Psychopaths in Training: Successful MBAs, Lawyers, and Accountants
October 1, 2014
I read “The Unexpected Consequences of Success.” For some reason, my Overflight system is gathering ever increasing numbers of management silliness. If management worked, would not PIMCO avail itself of the methods and demonstrate that it could retain staff, generate returns of little interest to the SEC, and stop institutional investors from withdrawing a few dollars here and there?
The write up states:
People often prepare for failure, but rarely prepare for what they will do when they succeed. Even when we consciously want to be successful, enjoying that success can be a challenge.
In the 1980s, one of the challenges Booz, Allen & Hamilton faced was that some senior people dumped their wives and formed a relationship with their assistants. The rationalization I heard was that the assistants “knew” what the senior Booz person was going through and could, therefore, be a better partner. I am not sure how the firm worked this out, nor do I care.
Other management challenges exist. I spent several hours with a CEO of a Silicon Valley company who was coming unglued before my eyes. In addition to the long, unkempt hair, the person had embraced various New Age concepts. The person ignored email and allowed the usually chaotic programmers to behave more like a crowd in Henderson, Missouri.
With a matter of weeks, the company had become the subject of a vicious analysis in a zippy San Francisco blog. As far as I know, the individual is now either surfing or working at an organic farm.
When I sent a copy of an article titled “Research shows there could be increased numbers of psychopaths in high levels of business,” the recipient (an investment banker) replied, “Yikes, Wall Street stress?” Nope, psychopathic behavior.
According the the HBR, at least the success part of the job can be handled with several easy-to-implement tips:
- Don’t do victory laps. I think this means buy a LaFerrari and drive it to lunch when you fire people.
- Focus on the value you bring, not on winning per se. Nope, the winning is evident when the Charlie Sheen type winner get a bonus.
- Stay in the here and now. I think this means do not become psychotic, dependent on banned substances, or a modern version of Julius Caesar.
- Reach higher. I think this means, “Be more like Alexander.” That worked out well for him at least for three decades.
I am not sure how these pronouncements will help out the dozens upon dozens of search and content processing companies thrashing around for money. But it is good to know that there are four tips to ensure that old MBA trajectory of success.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2014
Search Vendors and SEO: None Is a Home Run Super Star
July 16, 2014
One of the ArnoldIT team located a link to a Web site analytic service called SavedWebHistory.org. From the site, it is possible to enter a url and get some information, mostly without context, about a domain. Some of the numbers are confusing. I plugged in a number of enterprise search vendors’ domain names to see what the SavedWebHistory.org system would report. I have reproduced a table containing the field names and the values for Autonomy, BA Insight, Coveo, Endeca, Funnelback, Mindbreeze, Recommind, Smartlogic, and SurfRay. This list includes some well known companies like Autonomy and Endeca and some companies with average visibility. I also included some lesser known search vendors. The idea was to generate a comparative table with data points pertinent to some of the companies I follow.
You can work through the table or run your own reports. Several points jumped out at me:
- In terms of search engine optimization, Autonomy appears to have its paws on more key words than any of the other vendors in my test sample
- Three vendors have little Alexa presence according to the data; namely, BA Insight, Endeca, and SurfRay. I find that Endeca’s zero score an anomaly. I am not surprised at the inclusion of BA Insight and SurfRay.
- Funnelback has more educational backlinks and governmental backlinks than any other vendor in this sample. Perhaps Funnelback is aggressively pursuing these markets or the Australian government is linking aggressively to Funnelback? Funnelback is also the leader in page views, according to the report for this sample.
- The all important Google PageRank score gives Autonomy a seven rating. The vendor with the lowest PageRank score is SurfRay, a vendor that has an interesting financial and business history. Most search vendors achieve a respectable PageRank score of five. Two legal centric search systems garner a PageRank of six. Lawyers seem to have a gift of lingo approximating that of Autonomy.
