What’s Inspiring Me?

I did a short interview over at PSFK in preparation for a panel I’m going to be on at SXSW. One of the questions was about what’s inspiring my work these days. My answer:

That’s a tough one. I really like what the folks over at Tumblr are up to. Their commitment to design and creating a more visual web is inspiring. I love Instapaper/Readability/Kindle and the whole family of textual mobile apps that are allowing me to shift my reading across any device I want. I don’t know that I’d say I’m inspired, but I’m excited by this first wave of “iPad magazines” or whatever we’re calling them these days. While I think there’s still a long way to go to being truly useful, I like the ideas and experimental nature of apps like Flipboard and The Daily. Finally, as a general trend, I am inspired by the ever-expanding design language on the web. It seems as though the rise of mobile devices have kicked web-designers a bit and helped them imagine an interactive world that’s different than the one they’ve been designing for over the last 10 years. I think Twitter.com and Gawker.com are pretty good examples of this shift in mindset.

The whole thing is on their site.

February 28, 2011

Why Watson Thought Toronto was a US City

In an interview over at The Browser, Stephen Baker, who has a new book on IBM’s Watson and computer intelligence, explains how the computer could have possibly thought Toronto was a US city:

Let’s review this. TheJeopardy! category was U.S. Cities, and the clue was, ‘This city’s largest airport is named after a World War II hero, and its second largest airport after a World War II battle.’ Watson starts hunting around, looking for these two connections to airports throughout the U.S. and, more broadly, North America and the world. Why would it look beyond the U.S.? Because Watson is never completely sure that it understands the clue. It has to hedge a bit, and allow for the fact that it might not understand.

Watson has also learned, through statistical analysis of the Jeopardy! categories, that they don’t always coincide with the question. For example, a clue on American novelists might say, ‘This masterpiece features a young man named Holden Caulfield.’ The answer to the clue is not J D Salinger, it’s Catcher in the Rye. Watson is aware – statistically at least — that categories can’t always be trusted.

So in the U.S. cities/airport question, Watson goes on a hunt and never really finds an answer it has high confidence in. It has abysmal confidence in both Toronto, which has a couple of airports named after World War I heroes, and Chicago. It probably doesn’t understand the Battle of Midway, so it doesn’t make that connection. Because it has very low confidence, it doesn’t rule out Canada. A lot of people would say, ‘Well, that’s a sign of idiocy,’ and you could argue that, in this case, it was. But Watson has to allow for exceptions.

The whole interview, which is actually about other books around the topic of artificial intelligence is worth a read. Also, on the topic of Watson, Stephen Wolfram (of WolframAlpha) has an interesting take.

February 26, 2011

Google’s Opinions

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that most people think of Google as a public utility. It is, for much of America, the site all of the internet flows through. They trust it to deliver relevant and accurate results to the queries they plug into its search box. Google, for its part, constantly refines the design and algorithm to deliver better results for users.

Of course Google also makes a lot of money off those same folks by presenting them contextual ads on the right (and top) of the page for them to click on. It’s those ads that have helped to make Google a very rich company. And while the company frequently claims its search and ad teams have no interaction, there is some evidence that at least on some occasions tradeoffs are made between revenue and user experience. Take this brief filed in the case Rosetta Stone has filed against Google for allowing competitors to use its trademark in ads. Although Google has done its best to keep documents out of the public eye, the following quote from an unredacted brief speaks squarely to this issue:

In connections with its 2004 policy change allowing the purchase of trademarks as keywords, Google conducted in-house experiments to assess the user confusion that would result if trademarks actually appeared in the sponsored link text. JA(41)-4362-4363 These experiments concluded that the use of trademarks anywhere in the text of the sponsored link resulted in a “high” degree of consumer confusion. JA(41)-4365-4368 (“For a user, it seems to make little difference whether s/he sees a ™ [trademark] in the ad title or ad body – the likelihood of confusion remains high.”); JA(41)-4370-4373 (“87.5% of users were confused at least once during Experiment 2, and 76% of the users were confused at least once during Experiment 4.”). Indeed, Google’s evidence of user confusion was overwhelming: “Overall very high rate of trademark confusion (30-40% on average per user)[;] . . . 94% of users were confused at least once during the study.” JA(41)-4375-4377

I don’t include this to blame Google for its decision, as the small change was estimated to “result in at least $100 million, and potentially more than a billion dollars, in additional annual revenue.” Rather, I include it to highlight the danger with being one of the most trusted brands in America. But ultimately I bring this all up to get to Google’s big announcement of an algorithm change that affects nearly 12 percent of searches (that’s a giant number).

