Webnomena

I recently discovered that Google shows Life Expectancy graphs for many countries around the globe.

I assumed a big gap between the developed and the third world countries in their average life expectancy,  the data did confirm my assumption, but it become way more apparent when I actually saw it using Google graph.

In Japan, the country with the highest average longevity in the world, based on the World Bank, World Development Indicators data, people lives up to 83 years old.

On the other end of the world, in Afghanistan, the average life expectancy is only 44 years.

ALMOST HALF!

It is also very interesting to see the growth rate. In Japan LE grew from 68 to 83 during the years 1960-2008 (~22%) whereas in Afghanistan, LE grew from 31 to 44(~41%) during the same period. Yet, I as you can see from the graph above it is harder to add more years as the average grows.

It is important to monitor the growth rate for each country, as an indicator for improving health condition in each region.

Here is another picture showing more countries and their corresponding Life Expectancy graphs:

Here you can see a huge growth for China during the 60th, and sadly, a huge drop for some troubled areas in Africa mainly due to HIV/AIDS infections. – some hope here.

Finally, average life expectancy does not seem to be totally correlated with financial success as you can see in the next picture for Iceland and Greece two recently troubled economies.

Probably beyond initial crucial conditions, other factors like work life balance, health care system, crime rate, dining habit, and others contribute to the health of the entire population increasing the average life expectancy.

Other source of Life Expectancy data is Wikipedia – List of countries by life expectancy. This page shows data for the years 2005-2010 and the country with the lowest LE average is Swaziland with 39.6 years.

The world is getting more flat over time, but there are still huge gaps between different regions in the world due to lack of basic human needs.

Do we have a Science Fiction imagination shortage? Can we ever be surprised by a new digital gadget again?

I watched Knight and Day movie the other day, it was funny and Cameron Diaz did a nice job. What that caught my attention in this movie was seeing Tom Cruise using a cell phone that looked very much like an iPhone running some sort of location based application to track the bad guys. I believe that few years ago it would’ve looked like a cool futuristic capability, yet these days I found that scene to be as fascinating as someone cooking food using his/her microwave. Actually, this scene got me thinking about the current gap between visionary and fantasy movies. I know that Knight and Day is not considered a Sci-Fi move or a gadget packed film, it is actually a comedy. Yet, seeing an iPhone in a an action movie a la James Bond style (even though that it is a comedy) was enough to trigger my thoughts about where we are in the technology world and this post.

What that also happened during that movie trip is seeing the preview of a new DiCaprio film Inception. This movie is considered a Sci-Fi movie (by IMDB – see next to Genre), but I disagree with that categorization. I can live with smart robots, doctors replacing human body parts with machines, the big brother (no more privacy), and even a trip to space that involved meeting aliens, but, for now, I have hard time making the leap to someone getting inside someone else’s brain, dreams, or people going back in time. I don’t have problem enjoying such a movie, I just don’t see the existing technology even to start supporting this kind of capabilities.

Over the years we saw movies that introduced technology that did not exist yet, but was somehow on the near to mid-term roadmap. These movies actually helped to inspire inventors to build that technology a little later, including smart computers, robots, phone, location based services, touch screens, real-time video streaming,and more. Today, in a movie like Inception I can’t see the next few steps ahead between what that we have now and what that is presented in the movie. Someone could say that Inception is 30, 40, or more steps ahead, and maybe this is true, but for now, it seems more like fantasy to me. I would like to see in a Sci-Fi movie the world 10 to 20 years from now. I would like to see the next generation of scientist inspired by the creative power of Hollywood.

One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that we are maybe getting closer to the point where the digital world has run its course and we need to look for the next thing in other places. The first transistor was invented in 1947 and since then we experienced the digital revolution in almost every part of our lives: communication, commerce, finance, news, entertainment, education, science, politics, transportation, dining and more. Maybe this process is near its ending. At least in modern countries. It could be just a temporary halt and we are about to be surprised with something totally new. Btw, I’m yet to find a good reason for owning an iPad:)

Where to look for the next thing?  PCR was invented in the early Seventies, mapping of the Human Genome was accomplished between 2000-2003, and recently J. Craig Venter Institute announce the construction of the first Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell. This seems like the beginning of a new revolution to me with potential products on the mid term road-map (average life expectancy over 100 years).

To be fair to Hollywood, most movies that involved biological Sci-Fi where too scary or depressing to watch(Twelve Monkeys, I Am Legend).

