Google and Italy: More Hassles
March 17, 2010
Short honk: “Italy Goes after Google over AdSense Payments” revealed that Google has more hassles in Italy. The story in SEO Roundtable pointed out:
Italy is “going after Google for how they pay Italian AdSense publishers.”
The issue is that Google does not provide much detail about how it figures payments. SEO Roundtable noted that there has not been much coverage of this dust up. Interesting? The addled goose’s has noted that his AdSense payments have traditionally drifted down when a quarter is closing. Now there appears to be other concerns about payment predictability. Could the effectiveness of online ads been decreasing and Google is just a barometer of the economic downturn? Could an algorithm be stumbling? No solid information at this time.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2010
No one paid me to write this. Since it is an international post, I will report non payment to the Department of State.
Why Bing Is Gaining on Google
March 15, 2010
eWeek ran an interesting story a week or so ago. “10 Reasons Why Microsoft Bing Is Gaining on Google.” I read the article when it became available and I sat on it. I wanted to see what happened to Google. The market share data for Web search is squishy, and my view is that Google is contributing to Bing’s success more than Bing is contributing to Bing’s success. This idea is not the focus on the eWeek article.
The eWeek article points to such factors as integration, partnerships, and social networks plus seven other factors. I think these are indicative of buzzword juggling, not what is actually happening.
My view is:
- Google is in the midst of a one two punch, backlash and fatigue. Microsoft is benefiting.
- Google’s management is becoming increasingly aggressive and causing even the fuzzy wuzzy Google followers to wonder if they should accept a Google mouse pad and write happy things about the company.
- Google is in the news but most of the news is either negative or sort of crazy. One example is that Google is giving China the evil eye. Hey, China is a country. Google is a new type of company but when countries and companies collide, unless the company owns the country, the country will win.
Google has passed a line in the digital sand. Bing, despite its heritage and its weaknesses, looks a lot more appealing to some folks I opine.
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2010
Nope, a freebie. Who would pay me to write this type of comment which goes against the straight and true grain of a “real” publishing company. Ah, grain. I must report non payment to the Department of Agriculture.
Social Networking, the Military, and Control
March 8, 2010
I don’t know if this item from Gizmodo is accurate. I will leave its veracity to you. Navigate to “Israeli Raid Cancelled After Very Stupid Facebook Post.” The alleged incident involves a soldier, Facebook, and a post. The upshot is that the soldier revealed information about an upcoming military action. In the context of the azure chip outfit Datamonitor urging banks to use social media and the US military relaxing its rules, the alleged Facebook post underscores how easily a single person’s actions can compromise a much larger group. I know the azure chip crowd and the poobahs are avid social media Kool Aid drinkers. Make sure that Jim Jones has not prepared the beverage. The posting was not stupid. The posting underscores how a command and control system does not work if one assumes social media is just super. One more example of a person who can make a browser work assuming he or she can navigate the information ecosystem. Clueless.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I am not going to report non payment to anyone.
Mainframe Madness in US Government
February 28, 2010
Fascinating article “US Secret Service Shackled by Ancient Mainframes.” The search engine optimization company known as IBM has been crowing about the value of mainframes. In fact, a recent sale was to a bank in Africa. Yep, that’s a niche.
Despite IBM’s efforts to convince me that I need a mainframe in my office, I have had enough experience with these beasties to say, “No thanks.” IBM is deep into search engine optimization, and I know that SEO wizards understand computers.
The most interesting point in the write up was the use of the phrase “shackled by ancient mainframes.” Mainframes are not ancient; they are – er, ahem – geriatric.
The second interesting comment in the write up was in my opinion:
… a Secret Service memo (dated Oct. 16, 2009) obtained by ABC News revealed that 42 mission-oriented applications ran on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating. In addition, networks, data systems, applications, and IT security did “not meet” current operational requirements, while the IT systems lacked appropriate bandwidth to run multiple applications to “effectively support” USSS offices and operational missions around the world.
