mediajunk

A survey by DoubleClick on the effect of spam on email users has shown that women and men respond differently to spam. Women are more likely to read and respond, explains Usability News.

"Men and women have radically different ideas of what spam is and different purchasing behaviour related to spam. Women are more receptive to promotions and discounts and correspondingly more interested in and tolerant of marketing emails than men."

Other key points of the survey were:

• Frequency tolerance (i.e. the point at which a user says "this company is sending me marketing emails too often") varies dramatically from individual to individual.

• The main factor determining whether a user will open an email is whether he or she recognises the sender company.

• Many email users are availing of spam-management tools offered by their internet service providers.

My own experience is consistent with these findings. One of the reasons I direct all my email through to my Yahoo account is because of its regularly updated filtering service, which catches about 80% (at a guess) of incoming spam.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the spam wars are only beginning...

Just days after Amazon’s launch of its Search Inside the Book feature (see my October 26 entry on this), news of Google’s book search plans are beginning to emerge.

“For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google's database, say people close to the discussions,” says Publisher’s Weekly.

“According to a report from one publisher, Google has said it has reached agreements that allow it to enter as many as 60,000 titles in its database and also presented extensive mock-ups to publishers of how book-relevant searches will look.”

Google’s move reinforces the notion that the web will soon be a true virtual library, with book texts that are currently only available in print becoming fully searchable and downloadable.

Google is also working on a pilot project with the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) aimed at making the vast catalogues of books, periodicals and other printed materials held in US libraries searchable by the general public.

The project involves titles and other descriptive information, not the contents of these documents. Nevertheless, it would be a massive coup for Google, since the pilot scheme contains two million documents – and a further 51 million could be made available to Google by the ODCP in the future.

“After users locate an OCLC record citation from a Google search,” explains Info Today, “clicking on the citation will link to an interface that requests a ZIP or postal code, state, or province. This in turn will locate the nearest libraries holding the item.”

It will be interesting to see whether Google adds a “book search” tab or whether it will mix printed book results with regular results. In any case, the move is a sign that competition in the search sector is now red hot, and that the internet is still rapidly evolving.

A new Australian search engine called Mooter was launched last week.

The splash it caused on bulletin boards frequented by search engine enthusiasts and experts was indicative of its potential.

Mooter's competitive advantage lies in its use of "clustering" to serve up search results in meaningful categories. The technique isn't new, but it's well implemented in this case.

As CEO Liesl Capper explains in her post to WebmasterWorld:

"Most search engines tackle the non-trivial task of organizing massive amounts of info from the same angle: 'lets decide on behalf of the searcher what is most relevant, based on what the bulk of the general public thinks is relevant.'

We decided to rather expend our efforts watching how individual PEOPLE actually search, see where it hurts, fix that. So, you know how it goes: type in search phrase, 3 mill results, read, read, read, scroll, click, back to results, read, read, click, then go back and type in a different phrase to educate the engine more about your needs. So there already are about 10 things you have to do, and that’s assuming the sort of search where you have a pretty clear idea what you after to begin with.

While you are reading, your mind is forming a sort of scaffolding with all the data. Hanging around in fluid nodes in this scaffolding are roughly held together conceptual groups – we don't really like handling more than 3-5 chunks at once.

The reason for this is pretty simple - back in our troglodyte days you would die rather quickly if your mind didn’t work like this: you had to focus on essential clumps on data (and clump details if there were too many), and discard anything extraneous (even though the 'extraneous' in today’s world may be critical info).

This means sometimes we got it wrong, by putting things in wrong nodes or assuming incorrect relationships between nodes, but it was better than slowing your decisions down and being eaten by something meaner and (possibly) smellier than yourself. That’s why so few people go past results page 2 of traditional engines. And that’s why we group conceptually, rather than try override human hardwiring."

Anyway, you'll be hearing a little more about Mooter here at mediajunk for reasons I can't divulge ;)

For now though, have a Moot and let me know what you think...

