I am looking at a Think Progress (TP) article titled 'The 8 Worst Responses To The Boston Marathon Bombings'. I scroll to the end. Instead of related internet articles (related to the content or tags) I get .. what?!
5 Most Overrated Exercises You Can Stop Doing
10 Best Makeovers of 2012
Investing For Income
What sort of crappy service comes up with this selection on that article? Why on earth would I click on one of those headlines after reaching the end of that article? And why would TP, or The Hill or DailyKos or some mainstream media news services, bother with something called 'Taboola'?
Taboola is surfacing your articles, slideshows, and videos to the right users, on the most innovative publishers in the world, and inviting them to click and ...
Oh just stop right at 'surfacing' ...
The latest from Taboola (@taboola). World leading content recommendation and monetization platform. Pubs integrate Taboola to surface interesting content ...
I'm looking at the result right now! If this is 'world leading' then the 'world' hasn't engineered its 'recommendation engine' very well, now has it?
It isn't that easy to pull off. I get it. The Guardian has one of the best CMS around and look at what can pop up (aka 'surface') at the bottom of its articles sometimes that's supposedly related.
But these options on Think Progress et al .... Frankly I think they make the users look amateurish. They look like Altavista search results. They look like desperation. They, cough, 'dilute the brand'.
Hands up. I use Zemanta. It gives me link and tag suggestions and related articles. I can add sources for those article suggestions. I choose what appears (I don't have to link to Zemanta or even mention them). It's useful. It also has a helpful newsletter and blog.
They also have a widget like Taboola which I have used elsewhere, but that allowed me to use it just for related links from the same website. And those links generally were closely related. The general web links then from Zemanta's widget were, from recollection, just as daft as Taboola's. I assume this is something to do with having too little granularity, too little segmentation and too small a vaguely related user base (to what my content was).
Another problem with Taboola, best shown when it is used like on The Hill to show related stories from the same website next to other links, is when the 'useful' or 'related' links content is actually paid advertorial but it isn't clearly marked as advertising.
For serious outlets -- like Think Progress -- that is playing with fire. See the Dish's series of posts on “Enhanced Advertorial Techniques".
And not only could it be reputationally damaging but, just as normal web advertising can be, it's scatterfire, clearly using nothing in the actual content to pick advertorial which a reader would be more likely to click on! So if the website is being paid for clicks this makes its presence even more bizarre than it already appears to be!
NB: Below are some of the 'related articles' (which included one clearly 'promoted' option) that Zemanta is letting me pick out:
'Heteronormativity' is the practice of assuming that the entire world is straight and that there is nothing wrong with presenting it that way. Words like that are not normally my favourites, anything requiring an explanation is usually dodgy and this one, as they often do, has an academic world source so should be automatically suspect. However I can't think of a better one to describe this way of looking at the world.
If you regularly visit the Guardian's website you may have noticed that they run little adverts (illustrated above) for their in-house produced 'Soulmates' dating service. These adverts exclusively present what look like heterosexual potential couples.
The first thing which struck me as problematic with this was actually not that I'm a raging gay activist scouring the internet looking to make trouble but that it made no business sense.
On the face of it, presenting the service consistently on the site as being for heterosexuals - first appearances count a LOT on the web, people barely glance at adverts - seems like plain bad marketing practice. Here's a Guardian 'profit centre' which could earn more (cough) 'pink pounds' if it actually promoted itself better.
The 'Soulmates' to be found on the website are definitely not exclusively heterosexual. In fact, the last time I looked there were 1,500 hits for 'man looking for woman' and 1,200 for 'man looking for man'.
Now if I was a raging troublemaker I might think of this as 'disappearing' gay people, almost 'closeting' them, certainly representations of them. My mate who writes the Fagburn blog has been documenting this in another area; how news websites keep on using cake-top decorations on gay marriage stories rather than photos of happy gay couples. Or when they do use photos their heads are cut off or they're viewed from the back walking down the street.
So I wrote with a positive inquiry and have a response. The images are "chosen automatically according to which profiles are proving to be the most popular on the site (the most-viewed, most-favourited, etc)."
