A sign of desperation? Microsoft advertises on Google

A fellow named James White posted a thoughtful, detailed item about the proper ways to handle "state" on the Web: how session variables or database drops are the right way to go, and JavaSript countdowns are not.

For some reason his post fired up the Google ad machine like nothing you've ever seen. That was surprising enough, but I was astonished to see a Google Adwords ad for: Internet Explorer 8!

Is this a sign that Redmond really is losing to Mountain View? IE has been losing market share to Firefox, and more recently to Google Chrome. Is Microsoft so desperate that they have to buy eyeballs from their arch-rival? This is akin to, say, CBS buying commercial time on ABC to advertise CSI.




See: http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0903&L=webmasters&T=0&P=2449

ChcagoTribune.com shows how national can capture local

One of the ironies of this age of 24 hour news sources and RSS feeds is that you may read about a US Airways plane ditching on the Hudson on the online site of a newspaper in Ireland. A human or a robot at the Irish newspaper picked up the story from a traditional wire service, perhaps. So I shouldn't have been surprised to receive this news alert in my mail this morning:

Oral histories part of Lansing's 150th birthday 

Chicago Tribune - United States

Michigan State University's American Studies program is preparing the material for online use. The oral histories will be posted alongside transcriptions ...

Nonetheless I was surprised to see the Chicago Tribune had picked up a story about Lansing, Michigan. There is a suburb of Chicago called Lansing; you'd expect a story in the Trib to be about that Lansing. Even though the Michigan Lansing is a state capital, it usually receives about as much national coverage as, say, that other famous capital, Pierre, South Dakota.

So I followed some links at the Tribune site and discovered something very interesting.  They're not just randomly picking up major stories off the wires and publishing them at chicagotribune.com; they also seem to be publishing stories from or about many burgs across the land.

To test this theory, I searched the Trib site for "Sacramento" and found this:

Section 1) contains ads relevant to Sacramento, California.  Section 2) offers links to related topics about Sacramento.  Section 3) presents news stories about Sacramento.

Could this really be true?  Could the Chicago Tribune really publish this much stuff about faraway Sacramento on a random Sunday in March?

The answer is no. The Chicago Tribune isn't publishing all things Sacramento -- not in its print edition. Instead, they are using robots and wire services to concoct  online "local" pseudo-sections for places all around the country.

Poking around a bit further, I found confirmation of this theory:

Item 1) makes it explicit:  

Highlights

A collection of news and information related to Sacramento published by Tribune Company sources.

Item 2) shows an actual, relevant news story -- ironically about the financial struggles of the Sacramento Bee, in trouble just as the Tribune Company is.

Item 3) shows how a newsbot can fail; it's a completely irrelevant Chicago "Local News" column by Trib columnist Paul Carpenter, whose most recent column casually mentions Sacramento.

Despite that robotic failure, I think what the Tribune is doing is incredibly clever. They're leveraging the news sources they own and subscribe to in order to appear to have a presence in perhaps hundreds of local news markets.  People who use news alerts about their home town, or who search Yahoo News or Google News about their locality, may find Tribune-published stories -- perhaps before they find coverage in their own local news sources.  The Tribune "section" on their home town also serves ads for businesses local to that town.

Back in the early days of the Web, circa 1994,  the Raleigh News and Observer embarked upon a bold, even audacious, experiment -- to transform their local North Carolina paper into a national online newspaper, the NandO Times.  I interviewed them for the cable TV show my friend Chuck Severance and I hosted.  The NandO folks had a crew of about 5 or 6 people who sifted through wire services and created a national newspaper from their nook in Raleigh.

Within a couple of years, McClathy bought the News and Observer and shut down NandO.  Now, 15 years later, a much larger regional paper, itself part of a major news media company, uses robots to do a different trick: to appear to be a local news source for communities throughout the land.

I always want clever folks to succeed, but there is a huge risk: if the Tribune succeeds at this,  they could kill local news sources. The Lansing State Journal is a shell of its former self; it's shrunk so much it's almost a tabloid, and it relies on ... wire services for many local stories.  If the Chicago Tribune does a better job of packaging Lansing-related wire stories, it could speed the death of the only local daily.

