Five More Search Tools You Should Know

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else?

Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

Related articles:

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-unveils-new-search-features.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-search-to-index-pages-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/yahoo-upgrades-search-engine.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/search-sucks-and-microsoft-is-almost.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/searching-for-meaning-of-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/microsoft-must-buy-twitter-msft.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/ballmer-on-bing-economy-and-more.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-has-google-attention.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://searchengineland.com/five-more-search-tools-july09-22766

Tags:

TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, Twicsy, real time image search engines, Spezify, SearchMuffin, Glearch, Joobili, Roooby, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter search, PageRank, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, Qik.com, TwitVid.io,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Google's 300 Year Plan

In the blissed-out California sunshine, the glistening glass-and-steel curves of the Googleplex seem to sweep you up off the pavement with the promise of a glimpse into the future – and a good time. It is 8am on a Monday morning and battalions of high-tech foot soldiers arrive at the gilded palace of the online revolution. Laptops and lattes in hand, they step off conga lines of biodiesel-powered buses, chatting loud and fast about the latest skyrocketing Silicon Valley start-ups, which have names that sound like Teletubbies: Jajah, Orgoo, Ningo. Geek by geek, they head inside to begin surfing and controlling the quadrillions of bytes of information that surge through Google’s giant servers, and which crash on to our desktops and mobile phones every minute of every day.

The sidewalk outside Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, 40 minutes’ drive south of San Francisco, is about as close as most people get to a company that has cornered the market in internet searching and become the killer app of the modern information economy. For all its success, Google is a closed system, as impenetrable as its complex search algorithms.

Its multibillionaire founders, Sergey Brin, 34, and Larry Page, 34, scarcely do interviews, and reporters rarely make it through the company’s doors to talk to top executives. But the dome-headed maths nerds are facing their first big setback. Suddenly, they need to talk. So, a few weeks ago they invited The Sunday Times into the heart of the search industrial complex.

Google likes to think of itself as “crunchy” – wholesome and worthy – and, walking into the Googleplex, it looks, at first sight, a pretty crunchy kind of place. There’s free coffee and muesli in the No Name breakfast cafe. Everyone gets around the campus on free bicycles. In the car park, the canopies that protect the neat ranks of hybrid Toyota Priuses from the sun are made from solar panels that power each building in the 1.5-million-sq-ft complex. There are swimming pools, massage chairs and free medical checkups. A model of Sir Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo prototype commercial spacecraft hangs from the rafters in the lobby. This is rocket science, after all.

Marissa Mayer is waiting in an anonymous-looking whitewashed conference room in Building 43, the engine room of the search engine. Like all Google key executives, she is annoyingly young –32 – and, even more annoyingly, wealthy – worth hundreds of millions of pounds, thanks to the generous stock options granted to the firm’s founding staff. She does her best to deflect the wealth issue by wearing flats, a studiously plain grey-black dress, and a $50 plastic watch – a combination that shrieks: “I know you know I’m a zillionaire, but please treat me as just one of the girls.”

The young, fast-talking blonde is the firm’s poster girl. It’s her job to sell Google’s vision of a connected future. “We’ve only achieved 2% of what we can do,” she smiles. “The world of search will get much, much bigger.”

Her task used to be really, really easy. Google made cool stuff – the best search engine and some whizzy online services, such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail system – and handed it out free. We grabbed it and told all our friends about it, so they grabbed it too. Google became the most popular internet service in the world. Thanks to its keyword online advertising system that matches ads with search queries, it generated billions – £8 billion last year alone.

But as it prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday, Google has developed serious engine trouble. A series of missteps have left it facing claims that it has gone from a benign project – creating the first free, open-all-hours global library – to the information society’s most determined Big Brother. It stands accused of plotting some sinister link between its computers and us: that it wants, somehow, to plug us into its giant mainframe – as imagined in The Matrix or Terminator.

The crisis began a few months ago when Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, popped up in London and made some extravagant remarks about the firm’s ambitions. He declared that the company’s goal was to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results and even start making recommendations, like a trusted friend. “We are very early in the total information we have,” he said. “We cannot even answer the most basic question about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

His comments provoked a firestorm. Right-to-privacy campaigners howled that a machine that knows so much about us that it can tell us what to do would be the biggest-ever threat to personal privacy. No totalitarian regime, no Bond villain had dreamt up anything so creepy. “At what stage,” one critic asked, “did the company whose motto is ‘Don’t be evil’ evolve into the Evil Empire?”

What’s going on? Is Google trying to take over the world’s information and worm its way into our consciousness? When he said he could implant a Google chip in our brain, was Brin not joking, after all? Or have we all got the wrong end of the memory stick?

You only have to spend a few hours in the Googleplex, talking to Mayer and fellow Googleytes, to realise that, if anything, Schmidt was being conservative. Instead of worrying that they are going too far, Google’s top team talk, with poker faces, about a “300-year mission” 
that will eventually see almost everything – including, perhaps, one day you and me – linked to the web and searchable online.

Google’s techno-dream comes in three bytes. The first is loosely referred to as “universal search”. Scribbling frantically on a whiteboard, Mayer, Google’s head of search products and user experience, says the web is currently “very limited and primitive”. It consists mainly of words, images and some music, mostly created in the last few years. There is much, much more that could – and should – be online. At its simplest level, this includes every film, TV show, video or radio broadcast ever made; every book, academic paper, pamphlet, government document, map, chart and blog ever published in any language anywhere; and any piece of music ever recorded. Google is currently developing new software that will scan millions of new sources of information to give richer search results.

