Arnold on Disintermediation in New Italian Compendium
December 8, 2008
December 2008 is shaping up as a busy book month. I received on December 6, 2008, my copy of “Galassia Web: La Cultura nella Rete”, published by Civita Associazione with the support of Boeing. I contributed a chapter that begins on page 67 and ending on page 80. My contribution was “Giochi di Open Access e altre nuove tecnologie di communicazione: la tentazione disintermediazion”. If your Italian is a bit rusty, the approximate English translation is “The Interplay of Open Access and Other New Technologies.”
The main point of my contribution hinges on Disintermediation. Institutions such as museums and libraries want to provide an online catalog and some type of access to the information under their stewardship. But large companies such as Google are slowly aggregating a broad range of content. For now, commercial enterprises have not shown a desire to create an aggregated service that includes indexes, images, music, and other information public institutions have created. The risk is that unless groups of institutions take the lead in aggregation, the commercial service may by default become the library or the museum for Internet users. In short, the disintermediation that ravaged commercial online services and corporate libraries may now have an impact on the information now in the control of universities, public agencies, privately-endowed institutions, and governmental entities. I don’t have a timeline but I make the point that acting in a parochial way may waste time. Action can provide a countermeasure for the forces of disintermediation.
I want to send a happy quack to the publisher, Moira Macpherson, and the editorial team that made this collection of essays a reality. So, here comes, “Quack!”
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
Yahoo Jumping Ahead of Google
December 7, 2008
On December 7, 2008, PCWorld reported that Yahoo will offer abstracts, not laundry lists of search results. The news story I saw appeared in the Yahoo technology news service. You can read “Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results” here. If the link goes dead, try the PCWorld site itself here. When I saw the story, the search engine on the PCWorld site couldn’t locate the story. Nothing new there, of course. The key point in the unsigned article was that Yahoo’s Bangalore research facility has figure out how to abstract key information on the page. The idea is that when a user searches for “hotel”, the system would provide an address, map, and other information. I described a similar function in my description of Google’s dossier function. See US20070198481. According to the news story, Yahoo will roll out this service in 2009. My thought is that these types of smart services work really well when described on paper. The value of these “reports” or “answer” type systems is that language can be tricky. Google’s approach relies on “context”, a system and method disclosed in the February 2007 patent documents filed by Google’s Ramanathan Guha. My hunch is that Yahoo went public because of the rumors that Google was starting to use some of its niftier technology in certain public facing services. The Googler with whom I had interaction in London knew zero about the dossier function. Maybe Yahoo is trying to jump ahead of Google. We’ll see. I think Yahoo needs to address the shortcomings of its core search service first.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
Social Software Failures
December 7, 2008
On the flight from London to lovely Kentucky, I reflected on the “big buzz” at the International Online Conference. Delegates seemed fascinated by “social” software companies, features, applications, and technology. From the keynote to the endnote, social was the cat’s pajamas.
You will want to read J.W. Crump’s “A Look at Failed Social Networks”. You can find the article at BivingsReport.com here. The write up presents two cases in sufficient detail to provide useful insights into the use of “crowdsourcing” to provide various features and benefits to users. His analysis of Wal*Mart’s The Hub reveals that the service did not allow its users sufficient freedom.
The second case was VitalSkate, a site for those who enjoy ice skating. The lesson extracted from this social software service was the operator did not understand the users of the site.
The third case was iYomu, which was a social software site for folks like me who are older. Among the reasons this site failed was it was its lack of purpose.
For me, the most interesting chunk of information was the inclusion of a timeline prepared by Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison. Scanning the list is an easy way to identify the major players and the steady increase in these types of Web sites.
The thoughts that struck me as I reviewed Mr. Crump’s article were:
- Social networks seem to require purpose. entertainment, and keen understanding of the needs of the site’s users.
- Social software appeals to those who are young in heart or who a significant need and find that requirement satisfied by a service that is appropriate and fun to use.
