Sunday, December 15, 2002

Google's Moment of Truth Wired 11.01: Google vs. Evil [Daypop Top 40] Maybe I'd surprise some folks who know me, but this article about Google taking flak on controversial links to anti-Scientology sites, or hate sites, or sites some government doesn't like, issues I would normally say are moral or ethical, leaves me with the urge to take a totally operational and functional view of Google's ethical quandry. In other words, I don't believe there is an ethical quandry, just as surely as the ACLU defends Nazis and Amnesty International looks after the rights of prisoners, some of whom may not be nice people. If I were Google, I would model my stance on these two groups. Uh, am I saying it is a basic human right to have a functional, machine-based search? Maybe so, just as surely as Ben Franklin once advcated public libraries. You don't build walls that information can't cross. It is Orwellian. The issue is far bigger than that. Google's functional credibility is on the line. And let me ask this from a propietary software point of view. Would anyone ask the Dialog database to compromise its functionality by using a less than complete dataset? How about Lexis Nexis? If you corrupt the data in your dataset, your search functions lose credibility, plain and simple. How did Google win the search engine wars? I can tell you what made the difference for me. I was with Lycos and Hotbot and Alta Vista all the way, and even before Google showed up, I would conduct searchs for things I KNEW were out there, but I couldn't remember where they were. The search engines often could not find these things. Frustrated, I longed for the day I'd have a perfect search engine, one that looked at full texts, not just titles, or not just metatags, or not just titles, metatags, abstracts and keywords. Maybe people don't care that search engines work from an incomplete dataset. Maybe all they care about is pretty banners cluttering up search engine functionality with bullshit. Frankly, THOSE PEOPLE ARE FUCKED. Search engines are databases that sell that searching and parsing functionality, PERIOD. The other stuff is noise. I don't care about entry level newbie marketing, cuz newbies benefit from higher quality products as much as researchers do. If this game were about portals, Google wouldn't have won the war in the first place. This fact should be part of Famous Marketing Mistakes 101. Reliable searching is about far more than site ratings or quick displays. Reliable searching is about credible searching, and that is about TRUST. Trust in the dataset. You can't do datamining, you can't do credible research, if the dataset has been fucked with from an editorial point of view. In other words, for Google's universe, to keep from being trumped by the next hot parsing AI search engine that is in development right now, GOOGLE MUST INDEX EVERY LOCATION THAT LAUNCHES A PAGE ON A BROWSER. It can rank and parse all day long, so long as the dataset is complete. The dataset is dynamic, in constant flux. That might argue against any credibility, in an old universe where software can't adapt to a changing dataset on the fly. But these days it can be credibly done, and not just by Google, but by Dialog and Lexis Nexis. If Google has any brains, it would realize the high-end proprietary databases are its primary competition, although I feel pretty sure by being so widely used in a distributed system, Google is likely far more sophisticated than Dialog and Nexis, which both operate on a very expensive, scarcity model, as do many other elitist products. Would these databases choose not to include data items on topics they didn't like or found odious? Given their high end cost and demanding clients, they would have a lot to lose by corrupting their data sets. Just because Google's reputation isn't built on sky-high fees and high end clients doesn't mean Google shouldn't have the same concerns for credibility. Or to put it another way: If Google corrupts its data, Google leaves the door wide open for the next level of search engine with exhaustive Hoovering dataset and advanced parsing to blow it away as surely as Google decimated Alta Vista. Miasma 7:51:33 PM    Comment [] Dion Dennis : Beneath the Home Page: On-Line With the Presidential Brand "W" Here's an idea I've been batting around for a while. Do blogs in some ways grant valuable and real world academic scholarship an audience that low circulation scholarly journals cannot? Granted, the peer-review process helps put a Good Housekeeping seal of approval on articles, acts as a gate-keeper, but also SLOWS publication down to the point of irrelevance and isn't quite set up with an electronic, XML-based citation system comparable to blogs, with the kind of installed base blogs have. (Somebody tell Radio to work in author, abstract, and keyword fields and we'd be on our way). My thought is this: pursue the peer-reviewed route and get tenure, since most the time all it is is an exercise performed strictly for the benefit of Tenure and Promotion committees and not due the the value of the research anyway, WHICH DOES NOT DISCOUNT THE POTENTIAL VALUE OF THE RESEARCH. After all, even good researchers get forced into playing that game, constructing their own prisons. But the accessability of the peer-reviewed journals is an issue (and yes, I've been at libraries that subscribe to the huge journal consortium, and