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Google and Disallow

You will want to check out “On Google Disallowing Carling of Their Life Hosting” here. Google Blogoscoped has a good write up about this — to some — surprising development. Other search engines cannot index the Time Warner Life Magazine images. Google inserted a blocking line in its robots.txt file. I noticed that I was limited in the number of images I could browse when the service first went live. I was surprised that these images were available to me without a fee. For years, the Time crowd has noodled about its picture archive. First, Time wanted to handle the scanning itself. Then Time wanted to subcontract the work but that was too expensive. Then it was a good idea to talk with experts about what to do. Then the cycle repeated. Along came the GOOG and the rest, as someone will write after this goose is cooked, is history. Here’s what is going on in my opinion:

1. Restrictive content access is going to become more visible. If you read the Guha patent applications from February 2007, you will have noted that Google’s system can operate in a discrimatory way. That translates, in my view of the world, to restrictions on what others can and cannot do with Google information. This is an important phrase: “Google information.” Please, note it, copyright lovers.
2. The Life images are a big deal, and I am confident that the restrictions are probably positioned as part of the method to balance public access with protection for the assets of Time Warner. Everyone has needs, so this restriction is a nifty way of finding a middle way with Googzilla’s hands on the controls.
3. The cost of getting the Life images was not trivial. I have not heard anything substantive about the financial burden of this project, but based on my prior knowledge of the magnitude of the scanning and logistics of the images, this puppy was expensive. In my view, unlike a pure academic library play, this deal has a price tag and someone has to pay at some point.

What’s ahead? Well, in my view, once Google creates metadata and populates one of its knowledgebases, those data will be protected and probably with considerable enthusiasm. Google’s programmable search engine generates data and if some data items are missing, the system beavers away until the empty cell is filled. Once those dataspaces are populated, the information is not for just anyone’s use.

I mentioned the word dataspaces in a telephone converastion today. I know I am not communicating. The person on the other end of the call asked, “What’s a dataspace?” Well, you are now disallowed from one.

Stephen Arnold, January 7, 2008

Newspapers: Another Analysis of Failure

Slate’s Jack Shafer took a Tanaka ECS-3301 chain saw to traditional newspapers here. His “How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web” was an enjoyable read for me. I don’t think the wizards at some of the formerly high flying newspaper companies were similarly affected. The hook for the article was Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Armed with a fact platform, Mr. Shafer frolics through the misadventures of media mavens and the Web. The phrase I liked was “extreme suckage”. I wish this goose had thought of that. Wordsmithing aside, the comment that resonated with me was:

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

A congratulatory quack to Mr. Shafer for this write up. Read at once. Now think about a similar fate for motion picture outfits confident of their brilliance after a strong 2008. The party’s not over for that crowd. More about this in my forthcoming Google and Publishing monograph.

Stephen Arnold, January 7, 2009

Search Pioneer Upshifts: Interview with Mike Weiner

In the 19080s I relied on a very fast search system for my personal computer. The program was Gopher from Microlytics. In the late 1990s, I met the founder of Gopher and tracker his interest in linguistic-centric search systems. I lost track of Mike Weiner, former president of Microlytics, but we spoke on the telephone a day or two ago. You can get information about Technology Innovations here. I captured his comments in an interview which is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speaks sub site here.

Two comments in my conversation with Mr. Weiner struck a chord with me. Let me highlight these in this brief news item about the interview.

First, search has grown beyond the desktop. Mr. Weiner said in response to a question about desktop search:

…the desktop of today and tomorrow are connected to the “world.” So there can be very clever background processing done on your behalf that can leverage off the information you access and the information you create. The question will be, what’s useful and important to you, and can the system fetch, or generate, this, for you, and in an efficient form you can cognitively benefit from. One of the next potentials for incredible retrieval will be intelligent “information extraction.”