- Social software and its attendant services are not a slam dunk. Despite the excitement MySpace.com and Facebook.com seem to offer services with wide appeal to a youthful demographic.
When the social “big buzz” is transported to an organization, a number of questions may require some consideration before deploying one of the zippy new services I saw demonstrated at the International Online Show; for example:
- A small organization may not have the number of employees and authorized users to make a social site generate sufficient traffic and information to warrant keeping the service online
- The cost of implementing and verifying a workable security system may be too onerous for most organizations. With a slap dash approach, the security and privacy methods may leave the organization exposed
- Are employees in an organization willing to participate in social software services? If the financial pressures are increasing, employees may be unwilling to allocate the time necessary to participate in meaningful ways.
I understand the interest in social software and the functions it makes available. The question is, “Will these services offer up enough tangible benefits to make the investment worthwhile?”
For me, the answer to the question is, “It depends.” Some governmental agencies and not-for-profit outfits may find social software helpful. In regulated businesses, I am skeptical.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
Information 2009: Challenges and Trends
December 4, 2008
Before I was once again sent back to Kentucky by President Bush’s appointees, I recall sitting in a meeting when an administration official said, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” When we think about search, content processing, assisted navigation, and text mining, that catchphrase rings true.
Successes
But we are learning how to deliver some notable successes. Let me begin by highlighting several.
Paginas Amarillas is the leading online business directory in Columbia. The company has built a new systems using technology from a search and content processing company called Intelligenx. Similar success stories and be identified for Autonomy, Coveo, Exalead, and ISYS Search Software. Exalead has deployed a successful logistics information system which has made customers’ and employees’ information lives easier. According to my sources, the company’s chief financial officer is pleased as well because certain time consuming tasks have been accelerated which reduces operating costs. Autonomy has enjoyed similar success at the US Department of Energy.
Newcomers such as Attivio and Perfect Search also have satisfied customers. Open source companies can also point to notable successes; for example, Lemur Consulting’s use of Flax for a popular UK home furnishing Web site. In Web search, how many of you use Google? I can conclude that most of you are reasonably satisfied with ad-supported Web search.
Progress Evident
These companies underscore the progress that has been made in search and content processing. But there are some significant challenges. Let me mention several which trouble me.
These range from legal inquiries into financial improprieties at Fast Search & Transfer, now part of Microsoft to open Web squabbles about the financial stability of a Danish company which owns Mondosoft, Ontolica, and Speed of Mind. Other companies have shut their doors; for example, Alexa Web search, Delphes, and Lycos Europe. Some firms such as one vendor in Los Angeles has had to slash its staff to three employees and take steps to sell the firm’s intellectual property which rightly concerns some of the company’s clients.
User Concerns
Another warning may be found in the results from surveys such as the one I conducted for a US government agency in 2007 that found dissatisfaction with existing search systems in the 65 percent range. AIIM, a US trade group, 
reported slightly lower levels of dissatisfaction. Jane McConnell’s recently released study in Paris reports data in line with my findings. We need to be mindful that user expectations are changing in two different ways.
First, most people today know how to search with Google and get useful information most of the time. The fact that Google is search for upwards of 65 percent of North American users and almost 75 percent of European Union users means that Google is the search system by which users measure other types of information access. Google’s influence has been essentially unchecked by meaningful competition for 10 years. In my Web log, I have invested some time in describing Microsoft’s cloud computing initiatives from 1999 to the present day.
For me and maybe many of you, Google has become an environmental factor, and it is disrupting, possibly warping, many information spaces, including search, content processing, data management, applications like word processing, mapping, and others.
Microsoft is working to counter Google, and its strategy is a combination of software and low adoption costs. I believe that Microsoft’s SharePoint has become the dominant content management, collaboration, and search platform with 100 million licenses in organizations. SharePoint, however, is not well understood as technically complex and a work in progress. Anyone who asserts that SharePoint is simple or easy is misrepresenting the system. Here’s a diagram from a Microsoft Certified Gold vendor in New Zealand. Simple this is not.
