respect.
Yes, I shouted. Yes, bloggers deserve respect.
Respect, digital journalists deserve respect.
Well, some bloggers. There are the bloggers who write about their cats, personal tastes in breakfast food, long form bloggers, and the newer microbloggers. My thought is that bloggers have to be separated into the ones who are “digital journalists using the Web log form” and the run-of-the-mill millions who start a blog, quit, or rant and foam in a manner that often surprises me.
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