It isn't a manual choice which profiles appear in the ads on the rest of the Guardian's website, but it is a choice to present one male and one female one.
I also got an answer to a question I hadn't actually asked, which is that:
Because the majority of Soulmates members are straight, this means that straight members are always likely to be getting more views and 'likes' than gay members, and therefore are much more likely to be automatically selected for the homepage slot.
This would be the service's homepage, not the Guardian's. But that shows an array of profile images, so I wouldn't have any issue with it.
They do know that a big minority of their users are lesbian, gay, trans or bisexual and, I'm told, are happy users of the service. So did they take my comments in the spirit offered in order to both better serve those users as well as their bottom line? Happy to report that it's a yes:
We are reviewing how we can make changes to this process to promote a more diverse selection of our users.
When I view a website I do it through a lens called AdBlock. It's a web browser add-on which automatically blocks almost all web advertising, thus making web browsing bearable.
Adblock is also able to identify every element in a website, thus allowing me to block things like hyper-irritating, corner-vision, flashing gifs. For almost every website I regularly visit I have used this feature to block at least one element.
Why run AdBlock? It's not some aversion to advertising, it's because, like most people in the actual, non Apple Store fetishist world, my broadband isn't that fast and is too regularly stuffed and my computer kit isn't that fabulous either.
Fact is that the real reason I use Adblock is because many websites are becoming as cluttered as Victorian living rooms. Weighed down with 'stuff' which is relevant to them but irrelevant to their users. And not only irrelevant but irritating.
The absolute worst example of this I have ever seen is on a website (disclosure, I have written for) called care2.com. A huge site, though not huge PR wise, that would be change.org (org = sic). It runs adverts as the background image on pages. This means that if you accidentally click on the background, which is pretty easy to do, you get automatically sent off to a 'sponsor' page. Surely a 'how to piss off users' 101?
And Think Progress. Your liberal audience may be well be hippys but at some point a bomb will be thrown if you persist in throwing up Rep. Keith Ellison-endorsed pop-up to 'encourage' people to sign-up for f**king emails. Dontchaknow pop-ups are prescribed in Xstian doctrine? Using them is like licking Beelzebub's anus.
Volkswagen have launched a left-field marketing campaign through a Swedish agency dedicated, they say, "to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better."
The two videos released for it so far are very original and have gone viral.
Alongside them they're launching a competition about "finding fun ways to change behaviour".
Fun Theory is the field of knowledge that deals in questions such as "How much fun is there in the universe?", "Will we ever run out of fun?", "Are we having fun yet?" and "Could we be having more fun?"
Fun Theory is serious business. The prospect of endless boredom is routinely fielded by conservatives as a knockdown argument against research on lifespan extension, against cryonics, against all transhumanism, and occasionally against the entire Enlightenment ideal of a better future.
Many critics (including George Orwell) have commented on the inability of authors to imagine Utopias where anyone would actually want to live. If no one can imagine a Future where anyone would want to live, that may drain off motivation to work on the project. But there are some quite understandable biases that get in the way of such visualization.
Fun Theory is also the fully general reply to religious theodicy (attempts to justify why God permits evil). Our present world has flaws even from the standpoint of such eudaimonic considerations as freedom, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. Fun Theory tries to describe the dimensions along which a benevolently designed world can and should be optimized, and our present world is clearly not the result of such optimization - there is room for improvement. Fun Theory also highlights the flaws of any particular religion's perfect afterlife - you wouldn't want to go to their Heaven.
Peter Barton, who heads up Lincolnshire's web team, is one of the most experienced local government (LG) webbies around and also a great thinker. We have chimed very often on his usual hang-out, the Public Sector Forums Bulletin Board.
Managing LG web sites has developed into a specialism in itself requiring a varied set of skills not singularly found within either of the web’s conventional current homes in the Comms or IT teams of a council.