What was your experience watching a recent Sci-Fi movie?

Picture credit: Lara604

Google’s search engine is the 21st infrastructure.

Search is infrastructure

When we think about infrastructure on a large scale we think about roads, train tracks, ports, and utilities – all things that are essential to the smooth running of our economy. Online searching has become so essential to our lives today that I think that we should add it to the traditional world infrastructure list.

Building and maintaining a search engine is so expensive and labor intensive that it requires the same kind of planning and upkeep that, say, the Golden Gate Bridge does.

I see two similarities between traditional infrastructure and search engines. The first is that a search engine is a mission critical system. The second is because the cost required for building and maintaining a good search engine is enormous—just as the costs are for ports, railroad tracks, and the electrical grid.

Mission critical system

Can you imagine a week without Google? Think for a moment how many times a day you use a search engine for a task. Life would be much harder without it. We are using a search engine to find a place, a person or a job. It is the same case when looking for information about a disease, a company or a product. Modern search engines also help to find directions, contact info, stock quotes and innumerable other things. I can’t think of a day without using a search engine (mostly Google but others too). Metaphorically search engines take us from one place to another (like planes, trains and boats), and if well designed and maintained they can save us an enormous amount of time and energy. But if that is not the case, they can be a big waste of time!

The mighty task

The web is big and expanding. In February of 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites (not pages). In March of 2009 (only two years later) the number had more than doubled, to 224,749,695. The number of web pages is more accurate than the number of websites but I think that the numbers above tell us enough about the size of the web.

New blogs are popping up every day, and blogs can post in some cases multiple times a day. With the recent introduction of microblogging services like Twitter and other personal life streaming tools, content is growing even more rapidly. The information is also dynamic: websites go down and pages are being constantly modified. Blogs allow people to leave comments over time. Content is much more than text and can include video, audio, and images.

A search consists of many steps. It usually starts with crawling – getting the data. This is a mighty task that requires building an army of web crawlers to spider the web. It requires a crawling plan using sophisticated algorithms looking for new content and also for keeping the stored ones up to date. It necessitates an immense amount of storage space and heavy computation resources.
The other tasks include indexing, lingual processing and ranking (for relevance and popularity). (If you are interested in learning how Google scales this process by breaking down tasks even further, read the following blog post about Google Architecture)

It is impossible to compare entirely, but it seems like building and maintaining a large-scale search engine is as hard as building a new power station and probably costs as much too.

Living with Monopoly

The purpose of this section is to get you thinking about my analogy and what it might mean.

The Monopoly question – do we need more than one search engine?

In some ways, a search engine industry might fit the definition of what’s known as a “Natural monopoly” (wikipedia):

1. “…it is the assertion about an industry, that multiple firms providing a good or service is less efficient (more costly to a nation or economy) than would be the case if a single firm provided a good or service.”
2. “It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands”

Google could be defined as a natural monopoly.  It now has more than a 70% market share.
The first definition raises the question: why do we need to more than one search engine provider? The second could explain why only one provider may survive.

Why we don’t need more than this one?

I’m personally not concerned about Google’s monopoly power to set rates. As a consumer I don’t feel any pricing power:) but maybe the companies that pay for ads do.

I do have a couple of concerns: The first is about the cost to the country and the world of maintaining a search engine or duplicating the effort in a large scale.
The second is that because it is such an important and world critical system, more stakeholders around the globe should be paying attention.

High Energy cost

Here is an excerpt from Data Center Energy Forecast – Executive Summary – July 29, 2008.

“As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to the nation’s servers and data centers is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Between 2000 and 2006 electricity use more than doubled, amounting to about $4.5 billion in electricity costs. This amount was more than the electricity consumed by color televisions in the U.S. It was equivalent to the electricity consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households (which represent 5% of the U.S. housing stock). And it was similar to the amount of electricity used by the entire U.S. transportation manufacturing industry (including the manufacture of automobiles, aircraft, trucks, and ships)”

Google is making an effort to reduce the cost of their data centers’ energy bills. My concern is that having multiple Google size search engine companies around seems as wasteful as pooling multiple power lines to every home. I also think that the energy consumption should be distributed across the globe since the search engine serves the entire world and not only one country.

What will happen if Google goes belly up?

I know that this seems radical and almost unimaginable at this point, but what if one day advertisers find another place to buy ad-space other than SERPs? Our lives are so dependent on Internet search technology that if no one can pay for the cost of maintaining one, that would have a direct impact on the world economy.