The change, which Google announced in an official blog post, targets “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” This has been bubbling for sometime now, with Google getting lots of bad press over the past few months and, with the company’s recent IPO, Demand Media, and as an extension “content farms,” generating quite a bit of conversation.

Now most people assume this week’s algorithm change was specifically targeting sites like Demand (though the company claims “we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business”). The assumption is certainly not unfounded, as just a few weeks earlier Google wrote:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

Later in that entry they specifically call out their “content guidelines” something I didn’t know existed (and they didn’t link to in the body of the post). They explained that “Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google.” Curious, I dug in on those guidelines. Though there are a total of ten, though only two are relevant to content (many of the others are about using proper HTML):

- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

What Demand Media (and many others these days) do is take things lots of people are searching for and create content around it. You’ve probably been on one of their sites and not even realized it. Although I’m not very fond of the content, it’s hard for me to argue that they break either of those rules (in fact the second rule is pretty much their business model). Which gets to the heart of my problem: It’s feeling more and more like Google is making arbitrary decisions about the value of different content.

When Google first started, things were simple. PageRank was a sea change in the way search worked, rather than just matching keywords they ranked pages based on how many incoming links it had and the authority of those sites linking to it. As Arrington wrote yesterday, “That’s why Google was so great in 1999, when there was less incentive to game search results, and less expertise by the people doing it.” Clearly the game is a lot harder on both sides as Google continues to adapt it’s algorithm and the spammers find more and more clever methods.

But let’s move away from spam for a second and back to content farms. Google is, at its heart, an algorithm. An algorithm is nothing more than a set of rules. You can write an algorithm to detect spam, say, by scanning the page to see if it makes any sense. If there are not complete sentences but a ton of outgoing links the code can conclude this page is probably spam. That’s the essential piece of writing an algorithm, you need to figure out your objective and then be able to parse it into a set of objective rules to judge it. After you write those rules you feed it some sample content and see whether its performing the way you want it to.

Which is what bothers me so much about all this talk about quality. I can’t figure out how Google could possibly be using an algorithm to judge quality. I get incoming links as a judge, and it’s quite possible that they’re using that to help judge, but of the three criteria they gave to define a low quality site (“low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”), I can only understand how you could objectively judge one of them (copy content). Of course, algorithms are not really objective (which Google surprisingly admitted a few weeks ago), but the opinions you feed it (a comment is spam if it includes the word viagra 16 times) is turned into an objective rule (the comment either has the word 16 times or it doesn’t). Value and usefulness are completely personal. Not only that, they constantly shift around as a piece of valuable information today may not be valuable tomorrow.

As usual, this change in algorithm is given very little explanation. The Google algorithm has always been a black box for lots of reasons (some good, some bad). Hiding behind the opacity was fine when we trusted Google’s motives, but it’s hard, for me at least, to still feel like they’re watching out for me. The bottom line is a company like Demand is a serious threat to Google’s wellbeing.

February 26, 2011

Design Details

A quick Friday pointer: My two favorite recent Tumblr finds are Little Big Details and House of Buttons which do nothing more than catalog tiny bits of good design.

February 25, 2011

Melo?

This is a bit different than the normal fare around here, but thought it was worth sharing. The big news around NYC today is that Carmelo Anthony is coming to town as part of a giant trade. But before everyone gets too excited, my favorite basketball statisticians rain on the parade a bit:

That being said, should the Knicks fans expect this team to become a title contender?  Although members of the media might think so, Melo is simply not that productive.  Yes, he can play very well over short periods of time (he was doing very well early in the season).  But as time progresses, Melo seems to regress to the somewhat above average performer we have always seen.  In other words, the Knicks have not acquired LeBron James tonight.  What they have acquired is a player who is just a little bit more productive than Wilson Chandler and Danilo Gallinari.  As for the other parts in the trade…

At least it’s worth watching the Knicks again, though. That’s something.

February 22, 2011

Reactions

I remember when I first saw the reactions bar on Buzzfeed I thought it was brilliant.