IBM Federal Systems has a big operation in between Germantown and Rockville. Why can’t the IBM folks get these Secret Service systems working? I think I know. The real wizards at IBM are in SEO or selling consulting services.
As a result, the mainframe units may be starved for talent.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2010
No one paid me to write this. With IBM revamping the GSA systems, I will report my writing for free to someone at IBM Federal Systems. I wonder if an SEO expert is on duty now.
UK Government Web Archive Progress
February 26, 2010
Short honk: I found “UK Web Archive Will Offer Just 1% of Web Sites by 2011” interesting for two reasons. First, the notion of taking a year to build a Web archive struck me as somewhat slow progress. My recollection is that at that rate, it may be difficult to build a sufficient repository to make its usefulness to me evident. New pages and changes are important in my work. Second, I found this comment interesting:
Its UK Web Archive, which was officially launched today, contains just 6,000 of around 8 million UK websites. According to the British Library, on average UK websites have a lifespan of between 44 and 75 days. It also said that at least 10 percent of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months. However, under the 2003 Legal Deposit Library Act the group needs to gain permission from the website owner before it can archive the site, which is slowing down the process dramatically.
When I read this, I can understand the frustration that some commercial companies must feel when government agencies decide to create certain collections of information. On the other hand, I see only opportunity. With the UK approach, the job seems to be behind the eight ball before it begins.
Why not chat with Internet Archive and just NOT (filter) out the non-UK content. Not perfect but somewhat more robust than 6,000 sites if I understand the write up.
Stephen E Arnold, February 26, 2010
No one paid me to point out that there is a disconnect between government time and Internet time. I think I have to report geophysical issues to the timekeepers in the US, NIST.
US Tech Lobbying Spend
February 6, 2010
Short honk: If you want to know what it costs to be a squeaky wheel and get it greased in certain situations, you will enjoy InfoWorld’s “Follow Tech’s Trail of Money in Washington.” The big surprise for me was the table’s reporting that Google made the list at number seven on the spending list. The total? $3.2 million. Quite a change from the days when the Googlers showed up in T shirts and sneakers. Oh, number one? Microsoft at $5.8 million.
Stephen E Arnold, February 6, 2010
No money for this one. I don’t even know to whom to report in DC. I will have to track down a lobbyist for guidance. No original thinking for me.
An Attensity About Face?
February 3, 2010
Update, February 3, 2010, 9 pm Eastern. A person suggested that this administrative move is designed to get around one or more procurement guidelines. Sounds reasonable but if the marketing push were ringing the cash register, would such a shift be necessary?–Stephen E Arnold
I learned that the Attensity Group has set up a business unit to sell to the Federal government. I thought Attensity’s roots were in selling to the Federal government and that the company’s diversification into marketing was a way to break free of the stereotypical vendor dependent on US government projects. Guess I was wrong again.
A reader sent me a link to this January 28, 2010, news release “Attensity Government Systems Launches as a Wholly Owned US Subsidiary of Attensity Group.” I noted this passage in the news release:
AGS offers a unique combination of the world’s leading semantic technologies: Attensity Group’s full offering of semantic engines and applications along with Inxight technologies from SAP BusinessObjects. Government agencies can now leverage — for the first time – the powerful capabilities enabled by the combination of Inxight’s multi-lingual advanced entity and event extraction with that of Attensity Group’s patented Exhaustive Extraction. Exhaustive Extraction automatically identifies and transforms the facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble spots in unstructured text into structured, actionable intelligence and then connects it back to entities – people, places and things. This new combined solution provides researchers with the deepest and broadest capabilities for identifying issues hidden in mountains of unstructured data — inside emails, letters, social media sites, passenger manifests, websites, and more.
In my experience, this is a hybrid play. Along with consulting and engineering services, Attensity will make its proprietary solutions available.
