The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

Amazon Feeds added

I've added Amazon feeds which update the bestseller lists for "Computers and Technology," "Literature and Fiction," and "Science Fiction and Fantasy" to the Syndication Viewer.

A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe: Not

I found myself a bit irritated by a review of Roger Penrose's most recent book, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review (2/27/2005) . Now, right off the bat, I have not read the book, and may not read it for a while (if ever). My sense is that the title is overly grandiose, even if there are some interesting discussions in the book.

Here's my beef with the review, by George Johnson. Mr. Johnson notes that the book is "very tough going," that on a scale of one to four of preparedness for dealing with math and physics he is maybe a 1.7, and that he "absorbed what [he] could osmotically."

This review is science, but vaguely, for the dumb and dumber set. I wish the editors at the New York Times had assigned a reviewer with either a background in physics or the perseverance to follow the technical arguments in the book (or both). I'd like to know more about the book's theses and ideas, in a more rigorous way, and less about "Aha!" moments and the reviewer's befuddlement.

About today, SlashDot, Wired, and Washington politics

Four new feeds added to the Syndication Viewer:
About today (top daily consumer advice and tips from About.com)
Slashdot (news for Nerds, stuff that matters)
Wired News (how technology affects our lives)
Washington Post (feed oriented to politics)

Origins of Cyberspace Sold

I discussed the Origins of Cyberspace Christies auction in two previous posts: The Origins of Cyberspace and The real origins of cyberspace.

Here's an update: the auction actually took place last week, with sales amounting to a little over $700,000 before auction house fees, and 133 out of 254 lots selling. Here's the MSNBC News account of the auction.

My first reaction was that this is not a triumph, considering that the pre-sale price for the entire collection was $1,300,000, and considering how many lots did not sell. But on further reflection, I think that this is a landmark auction establishing that there is a market in this area of collectibles. After all, some of the more important lots went for in the 70 thousands. Establishing this as an area of collecting with a market was probably the point of the affair for Jeremy Norman, and he is probably quite happy with the results.

Feed Topic Links

I've provided the following feed topic links for your convenience:
Google
RSS
Blogging Technology
Research and the Internet
Lifestyle
News
These links open the aggregated feeds that I've collected (because I think they are useful, interesting and/or fun) in these topic areas in your browser. Once you've opened the page combining the feeds in your browser, you can bookmark it (add it to your Favorites). Next time you select the page, it will show updated entries for all the feeds. You can also make your own selection of feeds on the RSS Viewer page.

Please contact me with suggestions for additional RSS or Atom feeds to add.

Dead People Don't Validate

In some kind of mordant fit, I decided to add the Dead People Server RSS feed to the Lifestyle section of my free RSS Web Viewer application. This RSS feed displays news about celebrities and other "interesting people" that have recently died. (You can use the links to navigate to the Dead People Server to go back further in time and discover whether that minor celebrity of yore is alive or dead, so it really covers more than recent deaths)

When I opened my RSS Viewer with the new (dead) feed added and clicked the HTML link next to the feed, the feed was displayed but with an erroneous second date (December 31, 1969) for posting next to every entry. In Unix-speak and PHP, the language I wrote the page in, December 31, 1969 is the last day in the previous epoch to ours, and on Jan 1, 1970 a new epoch was born. (We are still in it.)

Running the Dead People Server RSS feed through the feed validator at FeedValidator.org, I found several validation issues involved the dates associated with entries in the feed. So I guess that's the moral: Dead men don't have to wear plaid or validate. The feed is still funny (IMHO) even if it does print this strange, pre-epochal date along with each entry (so I left the feed on my RSS Viewer)!

P.S. I emailed the Dead People Server, and they fixed their feed so that it validates, and it now displays right on my site. A happy ending, not a dead end!

The kids on Phyllis's blog

Here is a link to some neat pictures of the kids that Phyllis posted.

I'm feeling lazy today (due to recovery from a nasty cold), and I'm working under a deadline, and picking up Nicky from school soon, so I'll leave it like that for now.

But since I've mentioned Nicky, I also ought to say that the response to Nicky's Duplo Gates on eBay has been astounding and worldwide. Answering the listing questions has been great fun!

Poor Mister Tumnus

According to a recent story in the New York Times, Disney is creating a movie version of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", the first volume in C.S. Lewis's classic for children Chronicles of Narnia. The film will feature animtronics and live actors, will be filmed like Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and features some of the technical expertise of the Weta Workshop. Disney plans to do the whole merchandising shuck and jive, with theme park exhibits, merchandise, dolls, and more all based on Narnia. The movie is due out in early December 2005 (just in time for Christmas and Xmas merchandising, get it?)

While the advance of movie CGI technology in combination with live-action footage means that Tumnus the Faun is unlikely to be turned into Bambi (because Tumnus will not be a cartoon), it is hard for me to imagine that Disney won't do more violence to the spirit of Tumnus than did the White Witch. Tumnus the Faun is the first creature that Lucy, one of the Pevensie children, meets in Narnia, which she enters through a magical wardrobe. Tumnus invites Lucy for a cup of tea in his cave, which sports an extensive library with titles like "Is Man a Myth?" The gentle Tumnus is later turned into a stone statue by the White Witch for failing to betray Lucy. Although Aslan the lion eventually rescues Tumnus, it is pretty teary-eyed going for the five-year-old set until it is clear that Tumnus (and all the other victims of the witch's repression) will be converted back to flesh and blood from stone. (The flesh and blood to stone thing happens at more or less the same time as Narnia's "100 years of winter without Christmas" melts away.)

The real problem for Disney is not that they will convert the wonderful book to a cross between icky-sweet (which they've done to other classics, such as Pooh) and some over-loud sword-play aimed at thirteen year-olds. It is a foregone conclusion that they will do this, and ruin the thing. (So read the books to your kids before you let them watch the movie!) The deeper problem is a "honeypot" conundrum in the Narnia books themselves: the deep religiousity and Christianity (with a big C) that pervades these books. This stands in stark contrast to the Lord of the Rings, which may have deep spiritual values at its core, and certainly chronicles a deistic struggle with absolute evil, but explicitly endorses no clear religious or sectarian values.

