vobios.blog

New day, new argument for why everyone must blog. Blog or die. For some reason the blogosphere is constantly trying to justify its existence. From The next Web is the human Web:

Quick, do a little project with me. Visit the home pages of Nestle and Quixtar.

Without clicking anywhere find me a real human being. Not one made out of a stock photo agency.

You don’t need to look. There aren’t any. Not to mention that you can’t talk to a real human being. And I don’t see anything on those two pages that I’d like to link to. Which means they won’t get high search engine rankings no matter how many SEO firms they pay.

Why should Nestle care about search engine rankings in the first place? Why should Nestle care about Internet at all? And who goes to the Nestle home page in the first place?

The Official Google Blog put up a story on Alex Chiles. “She just completed 6th grade in the Seattle area. And she wrote this essay for her class. If we made Alex up, you wouldn’t believe us, so take a moment to read her report yourself.”

A selection from Google Is The Center OF My Internet World, the essay in question:

Now you know how important Google is to me when I’m online or using my computer! Whether I’m finding a friend’s phone number or just checking my email, Google covers it all. Google has a product for everything and they’re so easy to use! I’m not sure if I could survive without Google and all of its products, they are just way to useful!

This is from a school essay.

Kids these days.

On Sunday, The New York Times runs an article about how employers are looking at job applicants’ profiles on social networking sites. From For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume:

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

Nothing groundbreaking here. Hardly a day goes by that the media fails to warn me that MySpace will steal my soul and eat my firstborn. The response is MySpace Careers. As stated in the official press release:

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—June 12, 2006—MySpace, the premier lifestyle portal, today announced the launch of MySpace Jobs, a new search feature to be powered by Simply Hired, the world’s largest search engine for jobs. The new feature—available at http://careers.myspace.com—provides MySpace members access to more than 5 million listings aggregated by the Simply Hired search engine.

After being hit with a major article stressing how crucial it is to separate your personal and professional life online, MySpace decides to bring them closer together.

As mentioned over at ZDNet:

The most interesting data in the Hitwise analysis though is undoubtedly the comparison of verticals between Google, Yahoo and MSN. In web email services, despite my post at the end of last week about Gmail being the best webmail service – when it comes to cold hard stats Gmail is a distant last:

1. Yahoo Mail 42.4%
2. MSN Hotmail 22.9%
3. MySpace mail 19.5%
4. Gmail 2.54%

Less than 3% for Gmail? I am not sure how exactly these statistics are compiled, but that is surprising. At a time when it seems like everyone you know is switching to Gmail, it turns out hardly anyone is using it at all. Something just does not seem right. Then again, MySpace is on this list and that is not an email service.

For years Apple explicitly stated there would be no video iPod. Many saw it coming, but the company denied it time and time again. In the end, the video iPod was released.

Today, Apple went back on its words again by introducing Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. From the press release:

“Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple’s superior hardware now that we use Intel processors,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch.”

It will be interesting to see how long this promise lasts.

I remember the day when you could not use the word blog in public due to an excessive amount of blank stares that would surely result. Fast forward a few years and now it’s almost a requirement in certain circles to have one. You know things have gone too far when someone decides to create a Business Blogging Index. From The Long Tail:

Earlier this year I was at a dinner with Doc Searls and we got to talking about why some companies blog and some don’t. Microsoft blogs, and Apple doesn’t. Sun blogs and Intel doesn’t. GM blogs and Toyota doesn’t. And so on.

Perhaps, Doc wondered, the risks and uncertainties of public business blogging are so great that big companies only do it under duress, when their traditional corporate messaging has lost traction. So companies on the way up don’t want to mess with their success by introducing a new lens on the enterprise that isn’t controlled by the PR department. But companies on the way down are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers.

Hmm, I thought. That’s testable. Let’s look at which of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging and compare their past twelve month share performance with those that aren’t. If this theory stands up, the blogging members of the F500 will have underperformed the nonblogging members. And then we can also see if blogging makes a difference going forward, by continuing to follow the two cohorts.

What grew out of this is the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. I’ll be checking it frequently to make sure I do not miss these exciting new blogs:
Bed Bath & Beyond – pillow news
Exxon Mobil – more reasons to get that SUV
Heinz – ketchup ain’t just for hot dogs anymore
Walgreen – you have to fill your prescriptions somewhere
Wendy’s – square burgers are better

This is my favorite section, though:

Over time, as the list gets more robust, we’ll add the share price performance back in and turn it into a Business Blogging Index so you can see if blogging is indeed correlated to company performance (and who knows, maybe someday some smart mutual fund will actually turn it into a fund you can buy).

