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Loading ...There’s nothing ’stoopid’ about Nicholas Carr
Nicholas Carr is not so much the IT industry Cassandra as its declinologue. With “IT Doesn’t Matter,” he argued that technology offers businesses no strategic advantage. With his most recent book, The Big Switch, he insists that cloud computing makes the traditional data centre redundant. Now, with “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he takes things one step further, wondering aloud if our dependence on the Internet will one day make the human brain unnecessary, too.
The article was published in The Atlantic Monthly, which might not be the most mainstream publication, but compared with the Harvard Business Review, where Carr got his start, it’s practically People magazine. It’s a fitting stage for his thesis, which is that extensive use of online media and search engines is slowly changing our ability to concentrate and think deeply. You know the feeling: instead of immersing yourself in a good book you’re itching to check e-mail. To Carr, it’s an early warning sign of what may come.
“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self,” he writes. “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”
The long-term cognitive effects of extensive Internet use are impossible to predict, and apart from a vision of artificially intelligent search engines hard-wired to our brains, Carr barely tries. He merely makes a point – and perhaps his most important one – that in our haste to move to the next Web page we may be losing our ability to contemplate. Without that kind of sustained mental activity, we will have a more difficult time dealing with the ambiguities that make life interesting. And although he doesn’t spell it out, it could make idea generation that much more difficult. No wonder Intel, Apple and other vendors are now asking employees to devote some time to thinking away from their PC screens.
Contrast Carr’s piece with a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called In the Air, which tries to help us understand why the big innovations often happen simultaneously among different people. He follows the efforts of a former Microsoft exec who sets up a group brainstorming network, and the value that comes from dedicating resources to such activities. His conclusion: that “insight could be orchestrated,” but primarily among scientists, not artists.
“You can’t pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart’s Requiem. You can’t put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse’s ‘La Danse,’” he writes. “Our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong. Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner’s desk a few hours before Gray’s. The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle.”
If the Internet erodes our attention spans, however, it may not matter whether we are scientists or artists. It will become harder to have those eureka moments that are critical to major discoveries and accomplishments. Of course, the rub here is that both Carr’s and Gladwell’s articles are obviously the result of deep contemplation, and run thousands of words longer than most of what’s read online. So far, we are winning the war on distraction.
Carr has said the role of the IT manager will eventually fade away, but for the moment, at least, they are the ones setting up the systems we use for managing information and, indirectly, the collected knowledge of employees. Just like users, they are bombarded with data and decisions to make, and one of those decisions may be whether to provide technology that makes workers not only more productive but develops their capacity to ruminate and reason. “The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure,” Carr says. That of the IT manager cannot afford to be.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Memo to StatsCan: Internet use blurs personal/business lines
“An Internet user is someone who used the Internet from any location for personal non-business reasons in the 12 months preceding the survey. A home user is someone who reported using the Internet from home, for the same reasons.”
The above is taken from a set of definitions by Statistics Canada that were used in a report released this week on Canadian Internet use habits based on data collected last year. Unless there is a lot more information to which the public doesn’t have access, it is the last time in the report the distinction is really made. It doesn’t specify, for example, whether more people used the Internet at home or somewhere else (which would have told us something about the appetite for mobile Web experiences). It doesn’t highlight any ways in which home users are more predisposed to blogging, posting pictures, or whether “external” Internet users preferred to listen to music or watch movies. On the basis of what StatsCan released, the two definitions are meaningless. But then, so is the idea of segregating non-business Internet use anyway.
StatsCan preferred to emphasize a much more familiar story in its report – that there is a digital divide in Canada that determines who is getting online. Get ready for it: those with high incomes and education in more connected provinces show higher use of the Internet! Not that the government shouldn’t be taking greater steps to improving access to broadband (something they perhaps can attend to once they’re done getting rich off the wireless spectrum auction), but there are other areas where StatsCan could have probed a little deeper.
The agency’s definition of an “Internet user” sounds like someone sitting in an Internet café, but more likely these are the people who are actually at work, and the usage they describe to StatsCan reflects the “breaks” they take in between answering client’s e-mails and entering information into a SharePoint portal. There is no good reason to ignore this, and every reason to factor it into the report’s findings.
Take one of the charts provided near the end of the report. It offers a laundry list of what Canadians are doing when they’re surfing, and some of it suggested a more Web-savvy population than you might have previously supposed. There was researching health information or planning for travel, but I was intrigued by one labelled “window shopping.” Sixty per cent of Canadians said they do this on the Internet. Another 45 per cent said they actually order goods and services. But although some categories did better than others (only 32 per cent go online to look for a job – sorry Workoplis et al), what came after e-mail in the No. 2 spot was “general browsing for fun and leisure,” at 76 per cent. All the other categories could fit into general browsing for fun and leisure, which suggests to me that people are multi-tasking online – no doubt because they are doing at least some of that browsing in the midst of business-related activities, even if they are at home.