Second, Mr. Weiner’s new interests pivot on innovation. Technology Innovations holds patents on different facets of electronic paper or “epaper”. About the future of epaper, Mr. Weiner said:

I see epaper heavily used in educational publications, where children and learners have questions, need definitions, etc. You may see a speller and thesaurus, and translation technology coming bundled on books with electronic chips in them.

If you are interested in search and publishing in the 21st century, you will find the Mike Weiner interview interesting.

Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2008

Sky Grid: Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Challenger

A reader in the Eastern Mediterranean alerted me to SkyGrid, founded in 2005. After a bit of checking, I found some information in the TechCrunch write up here. The SkyGrid Web site here provides a run down of the media coverage the firm’s for-fee service has achieved. The founder of the company is Kevin Pomplun who combined high value content and what one commentator called “flow based architecture”. The notion is that information is dynamic, and the SkyGrid system is constantly refreshed. Once configured, the system delivers search without search. The service costs about $500 per month per user. The target market appears to be Wall Street’s analysts and related disciplines; for example, some intelligence and law enforcement professionals will find the service interesting. Based on information available to me, SkyGrid uses proprietary methods to acquire, process, and personalize information for each user. The technologies embraced by SkyGrid hit such hot buttons as sentiment analysis (whether information is positive or negative), categorization (figuring out what an article is about and tagging it with a classification code and term), and graphic displays of data (stock price change, for example). When I reviewed the service, I noticed parallels between SkyGrid and data on the terminals in financial shops now. The dense display (shown below) appeals to those in the financial business. The idea is to provide hot information in one place. There are some similarities between SkyGrid and Silobreaker, which I have described in this Web log. Other services that offer similar functions include FirstRain (which asserts that its technology “changes the rules of research). Monitor110 was another similar service but fell upon hard times in mid 2008.

Source: SkyGrid 2008

Several comments will let me capture my thoughts:

First, the financial services sector has some challenges facing it. As a result, I expect some of the big name Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters customers to start demanding more value. The word value, in my opinion, means price cuts. This may be good or bad news for companies like SkyGrid. The good news is that its price point is appetizing compared to the hefty fees assessed by the incumbent real time data providers on Wall Street. The bad news is that a start up lacks the track record of the incumbents, so the cost of sales might be an issue. Long decision cycles may also work against the newcomers.

Second, other companies are pushing into real time. These range from “utility” type vendors such as Exegy. This company’s value proposition is speed; that is, no bottlenecks. Latency is a big deal for the surviving financial services firms. Also, such companies as Connotate and Relegence offer appealing services that are even more customized than some of the services now trying to make sales to the Wall Street crowd (minus Mr. Madoff’s operation, BearStearns’ and Lehman Brothers, of course).

Third, these new services are at their core “dataspace” plays. As the volume of information increases, the cost of the plumbing will be an ongoing issue for these challenges to Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. Cluuz.com, for example, has shifted from direct indexing of Web content for its demonstration service to the Yahoo “build your own search service”.

Fourth, the for fee content vendors are going to have little choice but raise their rates. The Factiva unit of Dow Jones struggled as an independent entity. Now that company is inside Dow Jones and as Dow Jones’s financial pressure mount, watch for Factiva to charge more for its services, particularly the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s data.

Fifth, the Google looms over this entire sector. Here’s why that company is a serious mid term threat to both incumbents and start ups:

1. Scale. Google has plumbing. Incumbents and competitors have to get it. Expensive that.
2. Data. Google has quite a bit of structured and unstructured data. The incremental cost to the GOOG to expand http://finance.google.com is incremental, maybe incidental.
3. Brand. The GOOG has the hot brand. Brand visibility sells.

In closing, I think there will be consolidation and attrition in this sector. I don’t think the services have flaws. I think that the broader datasphere is marshalling forces that will make life difficult.

Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2008

Dead Tree Update: Chicago and Suburban Shoppers

Newsweek Magazine, a dead tree publication in some danger of marginalization, published “Chicago’s Newspapers Facing a Troubled Future” here. When I read this article, I had the impression that the author, F.N. D’Alessio, was writing about Newsweek and the Associated Press. Mr. D’Alessio refers to newspaper “addicts”. I don’t know too many. I receive four dead tree newspapers: the Courier Journal, USA Today (affectionately known as McPaper), the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I used to get the Financial Times, but the delivery was so erratic I dropped the paper in January 2008. I received an offer of a year’s subscription for $99, and I threw it in the trash. Too much hassle trying to work through clumps of papers arriving twice a week. For me, the most significant comment in the Newsweek story was a comment about the Tribune’s rival, the Chicago Sun Times:

Hollinger’s biggest move was to create the Sun-Times Media Group by buying up 70 suburban and neighborhood newspapers, more than a dozen of which are dailies. Some of those are profitable, and some newspaper analysts envision the Sun-Times company shutting down the namesake paper and keeping the suburban ones.

I read this as a clear statement that big city papers are gone geese. Check out the Tribune’s online version of the newspaper. It is a disaster. My discussion of this wounded duck is here.

The future for dead tree outfits–if there is to be one–is to become ad supported, micro publications serving narrow markets. For years, I thought the Gaithersburg Gazette was had potential. Now that type of publication along with penny shoppers may be the margin of the information world available to the dead tree crowd.

You can make money in niches, but the revenue will buy used Malibus, not the flashy Mercedes the princes of journalism see as suitable transportation.

Stephen Arnold, December 29, 2008

Reading Google Paw Lines to Foretell Its Future

Alex Chitu must have been close enough to Googzilla to get it to show its paw for a fortune telling session. You can read his “Predictions for Google’s 2009″ in Google Operating System here. His observations for the most part are interesting and I think, like Nostradamus, some of these predictions may be “true”. For example, Google Translate will become a more widely deployed function in Google products and services. You will find my discussion of Google’s December 25, 2008, patent application US20080319962 germane to this prediction. If you want to peer beyond Mr. Chitu’s flat statement, download the patent document and check out the claims. I also agree that Google Contacts will gain some beef in 2009. If you have been watching the weird ritual mating dance between Googlers and Salesforce.com, you may conclude that the GOOG wants more from customer relationship management than a quick buy out of Salesforce.com for its multi tenant inventions and the company’s potent marketing engine.  The personalized search ads have been visible to me on a couple of my Google “ig” sessions, so that’s a slam dunk for 2009. You can read his other prognostications here. I would like to mention three predictions that I hoped he would mention but did not. These are quite addled, and so these are ideal for the Beyond Search addled goose crystal ball output; namely:

1. Companies in sectors unrelated to Web search and online advertising realize that the GOOG is disrupting their businesses. The addled goose watched in 2008 as commercial database companies and telecommunications companies woke up to a strange, new, Googley world. Can you guess the business sectors? You can get a list of these plus a diagram in my 2007 Google Version 2.0 which is still available. Click here to order.
2. Authors will turn to Google as a way to sell, not just market, their original work. With dead tree publishing companies racing toward Armageddon, the GOOG as a publishing medium will come into its own. Google has quite a few technical documents explaining in considerable detail how to make this happen.
3. Regulators in various countries will realize that Google heralds a new spin on globalization. Local operations deliver quite specific products and services, yet the plumbing exists “out there” so it is tough to deal with the GOOG under existing regulatory umbrellas.

What do you think the GOOG will do in 2009? Oh, I know that Google is just a Web search company in the business of selling ads in a deteriorating economic climate. I am a silly goose for having articulated that Google is more, much more.

Stephen Arnold, December 26, 2008

Pew Speeds Quantifies the Dead Tree Blight in the Information Forest

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (a go-to info source for the Washington DC crowd) released a news story here with the snappy title “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source.” the write up is typical charts and graphs style. You can wade through the data and the inevitable footnotes designed to make it easy for Statistics 101 teachers to create an assignment via cut and paste. For me, the key point was:

Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the Internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

The rest of the data are interesting but not the pivot point for me like this shift to the Internet and the crowning of TV as king for 2009.

