Wall Street Journal, Desperate and Ineffectual or Just Clueless
June 29, 2009
I am now receiving one email every hour from the Wall Street Journal. It is now 3 38 pm Eastern time, and I spoke with a customer service representative about my receiving these automated spam messages. The customer service representative took my email address, verified that I am a paid-in-full, real-life subscriber to the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. The customer service representative apologized three times, I explained that if I received additional spam asking me to subscribe I would post another document of record in my Web log and ask my legal eagle to notify the appropriate agencies in New Jersey and Kentucky about this use of my personal email. In my opinion, I am not sure whether this means the WSJ is desperate and ineffectual or just clueless.
So, here’s the contact information for these spam messages:
Can’t read the fine print? Let me reproduce it for you:
The Wall Street Journal
This is a special offer made available only for first time subscribers to The Wall Street Journal. Thereafter, your subscription will be renewed automatically at the then current rate. Other restrictions may apply. Should subscription rates or terms change, the Wall Street Journal Online will notify you in advance. If you would prefer not to receive further commercial messages from the Wall Street Journal Online, please click here and confirm your request. To contact us by mail, send correspondence to: Customer Service Department, the Wall Street journal Online, 4300 Route 1 North, South Brunswick, NJ 08852. Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company. Our records indicate that your email address is opted in to receive this email. etc, etc.
Observations:
- I opted out last week, and the service here told me it took Dow Jones 10 days to stop sending spam.
- I am a subscriber and I use the email address in this Web log for work, not spam from publishers who seem to be a combination of desperate and clueless
- The customer service representative said I would not receive any more emails.
My thought is that when once respected publishers use the tactics of those selling Viagra, colon cleansers, and get rich schemes – there’s serious trouble in Wall Street Journal type outfits.
Watch this Web log for updates from a customer. If an outfit treats a customer to spamfests, imagine what the company will do to mere prospects! I suppose the paper will be gone someday and I should have pity. Unfortunately spam from legitimate companies riles my feathers.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
Google and Big: The Roman Crowd Sees One Thing, Caesar Another
June 29, 2009
I read the New York Times’s story “Google Makes a Case that It Isn’t So Big” when it plopped into my newsreader sometime after I tucked my head under my wing. I awoke to the story referenced in a number of Web articles. I enjoyed the analysis in Tech Generation “God Is Out on Whether Google Is Good or Evil” because it mixed math and morality. C Shanti wrote:
Consumer Watchdog managed to get hold of the slides that Google is touting around earlier this month, and it’s clear that Google wants us all to think that it’s just a minnow compared to giants like Microsoft and IBM. Interestingly, it doesn’t include Intel in the figures – Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO is on Google’s board. One key message Google wants you and me to understand that “competition is just a click away” – that means that if something comes along that’s better, like Microsoft’s Bing, for example, arguably – Google stands the risk of being toppled off its search perch.
The addled goose wishes to honk respectfully:
- Search and other computer centric activities are a combination of mental habits and motor skills. As a result, switching is not the easy-as-pie action that most observers assert. I have said in many venues “habits are like a soft bed. Easy to get into and hard to get out of.”
- In the scheme of things, Google wants to be IBM-sized. I think it was in 2006 or 2007 that I first heard the $100 billion figure offered as a revenue target for Google. In Google Land, $100 billion is a one followed by 11 zeros or 2^11*5^11 if you are Google grade. The Google ad revenue is a mere $20 billion or 2^11*5^10. That an order of magnitude and a big number. Ergo: Google is small.
- The Google game plan means that Google will explain its position over and over again. Say something enough times to those who don’t dig into the argument and the Google position starts to sound pretty darned reasonable; “Google has many competitors” and you can see how Google presents its challengers in the image from the Google game plan deck below:
© Google via Computer Watchdog at http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/Googlepresentation.pdf
Yep, in semantic search Powerset and Hakia are going to be a real challenge for Drs. Norvig, Guha, Halevy, and Pereira and the others in the Google semantics vineyard.
