Posts Tagged: information

Thoughts — 1 Comment
2
Aug 07

Why doesn’t YouTube care about relevance?

As we all know, YouTube is a Google property, and perhaps Google’s hottest property going. In the time since Google has acquired the company, I’ve seen lots of feature additions – playlists, “Who’s watching now”, even a Google advertising channel. With all of these feature additions, what I haven’t noticed is meaningful improvements to search and relevance, anti-spam efforts, or efforts to prevent gaming. Granted, a lot of this is likely going on behind-the-scenes, but I’ve noticed YouTube getting less and less of my time as I grow increasingly frustrated with the service.

It strikes me that so many of the problems with YouTube could be fixed by some very simple modifications to the way they present the video thumbnail. The first option would be to not just grab a predictable frame, and instead pick a random frame. Seems simple enough, right? If YouTube wanted to get a little bit more tricky they could offer a multiview thumbnail, which would show a few random frames from the movie. Frankly, any strategy that prevents me opening videos of teenagers talking into their webcams would make me happy.

At the same time, it seems that YouTube hasn’t put much effort into making search useful at all; the first result by views for Minneapolis bridge is some XXX Paris Hilton spam. I mean, if my email filter can catch these, why can’t YouTube? And is YouTube doing anything to prevent the botted results that have made the Most Popular feature almost useless?

Conspiracy theorists will say that YouTube/Google actually don’t care much about developing spam filters or screeing fraudsters. The more video the merrier, for Google to stress-test systems and accumulate the world’s content. However, YouTube being Google, and Google being Google, I have to believe that a number of geeks behind the Google wall of silence also secretly pine to make YouTube better. So do it! While YouTube will always serve a purpose (uploading videos), there’s plenty of competition in this market. Google bought YouTube for its community, and unless Google invests in tools that make the community experience more sane (and less spammy), the community will start to dry up. Let’s hope that this point is not lost on the YouTube/Google team.

Thoughts — 6 Comments
15
Jun 07

In-Between Places

This morning, I was reading an interesting post from Chris Messina. In it, he talks about his in-between blogging behavior. Messina says:

I also screenshot as a way of in-between blogging, I guess. Y’know, like Twitter, Tumblr, Ma.gnolia, Plazes and Last.fm (among others) are all forms of in-between blogging. They’re where I am in the absences between longer posts (such as this one) where I record what I’m up to, what I’m seeing and what’s interesting to me.

As I sat back a little from that statement, I started wondering just when exactly blogging lost the battle for the in-between places. In the very beginning, we starting blogging because blogging made publishing easy; before blogging, we were marking up HTML and uploading it. With this revolution in simplicity came expectations – that we’d blog a certain way, that we’d have a set of links to famous bloggers on our blogs, etc. These expectations marked a recomplication of the medium, a depersonalization of sorts.

Another complication of blogging that arose was discoverability. If blogging is a personal medium, how do we find the blogs of people we care about (or are relevant to our interest areas). Looking at our feedreaders, we read the blogs of people we don’t know because it’s often hard to find bloggers we do know (San Francisco, you don’t count here). A blog search engine can find a million entries matching a certain word or topic, but it generally can’t find my friends or neighbors, or other people I care about.

Let me place a caveat by saying that these problems aren’t really deal-breakers to lots of people, and moreso there are lots of real world analogies. I don’t know John Markoff but I’ll always pay attention to his articles when I come across them. Many people don’t know Michale Arrington, but they enjoy Techcrunch, and the communities that grow up around these extremely central places.

However, as Messina describes, blogging is losing out to the in-between places. What are these in-between places? Well, they are social networks, the attention streams, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on. Unlike blogging, where your words are cast to an ether, these in-between spaces are inherently friend-centric. You explicitly build your networks in these services; furthermore, the onus isn’t on creating the networks of the largest size. Rather, the important thing is to create the network of most personal relevance to you. Compared to blogging, these spaces are less complicated and more relevant. To these networks, you can quickly and easily share the things more appropriate for the in-between: links you enjoy, quick updates, one-off thoughts. This is Dunbar’s grooming, an absolutely essential part of the friend maintenance process.

Rather than purely looking at this as blogging “losing”, we may consider these in-between tools as affording us new ways to enrich and deepen friendships. At the same time, they are places where the content is purely relevant to us, because the networks are made up of people we care about. This type of friend maintenance is something that many patterns of blogging don’t afford.

