Welcome to the 21st Century, People

There’s an inorganic rubbish collection in our area next week. There is so much I could write about this – the van-loads of ’seagulls’ pouring in from all over Auckland for some al-fresco shopping are a reality TV show just waiting to happen – but that’s a post for another day.

I walked past the rubbish pile below, as I was out walking the dogs this afternoon, and was so gutted not to have a camera with me that I jumped in the car and drove back, just to capture that beautiful scene and share it with you fine folks.

A full set of Encyclopedia Britannica, strewn out on the curb alongside a broken TV and a piss-stained mattress.

Welcome to the 21st century, people.

I ain’t drinking the Kool Aid

I don’t want to sound like a hater. I think Wolfram Alpha is a beautiful execution of a unique approach to search, and I’m glad the Mathematica folks have been able to bring it to life. Unfortunately, it is subject to two critical flaws:

1. It isn’t what people think it is; and
2. What it is really isn’t that flash

Let’s start out with the obvious. Wolfram Alpha isn’t a Google killer. It doesn’t even come close. Actually, it really doesn’t have much to do with anything Google does. Putting aside a whole lot of peripheral activities, Google is a search engine, an advertising network, and a bank. It helps people to find authoritative websites on topics they are interested in; It provides advertisers with a cost-effective means of reaching prospective customers; and It facilitates transactions between advertisers and publishers, and is effectively the Reserve Bank of the Internet. Wolfram Alpha does none of these things – it doesn’t lead you to authoritative sources of information, it assumes that role itself; It doesn’t help advertisers reach new audiences; and It sure as hell doesn’t help to monetise other properties.

The latter two alone would seemingly be enough to ensure Google’s continued dominance over newcomers, but even if that wasn’t the case – even if all Google was was a search engine – Google would win hands down. Why? Because this *smarts*, this unique approach that sets Wolfram Alpha apart from its predecessors and competitors is the answer to a question nobody asked. It is different more for the sake of being different than as a response to a real need, and it smacks of the ‘build it and they will come’ mindset that has lead to some of the Internet age’s greatest failures. Louis Border’s ‘Webvan‘ immediately springs to mind. Assuming people wanted to buy their groceries online, and assuming that a completely automated online-only supermarket was the best way to satisfy that need, Webvan was the best possible response to that opportunity. Problem was, both of those assumptions were tragically flawed and billions of investor dollars were lost. In the same way, Wolfram is assuming that all people want is a direct, concise response to a direct, concise question. Problem is, people don’t ask those kinds of questions or accept those kinds of answers.

Wolfram seems to misunderstand how and why people really use search. Sure, we search for information, but we do so in order to be able to do something with it. We search for hotels so we can find somewhere to stay, not to find out what a hotel is. And when we do want to find out what something is, context and referenced, authoritative sources are essential for validating what we are being told and furthering our understanding. The ’source information’ link accompanying Wolfram results provides a list of sites used, but with no indication of which *facts* came from which sources. Even Wikipedia - whipping boy of research purists the world over – has higher standards of transparency, which is kind of ironic when you consider that Wolfram Alpha was designed by a respected scientist.

Wolfram’s reference material is also alarmingly Americentric. For example, no New Zealand websites are referenced in response to queries about ‘New Zealand‘. I agree that there are always three sides to every story, but I’d back our own over the Library of Congress, any day.

The contextual deficiency of Wolfram results reminds me of John Steinbeck’s meditation on the problems of measuring a fish:

The Mexican sierra has 17 plus 15 plus 9 spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into being – an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from the formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth. . . . There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed – probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way.

- Steinbeck, John. 1941. The Log from the Sea of Cortez

So Wolfram Alpha isn’t what people think it is. It isn’t a Google killer. It isn’t a better search engine than Google, Yahoo, MSN or even Wikipedia. It isn’t really a search engine at all.

It is also pretty uninspiring. A lot of attention has been directed towards how *different* it is, and much has been made of the various witty responses returned by some search phrases. Sure it’s different, and its novelty value is enough to ensure we’ll all check it out at least once. But is different better? Is different enough to change our habits? Is different enough to make us persevere with a lesser solution that offers to human understanding what KFC offers to human nutrition?

It can’t be. It shouldn’t be. And it won’t be. Expectations are too high and substance is too low. Wolfram Alpha will never make it as an alternative or successor to traditional search. At best, it will become a new feature or algorithmic enhancement to Yahoo, Google or Microsoft.

But maybe that was the plan all along.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I totally LOVE The Onion

How to waste money in online advertising

Pour money into establishing a pretty cool campaign (buy beer and get cheap flights to Oz), using digital and media agencies who are too stupid to insert the destination URL into the banner, and too lazy to test in the live environment (click the banner to see what I mean).

FAIL!