The unfortunate part is that some people would actually buy that fund. Forget the management, the cash flow, the product lineup, or the industry. Blogging is what drives the corporations of tomorrow. Amazon.com and Microsoft are more likely to blog than Berkshire Hathaway or Dollar General because they simply “are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers”. Everything is so clear to me now.

Upon reading this piece by David Pogue, I just had to fire an email to the author.

Hello David,

I just read your 10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year article. For the most part, I thought it was a good lineup. Unfortunately, not all of them are new or entirely accurate.

“THE FREE DOMAIN NAME A domain name is what comes before the “.com” in a Web address – like NYTimes.com, verizonwireless.com or MarryMeBritney.com. Getting your own personal dot-com name has its privileges – for example, your e-mail address can be You@YourNameHere.com – but it costs money and requires some expertise. It took Microsoft, of all companies, to make getting your own dot-com name free. Its new Office Live online software suite for small businesses, now in testing, will offer a domain name, Web site and e-mail accounts free. Yes, you’ll see ads on the screen (unless you pay for the adless version) – but plenty of people won’t mind viewing them in exchange for a free, professional-looking Web presence.”

It was not Microsoft that came up with the idea of a free domain name. Around 1999-2001, during the final days of the tech bubble, there were several free domain name registrars. They have long since changed their business models, but their place in history cannot be ignored.

Also, since Microsoft’s free domain comes with Office Live, a relatively expensive product, is the domain really free? What about all the companies that offer free domains with their hosting packages?

As I said before, you produced a good lineup. However, some parts were somewhat fudged. I really would like to expect more from a publication like The New York Times. This is more than just a local paper. If I find errors in the information I am familiar with, how can I trust anything else in your publication?

I hope such reporting is avoided in the future.

I wonder if I will at least be honored with a response.

The Wikipedia saga continues. The Register had a beautiful article today:

For CNN viewers, and for NPR listeners again the following day, Wales repeated his wish to unmask the perp, but could only offer some hand-wringing excuse about the difficulty of finding anonymous users, and the complexity of serving internet service providers with subpoenas. However, we now learn that the libeler wasn’t very hard to find, and has now stepped forward to confess to making the edit with an apology.

Brian Chase, a 38 year old employee of Rush Delivery in Seigenthaler’s home town of Nashville, Tennessee, admitted to making the edit and has apologized to Seigenthaler. The reason he gave to the New York Times was most revealing.

Chase thought Wikipedia was a joke site and he made the edit to amuse a colleague. From which we conclude that the spoof site Uncyclopedia, which consists entirely of fictional entries, is doing far better than expected, and that Wikipedia has a long way to go to rid itself of the image that it’s a massive, multiplayer shoot-em-up game, or MMORPG.

Chase has lost his job, and Seigenthaler joined the pleas to reinstate him.

But the unusual aspect of this – and this is an irony on a par with Sony using ‘DVD’ Jon Johansen’s anti-DRM code in its DRM CD software – is what compelled Chase to step forward. The libeller was outed not by Wikipedia guardians, by a prominent critic of the site who has been earned himself a lifetime Wikipedia ban – researcher Daniel Brandt.

Chase left a fingerprint behind, in the form of an IP address, and Brandt discovered that the machine was active, traced it to Nashville, and discovered it was hosting a web server. The web server revealed the name of a company: ‘Rush Delivery’. Brandt fired off a fax to Rush Delivery in Nashville and confirmed the connection.

Then the article offers a quick summary of the entire debate and hits the nail right on the head:

Two great cries have rung around the internet since the Seigenthaler scandal broke.

One is that Seigenthaler should have corrected the entry himself, and the other is that no source of authority can be trusted “definitively”. That’s a deliciously weaselly phrase we’ll examine in a moment.

But both excuses seek, in the classic tradition of bad engineers blaming users for their own shoddy handiwork, to pass the responsibility onto Wikipedia’s users.

The blame goes here, the blame goes there – the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there’s a problem – well, the user must be stupid!

It continues:

If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public “internet” ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world’s greatest “knowledge” was just around the corner. This hasn’t happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile.

Everything you read is suspect! You’d better duck!

Only a paranoiac, or a mad person, can sustain this level of defensiveness for any length of time however, and to hear a putative “encyclopedia” making such a statement is odd, to say the least.

This defense firmly puts the blame on the reader, for being so stupid as to take the words at face value. Silly you, for believing us, they say.

I could not have said it better myself.