What's interesting is that at a Better Connected event in Birmingham two months ago, where myself and Vicky Sergeant of Socitm held a well-attended discussion about the forming Public Sectors Web Professionals body, this came up in a lighthearted way, because it seemed, I think, a radical wish to the webbies there, but got nodding acceptance in the room.
As Peter points out, good LG webbies draw on skills found in the commercial sector (many actually originate from web experience there) in particular from Sales and Marketing.
In order for there to be a good local government website experience and for users to take-up online services in a big way those commercial skills are exactly the sort you need. Plus, as he argues, you need a customer focused perspective which understands that this user experience needs to match that found on successful commercial websites to have any hope of achieving 'transformation' of service delivery.
The print media publishing industry in this country has huge web sites compared to LG so where are they going? Some years ago it became clear where the management of web sites should sit within their organisational structure. Publishing web sites are not run by IT departments nor are they generally run by journalists, the sector’s equivalent of our Comms departments. They are run by dedicated digital publishers who utilise platforms and services from IT and content provided by the journalists. Furthermore the web sits front and centre within their business. It is the first, and sometimes only, port of call for a large and growing proportion of their customers. And of course the publishing web sites are about making money from their expensively sourced and produced content.
Thus:
The role of managing the ever changing and volatile, digital stream is best served by having an independent view; a view where the customer is king; a view not hampered by the old, over-simplistic and clumsy, shorthand labels of “Comms or IT”.
The plain fact is that within current LG structures 'webbies' do not have clout. This is why a lot of debate is about how to win arguments, make cases, get champions, struggle for resources - because 'webbies' don't actually run web (or digital) in the final analysis.
Peter's argument, which I completely agree with, is:
So what is this Digital Stream Manager? It’s a new, or perhaps evolved, role for a new age.
An age in which the majority of contacts[if measured by number count of clients served] made to a local government organisation are made through a web site or service.
An age in which the “on-line” is becoming the norm.
An age in which immediacy is key.
An age in which clients “expect”
An age in which we are being compared to sites which are commercially driven.
And especially an age in which satisfying the customer is king.
It’s a multi-faceted role that requires the ability to pull together all the diverse resources required to populate a content-rich site; to manage the application of technology to efficiently deliver that content; to act as the intermediary between the various sources of content; to ensure quality across the output and user experience; and - critically in a world of user-generated content - to manage the delicate and increasingly complex balance between ALL the stakeholders.
Marketing is one of the biggest influencers on our world, yet when did you last see a TV show devoted to it?
Australia's ABC (the equivalent of the BBC or PBS) has the Gruen Transfer, a fantastic show which is a 101 on how to do two things: make the subject extremely entertaining and also make US stop and think about how this huge industry works and affects our lives.
Where does the title come from?
In shopping mall design, 'the Gruen transfer' refers to the moment when consumers respond to 'scripted disorientation' cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques). Recently, the Gruen transfer has been popularised by Douglas Rushkoff.
The show is hosted by comedian Wil Anderson with a panel of advertising industry experts. The two regular panelists are Russel Howcroft of George Patterson Y&R and Todd Sampson of Leo Burnett. Apparently the concept has been sold to TV production companies in the UK, Denmark, France, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain.
Here's an example of how they combine entertainment with stuff to make you think. Each week they ask two agencies to 'sell the unsellable'.
During last season's penultimate show one agency took the pitch of 'fat pride' one step too far for the ABC's lawyers and produced an ad which didn't get shown. It also didn't win the panelists over - and I agree with them. Here's the ad along with a panel discussion which was only made available online.
It's interesting that the professionals get that the in-your-face abuse of other groups represented in the ad's content, in order to say discrimination-is-discrimination, smothers the overall point. As straight non-Jewish blokes they didn't viscerally feel this but knew it was there. The poofter joke does smack me in the face and totally downgrades what the ad-maker is trying to achieve.
In the best traditions of publicly funded broadcasters failing to police their distributed content, both series can be found on YouTube.
Postscript: I spoke too soon, this has been removed for 'copyright violations'. The spot where the pitch and the discussion was supposed to be hosted - http://www.antiprejudicead.net - is down. The pitch's existence seems to have been removed from the ABC entirely. The pitch itself is still on YouTube, but the debate has been removed.