Mayer illustrates the idea by googling her hero, Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, on her PC, which already uses an experimental version of universal search. The results include video 
news archives, the latest news on the iPhone, highlights of Jobs’s career, and up-do-date news stories. “You get six searches for the price of one,” she says in her curiously giggly voice.

So far, so uncontroversial – but there’s much more. Mayer and co argue that to be true to its mission statement of “organising all the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful”, Google should be about more than searching for words, images and music; it should be about finding objects and, eventually, people. Any item that can be fitted with a radio-frequency identifier – an electronic tag called an RFID – can be linked to the internet over local or national WiFi networks.

Retailers already use this technology for stocktaking, and fleet managers track buses and taxis this way. Why not, asks Mayer, “take the things you care about – your watch, your phone – stick little tags on them and watch for their receiving signals”? This is not a joke. “It would have been really useful to me yesterday when I lost my cellphone while it was out of power. It took me half an hour to find it had fallen behind a dresser.” And why not go one step further and tag your partner or your children, so that you can find out where they are whenever you want? Googleytes point out that we already do this with newborn babies and pets.

The second part of Google’s techno-dream is “personalised search”. Google has just launched iGoogle, a new turbocharged version of its regular search service. It allows Google to monitor our search and web-surfing history, so that it can find out who we are, how old we are, what job we do, whether we are married and have children, where we go on holiday, what we do in our spare time – anything, in fact, that it can glean from our web-surfing, which, since we do so much online these days, means pretty much everything.

Google wants us to sign up for iGoogle on our PC, and also to install it, along with Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth software, on our mobile phone, so that it knows not just who we are but where we are in the world, 24 hours a day, thanks to the satellite-positioning chips starting to be included in mobile phones. “Our goal is that you can, if you want, search for anything, anywhere, any time,” says Douglas Merrill, 37, Google’s chief information officer.

The final piece of the Google future is called “cloud computing”. Instead of using the internet to search for information that we then copy and use to work on documents stored on the hard drives of our computers, using the software on those computers, Google wants us to create all our documents online, to work on them online using Google’s web-based software, and to store them online on Google’s vast global network of servers.

Google has recently launched its own web-based software programs – called Google Apps – that enable us to create password-protected word files and spreadsheets, edit them and store them online. These applications – along with Gmail, Calendar, Google’s online diary, Picasa, its picture-management and storage system, and Presentations, its online version of PowerPoint – mean Google will provide all our computing and storage needs, not on our PCs but, as Mayer puts it, “in the computational cloud”.

Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when.

This would not just make Google the largest, most powerful super-computer ever; it would make it the most powerful institution in history. Small wonder that the London-based human-rights group Privacy International has condemned its plans as “hostile to privacy”, and EU ministers called Google’s vision “Orwellian”. Even John Battelle, one of the net’s leading evangelists, who co-founded the technology bible Wired magazine, and wrote The Search, the definitive study of Google’s rise, now says: “I’ve found myself more and more wary of Google, out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.”

It all begs one key question: why? What makes a bunch of California geeks who are relaxed enough to spend their lives creating extraordinary products – and then give them away for nothing – suddenly want to take over the world, or at least its information? To Googleytes, the most surprising thing about the row over its plans for the future is that anyone is surprised at all. Its founders have always envisaged a vast super-computer that connects everything and everyone.

Ask Craig Silverstein. He knows because he was there at the beginning, when Brin and Page were graduate students messing about with algorithms at Stanford University, California, when they should have been out getting laid. Silverstein is a man for whom the word “geek” could have been invented. He is young – 34 – thin, has a beard and speaks softly. He does not like to travel more than once a year. He was Google’s first employee and, even though he is now worth £250m, he still turns up to work every day because he “likes solving complex software-engineering problems”.

We meet in another anonymous meeting room with no windows. For a firm that expects us to tell it everything about ourselves, Google is remarkably coy about revealing the simplest information about itself – such as what its executives’ offices look like. Interviews in the executive suite are banned for fear that journalists might uncover its software secrets.

Over coffee, Silverstein, now director of technology, explains that, from the earliest days, Brin and Page envisaged a super-connected computer. “The vision of search has always been broader than has been portrayed in the press,” he says. “We would explain it every chance we got. I don’t think the press misunderstood it. It was just that they were focused on what the users were into at the time.”

He recalls one example that shows that Brin and Page imagined that one day even the smallest “stuff” would be online. “When we were doing the first research, we used to eat in Whole Foods [an organic supermarket chain]. We talked about using search to find out what aisle the salt is on. Instead of having to look at the big signs at the top of each aisle, you could use a search engine to tell you where in the store everything is, and maybe graph it out for you.”

Brin and Page were obsessed with recording, categorising and indexing anything and everything, and then making it available to anyone with internet access because they genuinely believed – and still do – that it is a morally good thing to do. It may sound hopelessly hippie-ish and wildly hypocritical coming from a couple of guys worth £10 billion each, but Brin and Page insist they are not, and never have been, in it for the money. They see themselves as latter-day explorers, mapping human knowledge so that others can find trade routes in the new information economy.

