Google funniest joke of the year (that I’ve noticed so far)
I just noticed a subtle and really funny Google joke. Look at where on the search results page it tells you how long the search took. They’re screwing around with the units of time (and in some cases substituting actual measures of speed). So far I’ve noticed figures in units of:
- Centibeats
- Microfortnights
- Microweeks
- Nanocenturies
- “The velocity of an unladen swallow”
- Planck times
- Shakes of a lamb’s tail
- Warp (Star Trek, of course)
- Centons (Battlestar Galactica)
- Parsecs (a unit of time in Star Wars Episode IV 🙂 )
- Jiffies
- Skidoo (23.00 skidoo, to be precise)
- Gigawatts (pretty hard to explain how that’s a unit of time or velocity)
- Epochs (one precise figure was 1.25e-15 epochs)
- Hertz
- Femtogalactic years
I haven’t tried to check or estimate the conversion factors used.
Related links
- 2010 April Fool’s Day highlights
- My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
- A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
- My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day
- Google Operating System with more on Google’s 2010 April Fool’s jokes.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor | Leave a Comment |
April Fool’s Day highlights
It’s April 1, and hence time for jests, online or otherwise. Highlights this year include:
- In a charming blog post, Google annoucned the new Android Translate For Animals feature.
- Reddit has apparently made every user an administrator, throwing the whole site –or at least the Reddit hot stories list — into chaos.
- A video depicts icons falling off of an iPhone onto a table.
- Firetoys, Ltd., whoever they are, are promoting a Back To The Future style hoverboard. I want one!
Edit: And more being added as I find them:
Related links
- My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
- A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
- My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Social software and online media | 3 Comments |
Google’s version of an old joke
Search Google for “recursion” and it helpfully offers a link to let you search on — you guessed it — “recursion.” The joke has been implemented in German as well.
This idea is not, to put it mildly, new. I first saw the definition
Recursion: See recursion
in the glossary to Intellicorp’s KEE documentation, in 1984 or so. And I’d guess the joke is actually a lot older than that.
For another variation of the same idea, see this link.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
A new attitude toward online reputation?
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch stirred the post today with a post titled Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. The premise is:
- Embarrassing stuff about anybody can be found.
- Deal with it.
- If there’s embarrassing stuff about EVERYBODY out there, maybe our societal norms will loosen up and get more tolerant.
If anything, Arrington understated the case, by focusing on two kinds of disclosure:
- Specific pieces of information such as photographs, which were originally gathered in a well-intentioned way.
- Anonymous “reviews” — e.g., like those on Yelp, but soon about specific people as well.
That overlooks two other threats:
- Data aggregration or other technologically-advanced snooping used against one.
- Amateur, private-eye-like stakeouts, as cameras and other surveillance equipment get cheaper, and online publication becomes bone-simple.
I.e., Arrington was even more correct than he seemed to realize.
Fred Wilson responded by suggesting that the key issue is making sure that enough good things are said about you to more than compensate for the bad ones. I emphatically agree with that too, as per my 2008 online reputation dictum:
The internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too.
Where Wilson fell down a bit is in suggesting that you should get so many good things said about you they should completely crowd the bad ones off the top page of search engine results. First, this is difficult. Second and more important, if somebody is checking you out for a job or whatever, there’s a good chance they’ll click through to the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). But otherwise his thoughts are spot-on.
To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everybody is a celebrity for 15 minutes, or to an audience of 15 other people. And for many of us, you can tack a few 0s onto those figures. So there’s no reason to expect any more privacy than celebrities have — but there’s also no reason to expect any less tolerance for our failings than is shown to them.
Related links
Data marts in the world of text
CMS/search (Content Management System) expert Alan Pelz-Sharpe recently decried “Shadow IT”, by which he seems to mean departmental proliferation of data stores outside the control of the IT department. In other words, he’s talking about data marts, only for documents rather than tabular data.
