The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

Easy Travel to Mars

It can sometimes be problematic finding your way around this turbulent, overcrowded earth. But if you have access to Google, it's now easy to explore Mars.

Google Mars provides elevation maps (showing altitude in relief), satellite photos created using a mosaic of visible light images, and views created with a mosaic of infrared photography. As with Google Earth, you can zoom in and out and navigate across the various views.

Other features are almost too numerous to list. You can browse links that list the regions of Mars, show you where spacecraft have landed, or that are the subject of stories about Mars. As an example of a story, here's the so-called face of the man on Mars. Unfortunately, "story" means a scientific account about a feature, not the wonderful Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars fantasies beloved in my youth, nor even Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy describing a terra-formed planet.

Using any of the three view modes, you can search the surface of Mars for mountains, canyons, dunes, plains, ridges, and craters. For example, here's the elevation map of the Burroughs crater, named after my hero, pulp fantasy writer Edgar R. He got a crater named after him that is a whopping 78 miles across. Where's Tarzan, or John Carter of Mars, when you need them?

All this is very cool. Very cool indeed. If you have too much time on your hands, go check it out right away.

Putting together these images, which are credited to NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and Arizona State University was undoubtedly—as the About Google Mars page states—a great deal of fun, as well as real work.

But Google Mars inevitably raises the question, what is the point? I'm thinking that Google wants to lock-in its first-mover advantage for local search ads prior to the colonization of the red planet.

How Is a Honda Element Like a Platypus?

On our way to drop Julian off at school, Julian notices a new billboard that asks the question

What does a Honda Element and a platypus have in common?

Julian is now reading omnivorously, kind of like a platypus, whose food (not reading) diet consists of platypus insect larvae, snails, yabbies, worms, tadpoles and other fauna and shellfish.

Platypi also occasionally eat small frogs, small fish and fish eggs. Yes, "platypi" is a valid plural of platypus, along with "platypuses." A "yabby" is a kind of Australian crayfish.

To get back to my story, like any newly literate second grader, Julian has to read the advertising gambit about the Honda Element and the Platypus over and over again to us.

Julian also notices that the billboard says that if we tune to a certain AM radio frequency (AM 1660 I think) we will get the answer to the Element-Platypus conundrum.

So we dutifully tune our rather powerful car radio to AM 1660 and get nothing, nada, zippo. No signal at the specified frequency.

Julian, who likes order in life even though he knows it often doesn't exist, is upset. We are bemused: how like old-school Madison Avenue to buy an expensive ad placement that doesn't deliver to prospects. What's the point of the billboard if the "call to action" is a dud? How can this possibly compete with the efficiency to advertisers and ease of process of CPC advertising?

"Don't worry," I say to Julian, "I'll Google it and find out how an Element is like a platypus."

Interestingly, when I do Google Honda Element platypus, I don't find what I'm looking for at the top of the natural search results. Instead, I get a bunch of advertising trade rags boasting about how clever an ad campaign the Honda Element and platypus routine is.

Maybe it is a clever campaign if you make your living from brick-and-mortar ad commissions, or if your goal in life is to have your buddies in the ad business think you are swell. But if the goal is to both target a market and to deliver a message, then the Honda Element platypus ads should be on the endangered species list.

According to the Madison Ave accounts of the ads, the radio station is supposed to broadcast a cocktail party conversation between the Honda and the platypus.

But none of these articles tell me the actual content of the cocktail banter. To find out, I needed to visit the Element and Friends site Honda set up.

Fortunately, a CPC ad displayed by Google along side my search results directs me to the right site.

The campaign may not have been such a good idea period as a way to stop the sinking Honda Element sales from further deteriorating. But if it was to exist at all, it should have been online, and highly targeted using CPC—where a call to action can readily be pursued.

It may be a little anticlimactic, but after all this you'd probably like to know what the car and the animal do have in common.

Both the Element and the platypus are "hodgepodges": the car is "part van, part suv, part surf wagon," while the beast has the "bill of a duck and the tail of a beaver."

I can think of a few other commonalties myself: both have numbers that are on the decline, and both are peculiar looking to the point of ugliness. Well, maybe not to the parents of platypi.

Private Wikis As Knowledge Management Systems

Recently in The Commune and the Scholar I wrote about the conflict between communal information repositories (such as the Wikipedia) and the distinctive voice of lone authority.

Several readers have pointed out that Wikis are just as useful-if not more so-in private contexts as they are as general sources like the excellent Wikipedia.