Now I know Aussie TV and it has some crapolistic shows which make the worst of UK TV look Shakespearean. But it also has a whole terrestrial channel, SBS, devoted to largely 'foreign' programming.
The only non-English speaking UK (non-cable) TV programming we see is out-of-the-park brilliant Wallander and the occasional French film on BBC4. The former is only being shown here three years after Swedish broadcast because we deigned to make an English version of it. We have a shrunken world view as a result of bad programming.
Another thing Aussie TV has is lots of US imports which our rather Little-Englander viewpoint keeps away from primetime. This means that all Aussies know one of the best comedies of all time - Seinfeld - well and - because of the BBC's antics - Brits only know of it through word-of-mouth.
Another thing many a Brit has commented on is how bad UK TV comedy has got over the past few years and in one area this has got politically serious: satire. Yes, there are plenty of Radio Four series which take the piss in a sharp, upset-the-government way, but apart from the (rather weak) Bremner, Bird and Fortune what have we got which stacks up?
Google UK launched it's local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people.
As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me.
I wondered how many actual local government webbies would be there, given how many not .gov people (consultants) I knew were going but there turned out to be lots.
As predicted, there was a certain magic to being @google with very funky offices, pretty funky people, a nice meet-up room (though the seats with little tables reminded me of old school desks and were a bit too easily tripped over), a smattering of 'Google gifts' ('Google goo'?) - including £300 of AdWords - and the most fantastic food I have ever had at a meeting/conference in my life.
As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government's needs and issues are very different, it's hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.
But they were completely open about not knowing, about having lots to learn, and given that so much of their offering is free some of the slight bitching I picked up on the way the day was pitched seemed a bit rich.
My only thought with this is to wonder why - it appears - they didn't try to hire someone/some people with local government experience when they started? There's enough commonality of experience in the sector for anyone who has worked in it to be able to steer them better towards what's likely to be of most interest to most local government people. I would imagine that one outcome of the day will be talking to and maybe partnering with groups like Socitm and IDEA.
Producing better websites
The sessions about their products worked best for this audience when there was a self-evident cross-over from commercial to public sector experience, as what they generally did was simply present the pitch which they would make to any company about their products.
For example, the one about producing better websites, which boiled this down to ten things they'd learned, was spot on as to a very great extent a website is a website is a website from a user's perspective. This is the exact same message which people like Gerry McGovern are sending to local government via Socitm's 'Better Connected' work.
As well, the OpenSocial and Enterprise Solutions sessions demonstrated that these Google products have self-evident potential local government uses and they chimed with existing use by individuals present and existing discussion within the 'local government community' such as, for example, around open-source/'free' and nationally with 'cloud computing'. (Following the event they set up LocalGovCloud, 'a place for local government folk in the UK to have a play with some of Google's enterprise tools' - this needs pitching at IT bods in lgov)
Video for visual explanation
Less successful were the YouTube, Adsense and Adwords sessions because they weren't tailored for the audience. I understand that the Google Maps session didn't address in the presentation it's issues for local government (to do with Ordnance Survey copyright), despite this being a major discussion is local government circles (though I'd left by then).
I wasn't impressed that the YouTube presenter felt that 150 hits was quite a lot. Though he did mention the use of video for visual explanation unfortunately he hit on a recycling example.
I've presented on YouTube use and written previously highlighting one video on littering which honestly seemed like a few council officers having fun rather than a well thought through online marketing exercise. To do both littering or recycling needs thinking through (i.e. 'what's our views target?' 'who are we targeting?') and is probably best done by professionals and either nationally or with a group of councils chipping in.
It appears to me that, at the moment, the most likely growth area for YouTube use is with politicians and maybe senior council officers using it.
This has enormous potential to go wrong, as I showed with a hilarious and viral mash-up of Gordon Brown's now infamous twitch-to-camera video. As well, the clout of those making use of it has the potential to waste budget/officer's time better employed elsewhere.