Planets are using CCD cameras to spy on us?

Yup, I always suspected this.  Small planets are using CCD cameras to spy on us. NASA's Kepler mission will strive to find these planets.  We've got to locate these evil planets, and deal with this threat.

Today's Google News identifies a new celebrity: Mac Pro

Google News offers a section called "In the News" which tries to capture people who are prominently, well, in the news.  The Google newsbot obviously uses an algorithm to ferret out propoer nouns in recent news articles.  And it's obvious the algorithm thinks it's a person if it sees lots of references of two words with capital letters:  Rush Limbaugh, Barack Obama, Britney Spears -- and their pal, Mac Pro.

This morning Google News featured two new celebrities: Mac Pro and Mac Mini.  These two guys named Mac are of course two models of the Mac lineup; in the last couple days Apple announced new versions of these computers.  (Click for full-size image.)

At one point, Google News had these two guys -- Mac Pro and Mac Mini -- In the News.  Alas, poor Mr. Mini dropped off their radar, but his cousin Mac Pro remained.  As did his buddy, Late Night.

Google Earth outs our horrible lawn circa 2005

Coverage of the airplane tragedy near Buffalo NY included imagery from Google Earth and from the street view of Google Maps, making me wonder if they had discernible views of my own house. So I checked and found a satellite view of my house on Google Earth.  

When I zoomed in, I had to laugh.  The satellite image of my neighborhood showed a verdant area -- except for my own lawn. We installed a sprinkler system a couple of years after the image that Google shows, taken in 2005. 

Look closely, and you'll see that all of our neighbors obviously watered their lawns regularly.  Our lawn, by contrast, is brown.

I suppose we could claim that we were the green household in the neighborhood, not wasting precious water on living up to golf course standards.  Does this mean that brown can be green? In any event, Google Earth lays bare the story of our barren lawn.

Google News makes news out of Windows 7 non-story

Google News reports prominently that a university isn't supporting Windows 7. The headline screams Windows 7 Beta Flunks Out Of Georgetown.

This of course is not news. No IT organization supports beta software; they can't, because the definition of a beta product is that the vendor itself doesn't support it. Windows 7 is the next version of Microsoft Windows, an attempt to patch the many design flaws in Vista. It's available to the masses as a beta download. The university's IT department is merely warning the campus not to use an unsupported product.

Yet the Google News robot not only snared this non-story, it placed it above the fold, adjacent to news about world security, the global financial crisis, and the fool Blagojevich.

Ascribe original blame to Information Week -- but understand that IW is a tech industry publication whose readers will put the story in proper context. It's a problem when Google News yanks a headline from a speialty publication and republishes it for a general audience.

Jobs working less than 40 hours

Interesting juxtaposition of headlines in Google News just now.... Yesterday's inaugural address mentioned people who are voluntarily working less than full time jobs so that colleagues can stay employed; meanwhile, compensation experts are taking Steve Jobs to task for standing for re-election to Disney's board. They argue that if he can't work full time for Apple, he can't fulfill his duty as a director.

Click for full-size image.

The unnoticed Presidential transition

Newsmap makes Google News a lovely headline cloud

After 9/11 Google turned its home page into a sort of a portal with information about the disaster, how to donate relief, etc. I chronicled the evolution of their home page in an article for First Monday in October 2001, The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine. I predicted that Google would get into the news business, but they'd do it with robotic crawlers and indexers, not human editors.

Sure enough, in April 2002, Google News was released in beta. And sure enough it chose categories and headlines based on robotic algorithms. Most of the time the robot does remarkably well, but sometimes it makes some pretty funny gaffes.

Since that time the Google News interface and presentation have changed very little. For instance:















Now comes a critter called Newsmap, which transforms us from the boring text-only Google News to a cloud map of stories with headlines in proportion to apparent importance of each story. Check it out (click the image to see it full size):














A very cool graphical view. Wonder if Google will send a cease-and-desist letter, or hire the clever folks who devised this clever presentation?