Many companies and institutions-from entire enterprises to small workgroups-have replaced complex Knowledge Management Systems with wikis. Wikis can also be used to help share knowledge across organizations. For example, a publisher I work with has organized a wiki to benefit all the contributors to a specific series of books that share the same resources, vocabulary, and ideas.

What are the advantages, and what are the dangers, with private wikis?

Very much on the plus side: Private wikis can cut through bureaucracy, and make it easier for people to share information.

On the downside, with a wiki you may not know who has contributed what, and with what degree of authority?leading to possible confusion and delay. This is essentially the same problem as with public wikis, and can be mitigated in the same fashion that Wikipedia has used: openness about issues and process, and clarity about roles, reviews, and responsibility. Still, a reasonably sane corporate denizen would be wise not to accept private wiki information as gospel without understanding its source-and where the source fits into the institutional zeitgeist.

A related private wiki issue is ease of use. If knowledge workers find it difficult or time consuming to use a wiki, they won't-and it will lose utility as a knowledge management system. This implies that institutions may find it worthwhile to go with licensed wiki software such as Socialtext, or to use a consultancy specializing in wiki knowledge management systems, rather than going it alone with open source wiki infrastructure.

More important than choice of software or software implementer, any institution establishing a private wiki should establish an initial team tasked with clearing potholes out of the way and training users. Otherwise, the private wiki will likely only see marginal use-and the goal of creating less hierarchical knowledge management will fail.

The Commune and the Scholar

Everybody who uses the web-whether for fun, research, or profit-knows that much of the best content on the web is supplied by the community. This content is created in myriad ways-but is communal, usually not for profit (other than AdSense revenue!), and usually posted with the barest minimum of structure, verification and oversight.

The jeremiads of bloggers rise to the heavens but provide some useful insights.

Profiles on MySpace are the kind of superficial self portraits you'd expect of teens on the make?but can also show wonderful creativity and expressiveness.

Photographs posted to Flickr can be insipid not-quite-in-focus family album affairs-but also can rival or surpass the work of the best professional digital photographers.

Closer to the core of the web, open source software initiatives like Linux and Apache and others hosted by SourceForge provide the technical know-how that keeps the engines turning (and prevents private enterprise from consuming the commune).

Communal forums like LinuxWorld, SlashDot and WebMasterWorld provide the discussion and descriptive glosses that make it possible for all the moving parts of the web's technology to work together.

Taxonomies like the Open Directory Project (ODP) provide structure to search engines like Google and Yahoo. (The ODP is not really communal, but it is noncommercial, provides its data to everyone, and works because of the efforts of volunteer editors.)

Wikis are communal by definition. Commune-based wikis, particularly the Wikipedia, provide information repositories that are unmatched in scope (and in the number of contributors) while avoiding any kind of hierarchical information verification.

Everything, however, is not perfect in this paradise of communes. The major problems with information communes are that they are easy to manipulate or corrupt, and that it is hard to evaluate the reliability of the information contained in communal repositories.

These are not new accusations to hurl at demotic levelers of information barriers. No doubt the priests who could write elegant Latin said much the same kinds of things when Gutenberg produced his first printing press. But they are troubling all the same.

It is easy to manipulate ODP listings and Wikipedia articles to improve natural search engine rankings, and these are standard techniques in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) toolbox. When the stakes become large enough, anything is corruptible, and there have been serious claims that ODP listings are paid for with bribes (because they can be used to enhance a website's status in search engines such as Google).

More interesting philosophically is the accuracy of information found in communal repositories. A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times poses this question, asking how does the accuracy of the Wikipedia compare with the accuracy of the information found in a vetted publication such as the Encyclopedia Britannica?

The answer, of course, is that comparative accuracy depends on many variables.

Before I discuss some of these variables, I need to point out that the wise consumer regards all received information with some skepticism, suspecting that the inherent bias of the purveyor may well color what is presented even if the bias is not intentional. (Here's some more information about how to evaluate the credibility of web pages.)

It's true that the situation is probably more extreme on the web than off it, but information bias is a universal. Even casual researchers need to understand some of the techniques used to evaluate the veracity of information found on and off the web: context, consistency, professionalism of presentation, plausibility, the reputation of the information provider, the verification process (if any), and the apparent motivation of the information provider.

