Violating Terms of Service

The Lori Drew cyber-bullying case verdict. Is it a federal crime to violate a website's terms-of-service? And a darkly tongue-in-cheek statement of the implications. Troubling aspects for users of Web 2.0 as viewed by lawyers. Makes me worry about Searchwiki as well. Apparently Drew did not click the 'I Agree' box to the terms of service. Some think this is where online speech may ultimately be curtailed. And more.

SearchWiki not a Wiki but may be Evil

Just started to look at Google's Searchwiki, recently released. It works when you do a search and you are signed in to a Google account. Allows you to re-order the results of a search, add things that were not found, and add text comments. Identified by your search results and attached to any URL.

The reordering you do only changes what you see. Yet the text comments will be seen by anyone that gets to the same commented result. First I saw this as an annotation capability, but I was wrong. Nothing like a Wiki. It is more like a comment section of a blog, but attached to a specific URL result in a Google search. You cannot search the comments. No way to make your comments private. An un-moderated comment free-for-all attached to any URL when you do a search with Google! No room for abuse there?

It has already attracted lots of what can only be called comment spam. Only Google can police comments according to their own standards? Google seems to making the assumption that commenters will be reasonable and cordial ... not likely.

You can also add your own URLs to come up when you search, so if you were using this to aggregate URLs for some search projects, you could use it to assemble what data and comments you have. Not really annotations, since the comments point to a URL, not a part of it. To effectively use this you would need to be religious in using it, creating a critical mass. Not sure I would do that.

Overall quite shaky, childish capability, with the potential of driving people from Google. I would turn it off if I could.

3-D of Individual Purchasing

Herb Sorensen, Global Scientific Director, TNS Retail, writes aboout the Three dimensions of individual purchases.

Service Meltdowns

Service meltdowns for online shopping at major retailers on Friday.

Olfactory Route

In the World Flattener: Is there an An Olfactory Route to the Consumer's Heart? Agreed. Cited Economist article.

This Blog in ACM

I have been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for many years. It is the premiere information technology professional organization. They have a very useful technology news page. Happy to say that my blog, among others, will be featured in ACM's site in the coming months. I will report when that happens.

Marketing and the Semantic Web

Good Adage piece on the semantic web, which is explained, and its implication for marketing. Not technical at all.

What the Semantic Web -- or Web 3.0 -- Can Do for Marketers
Whatever you call it, get ready for more relevant ads. Marta Strickland explains the semantic web and its implications for marketing ... "

Smell: The Secret Seducer

In an ongoing look at sensory topics, I read Smell: The Secret Seducer
by P. A. Vroon et al. It does a semi-deep dive of scent subjects and their implications. Smell is a particularly interesting because it appears to be one of the most primitive, yet for precisely this reason is can produce subconscious effects we are unaware of. The book is translated, which sometimes shows. Written in 1994 and is also dated in that respect. Still worth a read.

For a more updated, and less technical view, see Whiff!: The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age, by Russell Brumfield and James Goldney.
I posted about it previously here.

Metro Tagging

Germany's Metro Group continues to progress with uses of RFID tagging, in this example tagging meat and promotion activities.

Housecleaning Robots Still a Dream

Lots of military things underway, but robot housecleaning is still a chore.

Unilever Axe Web Campaign

From Brandweek via GMA Smartbrief:

Unilever launches Web campaign for Axe product
Unilever is teaming up with Wired Digital to promote its Axe Detailer Shower Tool through a targeted ad campaign operated by SnapAds. The push is part of a larger campaign to promote the Axe brand to men through online and print media ... "

SnapAds is interesting because it seeks to optimize online ad placement, including the use of genetic algorithm methods. This makes sense since online presence gives enough data for testing and then evolving better solutions.

Mother of All Demos

Upcoming, December 8-9, quite interesting for those interested in computing history and future. See also the time line link embedded below:

" ... www.programforthefuture.org, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the "Mother of All Demos." But Doug Engelbart's invention of the mouse, videoconferencing, hypertext and all the rest is only the beginning of the story. Look further and you will find it all began with a quest to: Raise the Collective IQ of humankind to solve complex global problems.

