A Juicy Hollywood Style Revelation about Engineers. Shocking.
April 1, 2011
I read some biographical “fiction”. In today’s word processor world, I find it difficult to separate the goose feathers from the giblets. I read “Paul Allen: Bill Gates Is A Traitor Who Eats Chicken With A Spoon” and decided to abstain from biographical “fiction.” The write up describes some information in a book allegedly written by the giga billionaire who helped found Microsoft. The giga billionaire? Paul Allen.
What was the snippet the publicists paid to pump the forthcoming book? Here you go:
Allen claims Gates welched on an original agreement to split their interest in the newly formed Microsoft 50-50. Gates wanted to amend it to 64-36 in his favor because he felt he did more work. “I’d been taught that a deal was a deal and your word was your bond. Bill was more flexible,” Allen writes. “There’s a range of elasticity in any business deal, a range for what might seem fair, and Bill pushed that range as hard and as far as he could,” says Allen, who ultimately relented to Gates’ demand.
Cool. Two pals figuring out how to share a pizza.
What does this article tell me? Real journalists are now following in the rhetorical footsteps of high traffic gossip sites. What else does this article tell me? Some of the biographical “fiction” shows the deft touch of an editor who has logged quite a few hours in front of rich media. How different is this “real” behavior from the way in which those who want to have piles of money act? Not different at all.
For a more entertaining look at the antics of these two giga billionaires, check out their present activities. The “now” reveals more than the past edited by folks from publishing houses. I will wait for the YouTube video.
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2011
Freebie
Newspaper Chart Raises Goose Bumps on Beyond Search Geese
March 31, 2011
Not much scares the geese and goslings at Beyond Search. We are unflappable and mostly goose bump free. Note “mostly.” But Business Insider’s “Chart of the Day: Why the Newspaper Industry Collapsed” presents a very striking picture, created by Marc Cenedella of TheLadders.com. If it is correct, hello Titanic!
We all know newspapers have been struggling since folks started getting their news online. We should also consider how being able to find each other over the Web impacts the papers.
This chart shows how badly they’re doing in classified ad revenue, a key part of most newspapers’ bottom line:
[Cendella] shows ad revenue from help wanted classifieds dropping 92% in last 10 years, hitting $723 million last year, down from $8.7 billion in 2000. Once that easy money left the newspaper industry it was a lot harder to earn as much profit.
Cendella believes the papers only have themselves to blame, and I agree. Oh, well, at least this is good news for the trees. More goose bumps for newspapers? Yep.
Cynthia Murrell March 31, 2011
Freebie
Is an AOL Management Shift Coming?
March 26, 2011
Let me go out on a limb. I have observed Googlers in cubes and in management positions. Unlike the Google believers, I think that the equation Google = Good Management is a bit like 1 + 1 = 3. I read “Huffington-Armstrong Smackdown at AOL” and realized that the author is pretty much on the right cow path.
Here’s the passage I liked.
Meanwhile, Armstrong has to keep control of the company. He needs Huffington — now regarded as the company’s savior — more than she needs him because she has such a strong image. I wonder how long Huffington, who has grown accustomed to speaking her mind and having all the power at her company, will remain content to report to Armstrong. AOL has done nothing since the Huffington Post deal to show that it is in control of its destiny, that it has a coherent growth strategy and that it knows how to win. Arianna Huffington, the theory goes, surely knows how to win.
I think this is on the money, but it does not make the point clearly enough. I think what I would have said is that the Googler (Tim Armstrong) is going to find himself reporting to a person who can manage, and dominate. In short, the Googler is going to have his hands full. Several decisions of the Googler will come back to hang like a cloud over the “new” AOL.
First, the play for local content was expensive and is going to be exposed as a move that won’t yield the money the local golden goose is alleged to reside in the AOL offices.
Second, the expensive New York media wizards will find themselves looking into the eyes of a person who knows how to get traffic and eye balls without expensive New York media talent. You can terminate folks in India today but tomorrow, the empty cubicles will be in the good old USA.
Third, in a day to day content of “who can manage better”, the Googler is going to be in one of those corporate Mixed Martial Arts’s battles. I go with the Huffster.
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2011
Freebie unlike the local news company AOL bought
Arnold Columns for March 2011
March 1, 2011
The for-fee columns for March 2011 cover a range of topics. If you want to access the full text of these documents, please, contact the publishers who own the rights to the versions of the write ups I submitted this month.
ETM (published by IMI Publishing in London), “Choice: A Growing Problem in Enterprise Search.” Google seems to be trimming its product line but other vendors are expanding theirs.
