Conference Facility Breaks Internet Speed Records

The Henry Center at Michigan State University touts itself as a unique conference and training facility. Outside each room they post a description of the technology inside. Look closely to see how fast they deliver Internet to each seat:

A Very Brave - Or Very Foolish - Michigan Fan in Ohio

ESPN has a TV ad showing a young couple making out on a couch, one wearing a Michigan shirt, the other Ohio State. Today on a trip to Columbus I spied a personalized license plate on a car whose owner must be very brave -- or who possesses excellent auto insurance:

Unnoticed Irony: Imclone Stock Always Beat Martha Stewart Omnimedia

If you'd invested $10,000 in Martha Stewart Omnimedia and $10,000 in Imclone on the day when MSO was born, which investment would have brought you better results? Was an MSO investment ever a better bet versus Imclone?

Many note the irony that Martha Stewart had only $52,000 at stake in her Imclone investment, yet her insider trading scandal destroyed billions of dollars in shareholder value in her own company. Yesterday alone, after the verdict, the value of Martha's shares in Martha Stewart Omnimedia fell $100 million. People are delighting -- or fretting -- over her potential time in prison. Martha may be more worried about the likely loss of her personal fortune than her prison term. Her company's products are based on the very image of Martha; can it reinvent itself sans eponymous founder?



And in the "truth is stranger than fiction" category, the FDA approved the drug Erbitux for treatment of certain cancers on February 12, 2004 -- during Martha's trial. That's the very drug that the FDA disapproved in December 2001, leading to the insider trading. The made-for-television movie will have fun with that.

Another layer of irony: Imclone stock plummeted when the scandal broke, but has done quite well since then. I ran a Quicken.com stock chart comparing what you'd have today if you'd invested $10,000 in each company five years ago -- an interval covering the entire lifespan of Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Eyeballing it, it looks like if you'd placed a $10,000 bet on Imclone the day of the MSO IPO, you'd have $40K today. It looks like MSO stock never rose enough for you to cash out ahead. In fact, MSO was never ahead of the Dow Jones average.

Just wait until Monday, when reality sets in: MSO is so closely identified with Martha Stewart, this company is doomed.

Google versus Librarians -- and Google has won

A recent piece by Washington Post author Joel Achenbach quotes Berkeley's Peter Lyman:

"There's been a culture war between librarians and computer scientists," Lyman says.

And the war is over, he adds.

"Google won."

Of course librarians struggle to explain to students and others that Google alone doesn't suffice in many cases, but I didn't think there was a war going on. In fact, a librarian, Cindy Chick, introduced me to Google soon after Page and Brin launched it at Stanford. It seems to me that as a cohort librarians probably rely on Google as much as anyone else -- they just know how to use it better, and they don't use it exclusively.

For almost a year I've been saying openly that "Google has won," but the war I have in mind is Google versus Yahoo, AskJeeves, AlltheWeb, etc. Not everyone agrees. Last June, I postulated that Google had won to Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology at Google and he quickly distanced himself from the notion. Google principals display a quiet confidence but also studied humility. When I gave a talk at Internet Librarian entitled "Why Google Won", some folks from Yahoo wanted to have a chat with me afterwards -- in the Monterey Bay.

What's surprising to me is which "side" Peter takes in Google vs. Librarians :

And yet Berkeley professor Peter Lyman points out that traditional sources of information, such as textbooks, are heavily filtered by committees and are full of "compromised information."

And the open public Web is full of authentic, up-to-date, accurate information, that Google always puts at the top of the hit list? Peter, come back to visit for some Lake Michigan whale watching!!!

Actually, I bet this will prove to be a false dichotomy, as Google integrates more and more commercial content under their search umbrella, such as their recent IEEE partnership. We may yet see an Advanced Search radio button toggling between the Public Web versus Commercial Content Filtered by Committees, Full of Compromised Information. Important treaties are yet to be signed in Mountain View.

The Quixotic Quest for Universal Broadband

Tonight I'm privileged to give a talk at the Ann Arbor Computer Society. I first spoke there in spring of 1993, when the subject was this newfangled thing called "the World-Wide Web." (Back then, it was hyphenated, kind of like Berners-Lee.)

For quite a while I've wanted to find or create a graph that shows how many years it takes for a technology -- telephone, electricity, indoor plumbing, CD players, dial-up Internet access, residential broadband -- to achieve 90% or 98% penetration.

It turns out the FCC took a stab at creating such a graph:



The source for the graph is:

http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Notices/2000/fc00057a.pdf

The FCC offers a collection of reports on Internet and telecom deployment at:

http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/comp.html

Coach Barnett Blows It; So Does Colorado Search Engine

When media around the world shine their collective spotlight on you, should their search engines know more about your story than your own search engine knows? That's exactly what's happening at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

CU is suffering through a public relations nightmare. Amidst stories of booze and strippers for high school recruits, CU head football coach Gary Barnett, asked about rape allegations by their former kicker Katie Hnida, responded that she didn't command other players' respect because she wasn't a very good kicker.

That stunning display of insensitivity will likely cost him his job. On February 19, the university suspended Barnett; on the 20th, CU named an interim coach.