In my opinion, there are manifest instances of information bias in the Big Red Barn and Dr. Seuss-and techniques for evaluating the veracity of information should be taught starting in first grade. Seriously. And it has some bearing on the situation, and is not entirely trivial, that I found the Wikipedia article about Dr. Seuss the best, most objective, and least commercial site to provide a link for more information about this children's book author (above).

Leaving first grade behind, would you rather read an article about elementary physics prepared by 1,000 anonymous members of the hive on Wikipedia, or one written by Albert Einstein for the Encyclopedia Britannica, and scrupulously edited by professionals?

This is kind of an apples and oranges comparison. I sure have more respect for Einstein's intellect than even for, well, a googol of anonymous intellects that have contributed to the hive. Einstein obviously will know his elementary physics, and furthermore will have insights to impart about how to think about physics.

On the other hand, the 1,000 hive contributors will get elementary physics right, too. By the time these folk have been back and forth over each other's work, the finished article is likely to be as accurate as something subject to the most rigorous professional review. There isn't likely to be much bias left after 1,000 people have been over it. There may not be much flavor either.

This highlights an important point: articles in the Wikipedia that cover a topic of fairly wide general interest are likely to be thorough and unbiased. But more narrowly-focused topics are often written by one or two people with an ax to grind, may be biased, and may contain faulty information (or even outright fabrications).

The more technical and arcane you get, the more likely it is that there are only a handful of people who really understand the topic. This line of thinking implies that communal-process information mechanisms like the Wikipedia are less likely to produce good information on cutting-edge scholarly and scientific topics?and more likely to be good sources of information for topics at the general college level (and below).

Going back to Einstein, Einstein is not going to get his facts wrong, and will probably have an interesting viewpoint about physics (even elementary physics). But that self-same "interesting viewpoint" can also be called "bias." In fact, it's common for the very best scientists and researchers to be extremely opinionated in their areas of expertise (and a gosh darn good thing too!).

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, asserts that this issue is not about comparing the accuracy of information derived from a communal process with the accuracy of information from a lone distinguished, professional contributor. Rather, Wales opines, it's about the conflict between two vetting systems. The communal wiki process, according to Wales, involves unending scrutiny whereas a professional review process like that of the Encyclopedia Britannica is flimsy: in the future "people will say, 'This was written by one person? Then looked at by only two or three other people? How can I trust that process?'"

To its great credit, the Wikipedia has been open about problems with accuracy, methodology, fraud, and group process. In fact, these things are discussed ad nauseum as part of the Wikipedia (see the Wikipedia Community Portal for details).

Wales is right that from a philosophic viewpoint that the stakes are high, and that the process of individual signed contribution is on a collision path with anonymous communal information gathering. He's wrong to assume that the commune is always right.

[Thanks to Martin Davis and Phyllis Davis for reviewing this piece; the opinions and flaws, of course, are mine, all mine.]

As the Manichean Google Worm Turns

I have always been a Google agnostic. I don't love Google, and I don't hate Google. I think Google is a company with good and bad, like most companies, institutions, and human beings.

My picture of most "companies, institutions, and human beings"-and this is very transparent with my kids-is that an angel sits on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Sometimes the angel wins, and sometimes the devil wins.

Google cooperates with the Chinese government to censor Internet access in China. Chalk up one to the devil. On this story, you may laugh or cry when you read about Bill Gates taking the unusual step of praising the competition and Google's censorship in China as preventing more censorship overall. George Orwell, where are you when we need you?

Google resists turning over search records to the U.S. government when its competitors roll over and play dead-and don't give a fig for the privacy of their customers. This time it's three cheers for the Google angel!

On the good side of the ledger, I am very, very impressed with Google's technology prowess and business acumen. Besides personally using Google's search all the time, as the author of two books about using Google's technology, I am professionally grateful to the company. (The books are Google Advertising Tools and Building Research Tools with Google.)

However, I've been bemused for a long time about the free pass Google has got from the technology community (and media) for behavior that would have been critiqued soundly in any other company. (See, for example, my Do no evil? from August 2005.)

Any big business that enjoins on its Investor Relations pages "don't be evil" is riding for a fall. By the way, Google's famous-or infamous-"don't be evil" motto ties in nicely with my devil and angel Google analogy. Both "don't be evil" as a world view and the devil-angel dichotomy are representative of a black-and-white Manichean outlook. Google's more recent Corporate Philosophy statement has hedged "don't be evil" a bit by replacing the notorious too-good-to-be-true aphorism with the declaration that you can make money without doing evil.

