Sky Falls, Web Changes or Is It Sky Changes, Web Falls?
July 19, 2010
“It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It” telling us we should all ready for a change in the Web is true, at least according to Morgan Stanley, a company that should know. It’s no big surprise global internet surfing will be bigger on mobile devices than on PCs in the near future, but to suggest the entire Web will change might be a little premature. It was working this morning, right?
Apps will rule and fun will take over from grandiose design, according to the piece in adage.com. and it wont be enough to repurpose content like newspapers did for the Web in the 1990s. The idea that applications will become search is a popular one. The problem is that no one defines search. In fact, few marketers define anything except their billable hours and even those reports can require a team of linguists to interpret. How many billable hours fit into a 40 hour work week?
A new way of thinking will be necessary..new designs for the apps age, according to Steve Rubel, senior VP-director of insights at Edelman Digital. He makes some good arguments but wasn’t the Web going to be the end of mass media in general way back when? The addled goose never gets it right. Is it the sky falls and the Web changes or is it the sky changes and the Web falls. Well, one or the other.
Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2010
Partner News from BA-Insight
July 18, 2010
I received a link to a news story about BA-Insight, Microsoft SharePoint, and the Fast search system. You can read the material at this link. What interested me is not the endorsement of BA Insight by Microsoft. BA Insight, like other vendors, is a “partner” of Microsoft. Love is expected in this tie ups. What surprised me was that the page on which the story about BA Insight as a partner ran a video featuring a pirate flag, a trip to the commode, and a tour of ESA’s Mars500 and a video about turtle hatchings. I was confused because of the welter of distracting audio and video messages running live and via a link to a webinar. Interesting content-based marketing approach.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2010
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What Our Uncle Microsoft Knows
July 18, 2010
They all do it , so it’s unfair to single out Microsoft because pretty much every software vendor or Internet service collects information about you. Even while the experts tell us WAT, Bing and Hotmail do collect data when you use them, they also say they are not as concerned with what Big Brother ( Microsoft) knows as compared to other what other high profile companies collect. Still, they do collect data and here’s a few ways they do it. WAT, the validation process you go through when you first start your computer, doesn’t get too personal in an Orwellian sense but they do get the make and model of your computer and the region and language that applies. Bing and Hotmail get a little closer with IP addresses and unique identifiers contained in cookies. Perhaps you don’t need to worry through. Microsoft asserts that it deletes the IP addresses after six months.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2010
US Search Start Ups May Struggle for Funding
July 17, 2010
“Venture Capitalists Not Finding Funding Either” may mean good news for pharmacies selling Pepto-Bismol but bad news for search start ups. The write up said:
According to Thomson Reuters and the NVCA today, thirty-eight U.S. venture capital firms raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter of 2010, down 49 percent compared to Q1 this year, when 38 funds raised $3.7 billion. Thomson Reuters and the NVCA said that the quarter is the lowest–based on dollar commitments–since the third quarter of 2003.
I have heard that a number of search and content processing vendors are gasping for air. There’s an outfit in Chicago looking for funds or a buyer. There’s a vendor out west sweating bullets. There have been some rumors of trouble at one high profile outfit.
Without friendly VCs looking to fund the next Google, search start ups may struggle for funding.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2010
Barn Burns, Horse Gone: Google and Regulation
July 16, 2010
Wow, the Danny Sullivan, the Google Public Policy Blog, the Silicon Valley Watcher, and the New York Times (you may face a dead link and have to pay). That’s a link fest. What’s the topic of this click-a-rrific moment?
Regulating Google.
The addled goose is a bit jaded with the “look at Google now” crowd. In 2002, when a client asked me to flip through Google’s technical papers and patent applications (note, not patents) and report on any interesting developments, I unearthed some interesting factoids. I have documented these in detail in my three Google monographs published by Infonortics, a new chunk in the Beyond Search study published by Gilbane, and in Success Enterprise Search Management. The span of these monographs is from 2004 to 2009. When people stop paying me to do stuff for them, I hope to push my most recent study Google Beyond Text out the door.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane:
- By 2002, Google was beavering away on making money using the one revenue model that was working at the time: slapping ads into search results. Seems easy, but Google had to get technology from Applied Semantics and other places plus re-engineering what struck Yahoo as a system that was similar to Yahoo’s. I will leave it to you to check out the pre IPO settlement with Yahoo to make this “issue” go away. The point is that the “evil” motto, although cute, seemed to be particularly elastic.
