The Columns of April from Stephen E Arnold
March 30, 2011
Quite a bit of flux in the world of print and online publishing. I am going to need a scorecard to know who publishes which of my for-fee columns. Here’s the line up for April 2011 or a month or two later. The production cycle for some print publications requires two, three, or more months in some cases.
Enterprise Technology Management, owned by IMI Publishing Ltd. “Google Nurtures Its Enterprise Services” talks about some of Google’s more interesting actions germane to its enterprise products and services. One of the points I mention is Google’s hiring Oracle sales and marketing professionals. In a word, “Wow.”
Information Today, owned by Information Today. “Search to Services: The Quiet Enterprise Revolution” explores the shift from licensing software to selling services. Search has become more of a consulting business than a software business in certain circles.
Information World Review, owned by Bizmedia, puts my picture on its home page as I write this on March 18, 2011. Go figure. “Real Time Search and the Search Results Laundry List” talks about the problems of delivering users a laundry list of results for real-time content. I highlight a company called Digital Reasoning and its new Synthesys system. Yes, it is better than a results list.
KMWorld, also owned by Information Today. “The Sentiment Explosion” talks about the use of semantics to solve problems, not provide a subject for lectures on next generation search technology. One of the companies discussed is Attensity and one exemplary product is Hakia’s Sensenews, a stock picking advisory service.
Smart Business Network owns magazines and Web sites. “Google Jazzes Local Advertising Options” talks about Google Tags and how a local business can get an Adwords or “boost” for a compelling $50 a month.
Although it is gratifying to get paid a pittance for these somewhat polished pieces, I am going to have to rethink what I am doing. Across these five publications, the reach is less than that of Beyond Search and Inteltrax, which is a very shocking fact for us dwelling in the heart of darkness in rural Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2011
This item is a freebie; the columns are not.
Android Security: Is This an Oxymoron?
March 30, 2011
When I read this, I said sub vocally, “Wow.”
The H Security reports, “Google’s Security Tool Infected With Trojan” explains how the new Android Market Security Tool, developed to delete the recent contaminated apps, actually is infested with a Trojan virus. Users are unaware about the newest infection after a rash of harmful apps hit the Android phone in recent weeks. They were informed to expect the new tool to clean up their phones, but it’s making greater knots in the mangled data. Good news is that the infected security tool is only on an unregulated network in China.
According to an initial analysis by Symantec, the Trojan contacts a control server and is able to send text messages if commanded to do so. According to F-Secure, BGServ (as the contaminant is called) also sends user data to the server after being installed.
Wow.
We are offered the same age- old advice to protect our technology from digital infection: don’t open the application unless you know who sent it. Great advice for everyone in general and maybe for Android folks in particular.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2011
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Protected: MadCap and MadPak
March 30, 2011
Google: Do You See What I See?
March 29, 2011
I am in the deep dish pizza pan of jet lag. The goodies are gone and I am like the goo left behind. I did have the energy to read “Still Active In China, Google Hunts For New Business.” I wandered around a tech conference in Hong Kong. I went to some meetings. I had chats at breaks with rocket scientists. My interest was not the Google. I was there to flog my “content with intent” service, and I was busy. Too busy, I think from the bottom of the greasy pan.
There were some folks who wanted to talk about Google. I flipped the question because I am not involved with Google research at the moment. The answers I got back were consistently negative. My sample is skewed and maybe the rocket scientists at the Online Asia Pacific show were not representative of attendees from various countries 12 times zones from the goose pond. My take was that Google had stumbled in China and everyone seems to know it.
I read in the “Active in China” article this passage:
While it continues to battle the Chinese government over censorship and privacy concerns, Google Inc. is pushing forward with a bid to find new business. In a speech earlier this month, Elliott Ng, Google’s new director and head of product management for China, said the company was not only generating revenue there, but had its most profitable month ever in China in December.