According Attensity, AGS, short for Attensity Government Systems, will:
provides semantic technologies and software applications that enable government agencies to quickly find, understand, and use information trapped in unstructured text to drive critical decision-making. AGS solutions pre-integrate nouns (entities) together with verbs, combining leading semantic technologies, such as Inxight ThingFinder, with Attensity’s unique exhaustive extraction and other semantic language capabilities. This creates a unique capability to see important relationships, create link analysis charts, easily integrate with other software packages, and connect the dots in near real-time when time is of the essence. The comprehensive suite of commercial off-the-shelf applications includes intelligence analysis, social media monitoring, voice of the citizen, automated communications response and routing, and the industry’s most extensive suite of semantic extraction technologies. With installations in intelligence, defense and civilian agencies, Attensity enables organizations to better track trends, identify patterns, detect anomalies, reduce threats, and seize opportunities faster.
I did a quick check of my files on Inxight. A similar functionality may be part of the Powerset technology that acquired acquired. My hunch is that Attensity wants to go after government contracts with a broader offering than its own deep extraction technology. The play makes sense, but I wonder if it will confuse the ad execs who use Attensity technology for quite different purposes than some US government agencies.
Will Attensity be a front runner in this about face, or will the company build out other specialized business units? I can see a customer support unit coming from a vendor, maybe Attensity, maybe not? The bottom line is that search and content processing vendors are scrambling in order to avoid what some business school egg heads call “commoditization.”
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
No one paid me to write about vendors selling to the US government. I will report this to the US government, maybe the GAO just to show that I am intrinsically responsible.
Google, Word Choice and Nexus One
January 25, 2010
Short honk: I don’t have a Nexus One and I don’t plan on buying the device. Mother Google has caught my attention with each of my Google monographs. I try to steer clear. I did read “How Google’s Nexus One Censors Cuss Words.” If accurate, the story suggests that Google sees a dirty word and scrubs it out of the message. Not even IBM in its salad days would make the IBM Selectric so it would prevent the user from typing certain words. What if Charles Bukowski were still alive, keying poems on his Nexus One? Would the output be vintage Bukowski?
drunk and writing poems
at 3 a.m.what counts now
is one more
tight ######before the light
tilts out
Yep, just what Mr. Bukowski wanted, according to Mother Google and its nannytron.
Google knows more than a creative person. How reassuring. What about the references to off color subjects in Shakespeare’s comedies? What about the humor in the works of Plautus and Terence? Google would have fixed their work as well.
What a nanny society is emerging! If someone buys a device, the person can do what he wants with it in my opinion. Thank goodness I am over 65 and heading for the data center in the sky. I suppose when the Googlers, the TSA, and other nannyites arrive, I will not be allowed to write my opinions using unapproved words.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
This is a freebie. I am expressing an opinion. I can envision a day when Wordpress will delete any reference to nannies, wings, and guys like Charles Bukowski. Quite a world. I will report this to the National Archives.
Google and Its Security Woes
January 18, 2010
There are some practical issues that must be addressed when dealing with security. First, the people working on the security problem have to be vetted. This requires time and organization. Organizations in a hurry and not well organized are at greater risk than a plodding, more methodical outfit. Although troubling to some, the security people have to be subject to some type of monitoring as well. The idea is that layers of security methods and procedures are required. Again, this takes expertise and experience. Short cuts can increase risk.
Then when something bad happens, it is a good idea to look for indications that someone close to the matter is involved, intentionally or unintentionally. Some countries use clever methods to socially engineer an opportunity to exploit a weakness in security. I know that the idea of a team implies that everyone is going to run the game plan. Alas, that’s not always accurate.
In my experience, keeping an issue contained is a prudent first step. The idea that quick reaction or chatter helps may be an inaccurate one. Some outputs are necessary, but crazy talk is rarely helpful whether from pundits, poobahs, satraps, or azure chip consultants.
I was surprised to read several widely circulated news stories that provide some additional “information” or “disinformation” about the Google security matter. The work “attack” is attached to this issue, but I don’t know enough to be able to say whether this was an “attack” or one of those cute things that math club members perpetrate as a way to get attention, change grades for the football team, or transfer cafeteria money to a charity like Midnight Auto Supply.
