isolated in a web of one

mash it up

I don’t want to be premature here, but I’d say tentatively that this does appear to be the greatest thing of all time.

Devin Coldewey of CrunchGear, cited in the Telegraph, commenting on PhotoSketch, developed by students in China, which uses a stick figure drawing to search available online imagery and mash appropriate shots together into a photo montage.

Unfortunately the rush of interest appears to have brought the PhotoSketch site down.

So you're just gonna have to wait for it.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

king of hits

The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes [on June 25th], when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for.

R.J. Pittman, Director, Product Management, Google in his blog post Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson.

earthshaking

[Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram] told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake.

The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

Rafe Needleman writing in Cool changes coming to Twitter Search.

Those cool changes include indexing the content behind links that are tweeted and ranking search results according to a reputation ranking.

Stating the obvious: Once Twitter has nailed search they're halfway to monetizing their business model -- and seriously competing with engines like Google. Twitter has an advantage that Google doesn't have[1]: homophilious network neighbors, which research has shown to be a powerful conduit for influencing others and for identifying affinities that don't materialize via traditional demographic profiling.

With the introduction of more powerful and reliable search capabilities Twitter could become a serious contender to Google in the search space.


[1] Worth noting that Google has attempted to accomplish something along the same lines by introducing the ability to tether an individual profile with search history (even more so now that they've introduced profile pages) and by letting folks score and record the importance of their search results.

mind map

“Coupons” up 161%
“Unemployment” up 206%
“Discount” up 26%
“Mortgage” up 72%
“Bankruptcy” up 156%
“Foreclosure” up 67%
“Unemployment Benefits” up 247%

Year over Year growth in Search Terms related to the Economic Downturn, December 2007 vs. December 2008.

Via: comScore

separate but equal?

Illus: Letterpress from Blue Barnhouse

Rushmore Drive ... offers search results that, at first glance, border on stereotypes. A search query for “Thanksgiving recipes,” for instance, yields sites featuring recipes for sweet potato pie and collard greens.

But according to Johnny Taylor, the chief executive of Rushmore Drive, the results are based on years of search data from IAC’s Ask division.

Bob Tedeschi reporting on the release of Rushmore Drive, a search engine “meant to give the black audience a quick way to find information that other search engines -- including IAC’s own Ask.com -- might bury beneath pages of less relevant results,” in this morning’s New York Times.

A few weeks back in my official capacity in life outside this blog, I had a chat with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who was interested in knowing whether or not the e-commerce consultancy that I work for designs sites with gender in mind.

I responded that we design site experiences around user personas in which we identify 1) who will be using the site and 2) what they hope to do; that personas are largely task and role based -- and in that way were influenced in a broader way by gender -- but that no, we don’t sit down and say: “This site is for women -- let’s give them features A, B, and C,” and “this site is for men: let’s give them features C, D and E.”

And while I cited recent research from the Wharton School (warning: PDF) that indicated there might be a gender bias to the way men and women shop online -- I was quick to point out that if everything the Wharton research said was true, then I was actually a man.

I also referred to Barry Schwartz's conclusions regarding Maximizers and Satificers.

My comments didn’t make the cut, and I suspect it was because they didn’t support the underlying hypothesis, which was enthusiastically in favor of gender-biased shopping.

Why does this make me a little uncomfortable? Because even though yes, I think engines (search or otherwise) that can read the implicit and explicit behaviors of shoppers online means that we can give them a message that is much more relevant to what they’re looking for -- which in its turn makes the online experience richer and more relevant for all of us -- it makes me a little queasy to chunk folks into broad racial and gender categories and feed them info accordingly.

As frightening as it may be to some, behavioral marketing does hold the promise of meeting the consumer where they are -- and lets the site's host speak to them on a highly individualized basis.

Reducing that down to gender or race -- the thing we’re so good at doing as a discriminatory society -- undercuts the real opportunities that the technology affords.

Which is true plurality and regard for diversity.

To do so implicitly -- in which it isn't revealed to the user that we know X, Y & Z about you and are behaving accordingly -- also crosses lines of privacy for some.

A recent piece in Metropolis, Sizing China, touches on this delicate topic from another direction -- the compilation of a massive anthropometric database of Asian head shapes that took shape as an outgrowth of a helmet design project for Burton.

The metrics reveal why helmets designed for European and American heads don’t sell well to Asians -- they simply don’t fit -- but it was met with great un-ease when the designer, Roger Ball of Paradox, presented it to a “stony-faced audience in Austria” whose collective memory of the Nazi’s eugenics movement is still all too fresh.

I have no answers to offer -- just wanted to post because this has been niggling at me. I don’t believe the question is: are we different? Because I agree that we are -- it’s part of what makes human culture so interesting and alive.

I don't think the answer is to deny the fact that the computer user interface can be responsive to its audience -- and that responsiveness is in part what makes emerging online experiences so effective at doing what they set out to do.

The larger question is whether, given our diversity, our compulsion to cluster and chunk these divisions into easily understood categories will do us any good -- or instead invite us into the discrimination that we’re historically so well practiced at.

search me

Search is one of the most powerful editorial functions in our society today, and we should really demand that it be done in an open and transparent way.

So the project is really a bit of a political statement by me about what we should all be looking for in an open society and an open Internet.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales commenting on today’s beta release of the new collaborative search engine Wiki.com in DM News.

Wales assures us all that Wiki.com is based on principles of “transparency, community, quality and privacy”.

where the boys (and girls) are

In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise.

In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see chart).

As reported in Sex and the Internet: Devices and Desires, in the 19 April issue of the Econimist.

For anyone who's interested in traffic patterns online, the news that porn sites have been usurped by anything online is a possible indicator that, as the Economist suggests, the Internet is maturing as a medium.

It could also simply mean that the porn has picked up and moved shop to the sites that are beating it out in the traffic rankings -- social networking sites like MySpace, Flickr and SecondLife.

baidu it

Do you know baidu? I didn't, until today -- it's the leading Chinese language search engine -- and #4 in terms of global traffic (just after Google and right before MySpace) according to Alexa.org.

In keeping with the Chinese fondness for piracy, the interface is entirely Google-esque -- but it's not google.cn -- or is it?

(Anybody know?)

When I went looking to try to figure it out I found an article that implies there's no connection to the site that it emulates. The article also served up this tidbit:

In China, the Baidu logo, a dog's paw print, trades on a common local mispronunciation of the word 'Google' – which makes it sound similar to the Chinese for 'dog'.