The Christianity in the Chronicles of Narnia, in combination with the wonderful and magical fantasy of the non-religious material in the book, is frankly bizarre. The whole business of the great lion Aslan, "the only son of the Emperor beyond the sea," sacrificing himself for the traitor Edmund's sake, and then being ressurected, made no sense to me as a kid, but I loved the book anyway. I read the entire series twice to my son Julian when he was between four and six years old (we've since moved on to the Lord of the Rings). Baffled doesn't begin to describe his reaction to this stuff, and I found it very difficult to explain to him, particularly since to the extent that he has any religious education, it is Jewish. But the underlying message of the religious parts of the book is ultimately not one of tolerance. For example, in the end, Susan (the eldest of the Pevensie sisters, and one of the "four Kings and Queens of Narnia who ruled in Cair Paravel") doesn't get to go to what seems to be heaven because she has stopped believing in Narnia and is spending too much time focused on things like lipstick.

It would be a mistake to forget that this rather blatant and odd religious content is part of the Narnia books, although I think most children ignore it in favor of the wonderful fantasy of the books. (There have been some recent and ill-fated moves to secularize the books.) But because of the Christian religious content, the books are favorites (and have been for several generations) of the US Christian fundamentalist movement. Therein lies Disney's double-bind: they can secularize the books, and risk the wrath of the zealot consituents, or they can include religious content (which would be truer to the books) and be accused of intolerance (and lose the audience of secular parents and their kids like me). This one Disney can't win. I don't feel bad for them, though: they will certainly mess up some of my favorite children's books even without the religious dilemma.

The real origins of cyberspace

For an interesting and somewhat rigorous take on the intellectual (meaning: real) origins of the computer and cyberspace as opposed to a collection of ephemera and artifacts that may have something to with this topic, see Martin Davis's Engines of Logic: Mathematicans and the Origins of the Computer. (Full disclosure: Martin Davis is my father.) Within the Jeremy Norman Origins of Cyberspace collection (see my previous blog entry) there are reprints of scholarly articles that don't apparently have much to do with computers or cyberspace. For example, Lot # 86 in the auction is a reprint of a 1936 article from the Journal of Symbolic Logic by Princeton logician Alonzo Church with an estimate of $5000 - $7000. This article is in the auction because the circuits inside computers embody the insights of generations of logicians including Church, as my father explains in his book (incidentally, my father was a PhD student of Alonzo Church).

The Origins of Cyberspace

Christie's is holding an auction called The Origins of Cyberspace in New York on Wednesday Feb 23, 2005. The auction is of material put together by collector extraordinaire Jeremy Norman. Here's Jeremy Norman's History of Science site, and the Feb 17 NY Times article discussing the auction.

The auction is interesting for several reasons. First, will the estimates be met or even exceeded? To some degree these are rather large sums for papers that only a fairly short while ago would not have been worth anything. Case in point: Lot 340 with an estimate of $3000 - $4000, described as 'ECKERT-MAUCHLY COMPUTER CORPORATION. "Employment agreement." ' (Googlers, should you keep those employment agreements in a safe place?)

The auction is structured so that it is first offered as a single lot for $1.3 Million. If nobody purchases the entire Origins of Cyberspace collection for the $1.3 Million, then the individual lots will be auctioned. Norman has a reputation as a dealer and collector of being shrewd about purchasing items for much less than he sells them for (this is a good reputation to have as a dealer, otherwise you can't stay in business), so undoubtedly his cost basis in the collection is a fraction of the $1.3 Million.

Mr. Norman has pulled off quite a brilliant coup. His collection consists of over 1,000 books, papers, and so on, and at least attempts to intellectually describe one of the most important development in human scientific history. Perhaps this could also be done in relationship to genetic research, DNA, and so on, but it is hard to imagine many other fields in which the conceptual importance would be understood so quickly. (And in which it would be possible to put together this kind of broad conceptual collection of epigraphic material rather than the real thing. Query: What is the real thing? Hardware? Software? Computer programs? Will source code ever become a collectible?)

As an arena of collecting, the origins of computers, or as Norman likes to call it, cyberspace, falls somewhere between my collecting interest in pre-digital era mechanisms, and people who collect "old" computers. (Old computers means things like Altairs, and anything that is "over ten years old, and not Windows.") "Between" chronologically, not as an expression of value, because old computers that post-date the Norman era are not particularly valuable yet.

Here's an item by reporter Evan Koblentz from news.computercollector.com about Jeremy Norman and pricing the items in this auction.

Anyhow, things are getting interesting in this collecting niche. I'll be watching the auction results with attention.

Duplo Gates on eBay

Installation documention of the authentic Duplo Gates by Nicky is now available on eBay!

The Duplo Gates

Inspired by Christo's Central Park Gates, 3-year-old Nicky contructs and demolishes Duplo Gates.

The Anti-Gates

No, I'm not talking about Steve Jobs, Firefox, Google, or Linux. Although three of the four should make Microsoft sweat: Firefox, a better browser than Internet Explorer with 25,000,000 downloads and increasing momentum; Google, the clear leader as information portal to the Internet; and Linux, which is eating Microsoft's lunch in the server operating system arena. I am talking about those ugly $21,000,000 "Gates" by Christo and company in Central Park, New York.

If you are anti-Gates and sick of the Christo hype (or simply a bit of a puritan and turned off by the profligate waste in a world where people die of hunger), here are some alternatives:

• The Somerville Gates (cost $3.50, pussy cat not included)


• The Crackers (a gift to the city, is it Art or for the birds, a public happening and a tasty snack at a cost of $2.50)


• Our Very Own Duplo Gates (Cost zero, because we already had the Legos, Nicky not included!)

