Will Google Do Real News?
June 23, 2011
Will Google do “real” news? I read “Salon CEO Gingras Resigns to Become Global Head of News Products at Google.” I think this is a fascinating action on the part of Google. In Google: The Digital Gutenberg, published by Infonortics Ltd. in 2009, I looked at Google’s content technology. My focus was not on indexing. I reviewed the parse, tag, chop, and reassemble systems and methods that Google’s wizards had invented. The monograph is available at this link. The monograph may be useful for anyone who wants to understand what happens when “real” journalists get access to the goodies in the Googleplex. In addition, to Odwalla beverages, the Google open source documents suggest that snippets of text and facts can be automatically assembled into outputs that one could describe as “reports” or “new information objects.” Sure, a human is needed in some of these processes, but Google uses lots of humans. Its public relations machine and liberal mouse pad distribution policy helps keep the myth alive that Google is all math all the time. Not exactly accurate.
The write up says:
The new position as the senior executive overseeing Google News, as well as other products that may be in the pipeline, comes several years after Gingras worked as a consultant at the Mountain View campus, focusing on ways the search giant could improve its news products.
What will come from a “real” journalist getting a chance to learn about some of the auto assembly technology? I offer some ideas in my Digital Gutenberg monograph. Publishers may want to ponder this idea as well. Google is more than search, and we are going to learn more about its intentions in the near future.
Five years ago, when Google was at the top of its game, I would have had little hesitation to give Google a better than 50 percent chance of success. Now with the Amazon, Apple, and Facebook environment, I am not so sure. Google has been relying more on buying stuff that works and playing a hard game of “Me Too.”
With the most recent reworking of Google News, I find myself turning to Pulse, Yahoo News, and NewsNow.co.uk. Am I alone?
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2011
From the leader in next-generation analysis of search and content processing, Beyond Search.
Odd Spat: Academic Publishers vs. Universities
June 11, 2011
With the transition of formerly printed content to digital formats in academia, publishers of these academic materials are experiencing severe reductions to their revenue stream. Professors often put course materials on e-reserves, making it so students can access a single copy without having to pay for individual copies.
“Academic Publishers Attempting To Eliminate Fair Use At Universities [Updated]” from TechDirt.com delves into this issue and mentions specific entities in this ongoing battle. In one instance, “Cambridge, Oxford, & Sage publishers are filing against Georgia State University and asking the court to issue one of the all-time-detrimental-to-education injunctions in the modern era.”
This is clearly a heated debate and has been for some time. The write up said:
In 1994 publishers sought to deal with e-reserves at the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), but the issue proved so contentious that the participants could not agree on a recommendation for the final report. Since then, the threat of litigation has loomed over a number of universities concerning their e-reserves, as publishers’ reproduction revenues dipped.
This demonstrates publishers’ inability to adapt to the current environment. Everything has been going digital for a while now and an industry that relies so heavily on paper printing should have been prepared for this. The film and music industries have adapted to this climate, even books are popular in digital format; academic publishers need to board the train.
Our understanding is that academic publishers depend on university professors and those hard working graduate students to craft the content academic publishers publish.
Universities have found benefit from student loans. Perhaps academic publishers should explore some creative options as well.
Stephen E Arnold, June 11, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Sheer Insanity and Search
June 7, 2011
Jan Wenner’s bon mot—“sheer insanity and insecurity and fear”—caught my attention. Addled geese are not crazy. Loons, as I recall, have that distinction. Insecurity resonates. Here in Harrod’s Creek a shotgun or an automatic weapon can reduce a goose in a nonce. Fear. Yep, fear. Got it.
The question is, “Do these characterizations apply to the iPad and other tablets?” The write up “Jann Wenner: Magazines’ Rush to iPad Is ‘Sheer Insanity and Insecurity and Fear” accomplishes a fusion which caused me to do some thinking. First, here’s the passage that flapped my wings:
Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the internet and cable news. Because in those areas there’s a real advantage to getting a print product and having something you can hold and that of course is portable and has a luxurious feeling and is comfortable and immersive and you can spend time with it and it’s organized for you. In the age of the 24-hour news cycle and the availability of the internet you have to focus on those qualities in your magazine even more. Really you have to deliver quality more than ever. And unless you can deliver something that’s quality and really compelling there’s just too many …media choices around now. Unless you’re really good you’re in trouble.
Three observations:
First, the notion of quality is an important one. Online delivers information which lacks a tactile component. Mr. Wenner makes an important point about a product one can hold. Digital content may be great but it looks like baloney. Stripped from a Web site, content just floats. With an iPad one holds an Apple or some other manufacturer’s gizmo. The publisher and his / her content is like a sardine in a tin. Who remembers an individual sardine?
Second, another dimension of quality for Mr. Wenner is organization. Who organizes content on the Internet? I suppose I do, but I am not interested in news. I am focused on capturing ideas and links which I used to store in my paper notebooks. I use the content of this blog as raw material for my books. The New Landscape of Search is an example. I use the information captured in this blog in that book, which costs money and has a greater content payload than any collection of my blog posts from airports and restaurants. Mr. Wenner is spot on.