I mentioned in July that Amazon was developing a new text search. A couple of days ago they launched this “Search Inside The Book” feature. Now users can search not only book titles, but also all of the text contained within Amazon’s books.

While this may at first seem an innocuous usability enhancement to Amazon’s site, Wired magazine’s Gary Wolf treats the development much more seriously – and I agree with him.

“The Amazon project … represents a bold step toward the dream of a universal library,” says Wolf. “This shifts power away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and toward the people who offer access to information about where this material can be found. Information about books, not ownership of copyrights, becomes a new center of power.”

Incidentally, just how did Amazon get around the tricky issue of copyright?

“Amazon's solution is audacious: The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all … The archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but pictures -- pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book.

If you want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume -- which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon. Users will be asked to give their credit card number before looking at pages in the archive, and they won't be able to view more than a few thousand pages per month, or more than 20 percent of any single book.”

The message here isn’t just that Amazon is changing the way books are sold. It’s much bigger than that. One medium, the web, is changing the function of another, printed text.

It’s a paradigm shift, a metamorphosis that reinforces our feeling that cultural evolution is accelerating, that the internet is a catalyst for that acceleration.

It’s exciting.

"How I met my wife," is a fiendishly clever essay by Jack Winter, that appeared in a July 1994 edition of the New Yorker.

It begins thus:

"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate."

Reads funny, doesn't it? Look the sentence over again, and see if you can figure out what's wrong with it.

Yes, Winter illustrates our pervasive use of negativity in language -- by avoiding negatives (more precisely, he packs the essay full of expressions that we normally recognise in their negative form, but rarely if ever see in the positive).

The results are bizarre and amusing.

Joshua Carmody says the essay “makes fun of one of the oddities of the English language.” I don't agree that the oddity is exclusive to English. For example, the French language is similarly rich with negative expressions, n'est-ce pas?

I often think that advertisers and marketers are locked in a coevolutionary “arms race” with consumers. The more marketing-savvy consumers become, the less likely they will be influenced. Thus, advertisers are forced to come up with more inventive – and more furtive or duplicitous – ways to promote their brands and sell their products.

At the moment, that arms race is escalating to unprecedented levels. Newspaper “advertorials”; logos that are sported as fashion statements; movie-related toys that are given away free with happy meals; and paid-for search engine listings – these are all modern examples of advertising methods. Some methods are even sneakier. A couple of years ago, I discovered that a friend’s company had got a brand “makeover” with a new tagline, that I recognised as a movie title.

I noticed that the same movie was been shown that weekend on (Irish) TV. I genuinely thought this was a co-incidence, and mentioned to my friend how this was a spot of luck, since it would reinforce the new brand.

“Oh, it wasn’t luck,” she told me. “We’ve paid for the movie to be shown tonight.”

Since then, I’ve become increasingly vigilant about identifying the infotainment wheat among the marketing chaff (and I watch considerably less television).

Not that vigilance is enough. I once read that advertising’s power comes from the fact that we don’t believe we are being taken in by it. “Others, yes, but me? Nawwwww.”

I wasn’t terribly surprised then, that advertisers are now considering the possibility of creating false memories, or “memory morphing”, in consumer’s minds, to reinforce their brands.

"When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products -- not advertising -- in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter what consumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours," writes Jerry Zeldman in his book, How Customers Think.

Zeldman is chief evangelist of the power of memory morphing, and his ideas are explored in an article in today’s Independent.

“Zaltman's extraordinary claims are based on experiments carried out by memory researchers in the US, most notably the work carried out by Elizabeth Loftus, a former professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She singled out a campaign by Disney – "Remember the magic" – which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers.

She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert "remembered" meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character.”

Phrases such as “smacks of 1984” and “Orwellian” are so overused these days as to have lost their impact, but the falsification of individual (and collective) memories is a subject of that dystopian novel.

The chilling aspect of Zeldman’s memory morphing proposal is that, I suspect, it is quite doable. It is true that human memory is unreliable, and the brain is creative in its construction of memories.

