Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

Search and Immortality

I've riffed on it before. At a New Orleans based exhibition, an artist has taken it one step further. Wired reports. Sullivan said he wanted to create an urn that was visually interesting, allowed some user interactivity and referenced the physical body. He decided that his remains will be…

HydriolastI’ve riffed on it before. At a New Orleans based exhibition, an artist has taken it one step further. Wired reports.

Sullivan said he wanted to create an urn that was visually interesting, allowed some user interactivity and referenced the physical body. He decided that his remains will be integrated into a computer processor. A virtual agent running on the computer that contains his ashes will scour the web for mentions of his name. As the mentions increase, an on-screen image of Sullivan will morph into an image of his younger self. But if the mentions decline, Sullivan’s image will age, deteriorate and eventually fade away.

In the gallery, a prototype Ego Machine is presented on a computer display. Sullivan realized that since this is a project in perpetuity its results might be imperceptible during a brief visit to the gallery. To make it more interesting for viewers, Sullivan decided to allow people to consciously feed or starve his ego, either at the gallery or online.

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Davos, Google, and JAM

So I missed the Google party on Friday night at Davos, as I had to fly back for my best man's 40th. But this fellow did not miss it. If you feel like a trip down his particular rabbit hole, read on….

So I missed the Google party on Friday night at Davos, as I had to fly back for my best man’s 40th. But this fellow did not miss it. If you feel like a trip down his particular rabbit hole, read on.

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Blog Plasma

If you've been reading this site for a while you may recall my earlier post on MusicPlasma, a cool site that uses Amazon's web services to build a visual search engine for music based on collaborative filtering data. It shows bands as "orbs" or planets, each with their own…

MplasmaIf you’ve been reading this site for a while you may recall my earlier post on MusicPlasma, a cool site that uses Amazon’s web services to build a visual search engine for music based on collaborative filtering data. It shows bands as “orbs” or planets, each with their own “solar system” of related bands. (Play with it, it’s pretty cool.)

Recently a colleague contacted me and asked if I had anything interesting to say about blogs and how they might shape the media world in the next year or so. My initial thought was “Why of course I do!” – but the fact is, it’s not easy to have something interesting to say about blogs that doesn’t require a hell of a lot of throat clearing, groundwork laying, and general hand waving. Try to explain to an intelligent layperson the power of blogs – it’s not easy. The perfect piece has yet to be written on the true power and impact of blogs; at least, I haven’t seen it.

Sure, the examples are there – from the tsunami coverage to Trent Lott. But my colleague was looking for a visual high order bit – a way to see what the big deal was, after all. I thought about Dave Sifry’s slides from Web 2.0, but that was still too inside-the-blogway.

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Rosenberg Chimes In

Echoing other conversations I've seen around the web (wait for 12/14 to post)….Scott pings the Big Concept that while the folks building Google now are clearly well intentioned, we are creating an asset in Google together that someday may be out of our collective control. In Salon's blog, Scott…

Echoing other conversations I’ve seen around the web (wait for 12/14 to post)….Scott pings the Big Concept that while the folks building Google now are clearly well intentioned, we are creating an asset in Google together that someday may be out of our collective control. In Salon’s blog, Scott Rosenberg comments:

But Google is a public company. The people leading it today will not be leading it forever. It’s not inconceivable that in some future downturn Google will find itself under pressure to “monetize” its trove of books more ruthlessly.

Today’s Google represents an extremely benign face of capitalism, and it may be that the only way to get a project of this magnitude done efficiently is in the private sector. But capitalism has its own dynamic, and ad-supported businesses tend to move in one direction — towards more and more aggressive advertising.

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Ferguson on Google: Platform? Yes. Single Platform? No.

Charles Ferguson writes a lengthy and clearly considered piece on Google for Tech Review, focusing on the Microsoft angle and concluding that the only way Google can truly "win" is by controlling a new architecture of computing through the time honored approach of proprietary APIs. Ferguson argues that the…

Charles Ferguson writes a lengthy and clearly considered piece on Google for Tech Review, focusing on the Microsoft angle and concluding that the only way Google can truly “win” is by controlling a new architecture of computing through the time honored approach of proprietary APIs. Ferguson argues that the search wars are about to enter a major battle for control of standards which simplify the increasingly heterogeneous world of search, and in such a battle, Microsoft is far better suited.

I enjoyed reading this piece, and I am sure I will read it again and again, to more fully consider its argument. But I find myself disagreeing with the premise – why, in this world of the web, do we need to be bound by this winner takes all approach to the world? It works in a resource constrained world of homogenous PCs – once a consumer has purchased his Windows box, he’s not going to easily purchase an emerging competitor – but somehow, it really doesnt’ strike me as the right metaphor for a Web 2.0 world. I do agree that Google would be well served to make its service more of a platform, and that APIs are the way to go. But I’d really be interested in what Tim O’Reilly has to say about this piece, or Tim Bray, or any number of other folks. I’ll keep my eye out…meanwhile, do read the piece. It’s a worthy provocation.