“Google has been trying to democratise information to make it possible for everyone in the world to access the information they need to do the things they need to do,” Silverstein says. Belief in the value of information for its own sake was behind the firm’s highly controversial decision to cave in to demands from the Chinese government for censorship so as to break into the giant local market. Some information, Google reckoned, is better than none.

In spite of the growing public paranoia over its omnivorous intentions, Google is convinced that the more we find out about what it is up to, the more we will agree with it. The man whose job it is to persuade us to live on planet Google is Sep Kamvar, the firm’s head of personalisation. He’s a good choice. The 30-year-old shaggy, flip-flop-wearing, softly spoken surfer dude could not look less Big Brotherish if he tried.

We meet – shock! – in yet another whitewashed conference room. He makes his pitch by first appealing to my wallet. Cloud computing and data storage are free for personal users. If I sign up, I will never again need to spend hundreds of pounds buying software and zip drives to back up my data. Google will do it all for me. The vision of a paperless future – where all documents reside online – sounds tempting. Being tied to a physical PC box is old-school.

Personalisation, Kamvar concedes, sounds “scary” but is in fact designed to help Google to help me. The more he and his fellow Google engineers know about me, the better they can tailor search results to my needs and interests. They can also start making recommendations I might find useful. Kamvar illustrates his point with a simple example: “Say you are in Britain and you’re interested in new restaurants in your area. You search for ‘new restaurants’.

Google, now, will give you information about new restaurants in Britain. If you want new local pizza or pasta restaurants, you have to work through the list searching for the Italian restaurants 
in your area. It’s inefficient. If, however, you share your web history with Google, it will know that you like Italian food best because you search for it the most, and it will know the area you live. It will move the Italian restaurants in your area up in your search results.”

Putting Google on my mobile phone and tracking my movements is also designed to deliver the best search results. When I search for “new restaurants” on my phone, he tells me, it will automatically put new Italian restaurants at the top in whatever location I find myself – whether it is London or Silicon Valley.

It won’t be long, he adds, before Google will tell me when hot new Italian restaurants open in London without my even asking it to. An early version of Google’s Recommendations service is currently available in the US and Europe. It will soon be extended to cover new jobs, activities and even social networking – so that it can fulfil Schmidt’s dream of telling me what to do tomorrow or which new job to apply for.

Put this way, Google’s vision sounds a little less threatening – but how long will my data be stored for? How do I know that it will not be misused? What’s to stop Google “mining” my search history and files and folders to create a detailed personal profile that it can sell to advertisers who will bombard me with targeted ads? The man who claims to have the answers is Elliot Schrage. The former member of the US Council on Foreign Relations wears the chinos on privacy as Google’s head of global communications and public affairs.

We meet in Charlie’s Cafe. Forget everything you’ve heard about hippies and food. Google has the best canteen in the world. Oyster shuckers shuck Washington State’s finest to order. There are freshly grilled prawns and lobster, and the only lentils are in the Moroccan mezze. Schrage points out that Google has legally binding privacy-protection agreements with its users. If I sign up for iGoogle personalised search, Google formally agrees to safeguard my privacy. To prevent others – rogue or negligent Google employees or hackers – misusing my profile, it is not directly linked to my name.

Only a handful of very senior Google engineers can access my data. Not a single byte will ever be made available – far less flogged – to advertisers. Schrage adds that handing over my personal data is optional.

“We are not forcing you to give us access.” I have to opt in to iGoogle. And even then, I can control how my web use is monitored. I can, if I want, restrict it simply to web searches, rather than all web history. I can delete certain search queries or web pages that I have visited from my search history. If I decide I don’t like the idea of personalised search, I can permanently delete my search history and go back to using Google’s regular search service, where I can be sure none of my personal search or web history will be recorded. Google stores all general search queries for 18 months, but the information is aggregated and not linked to individual users. “We are only the 300lb gorilla in the corner of the room if you want us to be your 300lb pet,” Schrage jokes.

Critics dismiss the measures as ineffective. They point out it is up to me to permanently delete my iGoogle personalised data. Many users will forget, and their personal data will be “out there” for ever. Google, they claim, is experimenting with sending targeted ads to mobile phones. However strict its privacy policies may be, some fear the firm may be forced one day to make public my private data whether it wants to or not and regardless of whether I want it to or not. Competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have forced Microsoft to share some of its Windows software with rivals because, regulators argued, Microsoft tried to use its market-dominant system to stifle competition. If Google uses our data to create its own monopoly, regulators might take similar action.

Back in the lobby, the blissed-out California sun is dipping below the horizon, turning the glass-and-steel curves of the Googleplex the colour of burnt sugar. The foot soldiers of the online revolution are heading home, laptops and lattes in hand. I have spent two days inside the black box and Google’s aims are, at last, a little clearer. Google thinks that creating a free-to-use global library and global computer is “a good thing”. But it can only become a really useful library and computer if it knows more about the people that use it: you and me. If we trust it, it can do things for us we could never have imagined, things that Googleytes call “the magic stuff”.

Want every computer in the world to be “our” computer? Sign up for cloud computing. Lost our keys? Google will find them. Want to have an alfresco lunch? Use our Google-enabled phone to view images of our nearest Italian restaurant, check it has a terrace and book a table. Want to know how far our bus is from the bus stop or where the nearest taxi is? Look online. Worried that our child has safely reached school? Google him or her. Search and ye shall find.