Information Today (published by Information Today), “Autonomy’s Surprise Move into Health Care.” Who would have thought that Autonomy would dive into improving what a health care worker does for a patient and toss in access to third party journal papers?
Information World Review (published by Bizmedia in London), “Search 2011: Shape Shifting Accelerates.” This year promises to be one in which search is subjected to some potentially severe earthquakes or user pushbacks.
KMWorld (published by Information Today), Semantics is yesterday. Semiotics is the future at Sophia Search in this article “Sophia and Semiotics for Enterprise Search”. Don’t know what semiotics is? Read the KMWorld story when it comes out in a couple of months.
Online Magazine (published by Information Today), “Tracking Solr Activity” reviews some places to locate information about open source search and some of the cost factors to consider when deciding whether to go open source or proprietary search.
Smart Business Network, possibly available in online and in print. I am not really sure at this time. The article is “StumbleUpon: A Dark Horse in the Web Traffic Race”. The point is that one can advertise on StumbleUpon and use a free promotional service provided by the online service.
The quality of the research and writing in the ArnoldIT.com for-fee work is more detailed than the information that appears in the Beyond Search blog, on the ArnoldIT.com Web site, and in our data fusion blog IntelTrax. An explanation of the differences is at this link.
If you want content for your technical or business blog, write us at seaky20000 at yahoo dot com. Our team of writers is able to produce high quality writings at a competitive price.
We will be announcing two new Web logs in the next few weeks.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2011
Freebie but the publishers listed in this story pay me to write articles for their readers. The total circulation of these publications is in the 100,000 readers per issue across all six publications.
SysTools Offers New PDF Tool
February 17, 2011
Nifty tools catch our eye in Harrod’s Creek.
SysTools is offering a new PDF Batch Stamp Tool to Add Metadata, manage page order, add labels, format text, insert date and time or other text, and add password protection.
“PDF batch stamp tool . . . can easily modify [any] PDF document . . . and is a multi-lingual program that supports all versions of Adobe Acrobat.”
A demo version can be downloaded for free on the SysTools website and the full version is available for $129. While the software is currently only supported by Windows operating systems, Mac users will recognize that many of these features are already available to them on Preview, the Mac proprietary PDF reader software. For Window users who use Adobe Reader but can’t justify the investment in the full version of Acrobat, the PDF Batch Stamp Tool may be a good solution for basic editing of PDF documents.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 17, 2011
Freebie
Will We Pay for News Online?
February 10, 2011
BBC Mobile’s article “News Corp Launches Daily Newspaper for iPad” prompts a few questions.
The article examines the Rupert Murdoch empire’s launch of the Daily, via Apple’s iTunes store. A dedicated staff of journalist has been hired, a choice which separates this from most device-specific news sources. Alongside traditional news articles will be interactive graphics, videos, Twitter feeds, and personalized content.
The Daily will cost 99 cents a week. That doesn’t sound like much, but will consumers be willing to pay anything to access news online?
“Mr Murdoch has made no secret of his desire to get consumers paying for news on the Web. The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Sunday Times, all owned by Murdoch, have introduced pay walls for their websites. However, the Times has since seen an 87% drop in online readership.
We now have many sources for free, quality news coverage online, so it is no wonder readers are reluctant to pay. However, I predict that that flow will be stemmed in the coming years as companies become less willing to give their work away for free. Nevertheless, it is difficult to generate significant revenues online. Experimentation ahead.
Cynthia Murrell February 10, 2011
MySpace, News Corp., and Credibility
February 4, 2011
I read “News Corp’s MySpace Sale Options Include New Investors, Management Buy-Out”. The story was clear. News Corp. is going to get rid of the social networking service. What caught my attention was this statement in the write up:
“The new MySpace has been very well received by the market and we have some very encouraging metrics. But the plan to allow MySpace to reach it’s full potential may be best achieved under a new owner.”
I had in my Overflight files a 2006 story in Fortune via CNNMoney.com called “News Corp. (Hearts) MySpace.” That story reported:
MySpace has simply exploded since the deal was done last July. Measured in terms of page views, MySpace has become the second-most popular site on the Internet — behind Yahoo!, but ahead of MSN, AOL and Google. It has 66 million members, and about 250,000 new ones sign up each day. That’s a mind-boggling growth trajectory for an Internet site that was launched less than three years ago. “It looks like the best acquisition we’ve made in a long, long time,” Peter Chernin, the second-in-command at News Corp., said in an interview with FORTUNE. “MySpace is the single biggest growth opportunity this company has.”
