(image from Scientfic American – thanks ID:entity) I am writing the final chapter of my book (no, not the last…just the last one, I'm writing them out of order, don't ask….) In any case, I got the utterly lazyweb idea of asking all the folks I've interviewed, in particular the…
(image from Scientfic American – thanks ID:entity)
I am writing the final chapter of my book (no, not the last…just the last one, I’m writing them out of order, don’t ask….)
In any case, I got the utterly lazyweb idea of asking all the folks I’ve interviewed, in particular the professional thinkers and Big Idea folks, the relatively simple question of: What might the world look like if we had perfect search?
Read MoreIt's hard to know, as a Mac user, what to think about the software world these days. Many innovations are, understandably, only built for Windows. But wasn't the web supposed to change all that, make OSes secondary, less relevant? Problem is, if you have to download client software, folks don't…
It’s hard to know, as a Mac user, what to think about the software world these days. Many innovations are, understandably, only built for Windows. But wasn’t the web supposed to change all that, make OSes secondary, less relevant? Problem is, if you have to download client software, folks don’t like writing for the Mac’s tiny installed base. But the folks who do use the Mac have always been early adopters and influencers, at least, that what Nat Torkington points out. I noticed in his post that I was the only person among a very long list of very smart geeks (caveat: I consider myself unqualified for those modifying adjectives, as well as the noun) who he reads who blogged either FareChase or Picasa. Why? Because all the others use Mac OSX, and can’t use those services. Interesting point. I blog those services because I sense my readers might be interested in them. But alpha geeks only blog that which they can touch.
Those of us who've lived around the Valley for some time know of the correlation between autism, Asperger's syndrome (called autism's "milder cousin") and geek culture. The connection has been the subject of lengthy pieces in both Wired and Time. One of the principle characteristics of autism is what might…
Those of us who’ve lived around the Valley for some time know of the correlation between autism, Asperger’s syndrome (called autism’s “milder cousin”) and geek culture. The connection has been the subject of lengthy pieces in both Wired and Time.
One of the principle characteristics of autism is what might be called face blindness, the inability to “read” people’s faces for emotional cues (resulting in what most would call anti-social behavior). This and other Asberger-like traits have often clothed the body of geek culture in our popular culture – the tireless focus, the need to classify and order everything, to control and to name, to identify and to sort, to count and compute.
These observations were percolating in the back of my mind as I read Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” one of the few books which has been universally recommended to me, and honestly, one of the very few non-search related reads I’ve allowed myself as my deadline looms.
Read MoreAs David Weinberger notes. In particular, the Dewey Decimal System has inherent religious biases. I've done some research on Mr. Dewey as part of my book, and he was quite the bigot, it appears. I wonder, 100 years from now, when folks are writing the history of indexes like Google…
As David Weinberger notes. In particular, the Dewey Decimal System has inherent religious biases. I’ve done some research on Mr. Dewey as part of my book, and he was quite the bigot, it appears.
I wonder, 100 years from now, when folks are writing the history of indexes like Google and Yahoo, what biases will emerge?
One of my favorite pieces on the future of the web is Paul Ford's "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web." (You haven't read it? Go read it! Now!) He's at it again: Ford's just posted a new riff entittled The Banality of Google. Clearly,…
One of my favorite pieces on the future of the web is Paul Ford’s “August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web.” (You haven’t read it? Go read it! Now!)
He’s at it again: Ford’s just posted a new riff entittled The Banality of Google. Clearly, Ford is a teeny weeny bit sick of all the Google talk. From the piece:
Of course, you don’t arrive at a morally profound motto like “don’t be evil” without some serious thought. Here are some of the mottoes that Google tried out and rejected:
• Google! Dance with the devil, but go home before it gets serious.
• Google! We won’t commit genocide in most circumstances.
• Google! Don’t eat no babies.
• Google! We could do good, but we’re like, whoa.
• Google! Begone, demon!
A while ago I read Ross Mayfield's post on "Cost Per Influence" advertising and thought to myself "That feels important, but I don't get it." Something was missing, or, put another way, I was missing something. So I gave Ross a call last week and we hashed through it. What…
A while ago I read Ross Mayfield’s post on “Cost Per Influence” advertising and thought to myself “That feels important, but I don’t get it.” Something was missing, or, put another way, I was missing something. So I gave Ross a call last week and we hashed through it. What I realized during our talk was that the premise for how he got to the idea of CPI was, to my mind, far more interesting than CPI itself, at least in the near term.
Allow me to explain. Ross’s musings on CPI turn on the concept of “transitive advertising” – a very interesting idea that flips current advertising models upside down. In essence, this new model for online ads reverses the relationship between publishers and advertisers.