FastForward Search Blog on the Future of Blogs
December 3, 2008
I find sponsored Web logs fascinating. These quasi-promotional information services can be informative and quirky. Years ago, the Fast Search & Transfer company fired up the FastForward Web log to provided me and thousands of others with snippets of information about the Fast ESP user group conference. I asked about the user group focus a while back and learned that the Fast Forward Web log was reaching beyond that narrow focus.
That extension is quite evident. In fact, I recently read two posts here about the future of Web logs. One article was “The Uncertain Future of Blogging” by Jevon MacDonald; the other, “In 2010 What Will Replace Newspapers and Network TV?” I found the information in both interesting, in Mr. MacDonald’s piece, the data about media found their way into my statistics file. Then I began to reflect on a sponsored Web log’s role in the future of media. Here’s my chain of reasoning:
- A company Web log morphs into a community Web log and the company that started the Web log is acquired by Microsoft. I have little doubt about the potential financial support for the Web log will be available no matter what happens in the wide world of blogging in the months ahead.
- The future of media appears to be pretty grim with big companies embracing Web logs. Furthermore, the tools of blogging will now become powerful instruments in the hands of trained media professionals. If print newspapers can’t fly, the pilots will get a new airplane. That airplane may be blogging.
- Web log writers today have to innovate and shake blogging out of its doldrums. Big changes are coming fast.
I have over simplified the arguments in these two posts, so you must read the original write ups. What troubles me is that I expect to read about search and content processing, not about the problems of newspapers and other media companies. I want to know about the method Microsoft Fast used to get a government installation in a Scandinavian company up and running to make its spotlight function work well. I want to know how Microsoft Fast will handle voice to text in media files? I want to know how Microsoft Fast will integrate with Dynamics’ information stores held in SQL Server tables? I to know the status of the Microsoft Fast investigation underway in Norway and how to explain the issue to a contract officer who asks me for my view on the subject?
My opinion is that these search-centric topics are now out of bounds or out of information gas. I also think that the Web log is now a philosophical sounding board with a touch of consultant flummery added for color. To some search is less exciting than thinking about the future of Web logs when more newspapers bite the dust. Not to me. I want to read about ESP.
I would be eager to read FastForward if it returned to its roots and presented more substantive information about Microsoft Fast search, content processing, and information technology. I may be too limited in my thinking but a Web log anchored in Fast ESP should address topics germane to the software. But I’m an addled goose, easily confused by buzzwords like Enterprise 2.0 and analyses of the death of old media. What do you think? Should I re evaluate the FastForward blog?
Stephen Arnold, December 3, 2008
New Overflight Features
December 2, 2008
ArnoldIT.com has added two new features to its public Overflight service. Overflight provides a round up of news stories on more than 70 Google Web logs.
Exalead, developers of the CloudView information access system, indexes the Google Web logs. You can access the service from the Overflight splash page here or navigate to this vertical content collection here. Among the features of this index are:
- A thumbnail view of the Web page in a relevance ranked results list
- Full text searching of the entire corpus of Google’s Web logs. This means that you can identify a topic such as “semantics” and locate every reference to the subject. Given the recent suggestion that Google is not interested in semantics, you will find that when you run a query for “semantics”, Google’s Web logs make it clear that semantics are an important subject at Google.
- You can access content with a date filter. With this feature you can segment a results list by time.
- If a query matches documents in languages other than English, you can select the documents by language. The query “pdf” returns hits in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean.
A happy quack to the Exalead technical team. Use the comments section of this Web log to share your ideas with us.
The highest traffic on Overflight is flowing to the Google Ads Web logs here. We have added a continuously updated stream to this selection of Google Web logs. The “river” makes it easy to watch for important new developments in Google advertising services. You can try it here.