Now the Google worm has begun to turn, and the company that could do no wrong can do little right in some quarters. For example, check out Danny Sullivan's 25 Things I Hate About Google on SearchEngineWatch. Danny also loves Google, so I think he buys into the dichotomous Manichean Google worm world view, too.

Power Tends to Corrupt and Google Power Corrupts Abso-Googly

Google the term google and you won't find any ads containing "google" (or "Google"). In fact, "google" is one of the few terms you can search for on Google that produces absolutely no ad results. (A total aside: finding search queries that yield no ads could become another form of Google whacking.)

As you likely know, the results you see when you do a Google search are divided into "natural" links-the supposedly objective links the search engine comes up with in response to your query-and "sponsored" links, which are paid advertisements.

Sponsored links (does an ad by any other name smell fairer?) are clearly labeled as such (in very small type) and appear both above and to the right of the natural search results.

Google makes its very nice living on these sponsored links, a/k/a ads. These ads are placed using the Google AdWords mechanism. (Besides appearing in search results, Google's ads also show up on websites that have enrolled in the Google AdSense program.)

Anyone with a valid credit card can place an AdWords ad-although, of course, Google makes more money from its large advertisers than from its "two-buck chucks."

When you place an ad via AdWords, the system automatically checks the ad text for violations of the Google rules (click here for the lawyerly text of the terms and conditions).

The automated check includes an attempt to weed out copyrighted or trademarked terms.

If your ad is rejected by the software, you can request an exception-but don't expect a response with anything other than a boilerplate reiteration of the rejection.

Google is particularly strict about reserving the term "google". Oddly enough, "AdSense" and "AdWords" are both fair game. Well, perhaps not oddly because Google makes mucho dinaros off selling ads against these terms.

Case in point: a recent attempt by the publisher of my new book Google Advertising Tools to place an AdWords ad using the book's title.

I think this is pretty clearly a legitimate usage of "Google". (The book's copyright page does include the standard notice that Google is a trademark of Google Technology, Inc.)

The ad was rejected, and the reasoned request for an exemption signed by a marketing manager at the publisher was also rejected in boilerplate, reiterative fashion.

Of course, Google has every right to protect its valuable name. However, Google exercises great power over our virtual lives. Sometimes in arbitrary and capricious ways.

It continues to trouble me that this absolute power can be exercised without any effective appellate mechanism.

Buyer Beware, Indeed!

In a recent story, I noted that Craigslist is being sued to comply with the same Federal Fair Housing regulations that apply to newspaper classified ads.

According to a recent front page New York Times article, real estate transactions in which buyers have never seen the property have become increasingly common on the Internet, particularly on eBay.

It should come as no surprise that a great many of these sales are fraudulent. Any buyer of a house or land who does not at least view the property prior to buying it is an idiot (it is hard to put it any more kindly). That there are buyers foolish enough to proceed in this fashion is, in fact, a symptom of an overheated market in real estate (even with the slight cooling down in the housing market this year, things are still a bit frothy).

That said, these cases of outright fraud raise issues similar to the Craigslist lawsuit. eBay, and others, simply cannot go on abdicating responsibility for online transactions consummated on their sites. Ultimately, there will be a backlash.

If you stick to rummage sale items, it's reasonable to assume the same level of responsibility that you would find at a yard sale: once you walk away with your purchase there is no recourse.

But real estate is not a dusty tchotchke from your parent's attic. High ticket items lead to real damage, and to legal recourse.

Furthermore, most jurisdictions provide fairly thorough legal protections for buyers in real estate transactions in the off-line world. Both from a moral and a legal viewpoint, eBay will have to find a way to incorporate these protections into its workflow when real estate is involved—or surrender this potential portion of the online transactions market to the fraudsters.

Making Money with Photoblogging

Recently I was interviewed by Wired News on the subject of how possible it is to make a living as a blogger. The interview was in connection with my new book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs.

The Wired interview focused on the general question of whether one can make a living using AdSense from web content. (For details about working with Google's AdSense, see my book.)

Right here and now I plan to tackle a subset of the large question the Wired interview (and my book) tackle. The subset is how to make money with a photography blog. I happen to be highly qualified to share information about this because I create the successful Photoblog 2.0.

Photoblogging happens to be particularly interesting to me, not only because of my passion for digital photography, but also because traditional professional photographers have neglected it as an approach to supplementing their income. As such, it has some real benefits over (for example) creating photography for stock purposes: you get to create whatever photographs please you, as long as your content pleases or interests others. Your blog can be as good or as bad as you make it; no one tells you what or how to photograph.

