Goggle Mini Wave Washes Ashore
December 19, 2010
Short honk: The Wave thing is at Apache. The developer is at Facebook. The Google is back with a mini Wave called Shared Spaces. You can get the basics in “Google Has a New Social Experiment”. Begin your exploration at this link. The comments on this Google page are interesting. My view is that the real deal is dataspaces, a Google research effort that is bigger and bolder. I wrote about dataspaces for Sue Feldman a year or so ago. I also put some information in my Gilbane monograph named after this Web log. No one, as far as I know, cared much. Probably not a great idea in my opinion. I don’t know about shared spaces, but the dataspaces effort is a big deal and involves some of the Math Club’s top pranksters.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2010
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Google, Multiple Operating Systems, and the Mad Scramble
December 19, 2010
I thought politicians changed their tune. Navigate to “The Cloud OS” and you will see that even wizards and former Math Club members can crawfish with the best of the Washington DC big wheels. Xooglers have, in my opinion, a schizophrenic knife edge. On one hand, Google gave them the moxie to be world beaters. On the other hand, Xooglers are no longer part of the Google.
The point of “The Cloud OS” is, well, it’s okay for Google to be Google. I don’t have any problem with a multi billion dollar company doing what it thinks furthers the shareholders’ interests. I am ambivalent about Google’s multiple operating system approach. I think most users don’t know an operating system from a solid state drive. Computing is on a trajectory to work like toasters. I don’t have a strong opinion about that shift either.
Here’s a passage from the write up that caught my attention:
One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it’s spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user.
The big question is, “Who decides what does a function and when?” The answer, in my opinion, is the Math Club, Xooglers, and others of that ilk. The operating system is indeed irrelevant to the user. What matters is the control of the information utility.
Forget Google. Forget Gmail. Forget whatever hook one uses to think about a giant company controlling information plumbing. The physics of information work like the good old physics taught in grad school. In systems, strange attractors grab old and structures emerge. The idea for online information is to “own” one of those emergent structures. Other, smaller structures exist, but the physics of information becomes interesting when one of these big, emergent systems snags “energy”. In information one can measure energy in money, clicks, volume of data, or some other situational metric. The idea, however, is that once a big emergent structure becomes manifest, that structure calls the shots.
So the chatter about operating systems is useful but it is like talking about a behavior at a boundary condition. The main event is the emergent system which may contain substructures. Although interesting, the substructures are subordinate to the main idea: control.
What’s this mean to Facebook, Google, and similar companies? A two class world. The builders and the users. Medieval, Dark Ages, paternal? These terms are indeed suggestive. The focus is the system, not the players. The information of physics suggests constant change and when new structures emerge a bit of desperation becomes discernable. Today’s dominant system may be tomorrow’s LTV or Enron because permanence is tough when bytes collide. The mad scramble is a nibble of revisionism, but instructive nevertheless. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2010
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Netvibes Dashboards and Search
December 19, 2010
The San Francisco Gate gives us another story about dashboards: “Introducing Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence Solutions: Business Intelligence Reinvented for the Real-Time Web.” Netvibes has invented the Dashboard Intelligence solution, a dashboard programmed with features, including SmartTagging, to collect, interpret, and organize real time information for businesses. Netvibes’s advertising declares that the dashboard will save time, generate usable, current data, and keep businesses abreast about all social media information. The SmartTagging feature is how most of these actions will be accomplished.
“SmartTagging can capture hidden value generated by an infinite number of everyday work activities. Users won’t need to learn any complex new tools–they will soon be able to simply click and tag anything they access online with their personal sentiment and share their expertise with the entire organization.”
SmartTagging will then distribute this information to other personnel, who then can comment, and their additions will be sent out. This creates a cyclical process, augmented by new, real time information that keeps being fed into the system. I wonder if there will any repeated information or systems will get overloaded. Conclusion: do these dashboards actually make information access easier or harder in your opinion? Or, do dashboard provide a better user experience with the data pre-processed and ready to consume without critical thinking?
Whitney Grace, December 19, 2010
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Boolean and the Future of Search
December 19, 2010
Six years teaching library instruction sessions to college students taught me that Boolean searching is misunderstood by a majority of individuals. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised to read Glen Cathey’s Sourcecon blog post, “Boolean Search Does Not = Internet Search”, detailing how many in the human resources industry think Boolean and Internet searching are one in the same.
In the article, Cathey provides a brief history of Boolean’s creation in the 1800s, then states, “Practically any information system from which you need to search and retrieve information from ‘speaks’ Boolean to some extent, whether you realize it or not.” He goes on to highlight the varying degrees in which Boolean can be used in several databases and search engines—concluding that “Internet search = limited and conditional Boolean search.”
An interesting perspective, but given that Boolean searching is limited in some of the most popular search engines and databases, I don’t believe that a clear understanding will be coming any time soon. And Boolean? Is there an app for that UX (user experience)?
Christina Sheley, December 19, 2010
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Big Data, CAP, and NoSQL
December 19, 2010
We came across an interesting series of Web write ups about big data. You may know about the CAP theorum. The idea is that is “impossible for a distributed computer system to provide simultaneously” guarantees of “consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time), availability (node failures do not prevent survivors from continuing to operate), [and] partition Tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss). For more, read the Wikipedia entry here.
Nati Shalom’s Blog series Part I, II, and III on the CAP theorem postulates that if you are worried about CAP, then maybe you just need to re-define your needs. Shalom’s general thesis is as follows:
One of the core principals behind the CAP theorem is that you must choose two out of the three CAP properties. In many of the transactional systems giving away consistency is either impossible or yields a huge complexity in the design of those systems. In this series of posts, I’ve tried to suggest a different set of tradeoffs in which we could achieve scalability without compromising on consistency. I also argued that rather than choosing only two out of the three CAP properties we could choose various degrees of all three.
