YouTube Lover Gets Annoyed
May 8, 2012
Wil Wheaton took to his blog to declare, “Google is Making a Huge and Annoying Mistake.” Wheaton insists:
“Yesterday, I tried to like a video on YouTube. I wasn’t signed in to my Google Plus account, and this is what I saw: Where the thumbs up and thumbs down used to be, there is now a big G+ Like button. When you go anywhere near it, you get a little popup that tells you to ‘upgrade to Google plus’ for some reason that I don’t remember, because the instant I saw it, I made a rageface.”
He then went on to Tumble a profanity-laced missive to Google expressing his righteous rage. Apparently, he products a show whose existence depends on the capture of enough YouTube up votes. I suppose the problem with a newfangled business model is the rapid change that tends to accompany new fangles.
The thing is, I can’t reproduce Wheaton’s problem. I still get the thumbs up and down buttons, and nary a Google+ button in sight. (Even in Chrome, where I’m signed into iGoogle.) The only difference I see is that I am not a Google+ subscriber. But then, he says he’s getting a “upgrade to Google+” message, and wasn’t signed into his account anyway. I don’t question his experience, he has a screenshot after all, it’s just . . . odd.
He should try rebooting.
Cynthia Murrell, May 8, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Analytics Firm Humanizes Web Traffic Analysis
April 13, 2012
BetaKit recently reported on a new product put out by the data analysis firm known as Mixpanel in the article “Mixpanel Launches Flow to Humanize Web Traffic Analysis.”
According to the article, Flow is a free tool that gathers user information in real-time. It will hopefully raise awareness about the Mixpanel brand while driving more customers to the companies paid offerings.
The article states:
“The immediacy of feedback, combined with a focus on usable, attractive design are what help it stand out from competitive offerings. Insights that can be gleaned from the kind of information Flow provides are sometime obvious; users tend to click on links from left to right when they appear next to one another, for instance, with the left-aligned links often being clicked more frequently than the rest in navigation bars.”
While this product has some very exciting new features, it also has some limits. Unlike competitors like Google Analytics, Flow doesn’t yet provide information about the source of traffic coming into the website. Although it plans to eventually include that information. Where Mixpanel is setting itself apart is by putting significant emphasis on design and accessibility of information.
Jasmine Ashton, April 13, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google+ Designer Profiled
March 21, 2012
We see that Google is ramping its PR engine. Mercury News declares, “Apple Pioneer Brings Emotion to Google+.” The write up profiles Andy Hertzfeld, a longtime Apple veteran who now works at Google. Hertzfeld designed the prototype for Google+’s Circles feature, which many consider to be the social site’s strongpoint. He also gets a lot of the credit for Google’s visual changes over the past year.
Writer Mike Swift quotes Hertzfeld regarding his approach:
“We try to operate at the intersection of design and engineering. One of the reasons why things aren’t as good as they could be sometimes is that the engineers and the designers don’t work closely together enough.”
Hertzfeld was around for Apple’s break-through graphical user interface, which introduced the very concept of clicking on icons to launch software. He has written a book about that time, “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made”. Hertzfeld commented:
“ . . . The real breakthrough of the Macintosh was that we cared about UI. I learned in a formative experience that caring about UI matters, and if you do care about UI, you can make the world a better place.’’
As a user, I can say I do appreciate that attitude.
Stephen E. Arnold, March 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Read? Images Are Stronger
March 14, 2012
I came across an article about the value of Facebook profile pictures as opposed to text, and was amazed by the new research that shows that words simply do not matter; it is all about image.
“With the Right Photo, Your Facebook Text Profile Hardly Matters,” covers a couple of studies by Brandon Van Der Heide and two other Ohio State graduate students. The studies look into how people make impressions of others on social networking sites, and it seems that is primarily done through photos.
Apparently, people already have certain expectations of the photos they view on social networking. We expect people to highlight successes and social activities. The study went on to show that if a photo fits what someone expects to see, then the rest of the profile doesn’t have much impact on the viewer. If it doesn’t fit what they expect, that is when people will decide to look closer at what you wrote. The article continues:
Van Der Heide [lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University] said he believes the results apply beyond Facebook to dating websites and other social networking sites. It should also apply to other traits beyond extraversion and introversion, such as social desirability and even political orientation. It all depends on what is shown in the photographs, and what clues viewers can glean from them.
According to the research, when people use text or photos alone to build an impression, text will typically have a greater influence. As more businesses head to social networking to build strategic relationships and strengthen customer bases, this is something that should be kept in mind. Be sure to highlight exactly what you want the customer to take away at first glance, because that may be the only glance you get.