Jeff Gannon scandal finally covered in the New York Times

These folks (the NYT) should read my blog so they can report things in a timely fashion. At least they finally reported the Jeff Gannon scandal, even if the article is (as they say, whoever "they" are) a dollar late, kind of buried, and a little understated. Understated because an uncredentialed stooge was able to waltz into White House press conferences and use them as a bully pulpit for several years, while also being involved in marketing X-rated Web properties, allegedly working as an escort, and possibly outing a CIA operative. For more on the CIA leak allegation and Jeff Gannon, see the Daily Kos article.

If this administration regards you as a "friend" -- and that largely means you are a self-declared Christian fundamentalist with a big "C" -- you can do no wrong even if you are a fake, involved in the sex business, and arguably a criminal.

More RSS Aggregation!

My free RSS Web Viewer is new and improved! This is the third version (in as many days, so what does that tell you about obsessiveness?)

Feature improvements include a bigger number of preset feeds, the ability to instantly view any feed (by clicking the HTML link next to the feed), and the ability to open the RSS or Atom syndication feed itself (by clicking the Feed link next to each feed in the preset list). You can also bookmark an aggregated collection of feeds that you would like to view together again in the future. For example, here's a link that opens five feeds related to Google. Another example: this link opens three lifestyle related feeds (pregnancy, babies and parenting).

Notes: The ability to aggregate feeds in a single bookmarked link is particularly handy because the content of the linked page is dynamic. It changes as the content of the feeds changes. Managable addresses were created for these links using the TinyUrl service.

Thanks for suggestions and help with this project to Peter Scott, Peter Cooper, and Phyllis Davis.

Now I have to get back to my "real" work! But more features and enhancements when I get the chance. Please contact me with suggestions for feeds to include, thoughts about application enhancements, and (of course) flowers and chocolate...

Adding the Izzle

Gizoogle translates Web pages into rapper slang, or at least some kind of language that adds alot of "izz" and "izzle" to the ends of words. Yo dude and dudettes, izz think it's hilarious. Here's the rendering of the Barney theme song, and my own Braintique and Googleplexblog sites.

Life after Google

Update on my entry about 99 zero's Google firing and blog: it is now titled Life After Google (glad he's got that capitalization thing!).

T3 Google Toolbar

It's the terminator of toolbars, it is Google T3, nominally still in beta. It will wash your dishes, take out the clothes, and babysit. (We wish!)

Seriously folks, it does everything the old Google Toolbar did and more (although still only in Internet Explorer). New features include a word translator (when you hover over an English word it can be displayed in a variety of languages, see Building Research Tools with Google for Dummies for information about pre-T3 Google translation services), a spell checker for text you enter into HTML forms, and an Autolink button that provides contextual information (maps for US addresses, tracking number info, book information if you enter an ISBN, and so on). Note to Google: the maps are cool, but you get my address wrong, insisting I am in "Albany" when in fact I am in Berkeley.

Don't these folk at Google ever stop working? Great stuff. Now if only it worked in Firefox, too (hint, hint if anyone at Google is reading this)!

New Feature in RSS Web Viewer

I've done a major upgrade on my RSS Web Viewer. The RSS Web Viewer lets you view any RSS syndication from the Web. You can enter the address of the feed, or choose from a preset compendium of feeds. The new feature allows you to multiselect preset feeds. This means that you can view all the information on the feeds about a particular area of interest (for example, Google or RSS) without having to open feeds one after the other.

Power to the Blogosphere!

Power to the Blogosphere! Power to the People!

There are a raft of letters today to the editor to the Wall Street Journal about the Eason Jordan flap. (I'm not including a link because you need a paid subscription to access the WSJ.) A typical comment: "Thank God for Bloggers."

These comments are continued evidence of the huge impact the blogosphere is having, which cuts across the political spectrum. My recent posts about Jeff Gannon, 99 Zeros, and Eason Jordan are each a commentary on this phenomenon: White House sleaze operative exposed thanks to bloggers, Googler fired for publishing a blog, and news executive sacked thanks to blog reports of off-the-record (and dubious) remarks.

Is the power of the blogosphere good or bad? No doubt both. It is true democracy, which means it can reflect the actions of an unreasoning mob. On the otherhand, no one will keep secrets for long in the world of the blogosphere and syndication feeds. Everyone can publish their own op-ed pieces, and yes, they do get read. On the whole, I think it is a great thing, but bloggers are subject to no discipline, editors, or any kind of checks and balances -- which means reader beware!

Since the blogosphere (the world-wide community of bloggers) has become so significant, it is important to understand the blogosphere taxonomy. How many bloggers are there? What is the average rate of blogger activity? How do blogs get noticed and read? What are the blogging communities? How does blogging and syndication fit together? How do bloggers communicate with each other? What are blogger demographics? Geographic dispersion? What are the major blog hosting communities? How many independently hosted blogs are there (like this one) as opposed to blogs hosted by an organized blog community (such as Google's Blogger.com)? What constraints are there on publishing a blog within an organized blogging community?

Taxonomic, organizational, demographic, and functional information about the blogosphere is hard to come by -- but we need to have an understanding of these things to know how our world works. I'll try to shed some light on these topics in furture postings.

The Jeff Gannon Affair

You couldn't make this one up if you tried. James D. Guckert a/k/a Jeff Gannon gained access to many White House briefings and was one of the few reporters allowed to lob a question (of course it was friendly) at President Bush recently. He used the name Jeff Gannon, and no one knew that it was phony until the details of this affair began to emerge.

Guckert's press credentials turn out to be an affiliation with Talon News Service, a two-bit conservative Texan Web site set up as a side-show for GOPUSA ("Bringing the conservative message to America") and conservative Bobby Eberle, apparently for the primary purpose of providing non-partisan credentials for Guckert. Here’s a link to Talon, Talon’s statement about Guckert's resignation, and a link with information about the allegation that Talon was set up just to credential Guckert/Gannon.