Watch for other developments on the public Overflight site. If your firm would like to create this type of information service for your Intranet, Web log, or competitive intelligence program, write us at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008
Social Media and a Search Postscript
December 2, 2008
A happy quack to my one Canadian reader who sent me a link to “Most Businesses Don’t Have a Handle on Social Media Marketing”. You can find this story by Nestor Arellano here. The article appeared in ITBusiness, a Canadian Web site. Mr. Arellano summarizes the results of a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group in the US. The study revealed that executives realize social media is important, but at the time of the survey about 60 percent those surveyed in the sample allocate significant money to the this type of marketing. For me the most interesting comment in the article was:
For instance, 33.1 per cent of them said they were never able to determine ROI, while an additional 25.6 per cent said they “hardly ever” knew if their social media efforts were worthwhile. In addition, only 26.3 per cent thought social media marketing was more effective than using other online media tools for marketing, such as search advertising or display ads.
Mr. Arellano also notes that more than half of the IT staff and senior executives are not too keen about the use of social media for marketing. The concern is that employees will waste time fiddling with the applications. Social tools are likely to enter organizations the way personal computers did in the early 19080s; that is, some employees will just use these systems under the radar of management. One of the applications that may have applicability is a social wiki. Employees and possibly customers can contribute information.
After reading Mr. Arellano’s write up, I remain balanced on the fence with regard to social media in organizations. Employees are often spurred by their advisors and blue chip consultants to use social tools to improve operations, reduce costs, or whatever other benefit attributed to these systems. The issues that disconcert me are:
- Liability. Most consultants and employees are not the targets of legal action. As a result, their desires are not tempered by the liabilities certain information systems create the moment the systems become available. Consultants will weasel word their way around responsibility, and the employees often change roles or even jobs, leaving the “problem” to their successors.
- Finding what’s in these systems. Most employees and consultants deal with the surface or one aspect of a system. However, when someone asks, “Who gave the customer this information about this product?” someone has to hunt for the answer. My team has had this thankless task, and it is neither easy nor cheap to pull together the information from and within a social media system. We love this type of job, but it is expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, what’s “in” these systems can be quite interesting.
- Controlling costs. It is easy to fire up a wiki. It can be expensive to put in place a reliable mechanism to manage the wiki, keep the content fresh, and expand the system so it does not die on the vine. Like newsgroups, participation is often sporadic and brief. Social systems have to be marketed and managed. If ignored, these systems become a cost sinkhole when a problem surfaces. There is neither staff nor time to figure out what happened and then to fix the problem.
There are legitimate uses of messaging systems within organizations and for customers. The approach with which I am most comfortable is one that includes planning, budgeting, controlled testing, focused deployment, assessment, and then next steps, if any. Creating a customer-employee wiki and stepping back to see what happens is too risky for my taste. Companies have learned the importance of managing user groups. Now most organizations with active customer involvement try to schedule “summits” or some other type of organized activity over which the company exercises control. A user group can turn into a snake pit left to its own devices. An unmanaged wiki may have the same characteristics.
The problem of capturing the information, indexing it, and making it searchable is not intractable. Exalead has a social search capability, for example. But some effort is required before the system is deployed. Otherwise, the cost of playing catch up may erode the financial payoff of the system itself.
We have investigated a number of start ups in the last year. We’ve found that when the organization bakes in social media, the problems of shoe horning a social media system into an established organization are minimized. Consultants and some bureaucrats assume that the new functions can be layered on to the existing infrastructures and business methods. In our experience, the assumption may be incorrect. Furthermore, organizations engineered to use Internet centric applications as part of their basic business methods have a cost advantage. There is not much information about this aspect of social media available to us at this time. We also have a working hypothesis that start ups with social media baked in may have a competitive advantage over established operations that are taking the add on approach to social media.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
Ad Networks
November 30, 2008
The Overflight technology here sparked some inquiries from companies in the ad network business. I never pay much attention to online advertising. My view is that if a Web site offers content, the Web indexing systems will find you. A good example is the Overflight service announced on November 17, 2008. On November 18, the site was not in the Google index. By November 20, 2008, the Overflight site ranked sixth in the results list for the word Overflight. As I write this before getting on a flight to Europe, the Overflight sight ranking in the results list for the query “overflight” is number two. No metatag spamming, no SEO baloney, no nothing. We index content and provide what seems to me to be a useful service. We are now adding some other features to the public facing Web site. The most interesting will be the use of the Exalead CloudView technology. This is a joint effort between my technically challenged goslings and the French wizards at Exalead. Watch for the announcement shortly. The service is in final testing and looks quite good so far.