I have a frozen Web site at www.arnoldit.com. The score for this site is comparable to the average search engine vendor in traffic and PageRank. I am not sure how valuable these SEO-centric reports are, but if you are a coming looking for sales leads, it might be easier to buy Google AdWords than to try to figure out how to reach today’s Web surfer.
| Autonomy | BA Insight | Coveo | Endeca | Funnelback | Mindbreeze | Recommind | Smartlogic | SurfRay | X1 | |
| Key Words in SERPs | 1056 | 0 | 201 | 0 | 143 | 41 | 76 | 126 | 62 | 355 |
| Google PR | 7 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 6 |
| Yandex CY | 150 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 0 | 10 | 40 | 10 | 20 |
| Google indexed | 10.3 | 0 | 12.5 | 5.44 | 4.18 | 507 | 1.8 | 13.1 | 918 | 9.75 |
| Quantcast rank | 37.362 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 104.859 | 0 | 706.805 | 0 | 0 | 625.031 |
| Alexa Rank | 141.452 | 0% | 557.525 | 0 | 349.195 | 440.065 | 600.586 | 449.451 | 0 | 444.193 |
| Alexa Traff:Search % | 35.50% | 0 | 26.30% | 20.90% | 0.30% | 0.80% | 18.70% | 32.90% | 16.70% | 9.80% |
| Alexa Traff:TimeOnSite | 144 sec | 59 sec | 129 sec | 223 sec | 69 sec | 216 sec | 132 sec | 194 sec | 41 sec | 163 sec |
| Alexa Traff:Bounce | 57.90% | 0% | 64.60% | 40.10% | 62.80% | 42.70% | 52% | 63.40% | 61.10% | 43.90% |
| Alexa Traff:PageV/User | 2.4 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 3.9 | 4.9 | 2.3 | 220.00% | 3.3 | 1.3 | 2.5 |
| External BackLinks | 102.66 | 11.991 | 34.022 | 43.486 | 1.212.796 | 4.037 | 28.666 | 5.277 | 4.28 | 25.913 |
| Referring Domains | 5.186 | 267 | 893 | 1.45 | 545 | 302 | 919 | 461 | 241 | 2.17 |
| Indexed URLs | 9.38 | 1.625 | 42.736 | 2.207 | 78.497 | 7.517 | 6.945 | 159.279 | 14.606 | 52.694 |
| Referring IP addresses | 3.832 | 238 | 678 | 1.245 | 481 | 224 | 718 | 339 | 204 | 1.887 |
| Referring SubNets | 3.298 | 230 | 613 | 1.127 | 446 | 201 | 651 | 315 | 186 | 1.647 |
| Referring .edu Domains | 122 | 1 | 6 | 32 | 21 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 0 | 15 |
| .edu Backlinks | 215 | 437 | 88 | 87 | 703.051 | 3 | 14 | 11 | 0 | 146 |
| Referring .gov Domains | 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 29 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| .gov Backlinks | 19 | 0 | 10 | 3 | 23.209 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 16 |
| Referring .edu Domains to main | 47 | 0 | 5 | 24 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 6 |
| .edu Backlinks to main | 86 | 0 | 35 | 68 | 6 | 2 | 11 | 1 | 0 | 9 |
| Referring .gov Domains to main | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| .gov Backlinks to main | 15 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2014
The Observatory of Economic Complexity
March 26, 2014
The future of search may just be here, in the form of a specialized search engine courtesy of MIT (quelle surprise!) The Observatory of Economic Complexity (ECI) is the result of a 2010 Master Thesis in Media Arts and Sciences by one Alexander Simoes, and enjoys the continuing support of the MIT Media Lab‘s consortia for undirected research. A history of the project’s contributions is available on Github. Some technical details from the project’s FAQ page:
“Where does the data come from?
“The observatory provides access to bilateral trade data for roughly 200 countries, 50 years and 1000 different products of the SITC4 revision 2 classification. For historical SITC classification data, we use data from The Center for International Data from Robert Feenstra. For up to date HS classification data, we use data provided by UN COMTRADE.
“Can I download this data?
“Sure! You can download the latest dump of the entire data (in MySQL format) here. Or if you are looking for data on a particular country or product, you can click the CSV download button on the right-hand side of all explore pages.”