Amazingly, that’s just the beginning of the level of sleaze involved. Guckert/Gannon's journalism education consisted of a $50 two-day seminar at The Leadership Institute. The man was also involved in a venture to register domain names that, according to a story reported in the Washington Post and elsewhere, included HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com, and so on. According to a story published in Salon, there is even some evidence that the man was himself an "escort." Here's a site with a pretty good round-up of the allegations.

OK. This is a gentleman with less than no journalism credentials who was used by the White House for propaganda purposes.

From my viewpoint, the story is really about the power of the blogosphere, and a continuation of the Eason Jordan story. Right-wing bloggers brought about Jordan's fall from grace over some ill-advised (but technically off-the-record) remarks about the US military targeting journalists in Iraq. In the Gannon affair, left-wing bloggers brought about the exposure of a phony who was helping to manufacture propaganda for the administration. (Admission to White House press events without real credentials or a back ground check? I guess they knew who he was...)

Here is one blog that has been covering the story:

• AmericaBlog


• A Man called Jeff Beware: this one has X-rated pictures involving the Guckert/Gannon man

A fake pornographer touting Bush's right-wing family values administration as a White House corps reporter? And it takes bloggers to expose this widely? What are we coming to?

A world in which a new power for information dissemination has arisen: the blogosphere.

Haruki Murakami

"A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, you gold-plated whale of a dunce?"

-- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

How Murakami became a novelist: In 1978 he was watching a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Japan. As an American player, Dave Hilton, hit a double, a voice spoke to Murakami, telling him to go home and starting writing, that he could do it. He started work on his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, right away. Some good Murakami links:

• Salon interview


• Haruki Murakami (Unofficial)


• Official Murakami Site (Random House)


• Exorcising Ghosts

99 zeros @ Google no more

Mark Jen a/k/a NinetyNineZeros is the author of the Life @ Google from the inside blog. He will likely change the name of his blog, since he has been fired from Google after a short stint. According to Jen, "either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason." Jen puts a pretty good face on the matter: "i've actually viewed this as a great learning experience. obviously, i've gotten a first-hand chance to learn about the power of blogging." He goes on to say: "finally, for all those in the evil/not evil argument, realize that google is a public, for-profit company. i do not believe google is either evil or good. companies take what they feel are logical steps in doing business, and business isn't always fair."

I think this last take is exactly right (and also hope he learns about capitalization!). Google may appreciate a certain kind of external unconformity. In addition, inner-circle Google brain-trusters may also be empowered to think "out of the box." But Google is probably no different from any other large public corporation in that line employees are expected to toe the mark. Like children of yore, corporate line employees should not be "heard" too much. Jen is not the first to be fired on account of a blog, and he will certainly not be the last.

In this context, Jen acted foolishly by publishing his blog so soon after being hired at Google. On the other side of this issue, I've read the Life@Google blog from the very beginning, and nothing in it was particularly derogatory about Google (or indeed very revealing). Google could have let this go with an admonition had they been so inclined. Without being there, we'll never really know the backstory.

The story of the firing of 99 zeros has garnered a fair amount of media attention and even more in the blogosphere - witness the multiplicity of comments ranging from sympathetic to "you got what you deserved" on Jen's blog site (116 comments and counting). Personally, the thing I like most about Jen's blog is the screen handle: 99 zeros is a way cool name for a Google employee.

Like most people in the world, I am nothing if not solipsistic. (Did that one send you to the dictionary? It means that I think the universe revolves around little, old me!) The fact that Google took such an (in my opinion) inordinate notice of Jen's blog implies to me that my blog is probably read at Google. Of course, I can't be fired, but if you are from Google and reading my blog, please let me know what you think from time to time!

Note: See my RSS Viewer for a compendium of blogs relating to Google.

My Valentine!

Courtesy of Nikon D70 and Photoshop and Phyllis!

Open-Source Journalism

Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, was apparently forced to resign on Friday over remarks he made at an off-the-record session at the Davos summit in January. Jordan seems to have said the the US military intentionally killed 12 journalists, although his precise language is not available. Here's a link to the New York Times account of the affair. The Times headlined it in the following somewhat odd way: "Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters."

First, has the US military intentionally targeted journalists? This seems unlikely per se. I think any kind of official policy of targeting journalists is almost out of the question, although I'd be perfectly prepared to believe in carelessness, indifference, negligence, and even (although I am not asserting this actually happened) perfidy on the part of some individual line officers. But an official policy of this sort is almost certainly too difficult to carry out, and impossible to cloak in secrecy.

Next, what did Eason Jordan really say, and what were his intentions? We don't know exactly what he said. It was taped, but the conference organizers have refused to release the tape because of the off-the-record nature of the session. My best guess is that Jordan felt bad about about sending journalists to their deaths, and said something off-the-cuff which has increasingly been viewed out of context.

Jordan's remarks were first reported in a blog entry by Rony Abovitz, who is not a reporter. Abovitz says that Jordan's remarks bothered him, but won favor from the "anti-US crowd" in the audience, and that Jordan backpedaled, wavered, seemed to realize that his statements had created a public mess. Abovitz was left confused, and called for an official investigation of Jordan's allegations about the 12 journalists being killed on purpose: "If it is true, we need to know if it was official or if it was just some random disgruntled soldiers." Abovitz concluded his blog entry with the following statement: "I think that this article is a good pointer to the future of the news: average people, freely saying what they want, as they saw it, for anyone to see. To me, that is freedom of the press."

The Jordan affair leads to a whole raft of issues surrounding what has been called "open-source journalism" (the NY Times article uses the term, but it is hardly the first, see the Slashdot thread about open source journalism): the ability of anyone to publish anything they deem newsworthy in their own blogs, which are often picked up as sources far and wide. (I started writing about this in an entry yesterday.) On the one side, there is the allegation that the official news media were "protecting their own" by not reporting the story of Jordan's remarks. On the other side, there is the sentiment that with news being reported (and made) by bloggers, "the salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail." The quote is from Steve Lovelady and reported in the NY Times article; for more on Lovelady's take and role in this controversy see PressThink.