When copyright goes wrong

Some interesting developments in the area of online copyright infringement this week…

Fans of the cult show Mad Men had been tuning in to in-character tweets from fans posing as Don Draper and colleagues from fictional 60’s ad agency Sterling Cooper. Earlier this week the show’s producers, AMC, issued a DMCA takedown notice requiring Twitter to cancel the user accounts of those concerned, leading to widespread condemnation from fans. AMC has now realised that – get this – having fans is actually a good thing, and have withdrawn their complaint. The Twitter accounts in question have now been restored. Hopefully this will serve as a lesson to copyright holders that sometimes it’s better just to let the fans have their fun rather than jumping in and playing the bad guy.

Case in Point – Hasbro. At the insistence of the shortsighted North American rights-holder’s considerable legal might, Facebook has blocked Scrabulous access for all users (with the possible exception of India?). Fans of the game are not exactly flocking to adopt the official version released by Mattel (the International rights-holder). It appears they have taken zero usability cues from Scrabulous (fear of a copyright infringement lawsuit? LOL), making the game a very poor substitute for what was a pretty addictive gaming experience.

Good news is, fans can still play Scrabulous outside of Facebook via the Scrabulous.com website. And they are. I don’t know about you fine folks, but prior to the axing I’d say 60% of my facebook visits were Scrabulous-driven. Now I’m spending a hell of a lot of time at Scrabulous.com, and hitting Facebook maybe once every couple of days. Ironically (as opposed to Alanically), the only real losers in this one appear to be Hasbro, Mattel and Facebook. The big winners? Their lawyers, of course!*

*Yuh. We all know how smart lawyers are, right?

Where do people find the time?

Nobody who works in television has the right to ask that question.

– Clay Shirky

I’ve mentioned before that one of the common responses I get when encouraging people to give blogging a try is that they don’t feel they have anything worth writing about. Although I honestly believe that, no matter how mundane our lives and musings might appear, we all have somebody out there who’d be interested to read about them, I can accept that some people just aren’t in touch with their inner writer and will either figure it out one day or they won’t. Good luck to ‘em, I say.

Others claim that the only stuff they’d care to write about is so deeply personal that they couldn’t bear to share it so openly. Fair enough – I’ve used that excuse myself at times when personal circumstances have caused me to temporarily abandon my blog. The way I see it, if you’re trying to choose between sharing deeply personal thoughts you’d really rather keep to yourself and writing about stuff that’s really not important to you just so you can post something (something that isn’t deeply personal thoughts you’d rather keep to yourself), posting nothing is an acceptable third option. I’m waaaaaaaaaaaay too young to cut my ear off just so you’ve got something to read during your morning coffee.

Then there are the deluded, self-important assholes who smugly claim that they simply don’t have the time to blog and can’t understand how I manage. It’s hard to ignore the implicit accusation that the time I spend tinkering with my various online projects (blogs I maintain, communities I belong to, wikis I contribute to etc) is somehow wasted, a sink into which I pour my otherwise productive time.

I found the clip below about a month ago, showing author Clay Shirky speaking at a web 2.0 conference earlier in the year. It’s an insightful and well-delivered perspective on where this shift to online is taking us, starting with the wry observation that if gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution (numbing the upheaval of transitioning to an industrial society), the critical technology of the post-war years must have been the sitcom.

Shirky makes a brilliant point in that we – individually and as a society – have a massive ‘cognitive surplus’ that we just don’t have a use for (if we did, there wouldn’t be a surplus). Throughout history this had never been a problem, because we used to spend all our time hunting mammoths, tending fields, and slogging it out in Mr Bumble’s work house. The dawn of the 40-hour week may have freed us from servitude in many respects, but it also created a problem we’d never faced before – what to do with all that spare time? For decades, television has been the sponge that soaked up all this latent time and energy, but now we’re finding new and better things to do with our time. Many of these new pastimes – such as playing elf warrior in Warcraft, or trading pictures of kittens with amusing facial expressions – might not be considered productive in the traditional sense, but it’s something, and watching television is nothing. And as the man says, it’s better to do something than nothing.

The numbers are astonishing. The estimated 100 million man-hours that have gone into Wikipedia to date may seem like a hell of a lot, but bear in mind that the Internet-connected population watches a TRILLION hours of television per year – enough to build 10,000 Wikipedias. That’s one hell of an asset, if we could only figure out how to use it – imagine the possibilities!

No, seriously, please imagine the possibilities. How do I find the time to create things online? How can you not?

Click here to watch part 2. If you’d rather just read about it, Shirky’s written account of the talk can be found here.

The funniest thing I’ve read in ages

Techmeme served up this story this morning, a pretty interesting piece about how ABC has started letting advertisers take makegood inventory (definition below) from ABC on its ABC.com video player during episodes of specific shows.

A makegood is defined as: Credit given to an advertiser (or advertising agency) by a publication or broadcast medium for an advertisement or commercial spot to make up for an error or unavoidable cancellation on the part of the publication or broadcast medium. The credit is usually in the form of a rerun of the advertisement or commercial.