Yes, video can be a excellent medium for communication but only if it makes use of being a visual medium. As the Google guy did say, anything which needs to be shown, to be demonstrated, has this potential.
For example, in my presentation I picked a video of a council officer teaching students in a college about local building regulations. That's a obvious case where the benefit is self-evident and the entry/skill level for production is low. But in order to be sustainable and embedded in local government practice it does need a business case, it needs to be watched, which means marketed, and my presentation gave some ideas on how to do this. This example doesn't appear to have been promoted properly as it's only had 50 views - there must be more than that number of local apprentices, architects, joiners and builders for whom it would be useful?
Allerdale Borough Council's Building Control officers visited Lakes College West Cumbria
Most if not all of the people there were webbies rather than marketeers or communications people and the YouTube product - as well as, as Ingrid Koeler pointed out, tools like Google Reader and Google Alerts - could perhaps be best demonstrated to a separate audience of those council officers who can get best use of them.
Advertising
It is also the case with AdWords and AdSense that Google needs to be talking to people other than webbies in local councils, tapping into other networks of officers.
The presentation by Nottingham on their implementation was by a webbie and ended, after some discussion of whether the number should be revealed, with the income being stated as around £15k a year, which I don't think is a lot.
It was said that this money was used for website development but a missed danger here is that budgets will simply be reduced by that amount in a time of squeezed budgets and backed by arguments that other spending, such as on social services, is 'more deserving'. If website budgets become expected to be partly raised through advertising what happens when there's a recession and income drops?
This area needs much more serious work by Google, primarily I'd argue with the more commercial arms of councils. I would bet that most of these operations in councils - tourism, events, sport - are sorely lacking in any knowledge of how to maximise revenue from their web operations, so Google would be pushing at an open door.
The Google USB Stick Man pressie
Lincolnshire pioneered advertising on their council website but moved from using a big national operator with no experience in local government to one which specialised in council advertising (partly because the revenues were so low). The company they chose had the specific experience selling ads in council print and billboard but no experience in online so will take time to learn how to maximise revenue - there is an example of a gap where Google could move in but it needs to be talking to a different group than council webbies.
Usability and analytics
I did a session on Google Analytics at short notice (slides below). This followed on from the Site Conversion and optimisation bit, which had the excellent ten things they'd learned which ended on a #1 thing to do being usability testing. This meant that despite not being a pre-arranged tag-team with the Google presenter it ended up as a tag-team as we were both essentially talking about the same thing; the basics of producing a good website experience for users.
Both usability and analytics are something deprioritised and deskilled (usually explained as due to a lack of resources) in local government and this is reflected in most of the reviews of the day published thus far (links below). Yet both are vital to users and also to the aim of driving more users through online services. They need way more attention.
Sales funnel
As I said on the day, my impression is that local government has low expectations of service use - the bar is somehow lower. Socitm and others are trying to do something about this, through benchmarking for example, but this is an unsexy area yet an essential one politically because it explains to those making the decisions why budgets need to be maintained and the worth of investing in web.
As Charles Arthur argues in his piece about Birmingham's website, yes, moving away from exorbitantly priced monoliths like Serco and Microsoft to open source should be happening but it:
won't mean in the real world of local government just lower development budgets but staff cuts as well;
will still produce unoptimised sites and less successful 'funnels' to services if usability and understanding of web stats isn't similarly prioritised;
if the political case for the value of websites isn't made and backed up with facts and examples.
The answer here is education, with both a surface exercise and a deeper one as well available to people online skills development and through face-to-face training. Sorting out how to do both usability and analytics often leads to a haze where the amount of information, options and ideas confuses. The required skill level for entry is perceived wrongly far too often as high. For example, doing simple 'guerrilla' user testing is not hard.
I think people need plans and business cases in order to be able to get the resources they need to get the most out of usability and analytics and to know when they need them as well as online education resources to show them what they can do themselves.
Here Google can play an enormously useful role I think. As they have a huge and diverse customer base, they have developed excellent, usable learning tools which have both simple, grounded take-aways and great detail. The Public Sector Web Professionals group has skills development as one of its main aims, so a collaboration seems like an obvious road to go down.