The £100 billion question, therefore, is: will we feel comfortable putting our privacy on the line online? Or will fears that we will become slaves to the machine outweigh the desire for a connected future? In spite of the growing furore over privacy, the signs are that we might sign up. iGoogle personalised search is Google’s fastest-growing new product. It already accounts for one in five searches in America. The service has just been launched in Europe, and Google claims the take-up is strong.

Apple’s wildly popular iPhone already uses location-aware Google Maps, and online queues are forming for Google’s soon-to-be-launched suite of mobile-phone applications that will work on any handset. Some of America’s largest firms, including Procter & Gamble and L’Oréal, are already using cloud computing, in the first serious challenge to the dominance of Microsoft Office.

Polls show that, in spite of the recent furore, many web-users here and in the US do not care about privacy. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, a US-based privacy think-tank, 68% of Americans believe that online privacy is important, but only 8% care enough about it to change their online behaviour. Above the din of chattering classes railing against “Googlezilla” can be heard the tip-tap of hundreds of millions of ordinary users willingly signing up to what they consider to be Google’s benign digital dictatorship. What’s another hunk of privacy lost if it makes life easier?

As I walk out of the Googleplex, I notice a new feature by the exit. It’s a giant 3-D computer-generated image of the globe which has giant red lasers shooting up into the sky. Each laser represents the number of Google search queries made at that point on the Earth’s surface. The higher the spikes, the greater the number of queries.

It is supposed to be a celebration of what Google has achieved so far. But it also highlights how much of the world it has already conquered and reveals how much it soon hopes to colonise. It is the perfect metaphor for where that simple little search box we use every day has come from and what its vaulting ambitions are. It does not simply want to be a good search engine on the web: it wants to be the web.

Will it get there? In the end, it’s up to us. Google has only gone from being the most famous misspelling since “potatoe” to a verb recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary because you, me – in fact, almost all of us – use it. If we carry on logging on, it will carry on growing. And growing. If we don’t, it won’t. The choice – the click – is ours.

From a garage to the globe

1997 - Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two 24-year-old Stanford University computer- science graduate students, register the domain name ‘google.com’. The word ‘google’ is an accidental misspelling of ‘googol’, which refers to the number 10 to the power of 100 (or 1 followed by 100 zeros)

1998 - Google becomes a private company and ‘launches’ on the worldwide web. Its headquarters are based in a garage in Menlo Park, northern California

2000 - Google begins to sell ads linked to key search words

2001- 2 Advertising revenue and deep-pocketed venture capitalists help Google to ride out the dotcom crash

2003 - Google expands rapidly, driving internet use and threatening industries as varied as music, newspapers, television, advertising, telephones, travel and pornography

2004 - Google floats on the Nasdaq. Its shares initially sell for £40. Today they fetch more than £300, valuing the company at almost £100 billion

2006 - Google buys YouTube, the largest and most popular video-exchange website

2007 - Google announces its £1.5 billion plan to buy DoubleClick, the leading display-advertising business that also tracks web-users’ search behaviour

What makes google go?

- Two factors explain Google’s extraordinary success – its search-related services and its advertising business. Search brings in the crowds. Advertising brings in the money

- Google dominates the market for search because in 1998 its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, invented a better way to index and rank web pages

- Before Google, search engines simply looked for keywords and their position on web pages to determine their content and importance. Unscrupulous publishers manipulated the system by filling their pages with popular keywords, usually hidden from view, to earn high rankings in search results

- Instead of analysing the content of each page, Brin and Page devised PageRank, a complex mathematical algorithm that tallied how many other influential sites linked to that page

- The partners reckoned that sites that were ‘well connected’ would be of higher quality. They were right. Google delivered more useful search results than its rivals

- Thanks to PageRank – and dozens of other constantly evolving filtering, classifying and indexing systems – Google is now the most popular internet-search engine. In the US, the world’s biggest online market, Google’s share of queries is around 60%, Yahoo’s 23%, Microsoft’s 12%, Time Warner’s 4.5%. In the UK and much of Europe, Asia and Latin America, Google handles three out of every four search queries

- Google’s second big breakthrough came with its advertising system, called AdWords. When you search for a topic on Google, small paid-for text ads show up next to search results

- While it didn’t invent search-triggered ads, Google figured out a far more efficient way of turning web-users into buyers. Rather than doling out premium space to the highest bidder, as its competitors did, Google used another algorithm to work out how relevant the ad text was to a given query and the odds someone would actually click on it. This meant ads were targeted at the users most likely to respond to them. The result was that Google’s ‘click through’ rate (the number of times users click on ads) was twice as high as its nearest competitor’s. It has captured more than half the search-engine advertising market.

Related Articles:

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-android-steals-show-at-computex.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/homebrewed-cpu-is-beautiful-mess-of.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-inquiry-into-hiring-at-high-tech.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/real-time-web-new-prime-time.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/hp-web-connected-printer-no-pc-needed.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-attacks-heart-of-microsoft.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-facebook-launch-persian-services.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/is-google-getting-ready-to-enter-ebook.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-tv-google-hits-upfront.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-to-take-on-amazon-books.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-flipper-is-about-to-jump-out-of.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/five-reasons-to-be-terrified-of-google.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-vp-on-twitter.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/bing-meaning-but-it-not-google.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/singularity-university-launches.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave-could-transform-net.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-adds-new-features-for-bloggers.html

Source: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2688404.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

Tags: PageRank, Global IT News, Global IT and Business News, AdWords, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Craig Silverstein, Stanford, Elliot Schrage, Googleplex, Googleytes, YouTube, Search algorithm,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Big Media Seek 21st Century Business Models

Media moguls at this week's Sun Valley conference have spent as much time discussing how to reconfigure business models disrupted by the Web as they have worrying about the weak economy.