The outlook for traditional publishing. Source: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/deforestation-2.jpg

My interpretation of these data, as you may expect, is slightly different from the “newspapers are dead” analysis I have offered in the past. Here’s the variant:

1. More newspapers will chase the online world. I think this is akin to what I have seen described as death throes. These action presage the passing, not the dawning of a rebirth. Citizen input forms for breaking news, anyone?
2. The magazines and professional journals are next in line. These intellectual mavens will find tough rowing when budget caps crash on hapless accountants, crushing the publishers of serials under the weight of increasing costs.
3. The anti Google crowd needs to speed up their efforts to crush Google Video Search, YouTube.com, and the Google Channel. The children of the dead tree crowd are already defecting, so the publishing and media elite are not able to generate folks who share their mums’ and daddies’ love of 16th century intellectual artifacts. I can see the scene now. Mum says, “Take out the garbage.” Media child pulls iPod ear buds out of her ears and says, “What?” Media child goes back to the Macbook video, stuffs the ear buds in her ears, and grabs her iPhone to send a text message that says, “Parentz R 2 lame.”

Now you may point out that I omitted book publishers. No, I didn’t omit them. When the New York publishing houses started to announce cut backs in new titles last month, I wrote that segment off as intellectual meat through the sausage machine.

Okay, dead tree lovers, tell me I am wrong. Just include facts. Pew data are okay. Examples like the tiny 10,000 circulation newspaper in New Jersey are fine. Fancy books used to decorate law offices and upscale dwellings qualify as well. Just include data with your addled goose guidebook.

Stephen Arnold, December 25, 2008

When Will the Dead Tree Times Come Crashing Down

Peter Kafka, writing in Media Memo, provided a useful summary of the New York Times’s bleak November 2008. You can read his article “New York times: November Was So Terrible, Even Our Internet Ads Were Down” in “D: All Things Digital” here. Mr. Kafka provides a link to more nitty gritty here. For my purposes, this key point was that Internet ad revenue and other Internet revenue declined as well. What is my agenda? Three points to bright your December 24th:

1. What’s the big surprise? The Wall Street Journal’s early push into proprietary desktop software more than a decade ago and then its flirtation with BRS search generated losses as well. As one traditional newspaper after another brought its Gutenberg business model to online, revenues were not just down, most online ventures were disasters. Anyone recall the Knight Ridder “play”? Or, what about the Times’s own smooth move to kill the “Times file save tool”? Nice, especially with no provision to save the content elsewhere. Info about this gaffe is here.
2. For most traditional publishers, the online train has left the station. I used to work at a newspaper, and I have watched costs run out of control. The response has been to trim down staff and raise rates. Stepping back and thinking about alternative business models was a common practice. Whilst pondering, new media luminaries rose (Mike Harrington’s TechCrunch) and new distribution systems (Google to name one) emerged. Where were the traditional newspapers? Most were congratulating themselves on their ability to “manage” their problems. Wrong. The management was a hoax, and the problems are not really expensive and painful to solve.
3. It is not a question of which newspaper is next. My analysis suggests that the old doctrine of the Domino Theory” is right for our time and our place. Once the gray lady topples, the others will plummet with little or no warning. In death as in life, most of today’s dead tree publications are a bit like sheep. These four footed wizards are heading toward the cliff’s edge.

You can read Erick Schonfeld’s analysis here.