I'm not equipped to advise Colorado on how to manage their monumental public relations problem, but this is a case study in why every search engine should offer a "best bets" service.

Go to news.google.com and search for "barnett" and you'll see these results:



Now go to Colorado's own home page and do the same search. You'll see this:



Google News covers thousands of news sources worldwide. Out of hundreds of thousands of current news articles, just the word Barnett brings dozens of links to the relevant story to the top of Google's hit list. But Colorado's own search engine hasn't caught up to the story yet!

Even the search engines of individual news sources are ahead of Colorado's search engine. For instance, the BBC's news index also puts the relevant story at the top of the list.

You can bet thousands of people are hustling to the CU home page and searching for "barnett" and "football" and all sorts of terms related to the story. CU media relations folks are doing all they can to put the best face on this story. Sure, they can put links on the home page, but experience and Jakob Nielsen teach us that a large percentage of people just leap to the search box. They find nothing relevant.

There's a simple way to fix this: create a "best bets" feature for your search engine. When a story of massive interest breaks, get the PR team and the search team to coordinate a response. As each new press release comes out, add search terms to your best bets index. And monitor the search logs throughout the crisis to see what search terms folks are typing that you haven't thought of.

Ironically, it appears that Colorado's search engine has a Best Bets service, under the label Quick Links. All they need to do is make use of it to manage breaking news, not just static content.

You can't stay ahead of your own breaking news, but your search engine can keep up with it.

Another Windows Opening, Channel 6, Film at 11

The local CBS TV affiliate,WLNS, asked to interview someone about the ANS vulnerability for which Microsoft released a patch this week

The reporter came to the MSU Computer Store (with a chief videographer I happened to know) and we did a brief interview on the new vulnerability and on the importance of running Windows Update frequently.

Here's the coverage as streamed by WLNS.

From talking to students and others in town, I'm convinced that folks now think of Microsoft as the little boy who cried wolf. Never mind that Blaster, Welchia, MyDoom, and others of their ilk really have caused significant damage.

One student was quoted in the MSU student newspaper saying that her computer had two viruses so she just uses the university-provided microlabs. No hint that maybe she ought to get the computer disinfected and run up-to-date anti-virus software. Sigh...

Pretty brief interview; hope someone ran Windows Update after seeing it!

Internet Voting in the Michigan Democratic Caucus - Uncovered

There was international interest in the use of the Internet for voting in the 2004 Michigan Democratic Presidential Caucus. I voted over the Internet and captured screen shots of the process for posterity.


The process went like this:

-- First, you had to apply online to participate in the caucus.

-- Then, the Michigan Democratic party mailed instructions on how to vote online or by mail. The instructions included an assigned ID and password to use.

-- Then, you voted online or mailed in your ballot at the date of your choosing.

-- If you decided you'd rather vote in person the day of the physical caucus polling, you could do that; however, voting in more than one mode of polling was disallowed.

Here are screen shots of the actual Web voting process. At the very beginning there was a glitch: I went to the site without the https prefix; the party had secured the site through SSL, but failed to redirect an http request on port 80 to the SSL version of the home page. (Besides, it's not necessary to secure the login page, only the pages that take confidential information.)

There were some problems, though...

A friend who worked one caucus site tells me that a large number of people -- about 10% of those who voted that day -- had tried to vote over the Internet, but couldn't. So they fell back to voting in person.

Previously, news reports indicated that some 12,000 ballot requests for Internet (or mail) voting were denied due to subtle mismatches between name or address information and the official data from the Michigan Secretary of State.

In Detroit, a number of caucus sites were closed or moved the day of the voting. The party ordered voting in Detroit to continue until 8:00 pm, while in the rest of the state those who showed up to vote after the announced 4:00 pm closing were told "Nope."

All lot of out-of-state experts fretted about hacking; the real problems had to do with getting trains to run on time, not train robbers.

The Michigan Democratic Caucuses: It's the Duration, Stupid

I will vote over the Internet in today's Michigan Democratic Caucuses. The US and international media are agog over the fact that people can vote in Michigan over the Internet. They're missing a huge point that will influence the results in this race -- the DURATION of the caucus polling. Voting in the Michigan Caucuses began when Dean was the front runner.

My Internet voting instructions arrived over 4 weeks ago. I could've voted immediately. But after a millisecond's thought, I held off, knowing that circumstances could change.

You wouldn't bet on horses in the Preakness before they run the Kentucky Derby, would you? Of course not! A favorite horse might lose badly -- or become injured and retire from racing.

That's exactly what happened here. Dean was heavily favored before the Iowa caucuses, when Michigan's polling had already begun. Thousands of people cast votes as soon as they received their instructions. By Friday, 50,000 had voted online or by mail -- a large fraction of the total likely vote.

The earlier you voted in the caucus, the more likely you were to vote for Dean -- or Gephardt, Mosely Brown, Clark, Lieberman, or Edwards. (I suspect that Sharpton or Kucinich supporters are less susceptible to the bandwagon effect.) Whoever you voted for, you can't take your vote back.