Third, the notion of “always on” and a 24 hour news cycle has changed how many people conceptualize information. I think Mr.Wenner is correct but I think that for certain demographics, there will be little appetite for a hard copy anything. I think the gameification of content is gathering momentum. I miss magazines like Life which I used to flip through on long summer afternoons at my grandparents’ house in nowheresville. The problem is that “quality” has a different freight of meaning for lots of folks y0unger than the goose. There is, I assert, no turning back.
Bottom line? Traditional publishing is under considerable pressure. I don’t think the executives are much different than an executive at Kentucky Fried Chicken who missed his quarterly numbers. The iPad is still fresh and for some, it is perfectly logical to assume that creating online content is pretty much the same as traditional magazine content creation. Publishing executives have to do something. Paper, ink, distribution, and design are not getting much cheaper in my experience.
But my interest is in finding information, search, if you will. Can I find content in a pay walled, iPadded, and filtered world? Not easily. So we are moving backwards as publishers try to press forward. I find this an interesting situation which seems a bit like the Dark Ages running on zippy new gizmos powered by XML.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Disinformation: A Useful Factoid
June 3, 2011
When can too much information be bad? When it comes to a group, so says Wired Science in “Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds.”
Newly-released research on crowd wisdom finds that “when test participants were told about their peers’ guesses,” test results when awry. It appears that “knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines collective wisdom.”
The results confirm one of James Surowiecki’s tenets behind crowd analytics from his 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds.” In it, he discusses four conditions necessary to promote the phenomenon, one of which is that each individual in the group should have private information.
The news that the information people receive influences their decision making is no revelation to advertisers and educators, who have relied on it for years. In theory, members of the group would come to valid conclusions based on good data. However, the crowd can just as easily be influenced by bad information, giving a new meaning to garbage in, garbage out.
Disinformation has another tool methinks.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
The Web, Blogs, and the Reed Effect
May 31, 2011
There was a blip in the blogosphere about the infusion of capital into the big, firm information arteries of GigaOm, founded by Om Malik. Even the trend tracking Mashable covered the story in “Tech Blog GigaOM Shifts Focus to Premium Content.”
The money apparently flowed from Reed Elsevier Ventures with some other investors betting on the blog news and analysis service. The founder added some cash to the pot as did Alloy Ventures. The funding flies in the face of the well received of the Business Insider’s link to a presentation about how traditional media companies can behave more like start ups.
Traditional professional publishers push prices to the peak of Mount Tolerance. As long as revenues do not decline, the number of customers is irrelevant. Remember the concept of elasticity in pricing from Econ 100?
This is an interesting development for three reasons:
First, although the Huffington Post hit the jackpot, the GigaOM investment is suggestive. What I see is that the GigaOM content play is interesting, but not yet at the Huffington Post level. Investors hope to reach that benchmark in money magnetism so outfits like AOL will acquire GigaOM for an even more juicy pay day.
Second, the shift signals more trouble for the advertiser supported model of publishing. Google Adsense seems to be losing some steam, and the costs of pitching vendors to support a blog is expensive and time consuming. With more cash, GigaOM can follow in the footsteps of more traditional publishing, consulting, and analysis businesses. Get subscribers, sell reports, and cherry pick other money making opportunities as they come along—Sounds like a plan to me. For outfits like Google, the river of money may behave like Lake Hamoun. The Reed Effect, in my view, is pushing prices to the heights. If customers want the information, those customers can pay.
The Columns of Arnold: June 2011
May 24, 2011
My for fee columns for my June 2011 deadlines are completed. No easy task with the final corrections for The New Landscape of Search flowing through the Harrod’s Creek underground cellar. This 180 page report will be priced at $20 US and 15 euros. The Pandia ordering information will be available in a few days. Now to the columns:
Smart Business Network’s column is “When With It Marketing Won’t Work”. The main point is that for many small businesses digital marketing methods are less effective than more traditional methods. The column talks about the reasons and provides some sources of information about doing non-digital selling. Spoiler alert: Newspapers and other tabloids may have cause to rejoice.
KMWorld’s column is “Image Recognition Semantics: A Job for Smart Software or an Average Human.” Google announced enhancements to its image search, then it received a US patent for a method to recognize celebrities, and at almost the same time, Google’s chairperson dumped cold water on image recognition. I review where enterprise image recognition is and provide examples of systems that work quite well. Spoiler alert: Exalead and Cognex get the nod from me.
Information Today’s column is “Google’s Shallow Draughts: Its Shift from Search to Knowledge.” I take a look at Google shift from search to knowledge. My focus is what this means for searchers and for advertisers. I won’t give any details about this write up, but I do reference Heidegger, who also struggled with knowledge.
Enterprise Technology Management’s column is “Google, the Chromebook, and the Cloud: Time as Justice.” You may recognize the reference to As You Like It. I look at Google’s proliferation of cloud devices at the same time its Blogger.com cloud publishing system crashed and was off line for 20 hours. Reality is different from what companies “like”.
