RatBook: UK Bad Guy Goodies
December 19, 2009
Short honk: It is not often that I come across a new information service that intrigues me. I have done a tiny bit of work in the UK. I don’t know too much about people who participate in crimes, but the Rat Book makes it easy to get some information. If you want to know about criminals in the UK, navigate to the RatBook.com.
The firm told me:
Our website exposes convicted criminals across the UK, currently containing over 14,000 criminal profiles (updated daily), consisting of Paedophiles, Perverts, Rapists, Murderers, Abusers, Terrorists, and other Violent Criminals. Criminals can be searched based on their location, and the crimes they have committed, all through our easy to use Rat Map.
My query for “Russian” generated and interesting list of hits. Some of the content was dated, which is not unusual for information generated by a government entity and made available to a non-governmental service. Might be useful.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 19, 2009
Oyez, oyez, a freebie. I am now reporting this fact to the Court of International Trade. My hunch is that some of the bad people may move to and fro.
Digital Magazines and Hope
December 18, 2009
Anyone remember the Dyke Britton or the Graham Blue Streak? These were American automobile manufacturers, and they did not survive. The automobile industry and the magazine business on the surface seem to be very different. First, the automobile replaced the horse. The magazine did not replace anything. The automobile moved people. The magazine moves intangibles stuff like pictures, ideas and cartoons. The automobile created a massive social upheaval that is responsible for fast food and Tata’s cheap vehicle. The magazine created advertising.
Those autos are gone. Lots of magazines are gone. What is happening in automobiles may be happening in magazines. One difference is that I don’t think government subsidies and bail outs will be forthcoming. An information manufacturing era may be coming to an end.
Now the magazine crowd wants to move from the intangible world of content into the Frankenstein environment of digital information and a physical reading device. Don’t get me wrong. I think the magazine crowd has to find a way to survive. Charging me $15 for a Macintosh magazine from Future Publishing is probably not a recipe for mass market success.
I know the magazine crowd in the US wants to cook up an iTunes for magazines. The idea is that a person who reads “quality” content will gladly pay for certain articles. Well, maybe? When I read “Mag+, a Concept Video on the Future of Digital Magazines”, I asked myself, “Can folks who can’t make their core business work be able to jump outside their core competency?”
I look at quite a few digital magazines. Some like Zmags are quite interesting. Others rely on hardware that is ill-suited for the arts and craft approach to information that seems to be popular today. Even the Harvard Business Review magazine is going to try and be more “with it.” Get out the party hats!
Several thoughts:
- Traditional magazines have an editorial slant; today I can get information on topics of interest to me without my having to do much work
- Traditional magazines have been trying to be design conscious; today I prefer information
- Traditional magazines delivered an audience to advertisers; today I prefer information targeted to my specific needs.
In summary, magazines—regardless of format and media—are out of step with what I do to get information. The concept of a “magazine”, therefore, is going to have to be stretched in a different way. In my opinion, that concept will not have the elastic properties necessary to accommodate the odd shapes of consumers’ information needs. What happens when an elastic sheet is subjected to frequent stretching, it weakens and then gives way.
There you have it.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 18, 2009
I have to report that this is a free write up. No one paid me, but I think I have to reveal this fact to the Internal Revenue Service, an agency stretched thin due to various exogenous factors.
New York Times Gets Excited about Traffic Analysis
December 18, 2009
Navigate to “A Day in the Life of NYTimes.com.” You will learn that the New York Times has discovered that traffic to its Web site in mind 2009 is heavier at certain times of the day. There are other insights from the New York Times’s Laboratory. A couple of questions flashed through my mind.
First, what percentage of this traffic is in some way due to Google searches?
Second, why doesn’t the New York Times command the Web presence of the entertainment site TMZ.com, which is cited in the article as a big deal?
Third, how many New York Times executives are mesmerized by the videos showing traffic patterns?
Be still my goosely heart!
Disclosure: no one paid me to point out that these mesmerizing maps did not mesmerize this addled goose. I have to report this to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This information constitutes an emergency.
Google, Mian Mian, and Revisionism
December 17, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Computerworld Asia’s “Chinese Author Sues Google over Book Scanning.” I visited China once and learned quickly that figuring out who is on first is tough. This write up is clear enough. An author—the popular Mian Mian—asserts that Google scanned Acid Lover without permission. There are several points in the write up that are fuzzy, maybe even fuzzy:
- The aggrieved author wants US$8,770
- The aggrieved author wants a public apology
- Chinese authors want Google to pay them when their books are scanned for Google Books.