Andrea Hayden, March 14, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Quote to Note: Curation Means from Somewhere Else
March 13, 2012
Short honk: I find it fascinating that today’s generation of journalists, blog experts, journalists, and information gurus with “at” signs as part of their names don’t use library reference tools. Sure, these “experts” assert that each and every one knows how to search and “do research.”
Navigate to “A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators” if the link is still valid. The story appears in the New York Times, an outfit which has more content which is sometimes there and sometimes not. The story is about content aggregators and a “code of conduct” for those creatures. The idea is that someone thinks creating new graphics to indicate that stories come from somewhere else.
Consider this passage:
She [a person suggesting a content curation code] is careful about attribution and thinks others should be mindful as well. The Curator’s Code is a shorthand tool to signify that on the Web, most things come from somewhere else. Neither of these initiatives seems intended to serve as a posse to bring justice and order to the digital Wild West. In a sense, they are an effort to bring back the promise of the consumer Internet, creating visible connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information. It’s called the Web for a reason, after all.
I agree, most things come from somewhere else. Is not learning anchored in that method?
The origin of a bibliographic citation and abstract presented as a blog post in Beyond Search. Too bad most of the “experts” tracking multimedia have not donned white gloves and examined source documents and the often prescient glosses. Oh, I forgot. That’s not what “real” journalists and experts do. My apologies.
My thought is that codes are okay, but the core method is one of selection, citation, and commentary. In the scriptorum (alternate spelling scriptorium) (you know what that is, gentle reader), patient folk would add a gloss to a document. Then when books became the cat’s pajamas, some folks created citations which provided information about the book. Citations about books became catalogs. Write ups about individual articles became bibliographic citations with or without an abstract of the source.
Beyond Search is a hybrid. It combines the ABI/INFORM type of abstract, a citation (now expressed as a link), and a critical comment by the librarian or professional who creates the information. You can, for example, use one of the search boxes to locate information on a specific topic. The top box on the Beyond Search Web page provides access to the Blossom Software index. Blossom is a search system developed by a person who was at Bell Labs when Howard Flank and I were doing the MARS (market analysis and retrieval service) and BASIS implementation for the outfit. The other search box is an implementation of the Google Custom Search Engine. The idea is that a person visiting Beyond Search can get a sense of how two different systems process the same corpus of content.
Will Beyond Search implement a graphic gizmo? Nope. Will I change what is has been doing for the last 30 years? Nope. Will I keep in mind that on the Web “most things come from somewhere else”? Nope. The value of a series of citations generated for the query “Autonomy” in this blog is that I have a quick way of seeing the milestones in that company’s business trajectory.
The flaw in curation comes from some “experts” failure to see that the gloss of scriptorum laborers is alive and well in certain Web logs. No one thinks of a copyist creating a version of Euclid’s geometry. What’s clear to me is that we now have a generation of folks who don’t know much about reference works like Constance Winchell’s Guide to Reference Books, 8th edition, commercial databases like Chemical Abstracts, or the value of annotated bibliographies with critical commentary.
Journalists and self appointed experts no longer can be given a free pass when it comes to citation-centric content objects. But if you think news is your hammer, then every problem is one that one can pound with the journalistic Jingo. A little more fine grained thinking would make this addled goose a trifle more calm.
Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Mishaps at Google Apps?
March 11, 2012
More headaches are at hand for Google users, this time subscribers to Google Apps. ComputerWorld reveals, “Disabled Google Apps Account Deletion Mechanism Affecting Admins, Users.” The tasks of deleting and reactivating domains in Google Apps was handled by an automated mechanism until mid-January, when Google “temporarily” disabled it. The reason? “A related issue.” Um, o.k. . . .
The outage was only supposed to last a couple of weeks, but was still in place as of the publication of the ComputerWorld article on March second. Google Apps administrators have been receiving deletion and re-add requests faster than they can process them. Writer Juan Carlos Perez reports:
“Eventually, Google resorted to a manual process for handling these requests, asking affected administrators to report their domains in a designated thread in the official Apps discussion forum, where they’re then added to a queue to be dealt with manually.”
For users, the delay can impact daily business communications and other operations. Perez writes:
“Some users have remarked that Google could be doing a better job of notifying Apps administrators about this issue. For example, the problem doesn’t yet seem to have been added to the Apps Known Issues list.”
Does Google put users first? Hmmm.
Cynthia Murrell, March 11, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Internet Explorer Becomes Anorexic
March 2, 2012
Notice anything about this version of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser?