Watchdogs who are avatars of individual freedom? Lynch mobs using sound bites to zap a conflicted news executive who sent reporters to their death? Obviously the elephant in the room amid these cross-currents is the political one: is this form of "outing" a political weapon used by the right against the left, or the left against the right, or both? Jordan does seem to have fallen to this sort of political rancour because he spoke out, and was caught in an unsupportable position. But what about all the untrue things said by the Bush administration (for example, the WMD in Iraq) that do not get effectively challenged.

From a blogging viewpoint, the most interest aspect of the affair is the recognition of the power of blogging. Looked at negatively, this is indeed "mob" power -- because there are no checks and balances, no editorial review, and no code of journalist ethics involved. The quality of the "news" reported is thus inherently more suspect, so the argument goes, than the items that appear in the mainstream media. This is the same charge that is leveled at writers who self-publish their books, and it can be true: it depends (of course) upon the writer, or blogger. (Mainstream media can intentionally (or unintentionally) publish glaring lies, for that matter, particularly given interlocking corporate and political agendas, or with direct state control.) Blogging does give power to the people, and gives everyone the ability to report what they observe and believe. Observations within blogs need to be treated as primary source material: valuable, but subject to evaluation. Blogging is powerful. Blogging makes it very hard to keep information hidden. Blogging can be used in ugly ways by those with an agenda.

What I do feel is overstated is the comparison with open-source software development. The people who use this metaphor do not really understand the open-source software development process, involving meticulous steps, code review by peers, and so on. The fact that I can "publish" this blog entry without getting anyone's permission does not really confer any open-source status upon my blog, or shouldn't if people were thinking straight.

But maybe an open-source development process for blogging is not a bad idea. A set of standards and a methodology for "open source" blogging could be developed. This could include internal code standards (for example, the requirements that all items should be sourced, marked as first-hand observations, or marked as opinions) and a peer-review process conducted by fellow bloggers (randomly selected and not necessarily friends). Blog entries that followed the open-source methodology and review process could be labeled -- and would carry, for me, more credibility than the mainstream media.

Google Valentine 2005

Here's the Google 2005 Valentine!

Military intelligence

"Military intelligence" is a cliche of an oxymoron -- and, of course, not always an oxymoron because there are plenty of very smart people in the military. How do you find out what they are thinking? How do you find out what is happening on the ground in Iraq from the grunt's eye view?

The answer is that the universe of the blog has opening a portal into the soul of the hypothetical "every-person". A "blog" (or "web log"), of course, is a periodic web diary, with entries presented in reverse chronologic order. (Just like this one, heh, heh...)

Members of the military participate in the blog soul, thought, and opinion-baring just like everyone else. The researcher's problems lie not in finding these blogs, but rather in sorting through the multiplicity of them. Also, everything in a blog is just somebody's opinions and observations. Blog entries require even more validation than normal Web pages (which themselves can be pretty suspect, here are some tips for validating information found on the Web).

Blogs written by people who say they are members of the US armed forces range in tone from right-wing paranoid ("the US media is a vast left-wing conspiracy") to very caustic about American military command in Iraq. These apparent biases form something like the bell-shaped normal distribution curve. My impression is that the curve is heading a bit more towards the caustic, particularly among the reservists and national guard members who maintain blogs - but you should judge for yourself.

A good place to start finding these blogs would be a Google search like "US army Iraq blog" (you've got to make sure to put the US army first, or you mostly get opinions from Iraqis, and who cares about them?!)

Another approach is to go straight to the sites that specialize in blog aggregation. The best of these are Bloglines and BlogPulse. Bloglines provides a great way to search through a mass of blogs and RSS feeds. BlogPulse is more a specialty tool for understanding blog trends (an "automated trend discovery system") rather than an aggregator of blogs or feeds. As such, it is extremely useful but a bit crude: you can easily answer questions like how many times the term "military intelligence" shows up in the world's blogs, but it is (of course) harder to get an automated read on the tenor of a given blog's content.

Here are some specific army blogs:

• Boots on the Ground is written by a soldier serving in Iraq who notes at the top that his views "do not reflect those of the US Military or US Government," well duh!


• Line in the Sand, about operation freedom written by Sgt Missick, a member of the Signal corp


• My War: Colby Buzzell's blog entries about the truth about the war from the ground lead to a book contract -- he sure tells the military establishment where they can go and what they can do if they don't like his opinions


• American Soldier, a day in the life of an American soldier

Nuancing the Curves

Phyllis passed me on a Snopes link about the Curves exercise chain and its founder Gary Heavin. Curves is the largest exercise franchisor in the world. Its "shops" are aimed at middleaged over-weight out-of-shape women. According to the Snopes article, a rumor has been going around the Internet that Curves founder Heavin donates 10% of Curves's profits to radical-right anti-abortion causes. The top of the Snopes piece marks this rumor as "True." Phyllis's reaction: boycott Curves. (I was going to editorialize: "We like curves in the right places, not in the wrong places"...but maybe I shouldn't go there!)

Snopes is generally a reliable source. But to get to the bottom of this story, and understand its nuances, you need to read the full Snopes article, not just the top sound bite. There is no doubt that Heavin is a man of Christian convictions who takes an anti-abortion stance. Heavin, it turns out, one year donated 10% of his income (not Curvse's profits) to charities, conceivably including some anti-abortion causes. This is his personal money, not Curves money (or the money of Curvses's franchisees). (You want to make money as a Curves franchisee? Click here to see Curves's franchises for sale.) There's no hard evidence that the man regularly gives this much to charity, or indeed that the charities include causes offensive to women.

According to Heavin's account of his life, as a thirteen-year-old boy caring for his younger brothers, he woke one morning to find his over-weight mother dead in bed. This set him on a life-long mission to help women become more physically fit.