Maybe we need a different solution?

To reiterate:
-Search is a very large task
-Search is costly
-Search has become essential to the modern economy
-Google is effective but it is a monopoly
Yet today it is so mission critical that we need to watch it closely or maybe even break it up.

Regulations

One way to deal with a mission-critical natural monopoly is to turn it into some sort of government-granted monopoly. In this case it is not the government but some sort of world organization that can enforce regulations and demands like:

• More energy efficient data centers
• Better storage solutions
• Crawl to cover more ground – deep web
• Accounting governance and building cash reserves.

I know that this might sound like a radical idea. Please remember, the purpose of this article is not to support a return to a controlled market but to get us aware of the cost, power and dependencies associated with search engines.

Explore alternative search technologies (similar to exploring alternative energy sources)

In addition to possible regulations, there are other ways to address the functions that a natural monopoly like Google currently serves:

• Split the search task like crawling, storage and indexing and distribute them across multiple venors.
• Create better crawling algorithms – Cuil claimed to find a more efficient and scalable ways to crawl the web (it is not about Cuil it is about the idea).
• Real-time search (conversational search) – If you believe that real-time search is the future than you already know that maybe there is no need for deploying such a huge crawling tasks in order to find great content. Let the crowd do the job.
• p2p - distribute the the crawl, indexing, ranking and storage, across many search users. This technology mitigates the single point of failure risk and leverages existing unused computational resources.

Summary

The new president of the United States, Barack Obama, is leading his 21st Century New Deal with the hope that big investment in the country’s infrastructure will spur economic growth and prosperity. Online search has become a mission critical task in our lives. It has an impact on the world economy and energy consumption. I think that it should not be overlooked. To the traditional infrastructure list of transportation, telecommunication and energy we should add the 21st century infrastructure – online search engine.
In the same way that nations monitor the condition of their infrastructure, they should be looking at search engine implementations and technologies.

A few points that I like you to take from this post are:

• A search engine is more than software
• The tasks of building and maintaining new search engine on a large scale have an impact on society
• Search is a global objective
• We are heavily dependent on this technology
• Google is a monopoly – for better or worse.

Do you share my opinion that search engines have an impact on the world economy?
Do you agree with me that Google is a mission critical system today?
Should we be worried if someone might duplicate the task of keeping a large portion of the web crawled, stored and indexed?

**This blog post was published before on AltSearchEngine.com (my guest post) and it is no longer available so I decided to publish it here again.

Picture credit to my favorite artist Ron Shoshani

A little more than a year ago I wrote here about Datanetis, a cool company and technology that helps its customers to identify influencers within their customers database.

Datanetis just got funded with a $6 million Series A investment from Battery Ventures, and changed its name to Pursway. It also seems like there are new large customers on board.

Elery is a good friend and I’m very happy for him and his team.

Here is the press release.

Congratulation!

I had the pleasure of participating in #140conf Boston Meetup this evening.

Jeff Pulver was very inspiring showing enthusiasm, about the “state of now”, twitter, and how the real-time web empowers each and every one of us to make a real change in our world.

I listened to Adam Wallace (@adwal) and Brian Simpson (@Bsimi) from the Roger Smith Hotel telling other businesses that “it is ok not to be perfect”. The brand is not measured by not making any mistake, but by how it reacts to shortfalls. The key takeaway here is that don’t let the fear of bad criticisms to stop you from building your brand’s web presence.  The real-time web is the best new tool for listening and responding in timely manner to customers’ incidents as they develop. This tool provides a human voice to the company.

I heard from Kerry Israel (@kerryisrael) about how her re-tweets become the bridge between fans, having similar entertaining experiences, provided by the American Repertory Theater (americanrep). The real-time web people are becoming the glue, the hyper-channels, and the connectors for the rest of the community members.

I listened to a very moving presentation by Alicia Staley (@stales), 3 times cancer survivor, about her experience comparing the pre-internet and twitter era to nowadays. The real-time web helps you not to feel a lone. Not because you have a lot of friends, or followers but because you’ll find support from others in similar situation. It is helpful and rewarding to share both the good and bad experiences with other people. Twitter is also the best place to post a question when no one in your local network has any idea how to solve it, including your physician.

Finally, I had a very interesting conversation with Will Eisner (willboston) from awareness a B2B SAAS offering for building online communities. The real-time web sure plays a big role in this task. I hope to learn more about this field and product in the near future.