But the ad network calls to me put me in unfamiliar territory. I have researched Google’s AdSense, which makes use of the Oingo (Applied Semantics) technology plus many Google inventions, enhancements, and tweaks. My focus on AdSense and its sister AdWords created for me a volcanic island of information. I thought that Google * was * online advertising.
The yellow box marks the Overflight result on November 29, 2008.
After a bit of research Google is not the only game in town. Sure, there are the Microsoft and Yahoo services that I know by name. A bit of sleuthing turned up a large number of outfits who are in the business of selling ads to companies wanting to reach online users. One of them is the AutoChannel.com, a company with which I have been associated for years. Because of the volume of traffic, the Auto Channel gets, I saw its name as a place where companies wanting to reach auto enthusiasts could advertise. You can learn more about this directly from the company. Just navigate here for the media kit.
I located on the Web logs at ZDNet here a useful list here of what the company calls “Top 50 US Ad Carriers in October 2008.” The usual suspects appear on this list, but there were many firms whose names I did not recognize. I clicked on about a dozen of the top ranked firms and learned that each provides a wide range of services both the high traffic Web sites looking to generate revenue and to advertisers who want to place messages on sites germane to their core markets. I can’t reproduce this list, but I think I can give you a flavor of the diversity of firms in this sector. Here are three companies I found interesting, but your taste is likely to be different from this goose’s:
Search: Fast and Loose
November 29, 2008
Two news items do not make a trend, but two news items cause me to question what other shenanigans are afoot. The first item concerns British Telecom. The story “BT in Trouble over Secret Behavioral Ad Tests” appeared in WebProNews on November 28, 2008, here. BT seems to be involved in a legal matter related to using Phorm to sniff out data from unsuspecting customers. Gee, I wonder if other telecommunications companies have done things without their customers’ knowledge? Nah, probably not. The second item concerns online advertising. Ars Techica’s “Baidu Caught in Search Ad Scandal, Vows to Overhaul System” here does a good job of explaining some hitches in its relevance ranking. Ars Technica does a good job of explaining the alleged fraud. Baidu has been the target of criticism and litigation despite legal action from the recording industry. Perhaps these are outliers? My thought is that BT and Baidu might be harbingers?
Stephen Arnold, November 29, 2008
Alexa Search: The Gone-Goose Flock Grows
November 29, 2008
I had heard rumblings about Alexa for a while. Early in 2008, I had to gather information about Alexa’s infrastructure. I uncovered some information that did not add up. Great words about the future of Alexa, but the performance was spotty. Amazon–owner of Alexa–is making some changes, if the news reports are accurate. The world’s smartest man may be, in the words of TechFlash, Seattle’s Technology News Source, “pulling the plug”. You can read the story here. “Amazon Pulling Plug on Alexa Web Search” said on November 27, 2008, said, “The reason for the closure: very few people were using it.” The Bezos word for this was “deprecated.” I thought “deprecate” meant “to pray for deliverance from”. Don’t believe me? Click here and look at definition number four. So, the Search Engine Death Watch list grows again. For more information about Alexa, click here. What’s next for Amazon? My thought is that in the present economic climate, Amazon will have to crank the revenue dials for its we’re-better-than-Google cloud computing play. I think the cost of the cloud initiative at Amazon may be rolling in from the Sea of Red Ink. I hope the weather system goes around Amazon, but if it hits, wow, the costs will be high.
Stephen Arnold, November 29, 2008
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