One can only applaud the goal of the Curves franchises, and their apparent high rate of success. I'd prefer that wealthy patrons like Heavin not support obnoxious causes like the anti-choice movement, but (for the most part) this is still a free country, and I am not the opinion gestapo. The moral? As a researcher, at least read the full story and checkout the background info.

Springtime for Gardening in Berkeley

It's springtime here in Berkeley, which means for me (among other things) time to have fun and garden! I'm sprinkling some pictures I took today of our garden in this entry, so that I can show off some of what I've done!
So Nicky and I went over to Berkeley Hort. Nicky rode in the cart, I pulled it, and Nicky pointed out plants to me he liked. We took our plants home, and I planted them yesterday.
Now we're gearing up to plant our vegetable bins for spring. It's great having all this fresh stuff right out there to pick and eat in our salads!


I mostly buy our plants at Berkeley Hort and a few other local nurseries because it makes sense to use local suppliers. Plants at a local nursery are probably somewhat used to the climate. The people at the nursery know about local conditions and growing problems. Successful gardening at least around here is a very local issue. You have to understand the microclimates.

But when does it make sense to buy plants, or gardening supplies using the Web?



I've used catalogs and the Web as sources in some cases (I'll get to some suggestions in a moment). But first a tangent: so many things (services and products) one might want to buy have been effectively hijacked on Google and the other search listings. To some degree this is a problem with the ranking algorithms, and to some degree it is a result of an arms battle being fought with advertorial content created to jazz up "natural" search listing results. (As one SEO executive explained to me recently, "natural" results are results that are not explictly sponsored.) I promise a longer essay on this topic coming soon. In the meantime, be sceptical about top results for things like "garden plants" and "corporate party planning." The site that is putting out all this content out of the apparent goodness of its heart may in fact being doing so to lure customers and fool the search engines. Is the wrong? Maybe, maybe not. I'll discuss the issues in greater detail when I tackle the general topic later on. And remember, a natural listing ain't necessarily so...

I recommend Peaceful Valley Farms as an online source of organic gardening supplies. Olallie in Vermont is a great specialty supplier of Day Lillies. White Flower Farms in Connecticut is a great quality supplier, although they know nothing about conditions on the West coast and are kind of expensive. Jackson & Perkins is a great supplier of roses, although I wouldn't buy anything else from them.
Happy gardening!

Google Analyst Day

Google held a financial presentation for analysts yesterday, which according to the account in the NYT was a bit unusual. Almost unheard of for an analyst day, the Chief Financial Officer made no presentation - but Google's top chef did, detailing the lunch he had prepared for investors and analysts. Yum!

CEO Eric Schmidt indicated that Google will attempt to personalize its services to a greater extent: "We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." He also said that Google is trying to broaden its penetration with big (Fortune 1000) and small (you and me). Right now, "midsize" companies that are adept at using AdWords are Google's best customers.

Schmidt deflected criticism of Google as being too diffuse by saying that intentional planning led to spending 70% of its efforts on search and advertising, 20% of its efforts on "related" projects like email and Froogle, and 10% of its efforts on pure wild-assed technology for the fun of it (these are my words, not Schmidt's), with the Keyhole aerial mapping project being a for instance.

Somwhat oddly, Schmidt is quoted as saying that Google founder Sergey Brin had "proved" this 70-20-10 resource allocation was optimal. Trained as a mathematician, Brin presumambly knows he has "proved" no such thing, but actually it does seem like a pretty good way to go!

This analyst meeting is of more than normal importance for one of these affairs, because Google is facing its biggest post-IPO lockup expiration on Feb 14. This means that alot of Google shares ("supply" to Wall Street) will come on the market. Despite the shares coming onto the market, according to analyst Mark Mahaney, "As long as Google management doesn't come out looking like Martians on analysts day, there will be a strong bid to the shares."

I'm undecided as to whether they look like Martians, although I'd sure like to try the Google cooking!

Buying Intelligent Design

It's amusing and astounding that my blog entry blasting intelligent design as a euphemisim for bigotry, ingnorance, and assorted other evils has become the advertising host for creationists (aka intelligent design fanatics). These ads are titled "God's Existence Proven," "New Discoveries Prove Everything on Earth is Intelligently Designed," and so on.

If you are new to the world of Google's AdWords and AdSense, which in this case doesn't seem so intelligently designed, here's how this happened. Using the AdWords program, some of the Christian fundamentalist fanatics bought sponsored advertising aligned to the keyword phrase "intelligent design." My blog is hosted on Braintique, a Google AdSense affiliate. The Google AdSense correlation mechanism parsed the "intelligent design" phrase out of my polemic, and placed the ads next to my text.

As an author of the opinions I expressed, I am not happy with these ads displaying along side my thoughts (although I am amused). As the owner of the Braintique site, I can set Google AdSense to bar specific domains (although for this to be effective, I'd have to figure out all the domains belonging to fundamentalists who are flush enough to spring for key word purchases and savvy enough to use technology to back their ideology). I could also withdraw from the Google program entirely, so I do have options.

But as an advertiser who had bought the intelligent design keywords in the hope of promoting my religion (or my products based on religion) I'd be truly distressed at having my ads appear with content that is so antithetical to my message.

Now is this intelligent design, I ask you?

Happy Chinese New Year!

Euphemism Du Jour

I am bemused by the current euphemism du jour Intelligent Design, which is the radical Christian right code word for creationism. Intelligent design with a small "i" and a small "d" makes a certain amount of sense: who knows, maybe there was some intelligent intervention in the process of evolving life on this planet. It's at least as plausible to believe the interventionist was an alien life form as to belive it was a diety, but that's a subject for another day.

Getting back to the euphemism du jour, what makes no sense to me is that the hard right, who would ban evolution and science from our schools in the name of "Intelligent Design," practices none of the Christian virtues. This is a fanatic movement that is leading our country into state-sponsored torture, neglect of our poor and elderly, and enrichment of war profiteers. I know evil when I see it, whatever euphemisms it hides behind.