It was an interesting evening (at some point more interesting than anyone expected) and I hope to attend the 2 days big event in NYC around April time. Go real!

10 reasons for still buying good old books even after buying eReader:

1. If it does not come in a digital format
2. For getting it signed by the author
3. To read during take-off and lending
4. For beach reading – I don’t want any sand on my Kindle
5. Buying it for a present
6. If it is a picture book
7. If it is a classic, like Moby-Dick
8. For children under 6 years old
9. If you are on a trip and forgot your eReader
10. After visiting one of the indie book store

Any more? Do you think that some of these will change? Will some of these cases, for buying the good old book, shape the future of the publishing market?

picture credit: austinevan

TwitterSentiment – this sentiment analysis tool provides interesting information using Twitter status updates. Since it seems like this holiday season’s most desired gadget was one eReader or another I decided to ask TS about the overall  sentiments for B&N Nook and Amazon Kindle. I can  see the potential usefulness for this type of application.

B&N Nook  – is there a problem? To be fair, it is a small set of data, now.

Kindle – 53% Positive, 47% Negative (here we have a larger set of data)

Also it will be interesting to monitor Apple Tablet (all green) and its rumored name iSlate (in the red). There is really not enough data at the moment though.

Twitter Sentiment and a like has the potential for helping companies to test the water before coming up with new product name, during product launch, and after product adoption. TS also provide a graph view of the data so you can examine it over different time frames. TweetFeel a similar application type shows this data in real-time with aggregation.

Any more ideas for how to use it?

Btw, I still love my Kindle.

I like lazyfeed! I’ve been using it for few months now and I find it far better than any other real-time content streaming tool. I read a lot of blogs and I like to discover new blogs and bloggers, lazyfeed delivers diversify content fast, and with less effort than the rest. Recently, lazyfeed made some significant improvements to the interface. Now it is even easier and faster to read new blog posts.

From the user stand point lazyfeed delivers new blog posts about pre-selected topics, as they publish. The user adds new topics (filters) and lazyfeed does the rest, finding relevant blog posts . Done! There is a lot going on behind the scene but from the user point of view, new and relevant content gets refreshed continuously, effortlessly!

This is lazyfeed’s second attempt for coming up with the user interface that aims at bringing more laziness (ease) to fresh blogs’ content deliverability. I think that the mosaic metaphor works well in this case. The UI is very intuitive, requires far less scrolling and the Treadmill feature does it job propagating the more active topics to the top. Other than that the site is quite minimalistic. I’m not sure if going forward it will stay this way, but for now, the simple focused look and feel make it very easy for newcomers.

More lazy

Minimalistic or not there are few things that I’d like to see in following releases:

1. The feedback button on the side – so I can submit my suggestion there:)
2. The option to pause the flow for a single topic (square) and turn the Treadmill off (maybe to pin a square and doc it to the top). Sometimes it is working too fast.
3. More control over the topic filters:
   1. Combining tags operations – and, or, hierarchical (like book and review)
   2. Exclusion of tags – not
4. Favorites or a button for saving on delicious
5. Engagement indicators (hints) – hot trending topic, comments, reactions
6. Some blog posts are timeless others may be only relevant in the next couple of hours or days. These two types of content requires two different laziness methods. It is the way that the users handles this content that hint on the difference. If a user share it on twitter or facebook the content is mostly transient but if the reader bookmarks the link (saving it as a reference for later) there is a chance that it has longer lasting value.
   1. The short term relevant content should be served as soon as possible and be rotated quickly. I see it, I read some or all of it and I move on to the next one.
   2. The long lasting content should be served as soon as possible too but it should be also possible to schedule reading it for later. I know it is great content, I don’t want to loose it but I can’t read it at this very moment. It is the kind of content that I will visit again more than once. I will probably check to see if others left comments and added to the discussion. For example think about very technical blog post – maybe about software.  To be very lazy – I like lazyfeed to tell me that there are new comments/reactions on this great blog post that I marked somehow.
7. I think that lazyfeed feels a little lonely and is missing some social features. What that make Google Reader great (work) is the content sharing feature. I see some places where crowd-sourcing can contribute to the way lazyfeed filters and delivers new blog posts. Maybe via sharing tags (playlists), sharing blog post within the lazyfeed community.

I like the disciplined way that lazyfeed choose for adding new features so far. Prioritizing simplicity, ease of use and quality over functionality. So, if any one of the suggestion above break this practice please ignore it.