Imagine my surprise when I opened Internet Explorer to check a site that would not render in Chrome without delivering a “danger” message.
I had a platform preview version of the browser. I learned this when I clicked the Help word and selected About. Here’s what I saw:
The changes I noticed were disconcerting to me. You, on the other hand, may love the “enhancements”. I noted:
- No icons to do stuff like refresh a page
- No search box, no nothing
- No title bar into which to enter a Web address. To navigate to Google, I selected Page, Open, and typed the url into a box
- No obvious way to use a bookmark
- No way to get back to a version of Internet Explorer with my bookmarks.
I am semi amused but Opera looks better and better each time I encounter Google menus with different options, crazy pop up boxes, and simplification which is less than helpful.
Honk!
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Customer Service: Where Are Search Vendors?
February 20, 2012
To answer the question, search vendors are actually doing better than we expected.
Search vendors are forever chasing customer support clients, but what about the vendors’ own customer support? InfoWorld asks, “Which IT Vendors Offer the Best and Worst Customer Service?” The article reports on a survey recently conducted by the Temkin Group. Writer Ted Samson explains:
Tech vendors looking to bounce back from the recession might consider investing a few more dollars in improving customer service. According to a survey of IT professionals, most tech companies are offering merely an adequate customer service experience. Yet IT shops tend to steer their limited budget dollars toward vendors that offer not just the best products, but also the best customer service experiences. Even as large enterprise providers consolidate, IT still has clout — and is using it.
There were some intriguing results. The worst of the bunch included Fujitsu, which not only powers Perfect Search, but through its partnership with OpenText also affects Fulcrum Biometrics, Nstein, Collections Server (formerly BASIS), Livelink Discovery Server (formerly BRS), and others.
Microsoft’s business applications took number one (Fast), with IBM (OmniFind, Content Analytics) placing third. Other noteworthy rankings: Oracle at number eight, HP (Autonomy) at number nine, and Google just failed to make the top ten at number eleven.
Interesting. And what about those out of date Web pages and “press one if…” messages.
Cynthia Murrell, February 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Autonomy: Ready to Disrupt Again
February 17, 2012
When Hewlett-Packard (HP) purchased the enterprise software company Autonomy for a hefty 10.3 billion last August, the world was left wondering what would come of this new partnership. While HP has the hardware, Autonomy’s unique software allows enterprises to provide insight and structure to electronic data, including unstructured information, such as text, email, web pages, voice, or video.
Now, six months after the acquisition, word has broken and Business Insider’s Julie Bort has written “HP Finally Explains Its Big Plans for its $10 Billion Purchase, Autonomy” which shares some of the new products that HP has planned for Autonomy.
According to the article, HP is working on several hardware appliances that will power enterprise search and ideally out compete Google’s Search Appliance. HP also unveiled a new Autonomy video application.
In addition to this, Bort writes:
“HP is working on mobile Autonomy applications that will let you view images of physical world objects such as a movie poster and interact with them online. That’s nothing special, as lots of companies are working on similar technology, known as “augmented reality.” But this type of thing hasn’t gone mainstream yet, so there’s plenty of room for a big player like HP to own it if it ever does.”
While HP many not be using Autonomy to create the most innovative products right off the bat, HP’s extensive resources and purchasing power paired with Autonomy’s software make a duo that will be difficult to compete with.
Jasmine Ashton, February 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Oobian: Insight, Share, Logic, Connect
February 16, 2012
Founded in 1994, Maisis started out servicing the telecommunications market. Since 2004, the Portuguese company decided to take its experience in software and networks management and focus its activities on the document and enterprise content management and enterprise knowledge management sectors.
Maisis’ flagship product is Oobian. Released in 2009 after four years of development, it is a knowledge management system based on an intelligent navigation user interface developed in Microsoft Silverlight. The tool’s semantic interpretation capacity is based on an approach using ontologies. Oobian is able to link structured and unstructured data inside or outside firewalls. It can also automatically interpret metadata. Key features include a Web client rich user interface that has drill up and drill down features, various connectors and add-ons for Microsoft and open source applications; and support for all World Wide Web Consortium semantic Web recommendations, like OWL and RDFS. The 1.5 release in October 2011 added profile management and notification management. It also includes external Web search integration.
In May 2011, Maisis was named a Microsoft Gold Independent Software Vendor. Its Oobian clients include the Martifer Group, a multi-national engineering group, Portugal Telecom’s PT Innovation unit, and consultant Gestamp. Competitors include Ontopia, IBM, Fabasoft, and Oracle.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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