Is the assertion about revenue true? Are there some verifiable data from a source other than a consultant, poobah, or maven? If Google has found a way to criticize a government AND earn money in the country controlled by the government with which Google finds fault, that’s good news. What struck me about this comment in the cited article is that I did not get one hint, hear a peep, or pick up a suggestion that Google was in high cotton in China.
If anything, the notion of “curation” and understanding online policy is strong and going to get stronger. My source was a minister from the country which Google finds deeply flawed. I think everyone should have an opinion and the right to express it in appropriate ways in appropriate contexts. However, in some situations, one must understand that the “rules” or “assumptions” from one nation state do not automatically apply within the borders of another nation state.
To forget that a company is one type of entity and a country an another can lead to some darned exciting situations. So, I want to see some numbers for Google’s assertions and hear from various business partners and a handful of government officials that the Google assertions are indeed the reality in China. Is this unreasonable? I think not. I wonder if that smudge of cheese is edible? No assumption needed. A taste test will do.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2011
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Tips for Google RSS Feeds
March 29, 2011
Google News is a quick and easy way to keep on top of world and local events. With Google paying more attention to real time and social content, we find that good ideas to manage the “fire hose” quite useful. Here at the goose pond, RSS feeds are helpful when they alert us in real time about current news. When you combine the two, you have a great news application. One wouldn’t think there would be a way to improve such a great tool, but “Five Interesting Ways To Use Google News RSS Feeds” gives us great tips!
By learning more about these RSS feeds and incorporating a few interesting tricks to display and read these RSS news feeds, you’ll be able to stay on top of all the very best news as easily as possible.
Some of the tips are very simple to follow: find your preferred Google RSS feed, find news feeds for your topic of interest, create your own, and edit it to suit your preferences. By managing your feeds, you can keep yours news content relevant. The article goes on to explain ways that you can use the feeds for business, social networks, or personal Web sites and how to keep the content updated. You can use Google Alerts, add new search terms, add a NewsShow, get Google Reader, or read them via NetVibes. Before reading this article I did not realize how applicable RSS feeds were to every day websites. Try them out for yourself.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2011
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Dot Net, Not Yet for Some Hot Outfits
March 29, 2011
Microsoft is selling, licensing, or installing tens of thousands of SharePoint servers with a heart beat like that of a healthy mastodon. The problem that most of the cheerleaders in search and content processing overlook is that SharePoint is a giant services generator. Think of SharePoint as a digital money machine for English majors, failed Web masters, and journalists reinventing themselves.
I read “Why We Don’t Hire Dot Net Programmers.” Interesting information for sure. Here’s a snippet:
See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there, keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to do all the thinking for them. Microsoft started down this path when they were the only game in town, explicitly to maintain their monopoly by making it as hard as possible to either port Windows apps to non-Windows platforms, or to even conceive of how to do it in the first place. This decision — or this mandate for incompatibility, perhaps — has produced countless ramifications. Small things, like using backslashes in file paths rather than forward slashes like any dignified OS., or using a left-handed coordinate system with DirectX instead of right-handed as was used since the dawn of computer graphics. Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what bytes are actually going over the wire. And a thousand other things in between: programming tools that generate a dozen complex files before you even write your first line of code, expensive servers that force a remote GUI terminal on you to do essentially anything despite a few keystrokes being perfectly adequate for everybody else, a programming culture almost allergic to open source licensing. The list goes on and on. None of this makes you a “bad programmer”. All these differences are perfectly irrelevant if you just want to make 1.6 oz burgers as fast as possible, and commit the rest of your career to an endless series of McDonalds menus. But every day spent in that kitchen is a day NOT spent in a real kitchen, learning how to cook real food, and write real code.
Will Microsoft agree? Nah. Will Microsoft certified companies and people agree? Nah. Will poobahs and mavens focused Microsoft SharePoint governance agree? Nah.