The rest of the FAQ page lets users know how they can help the project improve by contributing translations, correcting errors, and reporting bugs. Besides the search functionality, there’s a Rankings page listing countries by their current ECI values. The site also offers profiles of different countries’ economic activity. As of this writing, though, I can’t seem to pull up a profile of a specific country, but rather click through a series of what seem like randomly presented entries. An interesting way to kill a few minutes of time, but not so good for finding specific information. If that’s a bug, I hope it’s fixed soon. If it’s a feature… I hope it’s fixed soon.
One more thing to note about this project—it has the potential to inform global policy in ways that make life better around the world. Their book “The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity” makes the case, and is free to download. Said a World Bank chief economist in 2011, “The ECI can play a very important role. It can help identify the role for developing countries.” We do hope the Observatory will live up to its potential.
Cynthia Murrell, March 26, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google is Innovating While Other Companies Rest on Laurels
January 2, 2014
An article on SVBTLE Magazine by David Litwak titled Google is the new Bell Labs makes the startling and insightful announcement that Google is an unusual business. The Bell Labs the article refers to is the research sector of AT&T and Western Electric Research Laboratories, which takes credit for 7 Nobel Prizes and the invention of (to name a few items off the list) the laser, transistor and UNIX.
The article explains the connection between the two companies:
“Google is acting in the same spirit as Alexander Bell, using their incredibly lucrative money-maker (Google Adwords) to finance moonshots and ambitious side projects. Both GMail and Google Maps are great examples, and they are ahead of the game with a truly integrated travel search engine in Google Travel (2-3 years in my estimate), Google Glass/wearable computing (at least 5 years before its time), autonomous cars (maybe 10 years) and household/military robotics (15 years?).”
Comparing this with the work of Microsoft, Apple or Amazon seems almost unfair, or at least a faulty comparison. (Apples and oranges?) The article does credit Apple with the creation of the smartphone industry, but points out that since then they have not really branched out the way Google cannot seem to help doing. Google is in the business of innovation and industry making. Good thing someone is around to remind everyone.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
LinkedIn: Search Less and Less Relevant?
September 24, 2013
I read “Today I Deleted My LinkedIn Account”. One of the goslings handles my LinkedIn account. If a comment is required, the gosling alerts me. One of the researchers snags relevant material and crafts either questions or a statement based on my previously published writings. One research librarian filters requests to be my “friend.” The policy is to ask, “When and where did we meet?” For the most part, the system works, but the information flowing through LinkedIn is not directly relevant to the work we do. Like any social media service, the process helps prevent abuses. We did experience a script kiddy who routed our tweets of articles in this blog and our other online publications through Miley Cyrus’ account. When I looked at what the clever teen had done, I learned a great deal about Ms. Cyrus. Great parenting at work I suppose.
The main point of the “Today I Deleted” write up is that LinkedIn is annoying to the author of the write up. I sympathize with folks who are annoyed at online information services today. The good old days of paying to access File 15 on Dialog are long gone. The hassles were mostly the cost of information and the silliness of the dial up terminal with bunny rabbit ears. I bet you don’t know what bunny rabbit ears are, do you?
The numbers the author presents are astounding. LinkedIn, according to the write up, has 225 million “members.” I am not sure how many are like me, operating through research professionals who are paid to ride herd on social interactions. I am not sure how many are human resource professionals looking to make a buck by referring a person whom the HR professional does not know to a company about which the HR professionals knows only a bit more.
I surmise that the majority of the 225 million are people looking for:
- Work
- Human contact albeit digitally intermediated
- Information about something that will yield money, power, or prestige
- A way to kill time whilst “looking at potentially high value content”
- Horn tooting.
The write up focuses on what LinkedIn does to a particular user. For example, LinkedIn emails are annoying. A more interesting aspect of LinkedIn surfaces in this statement:
For the quarter ending June 2013, Facebook reported 1,155,000,000 monthly active users. Calling their original registration numbers ~1,300,000,000 which is generous), that means that 88% of Facebook’s users actually use the site regularly.
Compare that to LinkedIn, which claims that 170,000,000 of its 218,000,000 users logged in during the quarter ending March 2013, for a total of closer to 77%. That number actually understates the disparity, because it just measures unique visitors.