If everyone votes on the same day, all voters have the same information. A Dean voter on January 15 might have chosen differently on February 7, given the very different political landscape those few weeks later. But because this is not a winner-take-all election, those early votes for Dean still matter.

Dean has pulled all his resources from Michigan as he struggles to win Wisconsin. But Dean has Michigan votes in the bag that were cast weeks ago, and that may well translate into Dean delegates. If today you're a Kerry supporter you may say "What the heck, why vote? Kerry's sewed up the race." So you don't bother voting, Dean's proportion goes up, and you just helped Dean win more delegates.

Now that Kerry is overwhelmingly favored, turnout for in-person voting is expected to plummet. Think of the paradox: because Kerry is annointed as prohibitive favorite, his proportion of votes will go down!

If you voted early for Gephardt, who dropped out of the race, you probably feel you wasted your vote. If you voted early for Dean, you may feel you wasted your vote -- but maybe you didn't. It's the Ebay Effect -- don't bid until 15 minutes before the auction closes.

Now imagine what happens if every state allowed 30 days of voting in primaries and caucuses. Imagine if you could change your vote up until the closing of the polls. Each state would have its own electoral stock market.

The bottom line: concerns about Internet vote fraud in the Michigan Democratic Caucuses are de minimis compared to the effects of allowing balloting for weeks.

Other points the press is fuzzy on:

-- It's not "Internet caucuses;" people can also vote by mail or in person.

-- It's not a secret ballot. If there were allegations of fraud, the party could conduct an audit. Each vote is tagged with the voter's ID.

-- This is NOT a state-run election. It's a party caucus. The State of Michigan has nothing at all to do with this; this is entirely a production of the Michigan Democratic Party. A party caucus is a VERY different thing than a primary or a general election. This caucuses will draw only 150,000 voters in a state with 7 million registered voters. Dawson Bell presciently observed in the Detroit Free Press last December that turnout would be relatively low unless the Michigan race was hotly contested:

http://www.freep.com/news/politics/polcol1_20031201.htm

-- Here's the party's procedures:

http://www.mi-democrats.com/press/2003pr/Caucus-DSP.pdf

Google News and People Names

Google News usually does a remarkable job of pulling together headlines and stories from a panoply of news sources worldwide. Sometimes, though, since the news page is assembled robotically, goofy things happen.

Here's an example: the News home page always has a little box labeled "In the News" where they pull up stories about people who are making headlines. Not surprisingly, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake are newsmakers right now, along with Howard Dean and Martha Stewart.

But one "person" in the news is a bit of a surprise: County Sheriff. Hmm, is this some rap star I never heard of? Clicking on the link reveals that there happens to be a bunch of stories in the news about various county sheriffs around the country, and the Google robot has somehow lumped them all into one melange.

Again, it is remarkable how well Google News does its job. It's pretty clear that Google has entered into explicit partnerships with some major news providers, which presumably means they use technology to do the gathering of content "right." That means using RSS or some other XML scheme to feed marked-up content to the harvester.

But I bet in many cases Google News still "screen scrapes" to gather content. This means parsing HTML to try to grok what a news source's page means -- and that means getting it wrong from time to time.

The Super Bowl, Janet Jackson, and Microsoft

The Janet Jackson incident at the Superbowl has spawned a zillion conspiracy theories. Justin acted alone. Justin and Janet acted in concert but MTV didn't know. MTV knew but CBS didn't. I'd like to toss a new theory into the ring: Microsoft paid CBS to do it.

If you go to cbsnews.com they not only report on the Janet Jackson story, they have a link to a video under a headline "Janet Exposed."


If, for scientific purposes, you click on that link from a Windows 95 computer, you are offered a chance to see the video using Real Player or Windows Media Player. But you must have WMP 9. If you click on the Real link, it attempts to download a codec update and fails. You can't get Windows Media Player 9 for Windows 95.

So if, for scientific purposes, you click on the Janet Exposed link from Windows XP, the default WMP for XP isn't good enough; you need WMP 9. Click to upgrade to WMP 9, and a new dialog box pops up offering a free trial of Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition.

Now think about all this. CBS News is reporting on how CBS covered (or uncovered) the Super Bowl halftime show, which was produced by MTV. Viacom owns MTV and CBS.

CBS claims to be shocked, shocked that Justin Timberlake tore off Janet's shirt. Justin claims it was a "wardrobe malfunction." But CBS News is compounding the incident by putting the video online. 140 million people in the US saw part of the Super Bowl; maybe a billion people worldwide saw it. Obviously the Janet incident will be buzzing at water coolers and bars worldwide.

And obviously some huge number of millions of people clicked on CBS News' video link today. Millions couldn't see the video because the don't have current software. Millions will upgrade to Windows XP and Windows Media Player 9 as a result. Microsoft has a great interest in seeing those upgrades take place.

This was no wardrobe malfunction -- it was a stealthy ad for Microsoft!

Typosquatting

Read how "typosquatters" hijacked several thousand expired domain names in order to build traffic for a tawdry commercial Web site.


A Case Study of "Tina's Free Live Webcam"