Who would agree? Maybe outfits like Facebook, Google, and Oracle.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2011
Freebie unlike unemployed journalists reminted as SharePoint experts.
The Google Comma: Web Search Secret Revealed
March 29, 2011
There are many ways to search Google, but sometimes it returns too much information when all you want is a simple results page. “Get Clutter-Free Google Search Results with a Comma” has wonderful news for those who want to tidy some Google Web search results. To find on-topic and simple search results, simply add a comma after your search term. We are given an example with apple stock:
If you type apple stock into Google, it will move all your search results down to replace it with a graph of Apple’s stock—meaning you have to scroll down to find your actual search and news results…If you want to exclude these extra results from your searches, you can just add a comma (or certain other characters, like a period) to your search results, i.e. apple stock.
Google has many relevant applications, but sometimes they give us too much. Using the comma tip for searches returns Google to its original search roots. Useful.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2011
Protected: More SharePoint Education
March 29, 2011
Search and Pinpointing the Obvious: Where Is My Nose?
March 28, 2011
After decades of ignoring enterprise, Web search, desktop search, and any other type of search, revelation. In “O’Brien: Search Undergoing Biggest Disruption Since the Dawn of Google,” I learned the obvious. One example of finding one’s nose is clear in this snippet:
During a recent conversation, Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners listed search as one of four technologies ripe for disruption in the next decade. “We’re seeing the peaking and declining of indexed search,” he said. Indexed search is the way most of us think about search. We sit down at a computer, type some key words into a box, and are presented with a series of links to other websites. Google did a vastly superior job of organizing this information on the Web.
In the materials I have made available on ArnoldIT.com, I have explained several facets of nose finding as it relates to the different flavors of search:
First, search has no single definition. As a result, no one, including those who have just located his or her nose, defines specially a particular type of search and retrieval. No surprise then that few agree on what findability means.
Second, one of the realities of search is that an individual user is generally indifferent to technology, interface,, ads, and nose finders say. The focus is on solving a problem; for example, getting information the user wants.
Third, search—regardless of technology or need—is one of those tough technical fields where teenagers find new ways to solve very tough problems. Once one new vendor revolutionizes search, the stage is set for another wave of innovation. So, “Hello, Facebook.”
Bottom line: search is doomed to be permanently disruptive. We are not talking Facebook, we are talking Hegel.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2010
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SharePoint: The New Black?
March 28, 2011
A new season of Project Runway is coming. Will black be the “new” color? Will SharePoint be the new “black”? I learned in Hong Kong that Microsoft is selling tens of thousands of SharePoint licenses each week. With SharePoint the new “black” for corporate fashionistas in Hong Kong and apparently other world capitals, the question of the value of a trendy color is important. I suggest you point your browser at “Measuring the Value SharePoint 2010 Can Bring to Your Organization.”
One of the goslings forwarded this link to me. I scanned the write up and noted that the author is into SharePoint, “smitten” may be a better word. The write up asserts that SharePoint 2010 has the ability to add value to my business by correcting and preventing some common business problems and improving the everyday functionality of my organization.
There is a key assertion; to wit: SharePoint 2010 can improve productivity by speeding up how fast business problems are able to be resolved. The author is convinced that SharePoint allows me to involve fewer people, prevent common mistakes and compare how long it takes to solve problems utilizing SharePoint compared to the time it took before SharePoint solutions were implemented.
And wait. There is more. SharePoint also has the ability to reduce cost by reducing the licensing costs associated with technical support, servers, and helpdesks. By eliminating dual servers you can cut updating costs.
SharePoint, if it is a good fit for your organization, can also help to increase revenue by creating a more productive and time saving sales environment and allowing users to share knowledge and give the organization a more competitive edge. Also, by quickly resolving problems presented by customers creates loyal customers.
Yep, the new black. No problem, but I like a different color. My hunch is that many SharePoint licensees will find a different color of search system essential to enhance basic black.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2011
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