While LinkedIn users spend an average of 8 minutes on the site daily, Facebook users hang round for over 33 minutes, or OVER HALF AN HOUR each. In fact, LinkedIn puts this problem much better than I can:“The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members. Our business may be adversely impacted if we are unable to attract and retain additional members who actively use our services.” (source)
(traffic stats: Facebook,LinkedIn, SEC data: LinkedIn, Facebook).
You should read the original post.
What struck me is that search or finding information within LinkedIn is not mentioned as an issue. LinkedIn hired a Googler to supplement their open source search team. I find that looking for content using the LinkedIn search box is a very interesting process. A direct query leads to the request to log in. (I call the gosling to find out what my user name and password are.) Once logged in, I am asked to upgrade to a paying service. I ignore that and go to third party search systems.
I can access some interesting LinkedIn information using the services which I highlight in my ISS World lecture this week. It appears that some LinkedIn information is indexed by third party services. A click on a link from some of these third party services displays the person’s profile. In some cases, I can view the people in some way “related” the the person about whom I seek information. I find this interesting because I have not been able to answer these questions:
- What services index LinkedIn content?
- How much information is available to third party services either via the LinkedIn tools, deals, or just clever spidering?
- What are the constraints on the use of the LinkedIn data within the third party indexes?
It makes sense to me that LinkedIn would want some of its content in various third party indexes. Because LinkedIn’s search function is unsatisfactory for my purposes, I find the third party approach more helpful to me.
What annoys me about LinkedIn is not its play to make lots of money. I don’t care too much about spam which is easily filtered. I don’t care a whit about the ego centric nature of the system.
I care about search, and I sure hope that LinkedIn improves its search system and I hope it makes explicit what services index LinkedIn content with or without explicit permission.
But saying, doing, and appearing are very different things in today’s challenging business environment. I may get a gosling to look into third party indexing of LinkedIn. For now, I boil down much of an online system’s value to search. For me, that’s the key function. LinkedIn, like other social media systems, wants to focus on other features. Too bad. I think that part of the value of LinkedIn is its content, however flawed. Access would urge me to pay more attention to a service fueled by financial need/desperation, professional branding/visibility, and sales/marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2013
Altova Release New Version of MissionKit
November 30, 2012
Altova, a data management solutions provider and creator of XMLSpy, recently published the news release, “Altova Announces the Release of Version 2013 of MissionKit” on its website.
According to the article, Altova has released an integrated suite of XML, SQL, and UML tools. It offers automatic error correction and support for SQL stored procedures in data mapping projects. Prices start at $59 per product and are available for purchase in the Altova online shop.
The release states:
“Among the many updates and new features we incorporated into the Version 2013 release, one of the most significant is Smart Fix. Smart Fix is unique to XMLSpy 2013 and is a huge leap forward in intelligent XML editing. It provides options for fixing validation errors that developers can apply automatically, with a single click. It’s true XML alchemy,” said Alexander Falk, President and CEO for Altova. “With increased demands on developers today we are always looking for ways to incorporate efficiencies into our products. You simply won’t find this functionality in other tools.”
Altova’s MissionKit is certainly affordable and the suite offers great tools. However, it only saves you money if you plan on using equal numbers of XMLSpy and MapForce.
Jasmine Ashton, November 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Mindbreeze InSite is a Hit
September 18, 2012
Even at its inception, Mindbreeze InSite was garnering rave reviews for its creativity and effectiveness. The From the Cloud blog features good news regarding Mindbreeze InSite acceptance in the industry in its entry, “futurezone.at: Mindbreeze InSite is a Direct Hit!”
The author begins:
A few weeks ago Mindbreeze InSite became the latest sprog to join the family of Fabasoft Cloud services online. The young Cloud service had barely entered the world when it landed its first major success: Replacing Google Appliance as the integrated search on futurezone.at, the Austrian national newspaper Kurier’s technology news portal. According to Alexa ranking this website belongs to the top 5 websites in Austria (top 871 worldwide)!