Examining my own behavior, I can identify a number of areas where blogging is losing to the in-between places. It seems that that places like Twitter and del.icio.us are moving from social backchannels to unique primary channels. This marks an advancement in the way we converse online; rather than using the brute-force, one-size-fits-all of blogging, we’re moving our conversations to the more relevant spaces. This transition is interesting and powerful, and it marks an advancement of our online communication behavior.

Thoughts — 7 Comments
8
Jun 07

The Subscription Curve

Yesterday, I found myself frustrated as I looked at the number of unlistened podcasts in my iTunes queue. With no long plane flights on my immediate radar, where was I ever going to find the time to listen to 16 podcasts! This led me to pondering how my patterns of media consumption, supposedly cutting-edge in their subscriptive nature, had led me awry.

First, a thought experiment. What are your subscriptions? How many newspaper or magazines arrive at your doorstep? How many blogs or podcasts do you subscribe to? What alerts do you get? How many mailing lists are you on? How many shows are on your DVR? How many people do you follow with Facebook feeds or Twitter? As I went through this process, I found that more and more of my consumption was through subscription – and I wondered how happy this “freedom” of subscription was making me.

Let’s remember the old days for a second, when you used to have to type in a web address or click on a bookmark to visit a website. Or a time where you had to be in front of the TV at a certain time (or set the VCR, egad) to catch a show. What about a time when you didn’t know immediately when your friends were breaking up, or you occasionally missed NPR’s Fresh Air because you were doing other things. I’m the last one who is going to make an argument that the past was “better”, that’s not the point; however, it might be useful to consider whether in solving the old problems we simply created a slew of new ones.

Let’s think about information consumption in the old model. Without subscriptions, media flew by you – you had to make time for media, essentially. Maybe you caught two television programs, three radio programs, and visited an average of ten websites regularly. Granted, there were some inefficiencies there, but consider how vastly things have changed. Look at your podcast queue. Look at your DVR queue. Look at how many blogs you have in your feedreader – through the power of subscription, we’ve turned information underload into information overload. As we collectively adopt, how will we deal with the sheer volume of information subscription-based models afford?

This led me to wonder if media becomes primarily subscription based, does that increase the insularity of the consumer? For example, if someone has 300 feeds in their newsreader, the web may seem vast, but 300 feeds in the scope of the entire web is actually quite minuscule. Of course, the counter-argument is that before subscriptions, a human could only pay attention to X people – I realize that. But going forward, as everything becomes a subscription, will it become more and more challenging to look out of our bubble? I think this is a genuine question.

Subscriptions mark a paradigm shift in our information-consumption patterns. Because we can offload the storing and filtering tasks, we can now subscribe to potentially endless information streams. At the end of the day, however, there’s still only so much we can consume. And to that extent, it seems like all of us will have to make peace with our subscriptions and consumption. Looking at those 16 unlistened podcasts in frustration, I simply clicked the “mark as not new” button and freed myself from the obligation. Just because we now can listen to, or read, or watch anything, doesn’t mean we have to. At least for now.

Thoughts — 3 Comments
22
May 07

Activating Latent Ties

There are a number of models that enable the integration of social technology into our everyday lives. In the context of online social networks, we’ve often talked about situational relevance. Here’s the basic principle of situational relevance: When a person is entering a new social network, they have information needs. They need to know about the people around them in order to navigate the social network. An online social network that addresses these needs is situationally relevant.

While I certainly agree that people use social technologies for entertainment/time wasting, a huge part of the calculation is also utility. Why did Facebook have such extensive success with college populations? Because it answered relevant social needs. Why do we choose Google over other search engines? Because it is best at answering our information needs. Ultimately, our relationship with information tools is structured around “what does it do for me.” The tools that best and most frequently answer our questions are often the most popular.

Today I’d like to discuss another model, one that certainly isn’t new but is well worth discussing. In a post yesterday, I talked about the power of latent social ties. Latent social ties are pre-existing social ties that we’ve deactivated or left behind. As we move through the various social networks of our lives, we develop friendships and ties that we ultimately have to backshelf as we move forward. These are our school friends, ex-coworkers, friends from previous neighborhoods, that sort of thing. No rocket science here.

Many of us would like to have a low-involvement context to get back in touch with these individuals. And there’s a plethora of reasons – potential business contacts and networking, catching up, reuniting, etc. Right now, we do this through email, though email is a particularly bad medium for these connections. Yes, it might be fun to write a long-lost bud a huge email filling him in on the details of your life to date, but you’re not going to do this every day. Rather, you’re going to want to keep them in an address book of sorts…one where you can pop in and check out what is new with your old friend’s life.