Summary

There are growing number of products that aim at delivering real-time content. lazyfeed focused on ease and simplicity. Pick some topics of interest, sit back and let lazyfeed to do the hard work for you, finding and presenting the most up to date and relevant content. Maybe just like conveyor belt sushi

Shifting the problem from finding content to finding people for search, discovery and filtering is not enough.

The evolution of finding new and engaging content:

Step 1: We started by searching for engaging content using search engine like Google or blog search engine/directory such as Technorati. These search engines operates web crawlers scanning the web for new information, then index (categorize) and rank web pages using different algorithms. As time went by we started adding blogs  feeds (using the RSS and ATOM protocols) to our feed reader of choice like Google Reader.
Results: with some effort we managed to find great bloggers to follow, but new content was slow to arrive, it was slow to discover, and even after awhile we ended up with not enough variety. No wonder it was a dead-end!
Step 2: step #1, plus finding the people behind the content, following their feeds on social media tools (twitter, FriendFeed, facebook etc.).
Results: initially, we got faster and richer content , but it got messy very quickly (especially when we auto follow back), it was also overwhelming at times, and lots of people share the same content (whether it is lame or great).  Add to the feed stream cacophonies the fact that people are using these channels for chatting with their peers, sharing thoughts and feeling, promoting their business/products/services and we end up with yet another dead-end!
Step 3: step #2, plus lists. Now we can group people into categorized twitter lists, and follow their tweets.
Results: Now, the content is a little less messy because we have more control over the data filtering. The process for building your own list is very slow and tedious at the moment, but you can use other’s lists via listorious or tweepml. On the flip side it requires coming up with a new process for scanning the lists timelines (how frequently? whom to give more attention? adding/removing tweeps), and you can easily end up with too many lists. The worse part is that the people on the list not always share just about the subject that matches the list category.  Bottom-line, it is somehow better than step #2 but not by much – another dead-end?

Content by people

In steps #1 we let the crawler to find and categorize the content and it was up to us to find it. In step #2 and #3 we shifted to people search and then we let them drive content to us. This time the crowd took care of the categorization tasks; finding and matching people to domains of knowledge. People categorized themselves and others, built many great lists, follow other lists (indication of popularity) and shared them for us to grab.

The shift

In the process from #1 to #2 we shifted the content discovery problem to people discovery problem.  Due to this shift we gained big time in scale, arming the entire web community to search for new content. We accelerated discovery and knowledge gain. We also gained speed over RSS or the web crawler. Among the changes, going from steps #1 to step #3, the focus shifted from filtering content to filtering people (lists).

Small pause to recap: we have categorized content thanks to search engines and tags, we have people grouped by categories thanks to the people, but we still have a lot of noise.

The missing step

In my opinion, we are missing a step.  I think that we ought to get back to the computerized categorization. We need a crawler, to categorize and rank the data in the context of the list.
I would like to be able to filter list timeline view by: links only, discussion threads only, and even more important by content that matches the list’s definition in the first place.
If I follow a list that discuss mobile phone technology I want to see only mobile phone technology related content.

Picture credit orangeacid

This new book just came out (October 19, 2009) but I think that it is becoming the Marketing department’s new baby. The book covers many areas of Internet Marketing practices, including content creation and management, SEO and product awareness, Social Media, Leads and customer conversion (including Landing Page optimization and Call to Actions page construction).

What that make this book really great is not specific chapter or topics it covers but the many great useful tips that are encapsulated within the text.

I read a lot of blogs and more than few books about Social Media and Internet Marketing over the last couple of years, but I did discover something new to try in almost every chapter that I’ve read (I did not read the entire book yet, I’ve read selected chapters only from lack of time). Sharing what works, what doesn’t and what worth trying is probably one of the secrets for success in the “How To” publishing business whether it is blog, eBook or book . In this book the two authors Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) and Brian Halligan (@BHalligan) did a great job suggesting lots of small fruitful actionable steps to take. The book also comes with relevant real-life examples to learn from.

Inbound Marketing was acknowledged by Chris Brogan the blogger and Trust Agent bestselling author among other Internet Marketing and Social Media gurus.

Here are couple of great quotes that are quoted in this book:

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer” Peter Drucker

“In God we trust, all others bring data” W. Edwards Deming”

Summary: if you are new to Internet Marketing and Social Media, then reading Inbound marketing and learning from these authors’ experience will save you months of wondering in the long tail desert. If you are savvy I+S Marketer, then expect to learn few new tricks and to get reinforcement to some of the things that you’ve already noticed.