- By 2004, Google had fired up or turned loose researchers to work on projects spanning seven different business sectors. I won’t repeat those in this bullet point, but I bet you will resonate with telephony. You know, the Google Android, the wireless stuff, and spectrum gambit.
- By 2006, the present day Google was discernable, including the company’s push into rich media. I know that folks are fixated on YouTube.com, but the technical reports and patent applications suggest that YouTube.com is a single instance, not the comprehensive rich media system Google’s engineers have commented upon and disclosed in open source writings.
What’s this mean?
Well, with the realization that Google dominates Web search, has put pressure on a number of business sectors not related to search and retrieval, and is throwing its weight around, folks are now waking up to Google.
Okay, good morning, Rip Van Winkle.
Source: http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Politics/Images/rip-van-winkle.jpg
The problem is that Google has been operating in the same manner for about a decade.
Ever hear the story about the barn burning down and the horses fleeing? In order to take meaningful action related to Google, several things have to happen?
First, competitors have to actually compete. Right now Apple (limping with a bullet in its iPhone holding hand), Facebook, and maybe Twitter have a shot. But if these outfits stumble, the Google will keep on truckin’, as we say in Harrod’s Creek.
Second, governments must do more than “study” Google. In the US, pressure centric politics ensures that the Google’s lawyers will neuter even the testosterone charged folks at an outfit like Viacom. But in other countries, the opportunity to take action may have different rhythms.
Third, Google itself has to avoid what I have variously called the Icarus problem, the Math Club behavior, or – my personal favorite – the Googzille effect. Yep, Google’s fatal flaw may be its management methods. The culture of a start up is tough to make work when you have 19,000 high IQ folks running around believing everything mom told them about how wonderful each was.
Fourth, the economic climate may be a problem. Forget global warming. Think about a chill in a double dip recession. With one source of cash – advertising – Google’s monoculture could face some problems in a climate change.
Bottomline. Read this passage from “Google Responds to Calls for Search Neutrality”:
Google is under more and more pressure from more and more groups concerned with its size. Google dominates the search market, in some countries by huge margins, and, subsequently, the online advertising market. It also has countless web products, Maps, Gmail, Docs. More and more, a call for ‘search neutrality’ is being made calling for regulation, government oversight or opening up search algorithm. It’s one thing for unheard of companies and people seeking attention to do it, it’s another when a respected news organization does it.
The only problem is that the comments were dated July 16, 2010, just a decade too late.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2010
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Lucene Revolution Conference Details
July 15, 2010
The Beyond Search team received an interesting news release from a reader in San Francisco. We think the information reveals the momentum that is building for open source search. Here’s the story as we received it:
San Mateo, Calif. – July 14, 2010 – Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Solr open source search technologies, is pleased to announce speakers for Lucene Revolution, the first-ever conference [EV1] in the US devoted to open source search. The conference will take place October 7-8, 2010 at the Hyatt Harborside, Boston, Massachusetts. Lucene Revolution is a groundbreaking event that drives broad participation in open source enterprise search , creating opportunities for developers, technologists and business leaders to explore the disruptive new benefits that open source enterprise search makes possible, in a fresh, energetic and forward thinking format.
The diverse and widespread adoption of Lucene/Solr for enterprise search applications is reflected by the broad range of speakers at the event, such as:
- Cisco Systems: Satish Gannu
- eHarmony: Joshua Tuberville
- LinkedIn: John Wang
- Sears: David Oliver
- The McClatchy Company: Martin Streicher
- The Smithsonian: Ching-Hsien Wang
- Twitter: Michael Busch
Conference speakers represent a cross-section of Lucene/Solr adoption – including new media, ecommerce, embedded search applications, content management, social media, and security and intelligence – spanning the broad spectrum of production-class enterprise search implementations, all of whom leverage the power and economics of Lucene/Solr innovation.
Other industry thought leaders participating and sharing their insights into open source enterprise search include Hadley Reynolds (Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC) and Stephen E. Arnold (Beyond Search; Managing Partner, ArnoldIT).
Over the two days of the conference there are over 30 sessions scheduled in a variety of different formats: technical presentations, use cases, panel discussions, and Q&A sessions. In addition there will be an “un-conference” the evening of October 7, where attendees can present lightning talks and take part in hands-on community coding efforts.
Registration for Lucene Revolution is now open for the conference at: http://www.lucenerevolution.com/register. A full list of speakers, along with a complete conference agenda, is available at http://www.lucenerevolution.com/agenda.