Some useful info to tuck away for future reference and consult before talking to a vendor who is pitching scale and the cloud when you need search or content processing.
Alice Wasielewski, December 19, 2010
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How Americans Spend Their Time
December 18, 2010
Slurp, slurp. ”
That is the sound of “real journalists” gobbling the latest Forrester confection. I read “Forrester: Americans Spend Equal time Online and Watching TV.” Great headline, but I am not sure I know what “time” means. Also, the pairing of online and watching TV is ambiguous.
I get the point. Web activity is now as popular as watching the boob tube. Great.
But what happens to the data if a person watches TV when online?
I think I know what the mid tier outfit is trying to accomplish: make sales for its consulting business. The “data” are the bait for the canny Forrester fishermen and fisherwomen.
Here’s the main idea. People are spending as much time watching TV as the people are fiddling with their computers, which I think means devices that are computers just hauled around or tucked in a pocket.
Several observations:
- What’s the sample size? What was the sampling method? Is the n=xxx such a big deal? Omit that from the stats homework in the lousy liberal college I attended as a dull normal and the prof awarded an automatic F. Guess that doesn’t apply to mid tier consulting outfits.
- Online usage is growing. Okay, great to know since devices have been proliferating for several years. It makes sense that if there are more devices, usage would go up.
- TV sucks. Well, the write up did not document that, but the TV crowd, like the newspaper and other publishers, are in a tizzy as people use their laptops and gizmos like the Apple TV to get the programming each user wants. With control, TV sucks less. If you want only shows you love, TV does not suck at all.
- The features used by those online mirror the same Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville “average” that his travels in America documented. The only difference is that the stuff that pleases is pretty well know; for example, email, buying stuff, and socializing.
What’s not in the write up may be in the “real” study available from Forrester? Facebook. My hunch is that the demographics of a statistically-valid sample rigorously surveyed would reveal some nuances not in the article and maybe in the “real” study. Here’s a list:
- In each demographic, which activity is growing more rapidly, which is decreasing more rapidly?
- In the demographic with the heaviest TV usage, what’s the group doing? Using the TV as background, a way to feel loved, or as a primary activity?
- In the demographic with the heaviest online usage, what amount of time is spent on Facebook versus any other social system.
- Across the sample, what is the lean back versus lean forward behavior? How many in each sector use one mode as a primary and the other mode as a secondary?
- Across demographics, who does the most buying? Under what conditions?
Our work in this field suggests some surprising behavioral shifts. The multitasking characteristic is covered in a Forrester blog post. Presumably that activity is documented rigorously in the “real” report.
But what about that sample? What confidence should I have in the oh-so-precise data? Without data about the mechanics of the study, not much I fear.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2010
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IBM Chases Predictive Analytics Opportunities
December 18, 2010
IBM was once a top technology provider but over the last few years it seems to have lost its oomph, maybe even a decline.
According to the Thomas Net News “New IBM Predictive Analytics Software Personalizes Customer Relationship Strategies,” IBM seems to be trying to bounce back with its new predictive analytics software. IBM attempts to get involved in the social media world and promises that with its SPSS Modeler “users can uncover and analyze information from social media sources, such as social networks and blogs and then merge that with internal data for accurate insight and predictive intelligence.”
More importantly companies could then use the data to better understand their customer fan base as well as for marketing and product development direction. Data analytics providers and the social media world are flourishing and it seems that IBM is trying to enter the game. However, it’s likely that IBM will be benched and forced to watch from the sidelines.
At the same time, SAS appears to be ramping up its effort in this sector as well. The battle of the statistics superstars in underway. Maybe a cable TV reality show here, gentle reader?
April Holmes, December 18, 2010
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US Search Share, November 2010
December 17, 2010
Short honk: Fancy dancing with search share is underway. I read “Bing Search Share Edges Up in November.” In theory, the link will work for a few days. Key point: The Google tallies a 66.2 percent share. The combined Microsoft-Yahoo search share is pretty much the rest of the traffic. No margin of error and no details of the method.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2010
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Baidu to Invest in Search Results Filtering
December 17, 2010
Those expensive coffees at boutique coffee shops are filtered. People like filtered coffee.
The goose knows why Baidu is probably going to be successful in certain markets. “Baidu to Spend $15 Mln to Screen Search Engine Results” reports that “China’s leading search engine plans to deploy $15 million to expunge illicit material and false information from its search results.” The source? State media.
Filtering makes some things better. One example is revenue derived from for fee service for the China market. Image source: Weekender.com
Observations:
- Filtering happens. What’s interesting is the price tag placed on the renewed effort. Details about the scale of the filtering or “expunging” appear in the Interfax.com write up
- Happy government officials. Reading between the lines I could see modest smiles of happiness on the faces of some government officials.
- Unbeatable advantage in the fastest growing and largest market for online in the world. No further comment necessary because some Google shareholders may ask, “Tell us again why you are not making every effort to maximize shareholder value in the world’s largest market?”
In my opinion, the $15 million is irrelevant. The message is the investment. Message received in Harrod’s Creek. I am not sure about elsewhere.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2010
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For You N-Gram Fans
December 17, 2010
There are grams and n-grams. If you have not looked for occurrence data in the GOOG, navigate to http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/. If the link does not resolve, go to Google .com and enter the query “Google Books n-gram Viewer.” With a bit of effort, you can fire phrases words at the Google Book index and see counts.
I tested the phrase “information factory” and got no hits. My publisher has not made my monograph in which the phrase was used in the mid 1990s available. I ran a query on “information warfare” and there were no hits. Your queries may be more productive. The goose is too narrow for the service.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2010
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