We can only hope that marketing professionals will take the attitude expressed by Richard Huntington, head of planning at the agency HHCL/Red Cell, in relation to memory morphing:

"It is the last refuge of the scoundrel to say that there's bugger all we can tell you about this product, so we'll pretend that you all had great Christmases."

Nevertheless, we should brace ourselves for an ever-increasing number of “just like mother used to make” ads…

I admit that I am a frequent practitioner of “vanity Googling” – the act, I have just learned from a Febuary 2003 article in the Boston Globe, of looking yourself up in Google.

The article by Neil Swidey explores the voyeuristic tendencies that Google's effectiveness is cultivating among a growing population of users. Swidey makes many thought-provoking points, backed with good examples of how the search engine that sorts out the wheat from the chaff has simultaneously created a raft of new privacy issues.

“While most of your embarrassing baggage was already available to the public,” he writes, “it was effectively off-limits to everyone but the professionally intrepid or supremely nosy. Now, in states where court records have gone online, and thanks to the one-click ease of Google, you can read all the sordid details of your neighbor's divorce with no more effort than it takes to check your e-mail.

‘It's the collapse of inconvenience,’ says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. ‘It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it.’”

Swidey’s piece is a good primer for anyone who wants to know why managing your identity on the internet has become all-important.

The article also made me aware of the fascinating – and tragic – story of 20-year old Amy Boyer, who was being stalked by a former student of her high school. 21-year old Liam Youens, kept a diary-like site that detailed various acts of stalking he had carried out on Boyer since 8th grade, and his intentions to kill her.

In late 1999, he did exactly that, shooting Amy Boyer and then himself.

Amy’s father is now a campaigner for privacy rights (since Youens used a "detective" company to find out where his daughter worked) – though he feels that he may have been able to prevent his daughter's death if he, or Amy, had only come across Youens’s site. In the interests of promoting awareness, he has reproduced the original site.

It would be hard to imagine the horror Amy Boyer would have felt had she come across her stalker’s site. But the simple act of “vanity Googling” could have helped her avoid her terrible fate.

Christopher Allbritton (former AP reporter and Iraq warblogger) is teaching a class on blogging as part of the Digital Journalism course at New York University.

This is a bonafide third-level class, for which students will receive credits. (For those unfamiliar with the US third-level education system: most US courses are made up of modules, each of which is worth a certain number of credits. Students can mix n' match modules, to some extent. Before being awarded a degree, the student must have gained a certain number of credits.)

Everyone in the class maintains a blog -- including the teacher! In fact, Allbritton's blog is used to co-ordinate the class; it would also serve as a great resource to any budding bloggers (eh, sorry, digital journalists) out there.

Just to show that Moore’s Law hasn’t yet reached its limit, a California-based company called ClearSpeed Technologies is to unveil a new microprocessor that, a spokesperson told reporters at Wired News, “has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.”

Okay, so you need to put 24 of these chips into a single machine, but that’s entirely possible, and a laptop with 24 microprocessors (arranged on six PCI cards) would still be a snip, at around $25,000.

“That’s not cheap!” I hear you shout.

For a PC, it isn’t. But for a supercomputer, it is. And a PC that contains 24 of ClearSpeed’s CS301 chips would be powerful enough to enter the current list of the world’s 500 top supercomputers.

“By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.

The most powerful supercomputer in the world, Japan's Earth Simulator, operates at about 35 teraflops, consumes a warehouse-size space and cost $350 million.”

But who would need a “laptop supercomputer,” other than guys who like to show off their gadgets?

Lots of people apparently, particulary those working in Hollywood computer graphics industry.

We may be approaching a cultural milestone. In the UK, people who have interent access are spending more time online than watching TV, according to a survey reported in Internet Magazine.

"The survey by NOP showed that people with both Internet access and a TV at home spend an average of 3.5 hours a day surfing, but 2.8 hours a day in front of the box.

It also showed that 44 per cent think the Internet is a better source of entertainment and news than television.

The survey is the first to show that the Internet is more popular than TV, in households that have both."