Mindbreeze InSite is quick and easy to install. Tens of thousands of pages of Web content can be indexed simply by embedding a few lines of script code. Additionally, tens of thousands of searches can be performed by hour by users to the Web site, without any burden on the system. In addition to the other successful enterprise services that Mindbreeze offers, InSite offers a wonderful compliment, equipping users to find quick satisfaction in their search of your public facing Web sites.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 18, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
The Wrath of the Algorithm
August 24, 2012
What if we imagined an algorithm as a disgruntled worker? The Washington Post gives us “The Tale of the Rogue Algorithm,” a story which does just that. Prompted by the news that recent stock market turbulence was caused by an errant automated stock trading program, opinion writer Alexandra Petri imagines what circumstances might drive some poor algorithm to stoop to such disruption. She writes:
“For days, a sense of vague anxiety had been dogging at this algorithm. Trading was fulfilling, sure, and things with Sheryl were off to a great start. . . .
“But the algorithm couldn’t shake the nerves. Watching the Olympics, it had been struck by the feeling that something was missing from its life. For no reason whatsoever, it had begun sobbing uncontrollably during a commercial for Charmin Ultra.
“What was missing, exactly? It was not sure. Algorithms did most of the trading on Wall Street, but where was the recognition? What had it gotten out of its years of service? It still lived in a slow computer in a bad part of town. A PC, as a matter of fact.”
The yarn continues in this fashion, ending with the algorithm’s impulsive, out-of-control, 30-minute trading run. All in great fun, but the spoof points to a very real concern—we simply can’t trust in the math-driven utopia some folks would like to make the norm. Please, let’s keep the humans. As supervisors, at least.
Cynthia Murrell, August 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
WideStat Collects and Provides Data on Web Sites
April 23, 2012
An interesting service has turned up with a report on Exorbyte. The site is named WideStat, and calls itself a “Website Worth Calculator.” The page is a collection of statistics, many of which are displayed in colorful charts. Pretty.
We are not sure if these types of auto-complete Web services help or hinder a search and content processing vendor. Here is what it has to say about our old friend, Exorbyte:
“Exorbyte.de has #662,408 traffic rank in world by Alexa. It gets 726 internet visitors per day. Visitors to it view 2.9 unique pages each day on average. Estimated daily time on site 02:45 seconds. It has an average of 786 pages indexed in major search engines like Google. There are an average of 124 links pointing back to exorbyte.de from other websites. Exorbyte.de has the potential to earn $15 USD in advertisement revenue per day. It has an estimated value of $5,227 USD. Out of the 30 unique keywords found on exorbyte.de, ‘exorbyte’ was the most dense. This site has Google PageRank 4 of 10.”
As a aside, think about how much more readable that would have been had a human written or translated it. Just a thought.
We are not sure if these types of Web services help or hinder a search and content processing vendor. Besides, the 726 daily visitors to the company’s Web site strikes us as quite low. We recommend you check your company on WideStat and see what tidbits it may have picked up about your business.
Headquartered in Konstanz, Germany, Exorbyte was founded at the turn of the century. The company provides search and data matching software and solutions for online ecommerce, directories, and data quality applications. Their core platform is colorfully named MatchMaker.
Cynthia Murrell, April 23, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Will Apps Kill Search?
April 2, 2012
Read Write Web recently reported on a new Pew study focusing on the future of information consumption and distribution in the digital era in the article, “The Web vs. App Battle Continues.”
According to the article, based on survey results, we could be looking into an all app future. By 2016 estimates say there will be 10 billion Internet devices in use across the world. If the population indeed hits 7.3 billion, that means 1.4 devices per person. Smartphone traffic is expected to grow 50 times. As we know, smartphone users download apps at rapid rates.
The Pew study notes that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said that they use smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers to connect to the internet. Alternating between these three devices is most easily done through the use of apps.
As a response to this, Web architects are looking to build cross-platform, browser-accessible Web apps rather than browser-specific or native apps.
The article states:
Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University, notes that the challenge will come with helping consumers think about the implications of HTML5-based apps as a part of the Web. How will app users perceive their experience? As part of the interconnected Web, or behind the wall of an app? These are important questions to consider, says Samuel. Can the Web and the app become one in the same? And will the browser-based Web stand a chance?
If this story is accurate, traditional search faces a very tough future.
Jasmine Ashton, April 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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