Sarah Lay had written up her extensive notes from the sessions "Every conversation has to start somewhere and I think the relevance of yesterday will be best judged on what happens next."
Ingrid Koehler picks up on similar themes to mine "Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale. And the key to this one was helping the people in the room make the sale to internal stakeholders."
Michele Ide-Smith "Very thought provoking and Google were great hosts."
Al Smith "The day was not very well tailored to the audience. But it's best not to dwell on the negatives"
Sharon O'Dea "This was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see."
Carrie Bishop "The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around."
I wrote recently about what I felt are misplaced (literally) fears about Google. Particularly the fears of intrusive advertising.
Well if you want something to fear/campaign about, try this:
What RemoteMedia are doing is writing software which allows the screens to spot your gender and decide which ad might interest you more. And if this were not enough, such discrimination is soon to spread to race and age.
All you have to do is walk past the screen and it will recognise you for what you are; but being of a contrary turn of mind, I immediately have to ask how will the bearded lady fare, the pony-tailed chap? Apparently the software can cope with this sort of thing without turning a hair.
In cinemas we are moving towards foyer-based advertising and film trailers which will be selected according to the people present, big people, little people, sensed for size.
Go into a Teleflorist outlet and the software will spot your gender and play a rather mean trick: "If you are a man the ad on the screen will be for big bouquets which are probably about saying sorry and will cost a lot, the floral suggestions for women customers will be different. It's all powerful stuff," Jason says.
British American Tobacco have asked RemoteMedia to come up with software for a hidden system at point-of-sale to check whether customers are the right age to buy booze and cigarettes, the retailers themselves want the systems to protect themselves from prosecution.
The system can track you around a store and clock the way you walk, of your gait pattern, and, somehow, based on this, will be able to trigger ads around the store aimed specifically at you, a whole new take on "they saw you coming".
"It's gone way beyond generic placing on an advertising loop," Jason says. "Why not an ad that comes on as a door opens, for instance, when you are leaving an airport, it could be for a car hire company.
"You are rifle-shooting these days, the scattergun has gone."
A next version of Signagelive, will complement the existing ticker-tape facility for news and weather, breaking messages, with the addition of real-time video. And there's more in the pipeline, but as Jason says:
"We're sitting here now with our software waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up." So very Cambridge, don't you just love it.
"One of the Internet's strengths is that it can help diverse communities to come together to insure that everybody's views and actions can really be made to count." Prince of Wales
As you'd expect the Prince of Wales' online rainforest campaign attracted huge media attention. Like undoubtedly thousands of others this prompted me to visit the website rainforestsos.org. Unfortunately that's where the problems start.
Yes, you can sign something, add your email address to the pile, and pass on a message to friends (which does have the facility to load your address book) but apart from that it doesn't appear to be enabled to let you do much else. You can sign up to be "able to record your own frog message with The Prince's Rainforests Project frog" ("and we will be in touch as soon as this section of the site is live!") and the sidebar says you can "grab our widget and place on your social network page or blog so you can count how many people have signed up because of you."
What the latter loads is a really over complicated widget with what appears to be either a slow host or a 'straining-to-cope' host (I suspect the former). As I've noted before, you really don't want a slow host for widgets as they will crash/slow down any web pages who chose to use them.
As it was, the click on 'grab this' did nothing, so I don't know if they were offering what should be the standard armory of virality: various sizes, various levels of complication (and code size) as well as various banners.
Other absent standard stuff are links to youtube, myspace (which was trailed in the PR) etc. There are design issues and navigation issues too.
Some press claimed that Charles' crew had hired Obama's crew to come up with this campaign. Surely not? This is way below par for them if that's truly the case.
And not just because of the website mistakes. The main thrust of the online US election campaigns (not just Obama's, Hillary's too) went beyond 'raising awareness' to connecting people so they could do stuff together, like get people onto electoral roles or to knock on doors.