Other POVs on this piece: TechDirt, Linden, SEW, Silicon Beat

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Print Implications: Google As Builder

Some folks have been calling me and together we've been pondering the implications of the Google Print announcement. And one drop dead obvious thing dawned on me during the conversations. This is so obvious as to be almost embarrassing to restate, but this program marks a major departure in…

Some folks have been calling me and together we’ve been pondering the implications of the Google Print announcement. And one drop dead obvious thing dawned on me during the conversations.

This is so obvious as to be almost embarrassing to restate, but this program marks a major departure in Google’s overall approach to search. After all, what has been the presumptive model till now? If it’s on the web and publicly available, it’s in the index. That’s why we called it web search, after all. But Gary Price and Chris Sherman, among many others, have reminded us how vast and darkly lit the invisible web is – all that information trapped in the amber of password-protected databases, or crumbling film libraries, or ….books.

Now other companies have taken significant steps toward illuminating these dark corners of the world’s knowledge web – Yahoo with its CAP program, Amazon with A9 and Search Inside the Book. And Google has long claimed that it’s mission was to go beyond the web and crawl the world’s information, wherever it lay.

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Friday Sketching: Tangential Ramblings on the Roles of Google and Yahoo in Search, Media and Beyond

For some time I've been trying to articulate, in a succinct fashion, what separates Yahoo and Google in terms of their approach to search, media, and ultimately culture. It came up today as I was writing, and damned if I got stuck. So in the spirit of other Friday…

For some time I’ve been trying to articulate, in a succinct fashion, what separates Yahoo and Google in terms of their approach to search, media, and ultimately culture. It came up today as I was writing, and damned if I got stuck. So in the spirit of other Friday sketches, I’m going to write out loud here on Searchblog, and depend on your forbearance and insights to get through the draught.

So let’s consider a search for the one-word term “usher,” and further, let’s presume the person typing that search in really does want to know about the (currently) popular singer Usher.

Googleusher-1

Now on Google, usher brings you a pretty predictable set of results. Because Usher, the singer, is quite popular at the moment and therefore much in the news, Google incorporates some of its Google News results into its SERPs, you can see from the link or picture that there are two in this particular example. On the right are tons of AdWords related to Usher – clearly there are plenty of vendors who stand to make a buck or two off the man, and they’ve found Google a good way to monetize the term. The majority of the page, however, is given over to listing the top ten Google results for “usher.”

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The Law Embraces the Internet Archive

As Cory points out over on BoingBoing, it was only a matter of time. This does point to the beginning of the web as digital memory for our ongoing culture….

As Cory points out over on BoingBoing, it was only a matter of time. This does point to the beginning of the web as digital memory for our ongoing culture.

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The Transparent (Shopping) Society

As long as I’m on the topic of societal impacts of search, I wanted to sketch out a scenario for you all, in a similar vein to the one I did recently on the integration of search and television. This scenario involves several elements already in place – search technologies,…

eyepyramidAs long as I’m on the topic of societal impacts of search, I wanted to sketch out a scenario for you all, in a similar vein to the one I did recently on the integration of search and television.

This scenario involves several elements already in place – search technologies, mobile phones, and the Universal Product Code system – and some more fanciful, but nevertheless feasible technological and business model innovations.

So let’s set this one in motion and see what happens. Imagine it’s the near future, and you’re in your local grocery store on a mission to pick up dinner for a Saturday night dinner party. Because you’re a Searchblog reader with oodles of disposable income to burn, it’s a Whole Foods store, the aisles dripping organic righteousness and whole grain goodness. You know that dinner for 8 is going to run you at least $200, not counting the wine, but that’s OK, compared to the tab at the local bistro, you’ll be coming out ahead. But you do want to make sure you’re not spending money you don’t have to, especially on the wine.

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You Are What You Index

Yesterday evening I spent some time chatting with a major news program that is doing a piece on Google. During the conversation, the correspondent asked how engines like Google are changing our own sense of self as we relate to the rest of the world. I went off on my…

ratherYesterday evening I spent some time chatting with a major news program that is doing a piece on Google. During the conversation, the correspondent asked how engines like Google are changing our own sense of self as we relate to the rest of the world. I went off on my (now rather tired) example of a hypothetical Deadbeat Dad who failed to make child support payments, was called out in court and in the local papers. He eventually mended his ways, paid up, and decided that because his reputation was sullied in the community where he lived, he’d move to another state and start over fresh.

But when he got to his new home, he couldn’t get a job. Why? Because unbeknownst to him, his potential employers had Googled him, and found out he was a deadbeat dad.

But damn, if I had talked to the correspondent today, I could have just pointed her to Tim Bray’s thoughts:

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