My take on this big small argument is that it depends on the seat in the arena from which one observes the action. Think about Rome. Some of Google’s “competitors” are huddled in the tunnels in the Amphitheatrum Flavium (named after my hero Nero’s modest statue). Other competitors are in the arena; for example, Microsoft and maybe Amazon. Others are sitting in the Emperor’s box; for instance, IBM (a Google partner for now), Oracle (a semi pal), and other companies attracted to Google because its aura invokes victory.
The observers don’t see the dynamics of the Google ecosystem. The main action takes place in the sand of the battle ground. I think that is the wrong place to look. Honk.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
Booze, WiFi, ATMs, and Email
June 29, 2009
When Google introduced the equivalent of an email breath-a-lyzer, I could not figure out who would want to have a cooling off period between writing an email and sending it. The addled goose’s only beverage is mine run off water which can be a potent drink. However, most of the goose’s email is consistently incoherent. No cooling off period needed, thank you. Google, on the other hand, presumably has big data that suggested lots of Gmail users would write emails about which regret would germinate.
Now I know that Google was once again ahead of the addled goose.
Read TechRadar’s “Pub ATMs Set to Offer WiFi Internet Access”. The idea is that a Web surfer can knock back some booze, fire up a mobile computing device, and obtain wireless connectivity from the cash machine located in the tavern, bar, or shot house.
Now Google’s cooling off period makes sense. What changes will Google make in its search interface to accomodate surfers under the influence? Will some clever person figure out a way to integrate fraud with the ATM, online connectivity, and liquor? The social implications are interesting to ponder?
Quite a “blend” of services.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
SEO Mavens Embarassing Themselves
June 29, 2009
I am not sure if search engine optimization is as fraught with risks as hooking up with Nigerian email scammers, but SEO may be getting close. I am not sure what business www.absoluteSEO.net is in, but the addled goose plans to steer clear. Two reasons:
First, navigate (at your own risk, please) to Prudent Press Agency (great name that). Read the story “Addition of Advanced SEO Services in AbsoluteSEO.net”. The article was stuff with silly generalizations and claims that struck this addled goose as wacky. But, hey, that is what makes SEO such a tasty sector for those with a good nose for an easy buck, euro, or eek. Consider this passage:
In AbsoluteSeo there has been made addition of advanced SEO Services to beat up the competitors. In this era of stiff competition every big or small company wish to have a website of its own which helps in boosting up the business. But only having the website does not solve the purpose, but it need to be perfect in every aspect as only then it will top in the search engines and consumer will be able to reach the site easily. For this, AbsoluteSeo has introduced the latest SEO Services which will help to optimize the website in each and every way.
Well reasoned for some but not the addled goose.
Second, the browser I am using flaged www.AbsoluteSEO.com as a reported attack site. Here’s the message I saw when I poked around this online offering:
I received a call from a journalist working on an SEO story. I mentined that I thought SEO was mostly baloney sold to those who could not create substantive content or who lacked the insight needed to provide surfers with useful services. He thought I was in the minority because some of the high profile “search experts” were on board with various methods, statistical tools, and proprietary techniques.
Baloney. In this goose’s opinion, as the economy declines, the cream of the scammers rises like the nasties in the Harrod’s Creek mine run off pond.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
Struggling Ziff Davis Bids Farewell to Newspapers
June 29, 2009
One deep breathing publishing company has gone out for a long swim. Tom Forenski’s “Disruptive Technologies Disrupt – Goodbye Newspaper Companies” has a simple message for newspapers:
“What could the newspapers have done to survive this disruption?” Even if newspapers had done everything right: started blogging five years ago, offered free classified online advertising as Craigslist, etc. It would not have been enough to avoid the continued disruption of their business models. This is an important point. What’s happening to newspapers, and other media companies, is not a business cycle. It’s not their fault. When an industry faces a disruptive trend there is nothing that can be done — except a complete reinvention of your business. You can’t just tweak a few things here or there. Newspapers cannot survive in the online digital world because the economics of the new world can only support the disruptors — the companies in the forefront of disrupting the old business model.