Take a quick peek in case Googleshysters make it go away: http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

Julian Bond, national media, get the Michigan primary story wrong

Over and over again, the national media get the facts wrong about the Democratic Presidential primary held on January 15.

Over and over again, the press reports that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate on the ballot. Blatantly false and misleading.

Over and over again, Julian Bond, a man I've admired since I was a teenager, speaks of "disenfranchisement" if the delegates are not retroactively blessed. Disenfranchisement occurred on January 15, when voters faced a ballot that listed Hillary -- and Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Uncommitted.

But the actual ballot we were offered omitted major contenders Barack Obama and John Edwards, who asked to have their names removed from the Michigan primary ballot because the Democratic National Committee pressed all candidates to promise not to campaign in Michigan and Florida because those states violated DNC rules against moving the date of the primary earlier.

Hillary Clinton left her name on the ballot, and now, in desperation, she wants the Michigan delegates (and the Florida ones) seated at the convention. This is ludicrous; she signed a commitment that Michigan would not count, and now, as the only leading Dem on that ballot, she suddenly, and desperately, wants those votes counted.

Julian Bond claims that African-American voters will be "disenfranchised" if Michigan is not seated. ALL voters who might have voted in the Democratic primary were disenfranchised on January 15. No write-ins were allowed. Obama was not on the ballot. No black person in Michigan had a chance to vote for Obama that day. No one -- white, black, yellow, or any hue in between -- could have voted for Obama, or Edwards (or Richardson or Biden) if they so chose.

Therefore many Democrats either voted for Uncommitted, or, as is allowed in Michigan, they crossed over and voted in the Republican primary. They either voted for the candidate whom they found least distasteful -- probably McCain -- or they voted to spoil the race by voting for Romney or Huckabee.

Any plan that proposes to seat all or the majority of Democractic Michigan delegates for the "winner" is bogus. You can't have a race if you forbid leading contenders from lining up at the starting gate.

And now, we have national media outlets such as The New York Times, the LA Times, and NPR falsely reporting that Hillary Clinton was the only name on the ballot on January 15. Never mind that Gravel and Kucinich were on the ballot, and that in places such as Washtenaw County, "Undecided" actually won -- probably a proxy vote by frustrated voters for Obama.

Measuring Obama's popularity

One measure of a Web site's popularity might be how it melts down when you visit it. Web sites tend to fail in strange and mysterious ways when overloaded. If you visit the official Web site for Barack Obama right now, you see a very artful photo of Barack and his family. If you click through, you see this:

Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/ext/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 376Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/ext/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 376Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/ext/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 376Warning: problem running db_change: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/config/blue_config_autosetup.inc.php on line 25Fatal error: error on SELECT for config data - does table exist? in /home/obama/htdocs/config/blue_config.inc.php on line 258

Civilized Wi-Fi in public spaces, versus Caesar's Palace

In November I gave a talk on Web search analytics in Barcelona, and this week, in Las Vegas.

In Barcelona we were at a hotel called the AB Skipper. Their approach was totally civilized. Free Wi-Fi (and Ethernet) in all the rooms, and free Wi-Fi throughout the hotel.

The conference was at Caesar's Palace. They charged $13.99 per 24 hours of Wi-Fi. They offered no free Wi-Fi in public spaces or conference rooms.

I write at the McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. They provide free Wi-Fi throughout the airport. They even advertise it.

When I connect in Minneapolis and in Detroit, the airports will charge for Wi-Fi.

I'm not a Utopian who believes that Wi-Fi will set you free. I think, for instance, that attempts for cities to paint the whole town wireless were doomed to failure. (And in fact many have failed.)

But I do think it makes much more sense to follow the model of the AB Skipper and of McCarran than to attempt to squeeze extra dollars of people stuck on your premises. On the way to the airport I passed a Motel 6 that had a banner offering free Wi-Fi. Major hotels and airports should offer Wi-Fi just as they provide electricity, and make their money off the bars and not amenities people have come to expect.