Notwithstanding the manifest virtues of centralization, there are numerous reasons you might want data marts, in the tabular and document worlds alike. For example:
- Price/performance. Your main/central data manager might be too expensive to support additional large specialized databases. Or different databases and applications might have sufficiently different profiles so as to get great price/performance from different kinds of data managers. This is particularly prevalent in the relational world, where each of column stores, sequentially-oriented row stores, and random I/O-oriented row stores have compelling use cases.
- Different SLAs (Service-Level Agreements). Similarly, different applications may have very different requirements for uptime, response time, and the like. (In the relational world, think of operational data stores.)
- Different security requirements. Different subsets of the data may need different levels of security. This is particularly prevalent in the document world, where security problems are not as well-solved as in the tabular arena, and where it’s common for a search engine to index across different corpuses with radically different levels of sensitivity.
- Integrated application and user interfaces. In the relational world, there’s a pretty clean separation between data management and interface logic; most serious business intelligence tools can talk to most DBMS. The document world is quite different. Some search engines bundle, for example, various kinds of faceted or parameterized search interfaces. What’s more, in public-facing search, a major differentiator is the facilities that the product offers for skewing search results.
- Different text applications require different thesauruses or taxonomy management systems. Ideally, those should all be integrated — but the requisite technology still doesn’t exist.
Bottom line: Text data marts, much like relational data marts, are almost surely here to stay.
Related link
| Categories: Enterprise search, Ontologies, Search engines, Specialized search, Structured search | 2 Comments |
Google declares total war on Microsoft
Google blogged Tuesday night about a new project, the Google Chrome Operating System. Highlights include:
- Open source
- Targeted to appear in netbooks in the second half of 2010
- Google Chrome browser + new windowing system + Linux kernel
- Minimal user interface
- Data stored or at least backed up in the cloud, and hence available on any computer
- Hardware compatibility hassles allegedly eliminated
- Ditto for software update hassles
- Ditto for security problems
- Apps apparently assumed to run inside the browser. (Not clear if this is required or just recommended.)
Obviously, Google Chrome OS is a direct attack on Microsoft — even more so than Google Wave, which I’ve predicted will “play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more,” or for that matter than Google Mail and the rest of Google Apps. Taken together, Google’s initiatives suggest that an all-out Google-Microsoft war is coming, in a conflict that many people have been expecting — and analyzing — for years.
So how will this all shake out? Well, let’s start with some basic points:
- Google Chrome OS Release 1 is expected over a year from now, and then only on a limited subset of PCs, namely netbooks.
- Google Chrome OS Release 1 is supposed to have great performance and be bullet-proof. Hmm …
- Google is evidently assuming that the apps people want to run will either be browser-based, or else be new ones written for Chrome OS. Hmm …
- Google is signaling that Chrome OS will be very limited in features. That makes sense for Release 1 — but what will be missing?
- Consumers have proven their willingness to buy non-Microsoft computers, especially Apple ones, specifically in the Mac and iPhone/iTouch product lines.
- A lot of people would have compatibility issues replacing Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint with partially-compatible alternatives. I’m not so sure about Microsoft Word, however. Other than those three, Outlook, and the Windows family itself, I’m not aware of any Microsoft client products that have much lock-in. (Well, maybe Xbox, but that’s not in the main stack.)
- Open source software often gets most of its community support in a couple of areas, namely compatibilities and language translation. Google probably doesn’t need the help in languages, but letting other people fix Chrome OS compatibility issues whose importance it didn’t recognize is potentially valuable.
- Google probably won’t make any direct revenue from Chrome OS. So how much will it invest in the project?
- Notwithstanding Danny Sullivan’s concern, there isn’t much of an antitrust issue here. Google’s search can’t easily be used to favor Chrome, Chrome OS, or Google Apps. And the other way around — e.g., using Chrome OS to favor search — Google clearly isn’t a monopolist.
| Categories: Google, Microsoft, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 10 Comments |
MEN ARE FROM EARTH, COMPUTERS ARE FROM VULCAN
The newsletter/column excerpted below was originally published in 1998. Some of the specific references are obviously very dated. But the general points about the requirements for successful natural language computer interfaces still hold true. Less progress has been made in the intervening decade-plus than I would have hoped, but some recent efforts — especially in the area of search-over-business-intelligence — are at least mildly encouraging. Emphasis added.