Google in the News

Google is in the news these days the way Microsoft used to be: all the time. Two items from the business section in today's NYT. Google becomes a domain registrar amid rampant speculation as to why they would bother. On this one, I take them at their word, it is for educational purposes. As any programmer knows (and Google is nothing if not full of programmers), you never really know how something works until you do it yourself.

The second item from the NYT is about hate speech (such as anti-semetism) showing up on Google's experimental community site Orkut. This is a hard one: it is difficult for anyone in a regulatory position to balance the huge value of free speech against the need to put paid to noxious weeds.

Hasty Ents and Branding Publishers

I was going to write about ents from the Lord of the Rings. For those of you who do not know the LTR, ents are tree shepherds who inveigh against other species for being "too hasty" -- and then proceed to hastily demolish the neighboring wizard and send hords of "huorns" (moving trees) out to ravish the ravishing orcs, thereby turning the tide in the direction of good (rather than evil). My point here was to be the difference between text and subtext. In fact, despite their rhetoric, the ents act hastily (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). In fact, despite Google's rhetoric about returning the best search results, Google may not mind having lots of results pages (even if the results are spam) so that they have a lot of pages for ad display. You get my drift.

But something caught my eye in today's Sunday NYT that really irritates me. It's a front page of the business section article about HarperCollins attempting to brand its publishing logos rather than its authors. Branding a publisher rather than the author is a lousy idea, and one that is ultimately doomed to failure. A publisher's brand can support an author, but the attempt to replace it will work in the long run no more than the wizard's foul plots could, when he forgot that he lived next door to the ents.

The article rightly point to technology books as one area where publisher-branded has worked (or at least gone farthest). The Dummies series is pointed to as an example of success. (O'Reilly might also have been used as an example, most purchasers of technology books know that an ORA book will have some degree of integrity.)

A problem with the Dummies series is that the quality of the individual titles varies tremendously. (I'm biased of course, but I think this mostly has to do with the authors of the individual titles in the series. Soem authors are good, and others are just not as good.) Purchasers of books in the series may buy their first one or two based on the series branding, but consumers are not really "dummies" and quickly come to perceive this unevenness.

An author of a book is the bottom line, buck-stops-here person responsible for the integrity and quality of his or her book. While some authors forget this, or let the realities of the marketplace help them forget it, no development editor aided and abetted by publisher branding will ever take the place of the author.

Publishers would be smart to bite the bullet and focus on finding the right books (in technology this means thinking creatively ahead of the curve rather than trailing the curve) and putting their branding efforts into the authors who make the books, rather than out of some foolish arrogance and vain hope chasing the will-o-wisp of series branding.

Where are the ents and huorns to knock a bit of sense into those publishers?

Back to Search

Back to search. (Or is it the future?) In a previous post, I suggested that search is the "honey trap" that induces users to visit Google's Web properties where they can be shown targeted ads. I also noted that this model (while still the majority of Google's business) is becoming relatively less important -- because close to half of Google's revenue comes from targeted keyword advertising (AdWords / AdSense) on affiliate sites.

Maybe it's time to have a hard look at searching. Google is still (more or less) the best search engine there is. (View a list of competitors). (So I can discuss Google and implicitly use it as a proxy for all search engines.) But you can't find what isn't there. There's plenty of information that just isn't available on the Web. Google's doing an imaginative and commendable job of addressing this with programs like Google Publisher and with its library digitization efforts. But the fact remains that it will be a long time (if ever) before all of the world's information is available online. (Some people, but not me, would even say this is a good thing!)

More interestingly, what about the garbage one sometime's gets out of Google search results? True, a skilled Google researcher who understands operators and is creative with search terms can usually find what is to be found. But Google is meant for casual use, not as a professional tool. Too often good information is buried after pages and pages of garbage search results. Many of these garbage search results are the product of attempts to game the system by practicing the arcane art of SEO ("search engine optimization") and attempting to outwit Google's PageRank algorithm in its current obscure variation. Some of diarrhea of bogus information simply comes from a plethora of new information mediums such as RSS feeds, blogs(!), etc. But whatever the etiology, it doesn't make for a pleasant user experience -- and calls into question how well the PageRank incantation actually works. Why bother with the thousands of search results when nobody looks past the firsty thirty? Is there a way to create an automated algorithm that makes it possible to find real information while discarding the garbage? Can PageRank be saved?

Stay tuned to the Googleplex Blog for my further thoughts, the answers to these questions, and the meaning of life, the universe, and all that!

Caching the Lingerie: Catastrophic Decline and Fall

I have been obsessing about what to get Phyllis for Valentine's day. My thinking is sexy lingerie. Is it OK to still be in love with your wife, and find her hot, after all these years, and three kids later?

Moving on. A few weeks back I wrote about Jared Diamond's book Collapse. I've now finished Collapse, and I find myself distressed by it. Certainly, the specter of our society succumbing to Malthusian and/or ecological disaster is frightening. But I think Collapse is disingenuous: it extrapolates from tiny, fringe societies (Viking Greenland, Henderson Island, Easter Island, and so on) to ours. It is completely clear why these societies catastrophically collapsed. For example, the Vikings in Greenland were dealing with an inhospitable climate without sufficient growing season, and then the climate got even worse. Yeah, maybe if they'd made like the Inuit they might have survived, but then again they might not have.

The much more interesting question to me is why do strong societies and institutions decline? What was the real cause of the fall of the Roman empire? Why do some companies create a culture that thrives, while others go through the motions, become hollow hulks that are "former glories," and eventually hit a catastrophic decline? What makes the Googles of the world Googles, and how long will they go on being Googles? At the opposite end of the spectrum, I used to work for Informix, a company that arguably had the best enterprise database technology. It has long since been swallowed by IBM, and is another tech wreck on the Ozmandius seas of time. What makes the difference?

I don't know the answers, but I want to go on thinking about the harder questions, not the easy questions (like why did a few thousand Norse in Greenland die after the winters got even colder and the ships stopped coming from Europe).