The key revisionist passage for me was:
“Google earlier argued that they didn’t violate copyright law as they only displayed a small amount of text of my book, but I think their move has seriously hurt Chinese writers’ rights,” the paper [China Daily] quoted Mian as saying.
Not fuzzy, certainly wuzzy.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 17, 2009
Quick confession. This is a freebie. I wish I could get paid in yuan. I will contact the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission to point out this situation..
Content Guide
December 16, 2009
With the furor over copyright, I assumed that “free content” was going the way of the dodo. I was wrong. If you are looking for “free downloads”, you may want to take a look at “100+ Sites to Download Everything Online.” Some of the links struck me as quite useful; for example:
- Audio books
- Books and documents
- eBooks.
Useful post.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 15, 2009
I feel compelled to report to the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission that I was not paid to point out where an industrious person can dig for free content.
Are Google Users Ready to Step Up to Fusion Tables? Nah.
December 16, 2009
WolframAlpha and Google have a tiny challenge. Both firms’ rocket scientists and algorithm wranglers understand the importance of herding data. Take this simple test. Navigate first to WolframAlpha and enter a word pair. Try UK population. Now navigate to Google’s public facing Fusion table demo here. What did you get? How did it work? Do you know why the systems responded as they did? How do you improve your query?
My hunch is that few readers of this Web log can answer these questions? Agree? Disagree? Well, I am not running an academic class, so if you flunked, that’s okay with me. I think most people will flunk, including some of the lesser lights at the Google and at WolframAlpha.
Against this background, the Google rolled out an API for Fusion tables. You can get the Googley story in the write up “Google Fusion Tables API.” My view is that Google’s moves in structured data are quite important, generally unknown, and essentially incomprehensible to those who suffered through high school algebra.
My opinion is that this API will result in some applications that will make Google’s significant commitment and investment in structured data more understandable. If you are ahead of the curve, the Google is on the march. If you have no clue what this post means, maybe you should think about changing careers. Wal+Mart greeter is somewhat less challenging that the intricacies of Google’s context server technology.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 16, 2009
Okay, I rode by Google’s DC headquarters. No one waved. No one paid me. I suppose I report this fact to the manger of the Union Station taxi dispatchers. Nah, those folks don’t care that this is a freebie either.
Oracle and Open Source
December 15, 2009
Open source has a future in the enterprise. IBM has made its commitment to open source clear. I can license a mainframe running an open source Linux OS. I know that IBM has a revenue imperative; that is, the company takes technical steps in order to generate revenue. I suppose this means that IBM is pragmatic, and it suggests that open source in this one instance may not be “open” in the sense that some of those in the open source community understand the term.
The same can be said of other commercial open source “plays”. Some are positive. Last week in London, Charlie Hull, Lemur Consulting, explained his firm’s commitment to open source, the open source community, and Lemur’s customers. I like his approach.
When I read “Oracle Makes Commitments to Customers, Developers and Users of MySQL,” I found myself asking some questions. Why is the deal between Oracle and Sun Microsystems stuck? Why is their so much consternation about the MySQL database? Why is Oracle making public commitments to a governmental group half a world away?
The write up said:
No later than six months after the anniversary of the closing, Oracle will create and fund a storage engine vendor advisory board, to provide guidance and feedback on MySQL development priorities and other issues of importance to MySQL storage engine vendors.
User groups—particularly uncontrolled user groups—and advisory boards can become problematic. I have seen a number of user groups become focal points for certain issues in enterprise software. The recent shift to software vendor owned and operated conferences is one reaction to the uncontrolled user group.
In my opinion, I think a certain large software vendor will release an open source data management system that will undermine today’s commercial and open source systems. If and when this release takes place, I think the data management world will face significant disruption. In fact, the concern about MySQL could accelerate this disruptive action. I don’t think that Oracle will be able to “control” this “advisory board”. Control is a large part of a successful publicly traded company.
Furthermore, Oracle’s apparent inability to get this deal wrapped up may be the inadvertent trigger for an even more disruptive event. Will Oracle’s assurances be enough for the European Union watchdogs? My hunch is that traditional software vendors will find themselves bitten by their own business processes. Just my opinion.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 15, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I am delighted to report to Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Bureau (Justice)that I was not paid to write this statement about the lack of adaptability in large enterprise software companies. This is an explosive idea: open source and the enterprise.