Has MySpace been the home run referenced in the 2006 story? I had tucked away a story call MySpace vs Facebook, which ran in HubPages. The original was offline when I checked this morning, but I found a copy of the 2009 article in the Google cache. TechCrunch reported in January 2009 that Facebook had 200 million unique worldwide visitors. The figure was twice MySpace’s traffic.
Short take: consumers vote with their clicks. In the click department, Facebook is at 500 or 600 million and MySpace is for sale. Does this case example shed light on the outlook for the News Corp. iPad newspaper. We think it does.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2011
Freebie
Mudoch Daily for the iPad
February 4, 2011
Up front: Haven’t seen it. Don’t care. Write up called “The Daily: Five Things You Need to Know” had a quote to note. Here she be:
It cost $30 million and 100 journalists to produce it, and another $500,000 a week to keep it going. Given the parlous state of the world’s finances, we sincerely hope this is money well spent.
At $2 million a month, that is going to require more subscribers than the entire population of Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2011
XML Carnage
January 31, 2011
We noted “Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub, and XML on the Web.” What caught our attention was this steemtn:
So next time you’re evaluating a technology that is being much hyped by the web development blogosphere, take a look to see whether the fundamental assumptions that led to the creation of the technology actually generalize to your use case. An example that comes to mind that developers should consider doing with this sort of evaluation given the blogosphere hype is NoSQL.
The article points out that the enthusiasm for OpenID, AtomPub, and XML for “the Web” has cooled. What looks like the next big think, I concluded, may not be.
What are the implications for search and content processing vendors?
For those who don’t know what the three technologies are or do, the answer is, “Not much.” Many vendors handle security, intakes, and formats via connectors. I wrote a for fee column about the importance of connectors, filters, and code widgets that make one outfit’s proprietary or tricky file formats easily tappable / importable by anothre vendor’s system. I know that you have been following the i2 Ltd. and Palantir legal hassle closely. If you haven’t, you can get some color in the stories in www.inteltrax.com and my for fee columns.
But, if you are a vendor who has a big investment in one or more of these technologies, the loss of “enthusiasm”—if the source article is accurate—could mean higher costs. Here’s why:
- The marketing positioning and collateral will have to be adapted. Probably not a big deal in the pre-crash days, but now this is a cost and it can be a time sink. Not good when pressure for sales goes up each day. One vendor told me, “We’re really heads down.” No kidding. I don’t think it is work; I think it is survival. A marketing distraction is not a positive.
- Credibility with some customers may be eroded. If you beat a drum for one or more of these three technologies, the client assumes that everyone likes the rhythm. Articles that suggest three “next big things” are really three day old brook trout may beg for air freshener.
- Partners who often just buy the software vendors’ pitches have invested. Now those investments may not have the type of value one associates with certifiation from Microsoft or the sheer staying power of a wild and crazy push by IBM or Oracle. If partners bail out, recovery can be difficult in some markets.
Worth reading the article and thinking about its implications for search and content processing vendors. Might not ruffle your features; could tear off a wing.
Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2011
Freebie
Arnold Columns for February 2011
January 31, 2011
The ArnoldIT.com team has completed Stephen E Arnold’s for-fee columns for February 2011. These articles will run any time between mid-February 2011 and the end of April 2011. Print publications have longer production processes. Online versions of the columns may appear at different intervals.
This months’ topics by journal, tabloid, or online magazine are:
- For Enterprise Technology Management, the column talks about Google and its compound documents. Quite a search and retrieval challenge brewing we think. We don’t have an answer to searching compound documents when legal discovery kicks in, but we raise some questions for US readers or no US companies with offices in the USA.
- For Information Today, this month’s column takes a look at discovery services that have moved from the Department of Defense to a library near you. Our focus is on EBSCO, a giant in the commercial database and information services world. Librarians will like this write up.
- For KMWorld, the column talks about the semantic challenges of the new content types. We highlight Expert System, an Italian outfit with some nifty semantic technology.
- For Searcher Magazine, we took our 1999 essay about Internet video, critiqued it and identified our errors. Then we looked at what seems to be the trajectory of today’s Internet video options. The question we answer, “Is Internet video viable yet?” Yes, we discuss Google TV. Wow, what a product.
- For Smart Business Network, “Groupon: The Social Coupon Revolution.” The write up describes Groupon.com, mentions Living Social, and references Google’s forthcoming social coupon service, Google Offers. The column explains what businesses are more likely to succeed with social coupons and which are more likely to achieve unsatisfactory results.
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