If you are not familiar with Lucid, here’s a snapshot:
Lucid Imagination is the commercial company dedicated to Apache Lucene technology. The company provides value-added software, documentation, commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting, and free certified distributions, for Lucene and Solr. Lucid Imagination’s goal is to serve as a central resource for the entire Lucene community and search marketplace, to make enterprise search application developers more productive. Customers include AT&T, Sears, Ford, Verizon, Elsevier, Zappos, The Motley Fool, Macy’s, Cisco, HP, The Guardian and many other household names. Lucid Imagination is a privately held venture-funded company. Investors include Granite Ventures, Walden International, In-Q-Tel and Shasta Ventures. To learn more please visit www.lucidimagination.com.
Goslings Constance Ard and Dr. Tyra Oldham will be attending. Should be useful. Certainly more timely than the plethora of SharePoint and gasping one-size-fits-all programs. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2010
Sponsored post.
Camelot to Go Viral
July 15, 2010
A Cambridge based search applications firm has been chosen by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to help provide a search engine experience to go with the late president’s digitized archives.
Endeca Technologies has been hired to work on the project that will launch on January 20, 2011, which will be the 50th anniversary of the inauguration. The idea behind digitizing Camelot is to make the whole array of the JFK archives available to everyone from historians to schoolchildren.
Endeca’s information access solutions have long been helping people and business to explore, analyze, and understand information in a variety of different ways. Their solutions cover a wide variety of areas from retail to media and publishing.
Rob Starr, July 15, 2010
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Facebook Now a Springboard
July 14, 2010
Those us in the Internet marketing aren’t surprised, saw it coming, will all now stand in a line and scream ‘I told you so’ to all those who thought that the social media frenzy might have just been a fad.
According to an article in ReadWriteWeb.com, Gigya, a company that provides social optimization platforms for firms that want to take advantage of these new tools, Facebook is the most common jumping off point for people logging in to other sites from social media. The gap that was widening last January is getting bigger too. Presently Facebook accounts for 46 percent of logins from social media.
Strange how the real competition from Google is coming from social media and not Bing. Maybe it’s time real innovators start targeting that site for some competition since Facebook is the preferred starting point for surfing when it comes to social media.
Rob Starr, July 14, 2010
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Gvoernment Scrapping Sites: Are Traditional Web Methods Dead?
July 13, 2010
What more proof does the average consumer and business person need that the traditional website is antiquated and doesn’t generate the leads and traffic you need than the story in computing.co.uk that appeared recently about the government scrapping websites?
They plan on doing away with 75% of their more than 800 websites. The problems uncovered seem to be in three areas:
- Cost
- Usage
- Resource sharing
It’s clear that a better way is needed. A more cost efficient way to reach the people you want to. The Arnold IT way. Find everything that you need with social networking and the Beyond Search Team. Build your brand, generate leads and/or create a community.
When the UK government starts to worry websites aren’t working, something is wrong. When the government starts scrapping Web sites, is this a signal that new methods of communicating are needed? Is the Google era winding down?
Rob Starr, July 13, 2010
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Oui Oui to Dok Dok
July 13, 2010
It’s no surprise that email is the primary way business shares documents and personal users their information and the attachment is the modern envelope. The paradoxical problem with this method has been numbers and categorizing and there have always been many people working on streamlining this part of the Web experience.
As far as the flow of a typical business day is concerned the Holy Grail of embedded findability as far as attachments were concerned has centered around three areas:
- Verifying the most recent attachment because ( at least where business is concerned) there can be multiple ones from the same source
- Tracking the changes which makes sense where business is concerned
- Sharing changes with others
Those were the goals. And all had to be accomplished without interrupting the flow of a typical business day. This is a lucrative proposition if done right and the Canadians couldn’t ignore the possibilities with their answer called DokDok, which the Quebec firm says is an automatic way for their users to locate, update and share the most recent version of any email attachment.
The Montreal based start up was created in 2009 and they promise that DokDok is not anything like the file sharing applications that are trying to replace email. Of course one of the big questions that any prospects have here will be about security.
People want to know if DokDok will be reading their emails or at least have the ability to do so. To the firm’s credit the answer is no. DokDok only indexes metadata, none of the real content in the actual emails.
You don’t even need to give them your Google Apps password if security is your big issue. Still, nothing’s perfect and there are a few drawbacks to DokDok. It’s important to remember here that the new system works only with Gmail’s web interface and does not work with the standard Gmail account.
However, when they’re out of beta, the firm promises big changes.
It’s good to see that Google understands their services can use improving when a good idea comes along that helps to streamline a business day and increase productivity. That’s why it’s Oui Oui to DokDok.
Rob Starr, July 13, 2010
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