It’s such a simple idea, but it reflected something I had noticed in my own blogging for quite some time: People are often unsure of what to say in a comment and therefore chose to leave nothing at all. I’ve found over the years that the posts I find most interesting tend to have the fewest comments and the ones that I jot off quickly get loaded up. I can only assume that’s because it’s easier to react to a half though than a full one. It’s for that reason that I love the way they handle things over at Buzzfeed, by offering people pre-packaged reactions you get them to engage with the content without necessarily having to put their neck out and come up with anything interesting to say. Not surprisingly (because they’re smart and share a co-founder), Huffington Post has a similar feature:

But today I ran into one I liked most of all over at Newser. Theirs combines the reaction with a poll:

I categorize all these things in the bucket of turning content consumption into an act of content creation, something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Good stuff.

February 17, 2011

Google’s Anti-Competitive Behavior

When I started this New York Times story about black hat SEO I was hoping that it would finally be the story I was hoping for that questioned whether Google’s practice of stomping down paid links could be considered anti-competitive.

Unfortunately the thing they chose to focus on is a much less interesting side of this debate:

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

I’ve thought for awhile that not allowing paid links on sites was forcing small publishers into AdSense, which pays a fraction of what a few paid links would net a site with a decent PageRank. What’s more, Google’s general attitude towards any sort of paid-for content is ridiculously. Two years ago I wrote about how Google was threatening to cut PageRank from bloggers who accept gifts and then write about the company or product without using a “nofollow” tag in the link (essentially nofollow tells Google that it shouldn’t count that link as a link, and therefore apply no “juice” to it). At the time I wrote this: “asking people to go through the process of adding “nofollow” feels to me like they’re putting the onus on individuals to do their job (or at least a job their algorithm should be able to do).”

Not surprisingly, then, I was glad to see the comments to this TechCrunch story about Forbes cutting out its paid links. Specifically from J Nicholas Gross who wrote in response to the story:

I think this is nonsense.

If Google wants to define the “link” as the be-all end-all of page rank, they can suffer the consequences. The rest of the universe should not have to jump through hoops just to make sure their inadequately intelligent search engine isn’t mis-ranking relevancy.

Michael Arrington, editor of TechCrunch replied, “I don’t disagree. But in this case Forbes is selling links only to game google.” To which Gross added this nugget:

I’m not sure that matters. Here, Google controls what will be easily considered a market controlling share in search, and they are trying to over-reach to force the rest of the web to do the “appropriate” linking behavior for them with the penalty of being evicted otherwise. I smell an anti-trust case on the near horizon as this is clearly anti-competitive.

I am very glad to see someone else arguing this as I’ve been waiting a long time to see this get picked up. To me when you add to the fact that the only real competitor to text links to the vast majority of the population is AdSense it only strengthens the anti-competitive argument. So what now?

February 17, 2011

Dealing with Wikileaks (aka How Newspapers Work)

Just got around to reading Bill Keller’s (editor of the New York Times) story on dealing with Wikileaks and it’s great. It’s a procedural story that really helps understand how a large organization like the Times deals with these sorts of things. I’ve always thought there was an opportunity for news organizations to write more of these kinds of stories and, while I might be alone in this, I’d love to read more.

There’s lots worth quoting in the story, but I particularly liked Keller’s response to the criticism that “the documents were of dubious value, because they told us nothing we didn’t already know.” He wrote:

I’m a little puzzled by the complaint that most of the embassy traffic we disclosed did not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders. For those who do not follow these subjects as closely, the stories are an opportunity to learn more. If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service. And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. WikiLeaks cables in which American diplomats recount the extravagant corruption of Tunisia’s rulers helped fuel a popular uprising that has overthrown the government.

Just downloaded the ebook this essay is adapted from and am excited to read it.

February 16, 2011

What Jobs?

I’ve been struck lately by a series of basically unrelated articles that all circle around a similar point: Felix Salmon on Wall Street, New York Times on IBM’s Watson and the Guardian on American stagnation. While they’re hitting on rather different subjects, at the heart of much of the conversation is what role technology actually has (and will continue to have) in the wellbeing of the American economy.