Keep in mind that ZD has killed its print publication PC Magazine. eWeek is thin. You know the old adage, “You can never be too thin or too rich.” It doesn’t apply to publishing. A few days ago I received a message that Ziff Davis’s Extreme Tech Web site was shutting down. Whoops. I learned a day later. Extreme Tech will be repositioned.
Here’s what Yahoo Finance had to say:
Technophiles in search of reading material have a friend in Ziff Davis Holdings. Through its Ziff Davis Media unit, the firm is a magazine and online publisher targeting the technology and videogame markets. It publishes the print magazine EGM, which covers games and hardware platforms. On the Internet, Ziff Davis operates PCMag.com, along with popular game sites 1UP.com, GameVideos.com, and MyCheats.com. The company also offers consumer events and direct marketing services. Formed in 2000, Ziff David Media filed for Chapter 11 in 2008. It emerged from bankruptcy later that year. In 2008 the company ended the print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, taking the title online only. [Emphasis added]
As a former laborer in the Ziff Communication cotton fields, I can tell you that the present line up publications does not look like big money to me. There are some weird podcast type of shows. There is the complexity of finding a story from the UK side of the ZD family. There are former Ziff stars who seem to be working for other folks and promoting their Web logs. There are quite a few signs that ZD has itself not been able to make an online business model work in a way that generates the type of cash that the Ziff of old relished.
When one publishing company wheezes that newspapers are losers, I hear the panting and wonder if oxygen starvation is an issue.
It is one thing for an addled goose in rural Kentucky to point out the problems with traditional publishing. It is quite another for a publisher that has tried to go digital to make the statement. When that company has emerged from bankruptcy, the write up by Tom Forenski becomes a message from some dimension to which I am blind.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
SharePoint and Social Computing
June 29, 2009
You will want to read “Social Computing in the Enterprise. Microsoft Vision for Business Leaders”. You can download the Microsoft white paper from the SharePoint Web site. What makes this paper most intriguing is that it plops into the gap between the hyperbole about social computing and the information I saw this week that most business executives don’t do Web logs or other types of social computing. You can get a general sense of this somewhat surprising state of affairs in Computerworld’s “Top CEOs Still Shunning Twitter, Facebook”.
I don’t think Microsoft wrote its white paper in response to the news that CEOs “shun Twitter”. I think Microsoft wants to position SharePoint as a social operating system. The white paper employs routine rhetorical methods to create a need for a SharePoint solution. SharePoint, by the way, is not positioned as complex. Other approaches are complex. See page 10 for more along this line:
This complexity makes it difficult to apply traditional structured project management and collaboration solutions. Social computing can help optimize the performance of teams by adding a dimension of unstructured collaboration. This provides a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogs and authentic, spontaneous conversations between people in previously isolated areas of the company that can expose best practices—and call attention to inefficiencies and duplication—more rapidly.
So, SharePoint as a social operating system. Two references to the word “search”. I wonder what happened to the potent relationship mapping tools in Fast ESP. Any thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
Google and Image Recognition
June 29, 2009
Not content with sophisticated image compression, Google continues to press forward in image recognition. Face recognition surfaced about a year ago. You can get some background about that home-grown technology in “Identifying Images Using Face Recognition”, US2008/0130960, filed in December 2006. The company has long history of interest in non text objects. If you are not familiar with Larry Page’s invention “Method for Searching Media” US2004/0122811 was filed in 2003.
Source: Neven Technologies, 2006
The catalyst for the missing link between auto identified and processed images and assigning meaningful tags to images such as “animal” or “automobile” arrived via Google’s purchase of Neven Vision (originally I think the company used the “Eyematic” name. The switch seems to have taken place in 2003 or 2004.)