After the recent media blitz criticizing Wikipedia, the web service responded:

Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.

I am sure the new policy will go a long way, especially considering that almost every imaginable page has already been created. True, the measures will help with the spam, but that is not what all the discussion has been about. Talk about a gimmick.

Additionally, this was in a different article:

“That’s an interesting philosophical issue,” Wales said. “Because on the one hand, particularly with things like podcasting, the people involved are people who know a lot about it, and on the other hand, when people are editing something they’ve been personally involved in, it can be hard for them to be neutral.”

He added that traditionally, Wikipedia has discouraged users from participating in such entries and asks them to be mature and serious when they do.

Luckily, the Internet is a great place to expect maturity and seriousness from complete strangers protected by anonymity.

Breaking news from The New York Times. Turns out the mighty Wikipedia cannot be trusted. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, “The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources.”

I have been dubious of Wikipedia for a long time. After all the praise it has been receiving lately, it is nice to see someone try to open up everyones eyes. I just wonder why it took years for this to end up in a major publication.

And just for the record, as Wikipedia continues to become more mainstream, the number of submissions will eventually completely overwhelm the small group of people willing to actually edit the content. How long this experiment will last is an interesting question though.

Today Thefacebook unveiled a new layout and a new domain name (facebook.com). In addition, now it refers to itself as just Facebook, so on some level it also got a new name. The confusion that resulted from having an incredibly awkward name is over. The masses may now rejoice. In honor of this occasion, below is the text of my post from June 17, 2004. This was taken from my previous blog that is no longer active.

As the blanket of snow covering the New England hills was facing its final days, no one could foresee an epidemic that would soon be unleashed upon the world. Spawned in the cellars of Harvard University, Thefacebook has been invading college campuses nationwide since its February launch. Cornell became one of the first petri dishes for this virus, along with other elite schools like Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Thousands of Cornellians rushed to create Thefacebook accounts when the campus was added to its network in March. The Cornell section of the web site already has over 9,000 members, which is incredible given the fact that there are less than 14,000 undergraduates at the university. Besides AOL Instant Messenger, it is impossible to name any other online service that has penetrated the student body to such an extent.

According to Thefacebook, the service is “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges and universities”. It is easy to make comparisons to Friendster and Orkut. When you join, you are asked to create a profile. All fields except for your name and email are optional, but of course the vast majority of students fill out most of them. A key part of Thefacebook experience is adding other members to your list of friends. It is absolutely delightful to browse your network to see who your buddies know and how you are connected to numerous other students. You may then proceed to look up random people to see where they are from, what classes they are taking, their birthday, and so forth. It is no wonder many call it an excellent stalking tool.

The way Thefacebook works is simple. The part that has continued to puzzle me is why people have joined it in droves, especially considering all of the privacy concerns. I decided to run a simple experiment. On April 15, a new account was created by Andy Connors. He became the 4588th person (determined from the profile’s URL) to join Thefacebook. Andy was a just like any other Cornell student, except for the fact that he did not exist prior to that moment. Despite having a simple name, he could not be mistaken for someone else. According to the Cornell directory, there was no one on campus with that name.

Just like many other brand new members, Andy left his profile on Thefacebook unfilled. He then started generating random user IDs and going to the profiles corresponding to those users. The first 20 people that already had friends (indicating they were active users) were sent a friend invitation. Three days later, Andy had nine friends. He was no longer someone existing solely within the digital realm. He had real friends. It was time to add some information to his profile. He then selected three people from each of his friends’ lists of friends (assuming they had at least three of them). These 24 individuals were sent requests to be added to Andy’s network. In the next four days, 15 of them would approve them. During this time, two more of his original invitations were accepted. In his first week of existence, Andy acquired 26 friends. After another week passed, this number grew to 29.

In the first two weeks, nearly two-thirds (29/44) of Andy’s friend requests were confirmed. The sample size in this study is far from sufficient, but it goes a long way in helping to illustrate an important point. When asked why they joined Thefacebook, most people fail to give a coherent response. Andy helped me find the secret that fueled the explosion of this phenomenon. Perhaps people see it as a way determine their self worth with a discrete number. A small network could only mean one that you are an antisocial loser, so it is imperative that you try to expand it. This means if there are people you know who still have not signed up, you must pressure them to do so. Your honor rests on it.

It is absurd to think Thefacebook is not about counting friends. It is about counting every person you ever met. It does not matter if you only saw them once in one of your classes. It does not matter if you have not talked to them in two years. It does not even matter if they are not a real person.