With difficult credit markets and an unclear future, talk of dealmaking has been at a minimum this year. Yet there has never been a more important time for media conglomerates and their financiers to act and adapt to the Internet age. The mood at the conference was described as "somber" and "very bearish" by executives. While the recession was a key reason, the other was the uncertainty over how future profits can be made from distributing news and entertainment online and across devices like smartphones.

"We're not using long-form content on the Web because it's not clear to us that's the way people want to consume content, said David Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery Communications Inc, which owns the Discovery Channel. "But also the business model isn't there yet, so we're taking it slow," he said in an interview on the sidelines of the event organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.

In the late-night bar at the Sun Valley Lodge, from which the press was banned, most of the discussions were around the issue of free versus paid content, said one senior executive who asked not to be named as his conversations with other executives were private. The challenge is how media companies can keep alive the lucrative cable business model at a time when consumers are increasingly used to getting content for free online. Cable operators pay affiliate fees to cable networks for their programming, and both share advertising revenue.

Plans such as Time Warner Inc's "TV Everywhere" and Comcast Corp's "On Demand Online" seek to preserve that business model by offering cable shows on the Web to authenticated, paying cable TV subscribers.

"Authentication is an interesting intermediate step and is something that we're looking at," said Zaslav. The conversations about TV Everywhere are heating up. Google Inc CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed to reporters that he has had early talks with Time Warner about the possibility of getting paid cable shows up on YouTube. But he did not elaborate.

TV VS PRINT AND MUSIC

Television studio executives do not want to repeat the experience of their colleagues in the hard-hit newspaper and music businesses, and are worried that consumers will expect TV shows, movies and all professional programing to be free. Hulu.com, owned by News Corp, NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co, offers broadcast TV shows and movies for free on the Web, but there has been talk at Sun Valley among executives of introducing a paid content model.

Wired editor Chris Anderson argues in his book 'Free' that many companies, with media at the forefront, could build bigger and better businesses around the notion of giving away their content for free. Many executives in Sun Valley would not agree. 'Free' -- supported by advertising -- is not a new concept. After all, broadcast TV is free but its dominance has been eroded by cable channels and its future as an advertising outlet is bleak.

Newspapers owned by News Corp and others are fervently examining news-bundling pricing models to seek ways to get users to pay to read news online. One consideration may be to bundle different properties along vertical lines, such as business and sports news, for a monthly fee.

Far from free, what media moguls would want to preserve on the Web and mobile platforms is the dual-revenue stream from subscriptions and advertising. "The big thing for these guys is how do you come up with that dual revenue streams online," said Jeremy Alliare, chief executive of Brightcove, an online video company that partners with many major media companies. "Cable TV is a part of that but I think it's a broader industry discussion."

Related Articles:

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/microsoft-and-publicis-strike-deal.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/virgin-universal-launch-music-download.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/youtube-for-tv.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/good-news-in-music-business-no-really.html

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090711/wr_nm/us_sunvalley_media_5

Tags: Hulu, News Corp, NBC Universal, Walt Disney Co, YouTube, Brightcove, Cable TV, Comcast, Chris Anderson, Wired, Global Blog Network, Paid content Model, Media moguls, Sun Valley conference,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Internet Service Providers Not Keeping Up with User Trends

There's a revolution happening on the Internet — though broadband providers have not seemed to notice.

Thanks to new gadgets, programs and Web services, consumers are sending, sharing and swapping more data than ever over the global network. Yet many are stuck with Internet connections that give them upload speeds much slower than download speeds. What that means is that it takes a lot longer to send a movie or picture out to the Internet than it takes to download the same file. Uploading a video, a roll of pictures or a backup of key files on your hard drive can take hours, or even days. I ran into this issue earlier this month when I sent some pictures to Kodak to get them printed for my dad for Father's Day. I uploaded 170 pictures, which was about 800 megabytes of data.

Admittedly, I have a relatively poky connection: EarthLink says my maximum download speed is 3 megabits per second, but I rarely get more than 2.2 megabits per second. Even at that rate, it would have taken me less than an hour to download that much data. But because I was uploading — at a mere 384 kilobits per second maximum throughput — it took me more than three hours.

I'm not the only one affected. Internet users as a whole are sending increasing amounts of data out on to the Net. They are blogging, posting messages on Twitter, using Loopt to tell others where they are hanging out, or writing messages on friend's profile pages on Facebook. They're sharing videos and pictures on sites such as Flickr, YouTube or Facebook. And they're playing multiplayer games over the Internet such as "World of Warcraft'' or via services such as Xbox Live.

Those on the cutting edge are doing even more. They're swapping videos or software — sometimes illicitly — through services such as BitTorrent. They're using gadgets such as the SlingPlayer, programs such as Simplify Media or services such as Apple's Mobile Me to remotely access videos, music or files from their home PCs or other devices. And they're backing up their home PCs to online storage sites.