The exact details of this survey are scant. For example: do the 3.5 hours spent surfing include use of the internet at work? (I think it would have been worth distinguishing between business use of the web, and entertainment use.) What group was surveyed? How representative was it? Etc.

I also get twitchy whenever I hear that a survey has been sponsored by a corporation that seems to have a related agenda (in this case, BTOpenworld, which is trying to increase the market for its broadband services in the UK).

While it is perhaps premature to say that web use is now more prevalent than television-watching, I nevertheless think that this survey is, at least, prophetic of what's to come.

The web has acquired a massive worldwide user base in less than a decade -- a much faster take-up rate than radio or television enjoyed.

The web is likely to become a more important medium than television in less than a decade. Indeed, it is likely to change television's function, just as TV changed the function of radio before it.

Meanwhile, we can expect a lot of mixing and matching over the coming years among technologies such as the internet, television, computers, games consoles, videoconferencing, digital sound and image recorders/players and phones.

My article on blogs as marketing tools was published on the Jimworld site today.

Jimworld is a web marketing hub and home to an active webmaster community. They also set up a discussion thread on the article.

Here's the opening section:

The practice of keeping Web logs (or "blogging") has become the latest phenomenon to sweep the Internet. An estimated 1.3 million blogs have been created on the Web, roughly two-thirds of which are still active (source: http://www.blogcensus.net/, September 2003).

Blogging started as something of a hobby for Web designers, but it is fast spreading to the business world. Some businesspeople use Web logs as a way of sharing their knowledge, their opinions, and their experiences with a wider audience. These corporate bloggers are people who see value in promoting themselves and in creating new virtual communities.

Business blogging isn't something you should rush into, however. Keeping a Web log involves a serious personal commitment. And just as a good blog enhances your brand, a Web log with poor or irregularly updated content reflects badly on its owner.

Still, if approached correctly, blogging can be an innovative and effective way to market your business and yourself, and to make new and long-term connections with individuals you would otherwise never have met.

Note: You can also read this business blogging article on my internet consulting site >>>

There has been some speculation among search engine enthusiasts that Longhorn – the name given to the forthcoming Microsoft search product – will offer peer-to-peer searching.

While Microsoft has made no comment to this effect, it has hinted that its new search technology will aim to rival Google’s, and will involve integration with its existing products. The company would be in an extremely advantageous position were it to enter the peer-to-peer (P2P) search market, since it already has such a vast share of the operating system market.

A P2P tool would use the physical internet, but it would not have to run on a browser. Thus a user of Microsoft Word may decide to do a search for a particular piece of information relevant to a topic he’s searching on – and, if he was linked to the internet, the search could through Word documents on the “public” portion of the hard drives of all other users that are connected to the internet.

Where would public drives come from? From any Microsoft users who wish to share their information (why they would do so is another question).
Let's say that I declare the partition "F:" of my hard drive as "public". In our futuristic peer-to-peer scenario, all of the contents of my F: drive would thus be searchable by all other Microsoft users connected to the internet. These other users could be looking around in my hard drive without my even knowing about it.

Of course, the logistical and privacy issues connected with this hypothetical scenario would be a nightmare.

Then again, thinking back to twelve years ago, if someone was to describe to me then how the world of digital information sharing (i.e. the web and its search engines) would be now, I would have said “impossible”.
And a couple of P2P search engines – Napster and Gnutella – have already proven notoriously popular, even though these have been restricted to certain kinds of (music) files.

Meantime, one company that’s trying to get ahead of the posse on P2P searching is Widesource. Check out their free P2P search engine.

Did you know that George Bush has a blog now?

For obvious reasons, I won’t be adding this to my list of celebrity blogs (see bottom right).

What would you call a porn search engine?

Go Ogle. (Bad-a-boom!)

Today's NY Times contains an article with the ominous title: "Frequent Search Engine Users, Google Is Watching and Counting".

Apparently, Google is testing a new counter icon, which displays the message: “You have used Google Search x times,” to users who have conducted a lot of searches over a short period.

Milking the Big Brother aspect to the story, the Times quotes Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as asking: “Do users know that Google is spying on them?”