No column required for the six times a year Online Magazine. We have stepped up content production on Inteltrax.com and SharePointSemantics.com. In addition, later this week we will roll out an investment centric blog called HighGainBlog.com. These blogs will be similar to Beyond Search; that is, we will not do original news. We will comment on important trends and issues in the various niches we cover. At this time, we are producing a significant amount of SharePoint information, which is interesting because the system is the subject of so many articles that talk about issues, concerns, glitches, etc.
We have added brief biographical sketches on our Writer’s Page. I have a couple of questions along the lines of “How do you produce so much content by yourself in the hollow in rural Kentucky?” The answer is, “I don’t.” My name turns up on many of the online news items, but that’s a production issue, not a signal that the addled goose is actually working more than a couple of hours a day.
Hey, I have to paddle in the goose pond.
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2011
Freebie unlike the reports and the for fee columns which I do write. To understand the intent of the ArnoldIT.com blogs, read the About page.
AOL: On a PR Blitz?
May 21, 2011
“AOL’s Leader Undaunted in Overhaul Efforts,” reports the New York Times. The company that many may have written off is determined to make some new waves under new CEO, Tim Armstrong.
Mr. Armstrong has already made many changes since he joined the company two years ago. Some highlights: replacing the management team; retiring a number of products; and redesigning the way the home page displays advertising.
The most well-known change, though, is the purchase of the Huffington Post. Armstrong also placed its charismatic founder, Arianna Huffington, in charge of the company’s content business. We learned:
Indeed, Ms. Huffington, although a newcomer to AOL, is putting her imprint on its editorial coverage as leader of what is now known as the Huffington Post Media Group. Since the acquisition closed in March, she has hired experienced reporters for the Huffington Post, pushed ahead with plans for international expansion and augmented the coverage of [local news site] Patch’s paid journalists with unpaid local bloggers.
Of course, it would take reinvention for what is really a dial-up company to survive in the age of broadband. Some would call branching into the content provider market a risk, but the head honcho is confident that that’s where the future lies.
For more PR goodness about Mr. Armstrong, the former Googler with an economics and sociology degree, navigate to the Miami Herald and read “A Look at AOL CEO Tim Armstrong”. Not much content but someone is helping me see AOL and Tim Armstrong most of the places I look. I want to see top line revenue growth, bigger profits, and a soaring share price. Mr. Armstrong, though easy on the eyes, not quite as much.
Cynthia Murrell, May 21, 2011
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Patch: A Hobby Horse or a Derby Contender?
May 8, 2011
I found “Tim Armstrong’s Rambling Explanation Of What He’s Getting For Plowing $40 Million Into Patch” darned interesting. The magnetic pull of going local continues to exert a pull over former Googler Tim Armstrong. The write up features a long segment transcribed from an analyst’ phone call. I have read a few of these transcripts, and there are typographical errors. My hunch is that over time the revisionists will explain the comments. In that spirit, I want to highlight one segment and offer a couple of observations from the perspective of search and retrieval:
And job one is getting consumer traffic going. Job two is on the advertising front. And Patch is basically being monetized right now almost 100% by local zip code level advertisers or people.
The only hitch in the git along is that I don’t run across Patch in Harrod’s Creek. The local ad market is tough to reach, lacking in know how and resources, and generally interested in paper coupons to putting big mobile signs in front of the fish joint on the creek’s side. Local news, well. There’s not much. My hunch is that other services are serving the needs of the technically hip. Others in Harrod’s Creek are oblivious.
Searching for local information is tough, and I don’t see AOL becoming the go to way to find a pizza joint or a fried catfish sandwich.
Patch. Puzzling. More like a hobby horse than a derby contender. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2011
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Anonymous Uploads to a Murdoch Property
May 7, 2011
Short honk: I just wanted to document the me too play from the Wall Street Journal. I learned about the Wikileaks clone from “The Wall Street Journal Launches a WikiLeaks Competitor, SafeHouse.” There is quite a bit of controversy and risk involved in doing the Wikileaks thing. My view is that uploading to a newspaper in today’s politically sensitive environment is going to be interesting. How quickly will those anonymous documents and the usage logs become bed time reading? Not long. No house is safe in my experience when certain folks want to enter. Yep, interesting idea. I think the parent company is trying to buy the F1 racing series too. Synergy!
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2011
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Preprint Server from New Journal of Web Semantics
May 5, 2011
UMBC Ebiquity Research Group lauds its own development in “New Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.” In the realm of things we didn’t know we needed– semantic information before it is hot off the presses. Writer Tim Finin explains:
Final drafts of accepted papers will be added to the preprint server as papers are accepted for publication, making a preprint available as soon as possible. . . . After drafts are on the preprint server, they enter Elsevier’s production pipeline in which they are professionally copy edited, formatted for the journal, and proofed by the authors. The result is assigned a DOI and put online as a JWS article in press available to individual and institutional subscribers.
A subscription to this service could put one ahead of the curve. Until, of course, everyone catches on. With preprints, blogs, and social media, what is the role for peer reviewed and other traditional publishing methods going forward?
Cynthia Murrell, May 5, 2011
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