There is no doubt I believe in the power of technology to help change the world, but this really struck me: “Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay may be changing the way we read and communicate – but in the US they have created fewer than 100,000 direct jobs.” It’s commonly held startup belief that the ultimate goal is to build as scalable a company as possible, which roughly translates to running your business with as few people as possible (let the computers do the work). In other words when you’re building a company today you’re trying not to create jobs. During the Google/Groupon talks one of the things people said about Groupon (can’t find a reference right now) is that they’re less impressive because they’re so human dependent (they have a large salesforce, as that’s the only proven way to do local commerce). What if you were to create a company with the goal of creating as many jobs as possible, not as few?

Then something else struck me: Each of those five American companies have created entire industries. While they may not be “direct jobs” Google has created agencies and consultancies focused on helping clients rank higher in their engine, iDevelopers are probably the hottest programming commodity in the market and revenues are predicted at $15 billion for 2011, obviously there are quite a few companies who create Windows applications and in case you haven’t heard, the video game market (Microsoft makes XBox) is doing okay, on a small scale Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allows anyone to turn simple skills into pay and AWS powers just about every startup I know and then there’s eBay, which is responsible for a store in just about every city in the country that will help you box up your junk, not to mention the crazy interest (and 30-some-odd TV shows) in antiques.

With all that said, though, I can’t help but think that Felix Salmon is right in his feeling that all of this activity is leaving a vast majority of people behind:

Today, however, stock markets, once the bedrock of American capitalism, are slowly becoming a noisy sideshow that churns out increasingly meager returns. The show still gets lots of attention, but the real business of the global economy is inexorably leaving the stock market — and the vast majority of us — behind.

It’s not just the stocks that people are being left out of, it’s the companies as well.

As usual I’m not quite sure I have a conclusion here, just more questions. I do wonder what a company would look like if you tried to optimize around creating as many jobs as possible, instead of as few. I’d also be quite curious to see that 100,000 American jobs number include the jobs created by the platforms those companies are responsible for.

February 16, 2011

Brand Advertising (or the Lack Thereof)

Yesterday I wrote a bit about brand advertising on the web and out of curiosity today I looked up the top digital advertisers versus the top overall advertisers. I didn’t spend a ton of time with this, so if someone finds better numbers please let me know. Anyhow, the top 10 advertisers from Q1 2010 are pretty much exactly what one would expect:

1. Procter & Gamble Co
2. AT&T Inc
3. General Motors Corp
4. Verizon Communications Inc
5. Pfizer Inc
6. News Corp
7. Johnson & Johnson
8. Time Warner Inc
9. Walt Disney Co
10. General Electric Co

Now I’m sure there’s been some movement in that, but the basics are pretty consistent: P&G tops the list with a roughly 40 percent bigger spend than anyone else. Following that are some carriers (AT&T, Verizon), entertainment companies (News Corp, Time Warner, Disney) and then some all around giants (GM, Pfizer, GE).

Compare that list to the top top 10 internet advertisers from 2009:

1. Scottrade
2. TD Ameritrade Brokerage
3. FreeScore.com
4. Verizon
5. E Trade Financial
6. Sprint
7. Netflix.com
8. Scottrade Stock Brokerage
9. LowerMyBills.com
10. E Trade Financial

Other than Verizon at 4 and AT&T at 12, not a single player from the overall list shows up in the top 50 (from 2009). Now this could be for a few reasons I guess (not measured properly, spent in non-working), but generally when you look at that second list you see a whole bunch of direct response advertisers. No one has been able to convince big brands in any sort of serious way that the web is a viable medium for doing brand advertising. This isn’t a new idea, but I had never thought to compare the two and it’s astounding to see that second list.

February 13, 2011

The Ad Game

I have a lot of conversations about how most of the startup world doesn’t have a good enough understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the advertising industry. Nick Denton clearly doesn’t have the same problem. These two comments from an interview with Daily Front Row do a great job at summing up why things don’t work the way most people think they should.

First, on media buying:

Have you ever seen one of those ComScore charts media buyers use? They’re totally revealing. You see one, and you just get it. If you’re a media buyer, you’re gonna say, “Give me the top 10 or 20 sites that match my criteria.” You’re not gonna scroll all the way down the list to, I don’t know, the Awl. No one’s even going below the fold! You need to be big, and the big, in turn, just keep getting bigger.