Of course, I wouldn't be about to give my "secret sauce" away if I thought there really were a secret sauce. But there isn't. You won't make money without worthwhile content. And the fundamental rules still apply.

So let's step back for a second and examine what makes content "worthwhile"—and explore the fundamental rules of making money with web content.

I don't think it would be possible to create a winning photoblog without a genuine interest and passion for the subject. So this interest and passion is a starting place.

The first rule of web monetization is that traffic translates into revenue. If you have enough visitors to your site, some of them will click on the AdSense ads on your pages, and make money for you. There's essentially a formula here: you get so much (on average) for each 1,000 site visitors.

The second rule is that worthwhile content translates into traffic. In the case of a photoblog, you'd better have great photos. "Great" is in the eye of the beholder and may be iconic, ironic, or narration rather than pretty. Check out my Photoblog 2.0 and see for yourself whether my photos have this kind of "worth."

Worthwhile content probably also means words as well as photos. For example, here's a link to the Photoshop Techniques section of my Photoblog 2.0. The draw here is that readers can find detailed how-to information that they could otherwise only learn from books or workshops.

The third rule is that some content is "more equal" than other content. Basically, advertisers bid against keywords, and you are paid when visitors click on your photoblog on ads placed on the basis of these keywords. Think for a moment about what keywords are going to be most valuable to advertisers. It's either going to be something with a very high potential value for a single customer acquisition, or something where advertisers might expect that some click-throughs translate into immediate sales.

An example of the high potential value keyword is any content related to high-profile litigation where lawyers are looking for plaintiffs. Think mesothelioma (and note all the ads on Google's search pages when you search for this term by clicking my link; each of these ads can be worth as much as $20 per click to content providers).

It's a little more useful to a photography blogger to realize that a great deal of photography hardware is purchased online. If you can discuss cameras and lenses without perverting your content, you are likely to attract some fairly lucrative advertising.

The fourth rule is that on the web community rules. It's essential if you want to generate quality traffic to become involved with your photography blog in something bigger than yourself whether it is a photoblog ring, or a community of passionate photographers such as Flickr.

Here are the four rules you need to follow to create income from your photography blog put more succinctly:

1. You have to figure out how to draw traffic (see my book for some tips)
2. You have to provide passionate photos and worthwhile (or interesting) text
3. Your blog will make more money if it has some references to photographic hardware
4. You should become an active member of web photography communities

More briefly still: traffic + content + community = $$$.

Should Craigslist Be Treated Like a Newspaper?

Here in the Bay area we use Craigslist for everything: finding jobs, apartments, and caregivers for our kids, buying and selling furniture and cars, and meeting that special someone. Craigslist is essentially a community site for San Francisco (and other areas). An ad can be flagged by other users as offensive, and removed by the Craigslist powers-that-be for violating the terms of use that they’ve established, but for the most part you can post any advertisement you want.

In effect, this means that ads can be clearer about what is really on an advertiser’s mind (even if this offends some people). For example, if you want (or don’t want) a gay roommate or a roommate from Texas, you can say so plainly.

Now a Chicago fair housing group has sued Craigslist for allegedly publishing discriminatory advertisements in violation of Federal Fair Housing legislation.

It’s pretty clear that some of the backing for this lawsuit comes from newspapers, whose classified revenues have been decimated by Craigslist. With the legal system you never know, but for the most part websites have been treated as distributors rather than publishers, meaning Craigslist cannot be held responsible for the “community” content placed on its site (just as a newsstand owner, or library, is not responsible for the content of a newspaper). This view is supported by some of the provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. (Did Orwell name this statute?) These provisions so far have stood up in court.

This conflict cuts to the heart of the communal nature of the web. Obviously, Craiglist is not the only company pleading that it doesn’t have responsibility. To a great extent, eBay leaves policing up to its community. Even Google abjures most responsibility for AdWords content. (Just try complaining to Google that you clicked on a scam link in a Google ad.)

I believe that Craigslist, eBay, and even Google couldn’t exist if they had to take legal responsibility for the content they present in the same way as “brick and mortar” publications do. Since I want my Craigslist, eBay, and Google, I don’t want this to happen. And I don’t think it will anytime soon. The specific lawsuit against Craigslist is a vain attempt to hold back the tide. Even King Canute couldn’t do that!