Generally, in a technology context, catastrophic failure results from a concatenation of unintended consequences rather than having a single cause. Most likely, technology failure means that a Wesbite is down, or that your site is generating HTTP 404 errors, not buildings and bridges falling down, or walls of water.

But the consquences are serious enough for the businesses involved, and it is worth thinking about a mindset that avoids problems. If cascading unintended consquences are the proximate causes of most system meltdowns, then the answer is to isolate, and to use mechanisms that provide elegant economy. Make sure that the wave of destruction can't spread too far, and keep things simple and not wasteful, even if it seems like there are resources to burn. (If this seems parallel to the right way to manage a society's ecosystem, that's the idea!)

Caching is a simple mechanism that fits the bill. If you've looked into how Google works, you'll know that the Google document servers make extensive use of caching. This is a straightforward mechanism: it takes less resources to grab a file from the file system than to generate the file. So the first time something(such as a list of search results) is requested, it is cached. Subsequent requests for the same information can use the (cheaper) cached version, provided nothing has changed.

Of course, nothing is ever free, so you have to worry about out of date (but cached) information, and you should think about the cost of caching (admittedly small) if no one ever requests the information again.

To bring this entry back to its beginning, I did a little bit of programming for Phyllis yesterday. She wanted a graphic on her High Risk pregnancy site displaying an estimate of the number of preemies born year-to-date in the US. (You can see what I came up with on the High Risk site.) This is something we care about, because our oldest son, Julian, was a 28-week preemie. Anything we can do to help parents who are in high-risk situations manage their pregnancies, we'd like to do.

The logic behind the numbers on the graphic is dirt simple: Roughly one a minute, time it from the beginning of the year. What I ended up doing was created a PHP program that "reads" the background graphic, and uses a value passed to it as a HTTP GET for display. You could actually call it with arbitrary text, for example, like this.

On the client-side, the Javascript code that generates the URL to the PHP program refreshes every 3 seconds. Off loading the time processing to the client-side takes away burden from our server, but I really wanted to cache the generated graphics. It's hard to see how to do so, since the numerical part of the graphic is constantly changing. This doesn't seem to cause a problem with only a few hits to HighRisk.org, but if there are thousands of hits, or someone malicious, you can see a potential vulnerability that might cause a cascading reaction.

I'll be thinking more in the days to come about how to avoid catastrophic declines. I'll also be thinking about Valentine's Day...

Beyond the Valley of the Google Search Dolls

Why is Internet search so important to Google and the other search engine companies?

Seems like a dumb question, right? Search is important because it is the way to find targeted information on the Web. This importance to users allows search engine companies such as Google to accomplish two things:

In other words, to companies such as Google, search is the feature used to "seduce" users into the Valley of the Dolls, meaning viewing (and hopefully clicking) targeted ads.

But searching is only one way to find things. To use the analogy of finding information in a book, searching is like using the book's index to find something. With both online search and the book's index, the user "runs" a query against a list of keywords. In real life, there are other effective ways to find information in a book: you can inspect the Table of Contents, browse the book, use a third-party concordance that points to information ("Cliff's Notes"), or even read it cover-to-cover, taking notes all the while, creating your own concordance. (See Part III of Building Research Tools with Google for more commentary on index searching as opposed to other information-gathering methodologies.)

With Google's quarterly report yesterday, it is becoming apparent that the Google site will not be as important as a revenue source going into the future. Affiliate revenue (from the AdSense / AdWords programs) is nudging upwards towards 50% of all revenue. In time, it will certainly over take the sponsored-link revenue from Google's own site. While the off-site revenue is dependent on Google's technology, it is not at all dependent on search, or on visitors to the Google home page.

This implies that companies such as Google can no longer define themselves as "search" companies. Not that Google ever has: with its usual accuracy and grandiosity it has more spoken of "information."

One arena Google and the other search engines have already played in is presenting access to information via directories (technically, taxonomies that classify information). This is the correlative of the TOC of a book.

Google uses the Open Directory Project for its raw taxonomic information presented in the Google Directory. (Other search engines such as Yahoo also use the Open Directory info either in whole or part in their directories.)

While the Google Directory is useful for some research purposes (and the Open Directory a good place to list your site if you want search engine coverage), its importance is diminished by the generic and watered-down nature of both the information and its structuring. Ultimately, drilling-down through a taxonomy proves for the most part to be a cumbersome way to find specific information on the Web, although it can be a decent way to get understanding about a general area of interest.

So what lies beyond the Valley of the Search Dolls? Stay tuned to the Googleplex Blog...

Do Google Trees grow to the Google sky?

On the topic of dadiaries, we've had a couple of rough nights at my house. Mathew was up all night last night (with Phyllis) and I was up all night the night before with Nicky. So if this entry seems a little waivering and erratic, well put it down to weariness while blogging, or (to coin a term) "blearging".

Anyway, do Google trees grow to the Google sky? Based on yesterday's quarterly financials from Google, in a word, "Yes." These are stunning results, with q-over-q revenue up 101%. While, of course, trees do not grow to the sky (even if they are Google trees), it is clear that Google's growth will continue at a reckless rate for quite a while. It also seems apparent to me that Google will become the single most important force in advertising full stop in the whole wide world.

The results break down Adsense revenue ($490M) which corresponds to sales from sites not owned by Google (like our very own sponsor, Braintique). This compares to revenue from Google own properties, mainly I suppose www.google.com, of $530M (so a ballpark of fifty-fifty). These are quarterly numbers(!), and there are offseting expenses such as traffic acquisition costs.

But there's no real breakdown of how much of revenue came from selling keyword linked advertising (Adwords) as opposed to other sources (for example, licensing search appliances to the enterprise). My guess is that Adwords is a huge contributor, upwards of 75% - and with both demand and rates growing there's no end in sight.

Dadiaries

If a Mom who blogs about her kids and family writes a momoir, what does a blogging Dad write? It seems clear to me that Dads who write about their kids and families write dadiaries!