As one might imagine, online social networks are particularly well suited for this task. The low-involvement, low-effort model of friend maintenance is pretty much what the environment is built for. It’s also a useful way to keep people engaged when they arent exploring new, situationally relevant new networks. If you’ve been at your job or college for a few years, the value of situational relevance declines somewhat, so what can a social network do to keep you engaged? They can certainly get you activating latent ties.

Of course, activating latent ties is somewhat tricky. My undergrad classmates largely aren’t on FB, and that reality is even moreso for those who graduated in the 90′s, 80′s and so on. So how can you create an environment to activate these latent ties? As a list:

  • The environment must be “accessible” (or comfortable, or usable, or whatever you want to call it). Facebook is particularly well suited for this role, with their emphasis on clean design and usability. Further, it must be easy for users to get on the systems and find their old ties.
  • Contexts must be respected. One of the main reasons that we feel uncomfortable about the mixing of social networks is the fact we’re different things to different people. While Facebook doesn’t really foster faceted identity, we can keep our social networks separate, which is a very important facet. It is up to us to provide a palatable identity, but if we can keep our social networks separate, that’s almost as valuable.
  • The activation of ties must be fostered. It isn’t an accident that people go to Classmates.com to connect with ex-classmates. The site is set up with the premise of rediscovering old ties. While I think Classmates.com is hopelessly broken, the point is valuable – the activation of latent ties doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people enter the social network with the intention of doing so, and they have the tools for doing so. Therefore, social networks must put effort into this approach – they have to foster the activation of latent ties.

While the answering of situationally relevant social information needs provide motivation for using online social networks, if that is all the user does, they will run into the “what’s next” problem. The activation of latent ties may stem this problem; and when you think about all of the potential latent ties we’ve left behind, you see the potential scope of the market.

Just like situational relevance, the activation of latent ties is something that must be done correctly. It is a unique information transaction and must be treated as such. The online social network that best understands the complications involved in this transaction, and designs appropriately towards these complexities will reap huge rewards from the latent ties market. Of course, I write this with Facebook in mind, as they are the network best situated to benefit from this opportunity. If my Facebook can become the low maintenance, low involvement directory of our lives, it is going to stand alone as a useful information tool. And usefulness, folks, is what its all about.

Research / Thoughts — 6 Comments
26
Feb 07

Wikipedia's Expansive Influence in Candidate Search Results

In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans. There is no other entity on the web that plays such a systematically influential role in candidate information positioning as Wikipedia, pointing to its increased importance as a messaging tool in the 2008 cycle. A full breakdown of candidate search result positions follows:

Candidate Main Site Rank (1) Election Site Rank (2) Wikipedia Rank (3) Outrank? (4)
John Edwards 1 1 3 N
Joe Biden 1 3 5 N
Christopher Dodd 1 4 3 Y
Mike Gravel 1 1 3 N
Dennis Kucinich 3 1 5 N
Barack Obama 3 1 2 N
Bill Richardson 2 4 1 Y
Hillary Rodham Clinton 1 2 3 N
Sam Brownback 1 3 4 N
Rudy Giuliani 2 2 1 Y
Duncan Hunter 1 2 3 N
Mitt Romney 1 1 2 N
Jim Gilmore x (5) x (5) 1 Y
Mike Huckabee 2 2 1 Y
John McCain 1 x (5) 3 Y
Ron Paul 1 5 3 Y
Tom Tancredo 1 3 4 N
Tommy Thompson 2 4 1 Y

This is truly eye-opening data. Wikipedia’s influence is systematic and pervasive, perhaps to the point of overreaching. Should Wikipedia outrank a candidate’s electoral site? Clearly, this shows that monitoring Wikipedia is a must for every campaign – thankfully Wikipedia makes this easy with RSS-based monitoring.

Wikipedia’s role in the 2008 cycle will be interesting to follow. Over the next few months, I’ll be looking at candidate Wikipedia presence and attempting to make some sense of the possibilities.

Caveats about this data and methodology: This represents a one-time analysis of Google search results. These results may and will change over time. The queries were directed to Google.com, from a US-based location. Other Google national sites may provide dissimilar results. Queries were constructed exactly as transcribed – i.e. no quotes around names, or special techniques.

Footnotes:
(1) – This is the search rank of the candidate’s main site, if the candidate has a main site different from their electoral web presence. For example, John McCain or Dennis Kucinich’s Congressional web presence.
(2) – This is the search rank of the candidate’s electoral web presence, the home of their presidential campaign or their exploratory committee.
(3) – This is the search rank of the candidate’s main Wikipedia entry.
(4) – An “Outrank” is declared if the Wikipedia page outranks the candidate’s electoral web presence.
(5) – A result was not found in the top ten search results.