The Great Wall of China was built for a reason. Some of those reasons exist for today’s Chinese governmental entities. Those who build the Great Wall were not concerned with the environmental or financial impact of the Great Wall. Priorities may be different in China than in other geographic areas or nation states. Image source: http://www.globusjourneys.com/Common/Images/Destinations/great-wall.jpg
That’s the problem with lots of information or lots of disinformation. There is uncertainty, what I call a “cloud of unknowing”.
Here’s what’s caught my attention. (Keep in mind that I have no solid opinion on this matter because I only know what flops into my newsreader and that information or disinformation is suspect by definition.)
Google and China: Who Will Control the Internet?
January 15, 2010
I think it is fascinating to look at the headlines from analysts about the “meaning” of the China-Google dust up. Let me point to one online observation and invite you to read the many others available on most news aggregation sites. The exemplary discussion is “China Brushes Off Google Threat, Welcomes Law Abiders”. The news story offered this:
Mountain View, California-based Google said Jan. 12 in a blog posting that it wanted to reach an agreement with the Chinese government to allow unfiltered Internet searches, and would be removing restrictions in coming weeks.
Why did I find it representative? The reporter is putting the nation of China and Google on equal ground. The assumption is that Google (a company) is in a position of dealing with China (a nation) on equal ground. The Bloomberg story said:
“Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information,” Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, said in a question-and-answer session with reporters, a transcript of which was posted on the office’s Web site today.
The issue, in my opinion, is access to the Internet. Google is on the path leading to a position in which Google becomes the Internet. I include a number of references in my 2007 monograph, “Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator”, to technical systems and methods that give Google this “effective guidance”. China—at least for its citizens—wants to define the Internet.
The notion of a free and open Internet is the point. Economics is not the issue. Control is. You can poke around with various queries and find for yourself certain topics or content gaps in most Web indexing services. “Old” information may not exist. A good example is information about the Top 5% of the Internet created by The Point in the early 1990s. I have some information on ArnoldIT.com, but the indexing services do not pay much attention to certain unvisited, deep content. Other examples include information retrieved via certain “stop” words. An example is to search the Department of Energy’s main Web site for SCRAM or ECCS. Information is scarce, and the last time I ran these queries, I found dribbles, not torrents, of information on these acronyms.
The notion of control is important for three reasons:
- A service with control can offer users and customers information on the vendor’s or the gatekeeper’s terms. In one scenario, if you want certain information, you may have to pay for it. With control, monetization is somewhat easier
- A service can create specific collections of information which give that control point a competitive advantage. The notion of exclusives in the world of online has been around long time. One example was my experiments with making the database Pharmaceutical News Index exclusive on a single vendor in order to determine the monetary impact of an exclusive versus multiple outlets for a single source of information. The exclusive won because I could charge whatever I wanted and the users who perceived the content as “must have” paid more for the information. In short, exclusivity—that is, control—was more lucrative.
- The ability to see or index “everything” provides ammunition for information warfare. The battle can be more useful customer data or for “information nuggets” that another entity cannot “see” or easily obtain. Information nuggets can be used to perform a number of useful functions; for example, shape a particular type of information flow.
The dust up between China and Google is a significant step in my understanding of the strategy of Google. I have argued in my studies that Google is a new type of enterprise, crafted to match the emerging world of pervasive data. Google is a domain, and that domain wants to make decisions for itself. China wants to make the decisions itself, particularly with regard to digital information.
Google will be on the world stage when it decides what to do with regard to other nation states’ steps to get its arms around certain Google issues. For me, the Bloomberg story and others have elevated Google to nation state status. That’s exciting. And interesting. A pivot point between China and the “nation” of Google. Just an opinion, gentle reader, just an opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
Oyez, oyez, I am herewith reporting to the League of Nations that I was not paid to point out that the interaction of China and Google is a real nation to a “digital nation”. I did this because I had some time at 6 14 am on January 14, 2010, sitting in an airport awaiting another convenient flight.