I still think the whole racket sucks when you think of how the Internet was originally created for scientists to be able to share their findings. IF we can get folks to hang on to ALL RIGHTS when they publish in peer-reviewed journals and then republish their own work in blogs with the full citation available, now THAT would be a good start. And this article her illustrates the important reason to do this, duh, to reach REAL AUDIENCES, rather than wank-job tenure and promotion committee, who don't read the fucking articles you wank out anyway (you fucking know they don't!). So, go take a look at this highly accessible marketing and visual rhetoric analysis of the first wave of Pres Bush's re-election campaign, cuz my guess is you'll be seeing more of it, but not nearly so well contextualized as you will find it here. Miasma QVC Politics. This "bushshot" requires commentary. Fortunately, it got some, thanks to Dion Dennis. Via wood s lot. Hey, I've still got a couple of pretzel buttons to sell... "bushpretzel" [Tom Matrullo's Stuff] Inventing "W, The Presidential Brand" The Rise of QVC Politics By Dion Dennis Before you is a flawlessly paved expanse of a black-asphalted, two-lane road. The Western sky offers up intensely surreal shadings of blue, from a dark royal blue to a hue that softly, hazily tinges the low mountain range off in the distance. Hanging below this iridescent ceiling are soft, peaceful and cottony tuffs of drifting cumulus clouds. In the foreground, to the immediate left and right, is a vegetative combination of brown, gray and green scrub, stubbornly growing in the rocky soil. Because these primal images are at a distance, the eyes of the virtual driver encounter this frame first, in a relaxed manner reminiscent of gentle hypnosis. Set in front of this frame, hovering above the yellow median of the road is a virtual Interstate highway sign, in the familiar red, white and blue tri-shield. The top red portion of the shield says "INTERSTATE." The bottom two-thirds of the shield tells us that we're on route W'04. Below the shield, carefully centered between the intermittent yellow median lines of the road, in a yellow script-like typeface, is this invitation: "Enter The George W. Bush Online Store." 6:46:10 PM    Comment [] Neopets: When they are older they'll live in Sims Online? I perked up at this, as I'm getting ready to start working on a piece on this (under my real name). I'm still researching it, so I'm not sure what to think. Miasma Being played into existence. Does anyone else have a kid who is always on neopets? My daughter and her entire 5th grade class appear to be addicted to this site. During lunch hour at school, they all race to the media center to enter its world. My experience of it as yet is limited. It offers games, and chat, and the facsimile of community -- there's a poetry contest, but the poems seem to have to be about neopets: Oh the time of year is near, Neopets everywhere find so dear... . ''Neopians'' also have the opportunity to set up personal web pages (they use fake ids - I gather neopets has, but does not publish, their real email addresses); they can bank fake money - neopoints - and calculate interest on it; they can set up shops to "sell" odd fanciful things and acquire more neopoints; they can enter fake items in neopet auctions a la eBay. It's a whole world in there. These kids are learning a lot about the web and its functions. But what seems foregrounded in this discovery of online community, I fear, is all the stuff the corporatized, AOL-ized marketeers want them to learn. Soon it will be eBay for real. I need to explore it more, but I'm curious whether anyone else has neopians, and how serious gamers like Dorothea might view this. The whole thing seems reminiscent of those simulacra of grown-up ''reality'' that toy product managers think kids want, (because they aren't kids): plastic kitchen stoves, firetrucks, etc. (Actual neopet toys are incubating, of course). It's tempting to summon David Weinberger once again to say these little neopians are playing themselves into existence, but are they? Maybe their consumer skills are being played into existence, in what almost seems a school for networked consumerism. Your thoughts welcome. [Tom Matrullo's Stuff] 6:23:00 PM    Comment [] Always Be Closing? This should be required reading for Zig Zigglar The Salesman as Social Pirate. Sales cold calls --- calling on strangers and proposing that they buy something --- are in every case immoral.  They break the Golden Rule, every time.  More importantly, they are parasites on our willingness to read email, answer the telephone, or open our doors to strangers.  Salesmen1 rely on offensive personality and manipulation of their marks, seeking to create a situation where the mark feels that more face would be lost by backing out of the "deal" than by buying, and where he must justify his refusal to buy to the salesman.  Perhaps as a defence against their social offences, salesmen have generated a large body of literature, seeking to bolster their faltering self-esteem.  The leitmotif of these texts, translated into plain English, is that if they hope to successfully deceive others, they must first deceive themselves.  In these texts, we are also instructed in the art of never taking 'no' for an answer. [kuro5hin.org] 6:18:06 PM    Comment []

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