At that time, All Business described the company in this way:
Neven Vision purchased Eyematic’s assets in July 2003. Dr. Hartmut Neven, one of the world’s leading machine vision experts, led the technical team that created the original Eyematic system. Dr. Neven is also developing groundbreaking “next generation” face and object recognition technologies at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI).
Google snagged with the acquisition the Eyematic patent documents. These make interesting reading, and I direct your attention to “Face Recognition from Video Images”, US6301370, which seems to be part of the Neven technology suite. The US patent document is – ah, somewhat disjointed.
Mixing Picasa, home grown technology, and the image recognition technology from Neven, Google had the ingredients for tackling a tough problem in content processing; namely, answering the question, “What’s that a picture of?”
Google provided some information in June 2009. A summary of Google’s image initiative appeared in Silicon.com, which published “Google Gets a New Vision When It Comes to Pictures”. (Silicon.com points to CNet.com which originally ran the story.) Tom Krazit reported:
Google thinks it has made a breakthrough in “computer vision”. Imagine stumbling upon a picture of a beautiful landscape filled with ancient ruins, one you didn’t recognize at first glance while searching for holiday destinations online. Google has developed a way to let a person provide Google with the URL for that image and search a database of more than 40 million geotagged photos to match that image to verified landmarks, giving you a destination for that next trip. The project is still very much in the research stage, said Jay Yagnik, Google’s head of computer vision research.
For me the key point in the Silicon.com story was that Google used its “big data” approach to making headway in image recognition. When matched to technology evolving from the FERET program, Google can disrupt a potentially lucrative sector for some big government integration firms. The idea is that with lots of data, Google’s “smart software” can figure out what an image is about. Tapping Google’s clustering technology, Google’s Picasa image collection has been processed engineers to assign meaningful semantic tags to digital objects that don’t contain text.
Plumbing Master, Plumbing Apprentice
June 28, 2009
Thank goodness for Cade Metz’s “Google Mocks Bing and the Stuff behind It.” My research documented Google’s investment in hardware and software infrastructure once Messrs. Bing and Page had the cash to move away from the Lego rack housing its first servers. Microsoft’s approach to infrastructure has been via a more traditional approach. I have described the basics of the company’s approach in this Web log.
Microsoft’s cutting back on its data center spending underscored for me the burden Microsoft’s approach imposed on the company in a faltering economy. Hiring Yahoo data center experts struck me as a clear indication that Microsoft wanted to follow a different drummer than Microsoft.
I routinely include diagrams of Google’s approach in my lectures. No one in my audiences in organizations at gatherings like the NFAIS venue on June 26 seems to know that hardware and software plumbing is a Google core competency.
Mr. Metz’s write up observed:
“Our approach is a little more absolute than [Microsoft’s],” Gill said. “Not only does getting to the end user have to be fast, but the back-end has to be extremely fast too…[We are] virtualizing the entire fabric so you get maximum utilization and speed on a global basis as opposed to local fixes – putting one service in a data center, for example, in Denver. “You want to figure out how you want to distribute that across the entire system so you get it as horizontal as needed, which is essentially the definition of cloud computing.” You can take issue with his terminology. But his argument is sound: While Microsoft is struggling to separately hone performance for each and every application, Google can uniformly juice speed across its entire portfolio. The secret to Google’s success, Gill said, is not in the company’s mystery data centers, but in its software infrastructure, including GFS, its distributed file system; BigTable, its distributed database; and MapReduce, its distributed number-crunching platform.
Several points warrant mentioning:
- Google’s approach delivers costs savings in a number of ways, including the automation of data center operations, configuration, spending for uninterruptable power supplies, etc.
- The Google plumbing is more homogeneous than Microsoft’s. You can see what I mean by looking at the diagram in my write up here.
- Google has done a lousy job of explaining its advantage. Content to publish technical papers, the language, the Googley humor (janitors for the smartest software in the Googleplex), and the game plan that Googlers run when giving talks give Microsoft ample scope to market their brand of technical excellence.