Research / Thoughts — 3 Comments
15
Feb 07

Digg: The Tyranny of the Minority

I’ve written about this in the past, but now I have the numbers to back it up! Kristina Lerman, a professor at USC has written an interesting paper (currently a preprint) on the social network dynamics of Digg, entitled: Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg.

The paper provides some interesting baseline analysis of the service. At the time of her data collection (Summer 2006), Lerman found:

  • The top-rated diggers don’t necessarily submit the stories that get the most diggs (i.e. the top diggers aren’t necessarily the best diggers).
  • The top 3% of diggers are responsible for 35% of the stories that hit the front page.
  • The top 3% of diggers are disproportionately responsible for submissions (28%), diggs (11%) and comments (8%).
  • Well-known diggers (people with lots of fans) have disproportionate influence in the service due to social filtering.
  • People dig their friend’s stories – not random submissions by friendless losers ;)

The paper uses these statistics to get to a central thesis that Digg, while viable as a social filtering utility, is vulnerable to a tyranny of the minority. As I argued in my post, this is a classic example of scale-free networks at work. With an overabundance of information, individuals will turn to their friends as social information filters. As it happens, people also tend to include prominent diggers like kevinrose, diggnation and others in their friend lists. Since people rely on their friends as a social filter, these individuals gain hugely disproportionate influence (they are highly centric) in the service. Lerman’s findings corroborate this notion.

In most cases, I’d call this tyranny of the minority a bad thing. However, in Digg’s case, it really might be working for them. Digg rose to popularity based on the powerful personality of Rose (a cult hero to many) and perhaps it isn’t too much of a bad thing that he stays unfairly powerful and influential in the service. It’s OK that Digg is a little less than egalitarian. This is not to say that the core base of power diggers couldn’t stand to be a little bit more diverse.

Thoughts — 3 Comments
25
Sep 06

Pew: Will transparency make the world a better place?

The Pew Internet and American Life project released Part II of its Future of the Internet report. Run by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, the content aggregated in this report is simply worth its weight in gold. In the study, Pew brought together a number of highly respected experts and asked them to respond to some possible scenarios. While the report as a whole is very useful, I felt that section 4 of the report would be of interest to readers.

Pew posed the following question:

As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly ‘transparent’ globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.

The respondents split, with 46% agreeing and 49% disagreeing. Personally, I’m blown away that half of Pew’s expert panel seems to accept the underlying assumption of the question – that privacy won’t really be an option in 2020. Pew, explaining the current status of surveillance issues, states:

Your life is being recorded in various ways today. Your cell phone is a tracking device. Your personal life and financial status are recorded in various databases. Anyone in the world can find out the tax-assessed value of your home with a 10-second internet search. And, with the further development of “IP on everything,” the concept that people and goods will be tagged and trackable on the network through the use of sensors, things are becoming more complex and more transparent simultaneously.

Billions of radio frequency ID (RFID) tags are already in use due to their growing adoption by retailers (such as Wal-Mart) and government agencies (such as the U.S. Department of Defense). The fairly inexpensive, nearly invisible devices are used as a means to improve efficiency. They can be used to track inventory, equipment and personnel; they may replace bar codes. One estimate finds that corporations making RFID devices will make more than $24 billion a year by 2016.

In a sense, we’re already living in this world. As I type this note, my computer is attached to an internet connection that records my presence; when I present a credit card at the store, I am further recorded – and who knows how many surveillance cameras record my every move. What we lack – what gives us this notion of privacy, is the fact the mesh network that would bring all of this information together doesn’t yet exist (outside of the NSA). How reminiscent of the Facebook feeds fiasco – yes, all my information is out there – but when it is in one place, I am no longer comfortable with it.

In the report, Cory Doctorow and Hal Varian weigh in on a social contract for privacy.

Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow, an EFF Fellow, wrote, “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical. We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows. We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.” And Hal Varian of Google and the UC-Berkeley wrote, “Privacy is a thing of the past. Technologically it is obsolete. However, there will be social norms and legal barriers that will dampen out the worst excesses.”

Barry Wellman explores the nature of power and privacy:

Barry Wellman, a researcher on virtual communities and workplaces and the director of NetLab at the University of Toronto, responded, “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”

A fascinating report. You can download a free copy at the Pew site, and you can view the complete remarks of the experts at this site. Note: Cross-blogged to the claimID blog.

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