I suppose it's difficult for the Prince to encourage people to lobby the powers that be but the impression left is 'support me in doing good work on your behalf' - and that's hardly "bottom up".
There's been a lot of paranoia around lately about Google. We've had Street View arriving in the UK and provoking posh protests blocking their camera car. Now we've got requests for investigations on the info they hold about their users.
The former seems bizarre to me in the country which has accepted more cameras looking down on us than anywhere else in the world. The latter appears worrying when it's suggested that they might disclose that information to states, but states can get far more from internet service providers (and already trawl our digital use anyway).
What's really exercised some though has been the Google business proposition, which is to use that data to better target ads.
Here's why I find this a bit ridiculous: Google just aren't very good at it.
I have been using Gmail for ages and send and receive heaps of email. Besides each one are text ads targeted at me using all the text in all that email plus the content of the particular email I'm looking at.
They're consistently mistargeted .
I swear I don't know why they think I might want Lionel Richie tickets. or have a legal problem.
After hunting I found one which is vaguely near to the content of the email. But only vaguely.
The area where we should be the most concerned is the one which I've yet to see British media really pick up on. And it's actually concerns Google's mission - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google Books is their project to make available digital copies of out-of-copyright books and make copyright book text searchable.
They've signed up Oxford University amongst other big name partners.
Recently Google changed it's terms to specifically disallow any of these services from using books they'd digitised - public domain books. There's not been any legal action thus far but why change the terms if they didn't want to challenge others, like the Internet Archive which hosts over half a million public domain books downloaded from Google.
Google has also 'locked up' some public domain books.
The agreements with libraries (which are mainly university libraries), which were only made public by legal action, means that they give Google all of their books for free, and in return they are given scans that they effectively cannot use for anything.
If they want access to the corpus, they have to subscribe just like everyone else. This means that Google is requiring them to buy back their own copyrighted books, if anyone wants to actually use them on or off the campus.
Their recent deal with publishers which includes the setting up of a Books Rights Registry appears to give Google different, more favourable terms to anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry. The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a consortium with the Internet Archive at its centre which wants to build (a virtual) Alexandria Library II (a physical Bibliotheca Alexandrina exists). The OCA includes the British Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and a number of corporations - though neither Google nor Microsoft, who recently left it after funding the scanning of 750,000 books to launch their own book scanning project.
Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive and heads the Open Content Alliance, warns of "the consequences of the consolidation of information into the hands of a few private organizations".
Google is digitizing some great libraries. But their contracts (which were actually secret contracts with libraries – which is bizarre, but anyway, they were secret until they got sued out of them by some governments) are under such restrictions that they’re pretty useless... the copies that go back to the libraries. Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare. I mean this is 1984 – a book about how bad the world would be if this really came about, if a few governments’ control and corporations’ control on information goes too far.
Some may have second thoughts if Google’s system isn’t set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.
For instance, Tufts worries Google’s optical reader won’t recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane thinks it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.
The OCA is trying to establish a standard and both Google and now Microsoft have opted out. Not only is there duplication (triplication) of these vital efforts for human knowledge but Google also refuses to even talk to them, it sees them as a rival.
The OCA are building a "permanent, publicly accessible archive" of digitized texts. Both Google and Microsoft are doing it to make money - not that there's anything wrong with that but it is right to fear when such knowledge is only available via coporate, proprietorial means.
It's not. There have been similar studies, though very few, going back years which have shown the same issues this one apparently does.
Its authors have said it undermines myth of gay affluence and demonstrates that lesbian, gay and bisexual citizens are as likely, or more likely, to be poor than heterosexuals.
They added: "Because the U.S. Census Bureau does not explicitly ask questions about sexual orientation, LGB families have been invisible in poverty statistics.
"This first analysis of the poor and low-income lesbian, gay and bisexual population reveals that LGB adults and families are as likely - and, in the case of some subgroups, more likely - to be poor than their heterosexual counterparts, contrary to the popular myth of gay and lesbian affluence."
The review will include a discussion of the social and political factors that may lead to higher rates of LGB poverty, including vulnerability to employee discrimination, inability to marry and higher numbers of those who are uninsured.