In traditional advertising models, the advertiser holds all the cards. They decide what they want to spend, and most importantly, where they want to spend it. But the rise of pay-for-performance networks like Overture and AdWords/AdSense has changed this relationship in significant ways. First, advertisers are only paying when their ad performs – this alone is a huge shift in media. But as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, these networks also disaggregate advertisers from publishers. The advertisers are no longer choosing the publisher with whom they are doing business, they are instead choosing keywords, concepts, context. OK, but not very good for publishers nor for audiences, in my opinion.
Read MoreThanks for all the posts on questions to ask Jerry and David. Turns out, we spent a lot of time on history and also on looking forward to the next ten years. We didn't focus so much on the present. When I reminded Yahoo's founders that they had ten years…
Thanks for all the posts on questions to ask Jerry and David. Turns out, we spent a lot of time on history and also on looking forward to the next ten years. We didn’t focus so much on the present. When I reminded Yahoo’s founders that they had ten years of experience running the site – they started in earnest in 1994 – both turned reflective. It’s not like they didn’t know it, of course, but there’s something about taking the time to think about that – ten years – that makes for a good conversation. I asked if they still believed in the vision and hype of the mid 90s – about how the internet was going to change everything – and they both said they did, but that timing was everything. It takes a lot longer than we’d like for basic things to change. Then Filo came out with a great line about the early promise of the internet – that we’d all become creators and producers of content – and how long it takes to fulfill:
That was the promise of the internet from day one -when Mosaic came out the whole idea was that anybody could publish now, that was the new thing …yet it took this long to get to simple blogging… If you said ten years ago that you could have blogging in ten years, and that will be the extent of it, people wouldn’t have been that impressed.
Indeed. In 1994, anyone claiming that in ten years, we’d have a robust self-publishing movement like blogging would have been drummed out of the room for a lack of vision. Despite Geocities or Tripod, it takes time for the ship of culture to change course. Makes me rethink my own sense of what might come ten years from now…
"There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things." – V. Bush We love stories. It's how we understand the world. Were I to tell a friend what happened in tonight's Giants game, I wouldn't send him a box…
“There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.” We love stories. It’s how we understand the world. Were I to tell a friend what happened in tonight’s Giants game, I wouldn’t send him a box score (though I might refer to one as I was talking to him). I’d say something like “Man, we looked terrible in the first two innings, our rookie pitcher was tight and we had back-to-back errors resulting in a three-run deficit by the second. But then AJ nailed a three-run homer that put us back in the game, and in the 5th we rang up three more (including Barry’s 689th!). It was all Giants from then on, and JT Snow was on fire …!” and so on. A story is our way of taking a journey and making it portable – we can give it to others, and we’re wired to enjoy both hearing a good story, as well as telling it.
I was thinking about this as I was researching the phrase “tempting fate” this afternoon. I was sure there was some Greek mythology behind it, some base case proof that human beings have always struggled with the question of determinism, the Gods, free will, destiny. At the very least, there had to be a good story behind it, and hell, we love good stories. So what did I do? I fired up Google and started poking around. First it was a simple “tempting fate,” but that was far too broad, not what I was looking for (though it was interesting to see a Google News story about the Athens Olympics). I called my mom, she of all knowledge mythological, and she reminded me that Shakespeare often used the Fates in his work. Armed with this new high order bit, I went back and Googled “The Fates” mythology. I was on to something. I started reading up on the three dieties of Fate, taking turns and twists through references both within Google and from links on the pages I found.
Read MoreNanosys, the nanotech start up light on revenues but full of promises, canceled its IPO this week due to "adverse market conditions." I've seen this movie before, in 1996, and again in 2001. I've been wondering what's up with the IPO economy lately, a fragile place built on the tenuous…
Nanosys, the nanotech start up light on revenues but full of promises, canceled its IPO this week due to “adverse market conditions.” I’ve seen this movie before, in 1996, and again in 2001. I’ve been wondering what’s up with the IPO economy lately, a fragile place built on the tenuous foundation of investor psychology. And my gut says it’s not a wonderful time to be going out. 2003 was a good year, overall, especially in the internet space. People started to believe again, interesting companies started making interesting products. And a slew of companies filed to go public, one right after the other.
For the most part, it’s still true that great companies are still making great stuff, especially in the internet space. But right now, things look pretty grim in the world, and I sense as a society we’re retreating once again into a somewhat grumpy, fearful place. As a result, IPOs leveraged over the future, like Nanosys, are being cancelled, IPOs that have narrow profit histories, like PlanetOut, are seeing their price range cut, and blockbusters, like Google, are being savaged by the pundits. Certainly it’s a good thing that there’s no appetite for hype in the world. But if I had my druthers, we’d still have a taste for hope.
Why Search? On a fine sunny morning, not long after the birth of my third child, I typed “immortality” into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button. In an instant, Google takes me to the “Immortality Institute,” dedicated to “conquering the blight of involuntary death.” Not quite what I…
Why Search?
On a fine sunny morning, not long after the birth of my third child, I typed “immortality” into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.
In an instant, Google takes me to the “Immortality Institute,” dedicated to “conquering the blight of involuntary death.”
Read More