Natural language computer interfaces were introduced commercially about 15 years ago*. They failed miserably.
*I.e., the early 1980s
For example, Artificial Intelligence Corporation’s Intellect was a natural language DBMS query/reporting/charting tool. It was actually a pretty good product. But it’s infamous among industry insiders as the product for which IBM, in one of its first software licensing deals, got about 1700 trial installations — and less than a 1% sales close rate. Even its successor, Linguistic Technologies’ English Wizard*, doesn’t seem to be attracting many customers, despite consistently good product reviews.
*These days (i.e., in 2009) it’s owned by Progress and called EasyAsk. It still doesn’t seem to be selling well.
Another example was HAL, the natural language command interface to 1-2-3. HAL is the product that first made Bill Gross (subsequently the founder of Knowledge Adventure and idealab!) and his brother Larry famous. However, it achieved no success*, and was quickly dropped from Lotus’ product line.
*I loved the product personally. But I was sadly alone.
In retrospect, it’s obvious why natural language interfaces failed. First of all, they offered little advantage over the forms-and-menus paradigm that dominated enterprise computing in both the online-character-based and client-server-GUI eras. If you couldn’t meet an application need with forms and menus, you couldn’t meet it with natural language either. Read more
| Categories: BI integration, IBM and UIMA, Language recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Progress and EasyAsk, Search engines, Speech recognition | 3 Comments |
Google Wave — finally a Microsoft killer?
Google held a superbly-received preview of a new technology called Google Wave, which promises to “reinvent communication.” In simplest terms, Google Wave is a software platform that:
- Offers the possibility to improve upon a broad range of communication, collaboration, and/or text-based product categories, such as:
- Search
- Word processing
- Instant messaging
- Microblogging
- Blogging
- Mini-portals (Facebook-style)
- Mini-portals (Sharepoint-style)
- In particular, allows these applications to be both much more integrated and interactive than they now are.
- Will have open developer APIs.
- WIll be open-sourced.
If this all works out, Google Wave could play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more.
I suspect it will.
And by the way, there’s a cool “natural language” angle as well. Read more
| Categories: Google, Language recognition, Microblogging, Microsoft, Natural language processing (NLP), Search engines, Social software and online media, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 3 Comments |
TechCrunch offers to pay a source’s legal expenses
A recent TechCrunch post recapitulates its dispute with CBS and Last.fm, reiterates its confidence in its accusations, and closes with
And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.
That’s a remarkable offer to make, one that is very rare for traditional media to match. As such, it’s a strong (albeit very partial) answer to the ongoing handwringing about the future of investigative journalism. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Online media, Social software and online media | 7 Comments |
Monetization strategies for the New York Times
In his remarks about my recent post that he aptly characterizes as “A Consumer-Centric View of Business Models for Publishing,” Daniel Tunkelang notes that I didn’t directly address the premium/freemium strategy he favors for the New York Times, namely monetizing community. As Daniel puts it,
But community can’t be copied. Even if you mirrored all of this blog’s content and put someone else’s name on it, the comment threads would still live here. You could copy those too, but only the readers who came here could participate in the conversation, and I believe that would still draw most of you.
Frankly, I don’t think that would work. Good blog commenters are precious, generously donating their own time and thought to build up your content. Could one charge people to read that? Maybe. But charging people to write great content for you seems like one barrier too many, and I’m not sure how to charge them to read without also charging them to write. That said, various forums (i.e., message boards) offer premium forums, so at least for some lifestyle business owners the approach seems to be worth pursuing.
Other strategies to consider include: Read more
| Categories: Online media, Social software and online media | 6 Comments |