My thought picture of the New York Times and some other dead tree publishers. Source: http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/bigthumbs/screenDead%20tree%20on%20Inyo%20crest.jpg

I am delighted I have four or five readers. One or two may take issue with my opinions. If I reached more people, I would have to deal with assertions, cat calls, and so-so vilifications. My specialist study Publishing on the Internet: A New Medium for a New Millennium (Infonortics, 1996) included this statement:

… Technology’s impact cannot be predicted. Small innovations and incremental improvements interact almost organically and behave in complex ways. the use of those technologies and the impact of those instrumental applications of what appear to be harmless inventions create a new type of information environment. this environment is not routinely recognized as a distinct construct almost in the way that a fish does not recognize water. Experts on electronic information are only beginning to come to grips with the rhetorical and syntactical rules of the network publishing information types. The social impact is not fully understood. the implications for commerce, education, medicine, and politics are not understood. Indeed many think it is business as usual. We do not know what will come next. Many aspects of digital life seem unpredictable. they are. It is the datasphere showing its true colors.

I suggest beet red as the new color to signify failure. Okay, tell me why I am wide of the mark even for an addled goose in rural Kentucky.

Stephen Arnold, December 24, 2008

Google and the Telcos: The Saga Continues

Earlier this year, Mercer Island Group and I held a series of briefings for telco executives. We reviewed Google’s considerable body of technology related to telephony. In those briefings, we encountered push back. Telcos did not understand what Google had been doing for seven or eight years. Furthermore, the telcos viewed the world of Google as one confined to looking up innocuous information on a free Web search with mostly meaningless advertisements sprinkled on the edges of the results. The Wall Street Journal reported that the GOOG allegedly communicated with some telcos to get a deal for high speed access for certain types of services. The story ran and Googzilla showed its fangs. But the story did not die. Now you can read more by Adam Lashinsky, editor at large, for Fortune Magazine, a dead tree output of the giant Time Warner. The digital version of the story “Google Wants Something for Nothing” here. I don’t subscribe to paper magazines anymore, so I can’t say if this CNN version is the whole enchilada or just the crumbs. The article runs down the Wall Street Journal’s story and takes more of a Google is doing something approach. For me the most interesting comment was:

The bottom line here isn’t the fine points of public policy. The main thing is attitude. The Web culture thinks things should be free. Internet access is a commodity. Music videos are for the taking.

You may want to read the story to get some insight into the perils of writing about Google and then rationalizing the differences between the “Web culture” and the dead tree crowd. My thought is that neither the telcos nor outfits like New York magazine publishers have a solid understanding of the scope of Google’s services and their implications for companies with business models that no longer work very well. I want to see what the New Year brings.

Stephen Arnold, December 24, 2008

Newspapers and Doom

You fans of dead tree companies will want to read James Surowiecki’s “News You Can Lose” in the New Yorker. You can find the digital version of the story here. To cut to the chase, for me the most telling comment Mr. Surowiecki made in this article was:

The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us…. Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily.

This goose doesn’t the mental equipment to dispute Mr. Surowiecki’s argument. True, I worked for a newspaper with a profitable electronic unit, but the paper self destructed and sold me like a box of Wheaties to a rust belt outfit. That team of management wizards spurred me to jump to Ziff Communications, a more enlightened information operation. But that too was broken up and sold off. I managed to weasel a consulting contract, and I have been a rental goose for almost 20 years. A happy rental goose, I might add.

The business undertaker is ready for the next dead tree outfit to take up residence. Will it be a newspaper like the Detroit Free Press or will it be a little guy like the local penny shopper. What about a small, over leveraged specialty publisher? Maybe a big New York book publisher? What about a magazine like Newsweek? Any nominees? Are there enough readers to support both Harper’s and The Atlantic? Interesting questions this silly goose opines.

I understand what Mr. Surowiecki has asserted. However, he does write this article for a dead tree outfit. He makes money by selling books published by another dead tree outfit. He has his roots (no pun intended) in the dead tree information sector. So, his “not necessarily” is a very gentle way to suggest that doom has not blanketed every nook and cranny of the dead tree publishing world.

But to be candid, I read “not necessarily” as a way of emphasizing a photon of hope. I would have concluded his article with this statement, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Stephen Arnold, December 22, 2008

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  Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleages worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.
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