An amazing group of people are assembling: Steve Wozniak (Apple founder) Tom Malone (MIT, Future of Work), Hiroshi Ishii (MIT Media Lab), Alan Kay (computer visionary), Andy Van Dam (ditto) and a host of educators, business people, and nonprofit leaders will gather December 8 and 9 at the Tech Museum of Innovation to carve out the next steps.

Where are we today? See for yourself on this mural/tiimeline Valerie Landau and I created in celebration of Engelbart's vision: http://www.visualinsight.net/_engelbart/Engelbart_Mural.jpg (click to enlarge) ...

Please join us for an historic event. www.programforthefuture.org

Eileen Clegg, www.visualinsight.net +1.707.486.2441 ... "

Robot Ethics vs Human Morals

In a NYT article today a view of how the ethics of robotic devices are being explored. Of primary immediate consequence to the military, it will ultimately have broader implications. The interesting point is made that a machine, without emotions, could be more 'ethical' than a person. Yes, if the machine had the same processed sensory information that a human has. That is not currently the case and still a tough artificial intelligence problem.

Gestural Environments

Good video of Oblong Industries G-Speak system. A three dimensional gestural environment reminiscent of the user interface featured in the film 'Minority Report'. From the video it appears that the system requires the user to wear special gloves to have it recognize gestures. I like the overall idea ... though it requires some careful design, and likely considerable expense for implementation. So its likely useful for the most focused applications. Also, just because you have a complex interface does not mean you should not simplify your information design. There is only so much we can perceive even in a multidimensional space.

Kraft Open Innovation

I was reminded this week that Kraft Foods has an open innovation site. Worth a look, I will review it in a later post.

Forecasting Product Success: AdPlanit

I have now mentioned DecisionPower's AdPlanit a number of times. It is based on methods that some of the largest and most sophisticated companies use to plan their media. Still an early beta, this is a really remarkable capability which you can test free for yourself online.

Ken Karakotsios informs me that his team have now added two new capabilities to the beta:

1. Plan improvement Suggestions: For any plan, whether input by you or auto-generated by AdPlanit, you can now request advice on how to improve that plan. AdPlanit will generate specific advice and, if you choose, automatically implement that advice in a copy of your plan, test the modified plan, and tell you the results. Are there ways your current advertising can be improved? Try AdPlanit and find out!

2. Closing the loop: Sure, awareness and persuasion are interesting, but what everyone wants to know is, “How much will I sell?” Now AdPlanit can estimate this. All you need to do is add a little information about how much you spent on advertising in the past, and what the results were. AdPlanit uses this information to tune the simulation to your specific business. Now you can find out the return on investment for that idea you have…

Text Message Dieting

From Healthday:

"A new University of North Carolina study shows that kids aged 5 to 13 are almost twice as likely to text daily records of their food intake, exercise and screen time as those using the old-fashioned kinds of diaries. The research was published in the November/December issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior ... "

Getting Things in Order Quickly

Sorting data, getting things in a preselected order, is a fundamental need for computing systems. It allows data to be accessed and delivered efficiently. Writing and analyzing sorting algorithms is one of the first tasks you do when studying computer science. Practitioners rarely write their own sorting methods these days, but sorting methods are still often used as benchmarks for computing efficiency. Now Google announces " ... we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers...". More details on their blog. These levels of storage quantity are common these days, browsing my local Microcenter I note that 1TB backup drives are inexpensive. It is estimated that the US Library of Congress has nearly 100 Terabytes of printed data.

Shuffling and Randomness

A short article on some of the randomness inducing aspects of card-shuffling, and how that is important for tasks other than card-playing.

Railway Maps

I am a big buff of the representation of rail and subway systems. Visualcomplexity posts a view of three railway systems. My favorite and broadest work on this is Mark Ovenden's book: Transit Maps of the World, posted about previously here. Compare the complexity of these maps to a map of the US Tax code. Or at the right, the display of a Korean subway navigation application for the IPhone.