And their ranks are growing. YouTube users upload 20 hours of video to the site every minute. That's up from six hours of video every minute just two years ago. Meanwhile, Facebook users upload 850 million photos and 10 million videos to its site every month.

But broadband companies seem oblivious to this trend. If you look at the plans offered by the Bay Area's two main providers, Comcast and AT&T, it's all but impossible to find one in which the upload speed comes anywhere close to the download speed. To get an upload speed that's faster than a slow DSL download rate, you have to subscribe to one of the pricier plans, like Comcast's Extreme 50, which gives you a 10 megabit per second upload connect — at a cost of $100 a month.

Comcast and AT&T officials say they are watching consumer Internet usage trends. They note that as their companies have ramped up download speeds, they've tended to increase upload speeds as well and will continue to do so. The download and upload speeds they offer are simply a response to market demand, they say, claiming that the vast majority of their customers still download far more data than they upload.

"We're designing our products based on how we see consumers using them," John Britton, an AT&T spokesman, told me. Over the course of a month, a week or even a day, it's undoubtedly true that consumers tend to download more data than they upload. But for a growing number of Internet users, there are times when they want to upload data.

When I was uploading my pictures, I was sending far more data than I was receiving. During that time, I couldn't have cared less how fast my download speed was. Indeed, I would have loved to have been able to allocate my download bandwidth to upload my pictures.

But there's no way for me to do that. In terms of Internet access providers, the Bay Area essentially has a duopoly. There are numerous small players such as EarthLink, but Comcast and AT&T dominate — and duopolies tend to not have a good read on real market demand. People often buy one of their products because they don't have any other choices — not because they meet their needs.

In other words, if the market were more competitive, a company might be able to build a successful business by catering to people who want faster upload speeds. Just because consumers use their connections to download more data than they upload isn't proof that they don't want to upload more. The slow speeds could well discourage folks from doing more uploading. And they may well find a use for faster upload speeds — if they had them.

I'd love to be able to back up the videos, songs and documents on my computer to a server on the Internet. But with my slow upload connection, that's not really an option because it would take days of uninterrupted uploading to back up any significant portion of my hard drive. Here's hoping broadband providers join the revolution and make faster upload speeds an option soon.

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_12689652?source=email

Tags: AT&T, EarthLink, Comcast, ISP’s, uploading rates, downloading rates, Internet infrastructure, Global IT and Business News, YouTube, Loopt, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, World of warcraft, Xbox live, BitTorrent. SlingPlayer, Simplify Media, Apple's Mobile Me,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Google, Facebook Launch Persian Services

(AFP) - Internet giant Google has unveiled a Farsi translation service to help Iranians "communicate directly" to the world, while Facebook has launched a version of its site in Persian, they said Friday.

The Internet has played a key role in allowing some Iranians to communicate since last week's disputed presidential elections and many international media outlets have used services like Twitter and emails in their coverage. "We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran," Google's principal scientist Franz Och said, announcing the addition of Farsi to Google Translate, its free online service.

Like YouTube and Twitter, "Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa -- increasing everyone's access to information," he added in a posting on Google's official blog. Meanwhile, Facebook engineer Eric Kwan said on its blog: "Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath." He added: "Today we're making the entire site available in a beta version of Persian." Several thousand people posted a "thumbs up" reaction to the news, denoting their approval.

The BBC reported that Google and Facebook had speeded up work on their projects because of huge interest in current events in Iran. Hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the winner of the elections, provoking major protests on the streets of Tehran by supporters of his principal challenger, moderate former premier Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Many young people have been taking part in the protests. Meanwhile, the BBC also said Friday it has increased the number of satellites carrying its BBC Persian television service to countries including Iran. It said in a statement that the Hotbird 6 satellite which carries BBC international TV and radio services had been subjected to "deliberate interference" since last Friday. Services will now be available via three other satellites.

"This is an important time for Iran and many Iranians are turning to the BBC for impartial and independent news and information during this crisis," said BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090619/tc_afp/iranpoliticsinternetgooglefacebookmedialanguage_20090619160723

Tags: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Farsi, Iran, BBC, YouTube, Hotbird 6, Franz Och, Peter Horrocks, Eric Kwan, BBC Persian Television, Google Translate, Global Best Practice,

Posted via email from Global Business News

How To Go Viral

The man who created flash mobs explains why crazes like Susan Boyle ruin our ability to focus on the big picture.

Bill Wasik is an Internet instigator. Though he works as an editor at Harper's, Wasik is best known as the creator of flash mobs, that early 21st-century trend in which, directed by chain e-mails, people formed mobs in public places for no other reason than to form mobs. That's hardly his only act of Internet impishness, though: Over the course of his career, Wasik has adopted numerous online personas in order to test the boundaries of our ever-expanding viral culture. He tried to derail the burgeoning career of indie rock darlings Peter Bjorn and John, started a fake version of the New York Times for conservatives, and ran a site focused exclusively on negative attacks against political candidates. In the process, he's analyzed how and why some stories became cultural phenomenons and others languish in the nursing home of online oblivion.

Now, in his new book "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture", Wasik sets out to explain what he's learned from all his Web mischievousness and also what our increasing addiction to the Internet indicates about us as a society. We now have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but Wasik suggests we find it hard to focus on issues that really matter because we're so consumed with myopic, ephemeral things.