Further concerns are raised about the way in which Google conducts such “spying”: by placing cookies on users' hard drives – without receiving clear permission to do so.

In the past, Google toolbar users have agreed to let the company collect data on their behaviour (but not on their names or any other identifying information), in return for the free use of advanced features.

However, I must admit I am surprised that Google has now started using cookies, albeit fairly innocuous ones, without requesting user permission. It seems to go against Google’s long held policies of openness and fairness.

Marissa Mayer, Google's director for consumer products, has described the counter as an "experiment"; that is "very new".

I certainly hope this isn't the thin end of the wedge. It would be *extremely* foolish of Google to lose users' trust, having done so well to gain it so quickly and impressively.

I have one other concern about this counter, which wasn't expressed in the Times piece: in general, counters suck. They look bad and give a web page an amateur feel. Site statistics should be kept separate from site content.

Why on earth is Google even exploring this idea?

I’ve mentioned more than once recently that the blogosphere seems to enjoy roughly half-and-half participation among males and females.

These results have been confirmed in another survey of weblogs, this one concentrating on hosted blogs only. (A hosted blog is one that resides on a “parent” site, such as blogger.com or livejournal.com. This blog you’re currently reading isn’t hosted, though my diaryland site is.) Females account for 56% of those with hosted blogs, according to this white paper by Perseus.

Among some of the other notable statistics were:

• 66% of hosted blogs have not been updated within the last two months

• Of the 4.12 million blogs created on hosting services, only 106,579 are updated at least once a week, and fewer than 50,000 are updated daily.

• 92.4% of bloggers are under the age of 30.
  

Perhaps then it was wrong to title this article men’s vs. women’s blogs, when most bloggers are, in fact, just lickle boys and girls. Aaaaw.

Not everyone is in favour of corporate blogging. Neil McIntosh of the Guardian has written a piece called Why Blogs Could Be Bad for Business.

He writes: "The notion that more than a few companies might relax their external relations strategies enough to allow weblog communication, willy-nilly, between staff members and the outside world, is absurd, no matter how many consultants insist such communication might actually have a beneficial effect on a company's image."

I think McIntosh makes some good points, but his analysis goes too far. Blogs offer a new and different way for businesspeople to communicate with the outside world; to build networks; promote themselves; and create virtual communities. However, business blogging should not be a "willy-nilly" process. As with anything in business, the practice of keeping a weblog should be undertaken with professionalism.

I will expand on these view in an essay I'm currently working on, entitled "Blogging for Business -- The Basics".

*****

Another interview with a senior Google exec this week. This one's with Chief Technology Officer Craig Silverstein.

*****

Personally, I've nothing against genetic engineering or genetic modification in principle. I don't think science, or even technology, is ever evil or stupid; only human behaviour (including human use of science or technology) can fall into those categories.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this poster -- part of a campaign by New Zealand's Mothers against Genetic Engineering -- from an advertising perspective.

There's a great interview in the Online Journalism Review with Krishna Bharat, chief boffin behind the Google News portal.

The article tackles the debate about whether Google News -- and the internet in general -- is a threat to journalism, or whether it is an expansion of that profession.

There are discussions about the limits of automation and the potential problems that arise when there is no human editor on hand to evaluate articles. Still, the piece makes you realise just how easy Bharat and his colleagues make it seem -- the truth is that collating news stories from around the world and serving them up them in a "democratic" manner to a global audience is no mean feat.

In many cases, the automated system has an advantage over people in performing this task. "We get 100,000 articles a day," Bharat explains. "A human editor couldn't read that many."

One of the most curious things about the article, for me, was that Bharat still thinks that personalisation is the holy grail of internet news.

I've never been convinced of this, and it hasn't really worked in the past when providers such as Yahoo! have tried it. Part of the fun of reading a newspaper is that an article might catch your eye in a section that you wouldn't normally read. This would be far less likely to happen with personalistion, where you would only ever be served up those items that fit into certain categories...

So, personally, I'm against personalisation!