Ask Chief Steve Berkowitz (caveat: we ran in the same circles at IDG) gives one of his first interviews (to the CC Times) since being formally named CEO. Steve's a good guy and he has quite a job – being #4 in a three-horse race ain't fun. But he…
Ask Chief Steve Berkowitz (caveat: we ran in the same circles at IDG) gives one of his first interviews (to the CC Times) since being formally named CEO. Steve’s a good guy and he has quite a job – being #4 in a three-horse race ain’t fun. But he lays out his plans and makes his case in the interview.
Samples:
Read MoreSo nothing really new in the news today, I wanted to take a graf or two and explain what I mean by The Database of Intentions, referred to in this post. That way I can use it again and again and just link the phrase to this post. Hey, we…
The Database of Intentions is an idea central to the book I’ve been working on for the past year or so, which is tentatively titled “The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google” (Penguin/Putnam/Portfolio 2004). As with many in this industry, it all started with the Macintosh. Back in the mid 80s I was an undergraduate in Cultural Antropology, and I had a class – taught by the late Jim Deetz,which focused on the idea of material culture – basically, interpreting the artifacts of everyday life. It took the tools of archaeology – usually taught only in the context of civilizations long dead – and merged them with the tools of Cultural Anthropology, which interpreted living cultures. He encouraged us to see all things modified by man as expressions of culture, and therefore as keys to understanding culture itself. I began to see language, writing, and most everyday things in a new light – as reflecting the culture which created them, and fraught with all kinds of intent, controversies, politics, relationships. It was a way to pick up current culture and hold it in your hand, make sense of it, read it.
At the same time I was making extra money beta testing some software on a brand spanking new Mac, vintage 1984. Anthropology and technology merged, and I became convinced that the Mac represented mankind’s most sophisticated and important artifact ever – a representation of the plastic mind made visible. (Yeah, college – exhaaaaale – wasn’t it great!).
Read MoreIt gives me something of a thrill to reference The Standard in an article about booming online ad sales, and give credit to Matt McAllister, who runs Infoworld's site and took over thestandard.com as a sidelight, as IDG was about to shut it down along with all of IDG.net….
It gives me something of a thrill to reference The Standard in an article about booming online ad sales, and give credit to Matt McAllister, who runs Infoworld’s site and took over thestandard.com as a sidelight, as IDG was about to shut it down along with all of IDG.net. The archive is still not up, but Matt vows it will be, and the stories are all headline retreads from other IDG publications, but, there’s still a pulse there. Also, it’s really poignant to see contextual ads on the site, after all the dreaming I did of CRM doing – far too expensively – what contextual ads essentially can do now. Thanks Matt!
Via MarketingWonk, I saw this short blurb in Crain's NY business which points to Barry Diller's increasing show of muscle in the local search market. He's got Citysearch and various other localized online businesses, and Yahoo, MSN and Google are all hot for the opportunity to extend their advertising…
Via MarketingWonk, I saw this short blurb in Crain’s NY business which points to Barry Diller’s increasing show of muscle in the local search market. He’s got Citysearch and various other localized online businesses, and Yahoo, MSN and Google are all hot for the opportunity to extend their advertising networks into the local market. Diller seemed to be at his Cheshire’d best on an earnings call Tuesday.
Eye opening Salon piece on Universities' practice of logging the net usage of their student populations. It notes that these practices are under review as the Patriot Act and RIAA are subpoenaing the logs, which many universities kept as a matter of course (why? who knows). This is another…
Eye opening Salon piece on Universities’ practice of logging the net usage of their student populations. It notes that these practices are under review as the Patriot Act and RIAA are subpoenaing the logs, which many universities kept as a matter of course (why? who knows). This is another example of the power of the Database of Intentions (a term that is central to my book, and I promise, I’ll explain at some point). Interestingly, the Patriot Act may well be responsible for the widespread loss of this valuable resource (see excerpts).