Recently, Salon spoke with Wasik via phone about nanostories, self-marketing, flash mobbing in front of Claire's Accessories and the fleeting fame of Susan Boyle. Your book is mainly about viral culture. We hear that term bandied about a lot, but what does it actually mean?

I use the term "viral culture" to talk about a whole new model for how we find out about things, whether it's a new band or some new celebrity or a political argument. When I use the phrase, I am thinking about a mode of culture that finds its purest expression on the Internet. But I also think that the shifts that I'm talking in the book deal with the speed with which we find out about new things. That obviously isn't just happening online, it's happening everywhere. When I talk about viral culture, I'm talking about a culture that's reinventing itself on an Internet model.

Part of that involves nanostories, which you also write about extensively. So how do nanostories flare up and then burn out? I define nanostory as the basic unit of this kind of churning viral culture. Susan Boyle is a classic example of a nanostory. She burst onto the scene. Not just in Britain but here in the U.S. with a few YouTube videos. And immediately what she becomes is not just a little celebrity but this giant symbol of all this stuff about the culture that people want to hang on her. Her age or her appearance becomes symbolic of cutting against this youth- and beauty-obsessed media culture. The sort of style of music she likes, these throwback Broadway songs, wind up being indicative of some kind of more transcendent approach to music.

She becomes this giant symbol and all this meaning gets heaped upon her. But then of course, there's nothing to sustain it. She became this giant micro-star at a point when she wasn't going to be on television again for many weeks. If you can't feed the machine, then it shuts down. We'll just be distracted onto the next thing if it doesn't give us more to keep us going. That, to me, is a classic example of a nanostory. It is a short-lived media phenomenon that is driven by the sheer quantity and speed of the contemporary conversation. So many hours of cable news to fill, there are so many blogs that need refreshing. Now there's Twitter and more. And so we seize upon these tiny little things and try to elevate them into sensations, but of course they can't bear up under the weight of it.

With so many different mediums, why do they all seem to follow these same stories? At the end of the day, why does anyone care so much about this random singer that none of us have ever met?

That relates to the "Long-Tail" -- the idea that the Internet will allow us to splinter off into a lot of smaller niches. The Internet does allow for smaller and smaller communities of interest that have more and more intense likes for shared things. But I also think one great value of culture for us is that we like to have something to talk about with each other. And so, you might have a great love for some very, very obscure form of heavy metal and on the Internet you can find all the other 5,000 different people around the world who like this very particular heavy metal music. But it's also true that if you go to high school or if you work in an office or if you have sort of friends out in the real world, you're going to want to engage with them in the shared stuff of mass culture. Mass culture continues to exist precisely because it's the stuff of cultural exchange among ourselves. And so, that to me is the reason why you have 10 million people becoming obsessed with Susan Boyle instead of 10,000 people. Precisely because she becomes grist for this bigger conversation.

But doesn't that suggest that what human relationships are founded upon is incredibly shallow or meaningless?

I don't know if I would go so far that it all has to be meaningless. You sometimes have these great sensations stirred up by news stories or by pieces of investigative journalism or great art. There's this section of the book where I talk about the Politico, the online politics site. Their audience really is interested in a lot of interesting picayune policy details. But of course it's also true that that audience cares about meaningless scandal.

Right, the Politico also broke the John Edwards haircut story. So does our fixation with nanostories make us less able to focus on the mega-stories, the long-term problems such as global warming or the economic crisis?

Absolutely. One of things that I find so depressing about the climate change conversation is the fact that we actually have succeeded in implanting climate change in a lot of people's minds as an important long-term challenge. But more often than not, the way that that happens in public discourse is seizing on these tiny, little, grabby ideas that are really, really short-term. So, Al Gore has a movie. That was the seminal moment in coming to an understanding about climate change in this country, where we could turn it into a little entertainment business piece. And I think your point about the economic crisis is right on too. We sat there and talked about the AIG bonuses for four days. It was very telling that we can only know the big problem these days by way of some tiny little piece of outrage or delight, through these little nanostories.

I also want to talk about what you call your experiments in viral culture. You are the originator of flash mobs. What was your goal in sending out an e-mail to your friends to tell them to meet you in front of a Claire's accessories store?

I had become really interested in chain e-mails and in the ways you'd get something forwarded from a friend or from your uncle or wherever. It did sort of seem like chain e-mails were a medium and if you could somehow tap into that, then you could potentially do something creatively interesting with that. And I had been thinking about how I might be able to use a chain e-mail to get people to come to a show of some kind. But after thinking about it for a while: What if there was no show? What if the idea with the e-mail was I just laid it on the line, forward this to everyone you know, we're going to get together, and the whole point of us getting together will be for us to all be together in some place that nobody expected us to be?

What were some of your other experiments and what have they shown you about viral culture?

One other experiment was in the indie rock world, where it's hard to stop the buzz of an indie rock band. So I created a site called StopPeterBjornandJohn that attempted to stop the rise of this band. I entered the Huffington Post Contagious Festival, which was this thing they ran for a year, where you would enter and create a site that got as many hits as possible, and whichever site got the most hits won. I also created this politics site called Oppodepot with the idea of it being a sort of collaborative site, a repository of smears, negative political information.