There is a overwhelming myth about gays and lesbians which is tied to their public profile, particularly of well-known people, that gay=better-off. This has been deliberately fanned by gay commercial business because it's in their interests.
When I worked for a gay newspaper in Australia we used some of the earliest marketing data about the so-called 'Pink Dollar' to attract then reluctant advertisers. Of course we did, and, shamefully, we also bought into the myth.
I've learnt since that gays and lesbians come in the most rainbow of varieties and most are not very visible. They are the ones affected by factors like poor educational outcomes due to harassment at school, and vulnerability to employee discrimination. They are the ones represented disproportionately in the ranks of the homeless. I'd also suggest that a certain 'ghettoisation' into accepting jobs - such as lower paid social work or working in service industries - would play a role.
Someone like Stonewall needs to fund a similar study here. This myth needs busting.
It's an old story. Your first record is a smash, your first novel wins the Booker - then what? Can you top that or forever live in its shadow.
So it is with viral video and after hitting the sweet spot with a 10m views message about watching out for cyclists, Transport for London is getting diminishing returns.
You take your headphones out of your ears and hold them against the large image of an ear printed on the billboard. If the ear goes green, you're safe. If the ear goes red however, the volume of your headphones may be permanently damaging your hearing.
The NZNFD say seven out of ten under 30-year olds are experiencing symptoms of permanent hearing damage after listening to loud music – yet do nothing to prevent it.
Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how they interact over time.
Starting today, they hoped to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across the capital for four weeks with the slogan: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." At mid-morning they'd already shot over this amount!
Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, is matching all donations up to a maximum of £5,500, so he's giving a total of £11,000.
The aim of it all?
We can brighten people's days on the way to work, help raise awareness of atheism in the UK, and hopefully encourage more people to come out as atheists. We can also counter the religious adverts which are currently running on London buses, and help people think for themselves.
As Richard Dawkins says: "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."
Danny Finkelstein likes the new Conservative website and, er, so do I. It doesn't actually just adopt the US template (like Paddick did) and has some innovations. Like Danny I fancied the Conservative Wall with its pop out voters.
And two thumbs up for a strong accessibility statement.
Via fivethirtyeight:Intrade Betting is Suspicious. Very interesting post about how some partisans are - apparently - gaming this major online betting shop, one which is often reported on as an impartial predictor.
HT: Tom Watson: Election 08 on Twitter. V. Useful pull-together of related twitter feeds.
"The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of information communications technology."
You'd have to think that much of the innovation will not come from the first world in this area (e.g. micropayments). Google has some good ideas though in this recent official blog post.
Two egov 'production' blogs - ones like the BBC's where the team feeds back and sources comment. Parliament and Aberdeenshire.
Very neat website add-on tool. odiogo converts text to speech for download or playing right there.
An SNP councillor suing a Labour blogger for mentioning something that was already in the public domain is going to do more harm to the councillor and his party than ignoring it would have done. I hope that Alex Salmond has the sense to publicly distance the party from the individual actions of the councillor, otherwise the SNP will be open to attack for using the law to silence its critics.
And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:
Beliefs / Themes
Internet Optimists
Internet Pessimists
Culture / Social
Net is Participatory
Net is Polarizing
Net yields Personalization
Net yields Fragmentation
a “Global village”
Balkanization
Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought
Homogeneity / Close-mindedness
Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies
Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies
Tool of liberation & empowerment
Tool of frequent misuse & abuse
Economics / Business
Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)
Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)
Increasing importance of “Gift economy”
Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms
“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence
“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence
Mass collaboration
Individual effort
Academics need guidance on how to make best use of web 2.0 technologies, according to a report from the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).
UCISA also says that higher education institutions need dedicated local champions to promote and develop the new methods. It calls for academics to be given the time to learn and develop the skills to use technology based tools.
Another problem with Taboola, best shown when it is used like on The Hill to show related stories from the same website next to other links, is when the 'useful' or 'related' links content is actually paid advertorial but it isn't clearly marked as advertising.
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