Excerpts: “At the University of California at Berkeley, the everyday Web-surfing habits of students are regularly watched and recorded. Berkeley’s Systems and Network Security group uses a program called BRO — named after the infamous fascist icon from George Orwell’s “1984” — that keeps logs of every IP address students visit on the Internet from the campus network.
Read MoreIf I ever put in AdSense, I am sure I'll get detox ads, as this is my second drug-related post, but…interesting to see yesterday that various drug companies and outlets are pressuring search engines to police advertisements for illegal pharmacies and/or drugs. This is a huge business, and it…
eMarketer has a stat-filled story today outlining advertising spending by small to medium-sized enterprises (SME). It's quite heartening – if you add up website, email marketing, keyword search and banners, online ad spending is a strong second place in overall ad spend for this category, behind only the Yellow…
eMarketer has a stat-filled story today outlining advertising spending by small to medium-sized enterprises (SME). It’s quite heartening – if you add up website, email marketing, keyword search and banners, online ad spending is a strong second place in overall ad spend for this category, behind only the Yellow Pages. According to the study, done by The Kelsey Group, online will capture 16% of a $22 billion spend, or $3.52 billion. The study goes on to say, however, that online will average only 2% of the total US advertising spend of $230 billion, or $4.6 billion (larger advertisers are only adding in another billion? Huh?!). Everyone counts differently on this metric, eMarketer says online ad spending will grow from $6 billion last year to $6.9 billion in 2003.
Steven Johnson , founder of Feed and author of Emergence and Interface Culture, also writes a blog about this, that and the other thing. He recently added Google's AdSense contextual ads , a program I've applauded as darn near revolutionary in its ability to support micropublishing. But Steven has…
“Jesus, one lousy post about Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love and every single GoogleAd on the front door is for heroin detox programs. Kind of a downer, no?
(Of course, by adding a new post with the phrase “heroin detox program” I’ve just made matters worse. Oops, did it again.)”
(For more, here’s the permalink.)
Read MoreClay Shirky, a prolific writer/thinker on subjects net-related, has made a strong argument against the "Semantic Web." Why should you care? Well, the Sematic Web is Tim Berners Lee's vision of the next version of the Web, a rather seductive vision which addresses many current shortcomings. And since he invented…
Clay Shirky, a prolific writer/thinker on subjects net-related, has made a strong argument against the “Semantic Web.” Why should you care? Well, the Sematic Web is Tim Berners Lee’s vision of the next version of the Web, a rather seductive vision which addresses many current shortcomings. And since he invented the first version, it gets some serious notice. But Shirky points out, in a very readable and convincing fashion, why the whole idea simply won’t work.
Some excerpts: “After 50 years of work, the performance of machines designed to think about the world the way humans do has remained, to put it politely, sub-optimal. The Semantic Web sets out to address this by reversing the problem. Since it’s hard to make machines think about the world, the new goal is to describe the world in ways that are easy for machines to think about.”
“There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web’s philosophical argument — the world should make more sense than it does — is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit. “
“This is the largest order for a real operational RFID application,” says John Shoemaker, VP of corporate development for Matrics. “And it’s just one airport. There are more than 430 airports in the U.S. alone, so this is truly huge."
The Las Vegas airport will soon implement RFID tags on all bags sorted through its facility (about 65K-70K a day). Now RFID tags – RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification – are “small integrated circuits connected to an antenna, which can respond to an interrogating RF signal with simple identifying information, or with more complex signals depending on the size of the IC.” (source) In other words, they are tiny little units of searchable information attached to your luggage, telling airport officials – and we hope only airport officials – who owns the luggage, whether it’s cleared security, etc. But as RFID spreads – and it will (Walmart is installing the technology to track inventory) – it brings an entirely new dimension to the idea of what it attached to the network, and what can be searched beyond the web. Perhaps if you lose your luggage, you’ll someday be able to find it via Google….