The main point of the article was that some TV advertisers were being given free digital ad space in lieu of an airtime credit when something went wrong with an ad they had paid for, and in many cases the digital credit was more valuable. This is a pretty new development and one that makes sense for advertisers and the networks – if your TV ad schedule is packed but you have latent digital inventory then it makes sense to give the latter away, regardless of its book value. The alternative – underselling airtime to allow for all the freebies you owe to disgruntled advertisers – is damn costly, and is becoming something of a nightmare for networks battling viewer erosion.

The thing that really grabbed me though, was this fantastic passage mid-way through the article. I’ve maintained for some time that ad execs and their TV counterparts have their heads in their asses, but I never imagined one of them would be stupid enough to state it for the record (albeit anonymously). Of course, I should have known better:

More than a few media executives were astonished that some marketers would agree to [substituting digital makegoods]. “What have we come to?” asks one disgruntled executive. “How can this beat full-screen television? We don’t even know if they can measure the Internet properly, let alone giving us a demographic breakdown.”

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Are you fucking kidding me? Let’s respond to each point in turn, shall we?

“What have we come to?” It’s called the twenty-first century. You might have heard of it? It started about 70 years after the birth of the TV industry, and ten years after the end of the decade you, your colleagues and the entire advertising industry are stuck in (in case you’re still hungover from yesterday’s coke-and-Dom-fueled “lunch”, I’m referring to the 80’s). Were the 90’s that scary? Was grunge so terrible you all just decided “Fuck this, we’re going back to the 80’s. Shoulder pads, Miami Vice and Flock of Seagulls. Woohoo!” If and when you do decide to catch up with the rest of the world, brace yourself: OJ killed somebody but got away with it, Magic Johnson got HIV but it didn’t kill him, America invaded Iraq (twice), Michael Jackson molested a bunch of kids, and to make matters worse they made a Sex and the City movie!

“How can this beat full-screen television?” Um, by being relevant, interactive, measurable and less intrusive. You should give this Interweb-thingy a try sometime, dude – it’s really swell!

“We don’t even know if they can measure the Internet properly, let alone giving us a demographic breakdown.” WTF? Of course we can measure the Internet properly! We can measure everything, that’s what’s so damn cool about the medium! Sure, some analytics tools are better than others, but even the crappy hit counters we used to stick on our FrontPage sites in the 90’s were more accurate than anything the TV networks have. I mean for God’s sake – do any of you know someone with a people meter? Talk about the pot and the fucking kettle!

What the hell, I needed a laugh today. Sweet.

What will YOU be doing this July 4th?

Sadly, I’ll still be waiting for this movie to come out. Scheduled for release in the US on their Independence [sic] Day, but I dare say it’ll be ages before we see it here in NZ. As you all know I’m waaaaaaaay to honest and law abiding to do anything so horrible as to download an illegal copy on the Internet (whatever that is). *sigh*

Yeah right! (Sod it – Hunter would understand) No sign of it at The Pirate Bay as yet. Will keep you posted.

Putting the cat among the pigeons

Following this week’s rant about the Shell ad, I decided to do a little background reading on what the doomsday scenario looks like for our depleting oil reserves. I was looking for a reliable estimate of how much oil is left (40 to 50 years, apparently), but I also found quite a lot of seemingly credible authorities (example) arguing that oil is not a fossil fuel (formed from the decayed remains of dinosaurs etc) and may actually be produced by the immense temperatures and pressure deep within the earth’s core.

I’m not saying I’ve decided to add ‘oil denier’ to the ‘man-made global warming denier’ moniker I so cherish, but I do find the idea intriguing and well worth looking into further. Is it plausible? Could it be that oil is a naturally-occurring mineral, or is filling your gas tank little more than (dinosaur) grave robbing? What are the implications of oil being a renewable resource? The first one that springs to mind is that people like me who dare raise such a possibility are liable to get ‘whacked’.

I’m going to look into this further, and hopefully find enough evidence to make up my mind one way or another. Ah, sweet library – will be great to see you again!

What about you folks? Am I nuts, or have I hit something you’ve wondered about yourselves? Would be interested to know what you think.

In case you’re wondering, my main motivation in writing this is how much it pisses me off how people think that repeating their opinion / belief over and over again makes it factual. Case in point is this whole ‘man-made global warming’ thing. I know we’re all being told over and over (and over!) again that we’re the cause of the recent ice age drawing to a close (not sure what ended all the previous ones – must look into that), but where is the credible, irrefutable evidence? ‘Al Gore said so’ just doesn’t do it for me, I’m sorry, and repeating it ad nauseum won’t change my mind – but it may get you a black eye. Think for yourselves, people!

Autograph hunting in the 21st century

Possibly construed by some as cyber-stalking, but I don’t care. For anyone who knows who Michael Arrington is, you gotta admit this is pretty neat. (click to enlarge)