I had some very interesting conversations with Jonah Peretti, who was the mastermind behind the Contagious Festival and is now the head of this site called Buzzfeed, and Jonah made the valuable point that successful viral sites need to speak to some kind of social relationship. If you're going to forward it along to someone you know, you're only going to forward it to someone that something about your preexisting relationship with that person makes you think they'll like it. He gives the example of this New York Times article, "What Shamu Taught Me About Having a Happy Marriage." It was an animal trainer writing about how the wisdom of animal training helped her understand her relationship with her husband. It was the number one story forever, seemingly.

Right. But think of all the different social relationships that it spoke to. If you were married, you might jokingly send it to your spouse. If your friend was having relationship troubles, you might send it to them. Or your parents. And also, you can have a viral thing that's designed to be appreciated ironically and you can have one that's designed to be appreciated earnestly, but man, if you have something that can be appreciated either way or both ways at the same time, then you're cooking with gas.

Another lesson I'd say I learned from the mob project is the idea of secrecy and being a secret agent. Being part of a small, elect group of people that are going to carry out some mission. That idea has a lot of appeal just because it gives you a thrill of belonging and being special in an Internet culture where everything is usually accessible to everyone all the time. I think that's an interesting point -- what is it that we all get personally out of these nanostories?

There's a way in which having the novelty before somebody else has it, so you can give it to them, becomes a kind of exchange. People like to be the friend who knows about the new band or the new movie or the new Internet meme that their friends don't know about.

In the book, you suggest that our predilection for propagating Internet fads is a form of self-marketing and that the Internet is teaching us to constantly sell ourselves. We're selling our discernment or hipness when we "discover" the hot new band or funny YouTube video. You write, "When one has developed the media mind -- which is, at heart, a marketing mind -- one can never stop selling, but neither can one be entirely sold." Is it dangerous that we're all becoming marketers of ourselves? If so, what does it lead us to?

I do feel that there's something intrinsic to these kind of Web 2.0 modes of self-presentation that makes us think like marketers. When you post a video on YouTube or a link to your blog or a song to your MySpace page, without you asking in most cases, the technology is going to give you all of this data about how many people listened to this song or that song, viewed this link as opposed to that link. Suddenly, you're like the TV executive with the Nielsen ratings. And this is exactly what's happened to newspapers. You have this information that you never had before.

The editor of the Washington Post never knew before which individual stories in the paper were generating interest. He just knew the whole thing sold X number of copies. But with the Internet you have all this granular information about where your readers are coming from and which stories they pick. You can't help but use that information in how you decide to present yourself or how you decide what to write or what to create in the future. And that to me is the way that this kind of marketing mind-set unavoidably creeps into Internet culture.

But in terms of individuals presenting themselves, especially people who are aspiring culture makers and are trying to make a career for themselves, you post something that gets a bunch of hits or you record a song that suddenly gets a bunch of downloads, that could wind up being the sort of formative creative experience that you have in your life. People talk about getting their break and traditionally, you come to New York or wherever you are, somebody who has power or has experience picks out something you did or pick you out and says, hey you've got something. Many people have those formative experiences.

I would say that for 90 percent of culture makers coming up today, your break is going to be online. And the way that you're going to know you had your break is going to be numbers. It isn't going to be a single person, like an established poet, or an established musician coming up to you after a show or responding to a piece of writing you sent them and saying, I really believe you can do it. Instead, it's like this giant hive mind will pluck out something that you've done and say, this we love, this we bestow the pleasure of 2 million hits on. From there on out, you're going to use those cues you get from this giant machine to tell you what to keep doing and to tell you what to stop doing. And that to me is potentially scary in all sorts of ways. The hive mind selects for a certain kind of thing, it selects for culture that is instantly digestible, it selects for culture that is sensational in a certain sort of way.

So what do we do about this? You write, "We must become judicious controllers of our own contexts, making careful and self-reflective choices about what we read, watch, consume." How?

There are probably people who will happily surf the Internet hive mind for as long as it keeps on going. And I wouldn't begrudge them that. I'm more trying to speak to people like me, who on the one hand are really viscerally engaged with the online culture, who understand rightly that it really is the locus of almost everything exciting that's going on in the culture. You can't ignore it. But on the other hand we feel that being constantly plugged in is taking too much of a toll on us.

I would say that if there's one thing that's causing the novels of the world from getting written right now, it's surfing the Internet. I do think that a lot of creative people want to be working on their craft, they want to be thinking big about what they should be doing and my belief is that the culture is encouraging them to think small. To me, the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves. To carve out spaces in our lives away from information. Away from the sort of constant buzzing of the hive mind. I think some of these constraints can just be arbitrary. Tuesdays, I'm not going to look at the Internet. I think that can often be effective.

Another way of working on it is to develop more effective filters of information. Instead of just freely clicking around from site to site to site, and before you know it, you've spent four hours following your whimsy every which way, instead pick out a few sources of information that you feel like are not just crucial and well-done, but also fairly broad based and representative. To me, the most important step is recognizing that you can't possibly take in all the information that's out there. [You need to] make a wise intervention into your information consumption and try to make it manageable so that you can live a happy life and save time for the thinking of higher things.

Source: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/06/10/viral_culture/index1.html

Tags: Bill Wasik, nanostories, viral culture, salon, How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, buzzfeed, Jonah Peretti, Contagious Festival, Global Blog Network, youtube, myspace,

Posted via email from Global Business News