Wave Goes Down Drain?
December 15, 2009
I read a suggestive article “Terminal Wave: The Google Wave Failure” by themilwaukeeseo. The basic idea is that Wave is going down the drain. The idea is that Wave has flaws, lots of them. You can read the article for the details of Wave’s inadequacies. A key point for me was:
No one can figure out how to use it effectively. It’s not that people don’t understand the basic notion of how to compose a WAVE, or even how to add in other people, but it’s not nearly as fluent as it was made out to be.
Several points:
- Wave is a typical Google service. It is not a commercial product. Wave is a demo, or, more accurately, a beta demo
- Google has a tough time thinking for the average Joe or Jill. Google is trying to make something usable for what Google thinks is an average Joe or Jill, not what an average Joe and Jill actually are
- Wave may be a part of a far larger data management system. Viewed this way, Wave may be the equivalent of a telescope poked from the Google submarine to see what life on the surface is.
My thought is that those who want to surf on Google may want to splash in the Wave. Learning to swim may be preferable to getting swamped when the big one rolls ashore.
Stephen Arnold, December 16, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to reveal to NOAA that this coming digital Wave was offered without compensation. Yep, another freebie.
Kngine: Web 3.0 Search
December 15, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Kngine, not to be confused with Autonomy’s origin kinjin. I think both are pronounced in a similar way. Kngine (based in Cairo) is an:
evolutionary Semantic Search Engine and Question Answer Engine designed to provide meaningful search result, such as: Semantic Information about the keyword/concept, Answer the user’s questions, Discover the relations between the keywords/concepts, and link the different kind of data together, such as: Movies, Subtitles, Photos, Price at sale store, User reviews, and Influenced story. We working on new indexing technology to unlock meaning; rather than indexing the document in Inverted Index fashion, Kngine tries to understand the documents and the search queries in order to provide meaningful search result.
There is some information about Kngine’s plumbing in the High Scalability Web log. The system uses “semantic technology”. One interesting feature of the system is snippet search. The idea is:
Snippet Search results will consist of collection of rich ranked paragraphs rather than collection of documents links. Snippet Search paragraphs is semantically related to what you looking for (i.e. content what you looking) so we will be able to get what he looking for directly without open other pages.
Haytham El-Fadeel in his blog provided additional color about the search system. He wrote on September 4, 2009:
Kngine long-term goal is to make all human beings systematic knowledge and experience accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and organize all objective data, and make it possible and easy to access. Our goal is to build on the advances of Web search engine, semantic web, data representation technologies a new form of Web search engine that will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.
I ran a number of queries on the system. I found the results useful. My query for Amtrak provided relevant hits, some suggested queries, and a thumbnail.
You can contact the company at Info@Kngine.com.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 15, 2009
Okay, okay, someone fed me date nut bread this morning in the hopes I would write about their product. That did not work. I ate the date nut bread and wrote about this outfit in Cairo. I guess this shows that you can pay this goose, but the goose does what it wants. Honk.
Connotate and Its Landing Page
December 15, 2009
Getting leads and making sales is the name of the game for enterprise search vendors. I think I found an example of a search vendor using Twitter and a landing page to get leads. Here’s the tweet that I saw from a person posting as dnapoleo.
This bit.ly link pointed to this special landing page:
I found this interesting. I wonder, however, if this type of marketing will deliver qualified leads. Making sales today requires a heck of a lot of work. The cost and complexity of enterprise search and content processing systems seems ill suited for Twitter. A quick look at my Overflight service reveals that a balanced marketing plan is the approach taken by Autonomy, Coveo, Exalead, and MarkLogic, for example.
In fact, making sales requires a motivated sales force, brand positioning, resellers, Web logs, media campaigns using every trick in the sales books at Barnes & Noble, and client champions. It is December and cold out there. Sales heat is needed.
Contrast the Connotate approach to Google’s use of a paper wrap around to the free commuter newspaper, Metro. Google was pitching its Chrome “consumer” Web browser.
Connotate’s effort warrants watching. Now that AOL has repositioned Relegence.com as Love.com, I think some market headroom may become available for Connotate.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 15, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I am disclosing that no one paid me to write about Connotate’s possible tweet campaign. Who’s on first? Oh, I know. I am reporting today to the Farm Credit Administration. Grow those revenues, people!
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