The bottomline is that Google has bumbled the opportunity to make clear what it has built and what its “as is” infrastructure can do.
I am offering my opinion based on Mr. Metz’s write up. In my Google studies, I tried to be clear and explain what Google achieved. I don’t think anyone really understands Google’s achievement and using Googley humor to make the point works in Microsoft’s favor. Math club is fun for those in it. Those who are in other activities don’t know what the heck the math folks are talking about.
Big, big problem for Google.
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
Wall Street Journal, Spam, and a Hint of Desperation
June 28, 2009
I have been running around for a week. I returned to dozens of spam emails from allegedly the Wall Street Journal. I clicked on the “don’t mail me these” link and learned that it takes the alleged Wall Street Journal 10 days to process an unsubscribe request. Odd, I thought software scripts executed more quickly. Well, maybe at more progressive outfits. Here’s the deal:
Now I must say that this graphic approach in the dozens of spam messages I have in my inbox is as catchy as anything from the Viagra vagrants, the PediPaws pushers, or the refinancing idiots.
I don’t like spam, and companies that mail me unsolicited baloney get laser sharp coverage in this Web log. Look at the howls from the Nstein crowd. Bad goose for objecting to multiple copies of meaningless to me email messages. I get lots of email, and I want to get only email directly germane to what I do to get antibiotic shots from the avian vet I frequent. Mine drainage is bad for a goose like me.
Quite professional is the alleged WSJ these days, and after the unsourced story about Steve Jobs’s liver transplant, I think the use of spam to get a person who is * already * a print subscriber to order another subscription is indicative of the desperation at the venerable newspaper.
I spoke yesterday to a former information technology professional about the alleged WSJ’s online service. I think the word he used was “clueless”. And – get this – I have a source too.
I set up a rule to put this enticing missives directly in the trash folder for autodeletion. Unless the WSJ finds a solution to its present troubles, I don’t think I will have to worry too much about this type of AOL-inspired marketing much longer. Nope, I can see the guys who have the Pitchmen TV show tackling subscriptions to the alleged WSJ. I wonder if the Slap Chop writer will be enlisted to explain why I would want to deal with an outfit who spams an existing customer. Oh, oh, I know why. The WSJ marketing manager and / or the alleged WSJ information technology people will say, “We’re sorry. We had no idea that we were sending these messages.” Yeah, I believe that. Perhaps I will dig into my files and recount the sequence of events surrounding the alleged WSJ’s online efforts, culminating with the Factiva fizzle, the direct mail spamming, and the abundance of alleged WSJ content that I can locate on various Web servers? On the other hand, why bother?
If you want this deal and email like I receive, click here. Careful. This outfit might not be the alleged WSJ. I wonder if the WSJ attorneys are checking into this nuisance. Probably not. It’s Saturday. Better things to do.
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
Google and Scientific Tagging
June 28, 2009
In my talk on June 26, 2007 for NFAIS, a question came from one of the participants in the Webcast of my presentation. A person wanted to know if Google Scholar tagged documents with scientific and other types of more formal language. The example was “heart attack” or “myocardial infarction”. I pointed the questioner to Big Google and this query: backpain. Now scroll to the bottom of the page, and you will see these added features:
This is a component of “universal search” so you see videos, categorized results, and the more precise medical term “fibromyalgia”. My point was the Google has the capability of providing these types of added value tags to the content in Google Scholar and to Google Books, for that matter. So far for public access, more sophisticated content processing outputs are not part of these two services; that is, Google Scholar or Google Books. If you know that Google is adding more sophisticated features to these services, please, use the comments section of this Web log to alert me. As Google grows larger and changes, I have a tough time keeping track of Mother Google’s knitting. People do seem to be resonating with the notion of surfing on Google. I have accepted an invitation to give a talk at the Magazine Publishers Association shindig in New York this fall. The topic? Surfing on Google. It’s not nice to fool, Mother Google.
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
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