Then on direct-response versus brand advertising:

From the kinds of advertisers we want, yes [the response to the new design has been "fine"]. We don’t want the direct-response advertisers. Most of the Web has been about direct response–shitty creative, with performance measured by how many people are clicking through and buying. The truth is, no one clicks through. Unless they’re stupid.

My only issue here is that the first point recognizes the illogical (or maybe just lazy) way the industry functions while the second hopes that it will magically change. For better or worse, it’s still going to take time to ween advertisers, even the big brand folks, off direct response (even though they’ll be the first to tell you it’s not what they’re going for). I think the big, in-your-face ad helps, but at the end of the day there is still a column in the spreadsheet for clicks. If I were Denton, and with that had the guts he seems to have to throw away stuff that’s working while it’s still working, I’d just switch off the clicks on the big hero ad in the right column. Make it an animated billboard that has no link attached to it. I don’t know that you can actually do that in DoubleClick, but it would go a long way to changing the conversation to the one he wants to have (and I think would be very good for the industry as a whole).

February 12, 2011

Nothing’s New

Just go read Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece about the current commentary around the internet. He breaks the field of study into three buckets: Never-betters, better-nevers and ever-wassers.

The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others–that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

I tend to fall into the ever-wasser camp, believing that this time, while intense and full of change, is not all that much more intense and full of change than other times throughout history. One of my favorite things to trot out in argument about the internet ruining whatever it’s ruining this week is Plato’s Phaedrus, where all the same things people say about the web is said about writing (it’s going to ruin the kids, no one will remember anything anymore, it’s making us stupid). Not surprisingly, then, I particularly liked this paragraph:

The odd thing is that this complaint [that the internet leads to a life of "disassociation and fragmentation"], though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

All in all, it’s well-written, and interesting, and takes a few things that are generally accepted digital wisdom and deservedly knocks them down a peg or two. Delightful.

February 9, 2011

Era of White Noise

Yesterday I went to a Social Media Week panel hosted by Barbarian Group on “Technologists as Publishers.” The whole thing was good, but what especially stuck out was a quote from Rob Harles from Bloomberg Paul Berry, CTO of the Huffington Post (at least I think he’s the one who made this point). Anyway, he said we’re in an era of white noise content. I think it’s a super interesting thought. When you look at something like Gawker’s redesign you get this combination of original reporting and enough other stuff (links, videos, pictures) to keep people satiated for a day.

The idea is made all the more amusing to me in the face of this quote from Nick Denton on what he calls “fake news”:

To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it’s frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I’d much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you’re going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don’t pretend you’re providing news. That’s not news.

I guess the difference is one of label: Are you calling it news or filling?

February 9, 2011

The Social Network

I’ve been having a lot of conversations about movies lately. Mostly I’m unimpressed by this year’s Oscar nominated films (though I haven’t seen all of them yet). The one I seem to disagree with the most people on is Social Network, which I essentially thought sounded more like a movie full of characters speaking like they’re written by Aaron Sorkin than speaking like the characters they were supposed to represent.

In one of these conversations with Frank Rose (who, in an unrelated side note, has an excellent new book out called Art of Immersion), he pointed me to John Hagel’s critique of the film, which is actually more of a review of the reviews than anything else. Hagel’s argument, basically, is that all the critics loved this movie so much because it supports the worldview that media holds dear: That the world would be worse off without them. Back in October, he wrote:

The revolutionary is winning but the victory will be empty. He has taken something good and transformed it into something shallow. The narcissists have won and distracted everyone from the depth and substance that we, in the mainstream media, have been providing. The world will be worse off, defined by alienation and loneliness. It is a tragedy of global and historic proportions.

Seen through this lens, the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity. It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

The whole thing is worth a read.

February 4, 2011

Big White Box Problem

I like this explanation of the value of new services like Quora:

As a blogger, you get good at this: finding inspiration from the things you observe elsewhere in the world and turning that into a unique and captivating blog post. Like getting good at anything, however, this takes time, effort and patience. Three things most people have very little of to dedicate to a pursuit like blogging. This is why, the biggest problem is blogging is the “big white box problem.” What, exactly, are you supposed to put in that big white text box when you start on your blog post? What topic should you even begin with? What topic will readers find interesting? It’s an intimidating thing to the newly initiated and even the old hands, and particularly to do it well.

Been thinking a lot about this lately.

February 4, 2011