Everyone in the IT industry should realize by now that the commercial and corporate use of the Internet is blurring, and so should Statistics Canada. If we want to really understand how Canadians are behaving when they surf, we can’t pretend that it all happens outside of the 9 to 5, or that home use doesn’t combine business and pleasure. The habits of Canadians, and pretty much Internet users everywhere, are much more tightly integrated than that.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...What IT managers should know about SEO
Maybe we talk about Web surfing because to talk more about Web searching would bring up a topic a lot of IT managers don’t want to hear about.
Search Engine Strategies (SES) will be taking place in Toronto this June 16-18 2008 and will cover all manner of strategies enterprises are using to get discovered by customers online. Matt McGowan, global vice-president of marketing at Incisive Media and one of the show’s producers, took a few minutes to give me an overview of where the industry was heading, including for those who only spend some of their time working with marketing people.
1. To what extent, if at all, do IT professionals such as CIOs and IT managers have in search engine marketing? Have the tools and strategies matured to a point where this can be entirely handed off to the marketing department, or is there still a need for custom development or integration with other systems?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to both (1) paid placement, occurs mostly on the right hand side of the search engine results page (SERPs) in addition to the content networks and (2) natural optimization (SEO). Marketers use existing tools every day to optimize spend. That said, new tools are released all the time and existing tools need to be tweaked to keep up with the ever occurring changes in the industry.
As far as paid placement is concerned, tools have been created that make my job as a marketer much easier. For example, Bid Management Tools allow for, amongst other things, a central point to manage campaigns across multiple Search Engines (SEs) and centralized tracking to help determine ROI.
Technology plays a major factor in SEO as well, in terms of the platform on which content sits needs to be optimized. For example, if your Content Management System (CMS) uses variables instead of relevant keywords in the url generation process, some would say you are at a disadvantage.
Other tools can help marketers with both their paid and SEO practices, including Keyword Research tools, which have been developed to suggest relevant keywords so as to grow lists into the long tail and beyond, and Website optimization tools which help marketers and designers determine the look and feel that drives the best ROI/conversions.
That said, tools are not perfect. CMS’s, for example, do not help you write strong unique content or achieve inbound links (a major factor SEs use in determining site relevance to certain keyword queries).
There are a lot of tools out there and many of the most effective companies utilize many of them. That said, there are many companies (the vast majority) that still need to develop a better understanding of Search and the tools that currently exist. Technologists and Web developers will be needed to integrate these tools/platforms for some time to come, in addition as the SEM Industry continues to evolve these same people will be called upon to update their tools and create new ones to solve new problems (for example the integration Video, Social Media and other new assets the SEs have now learned to crawl – better tools need to be updated to manage these non-contextual assets).
2. Although Microsoft hasn’t managed to buy Yahoo (at least not yet) there seems to be an inevitable consolidation among the major search players. What impact do you think this will have on those trying to advance their search engine marketing strategies within the enterprise?
I define the major players here in North America to be Google, Yahoo, Live (Microsoft) and Ask (IAC) - at this time talk has been around MSFT buying Yahoo (either parts or the whole company), which would make MSFT the number 2 player in the space, or as some industry veterans predict, Yahoo incorporating Google’s search technology, which would decrease costs for Yahoo and grow revenues as Google monetizes Search better than Yahoo. There are other conversations going on around CashBack Live and talent acquisition but those are not as relevant to this question.
What impact would consolidation have, if it happened (which at least as outlined above looks like it will not happen)? It makes marketers nervous. Do we really want to be reliant on so few companies for such a major portion of our ad spend? If we continue to see consolidation, it would mean fewer choices which could mean higher prices, lower quality Search results (as competition does lead to innovation), or worse…
This is the kind of thing we discuss during our strategy sessions at the premier global SEM event series the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo - I would encourage all reading this to join the conversation sometime soon.
3. What are the characteristics of a company that has successfully mastered search engine marketing?
Great question – and based on the last two questions an obvious query…
A) Strong communication between IT, Web development and Marketing
B) Minimal bureaucracy – decision making ability lies in the hands of the people who get it
C) Willingness to test new ideas, tools and services
4. How do North American countries such as Canada and the U.S. differ, if at all, in their search engine marketing strategies and approach versus internationally-based firms, and is there something they could learn from one another?
I have not seen that many differences other than the culture and language.
5. What’s the best search engine marketing tip you’ve ever received, either from attending SES or elsewhere?
Paid Search – break your keywords into multiple buckets, each with its own purpose, goals and ROI expectations.
Organic (SEO) – don’t try to game the system, write good content on a sound platform. Be original.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The five best quotes in Vanity Fair’s oral history of the Internet
When they’re done right, an oral history is like hosting the most interesting dinner party imaginable, where the guests tell the kind of stories that turn into legends. Vanity Fair’s oral history of the Internet is an example of doing it right.
As part of its latest issue, the magazine interviews countless contributors to the early days of cyberspace as we know it today. “How the Web was won” is a long read, but well worth it if you have the time. If you don’t, enjoy these personally-selected sound bites that made me want to keep turning the page.
“Communication always changes society, and society was always organized around communication channels. Two hundred years ago it was mostly rivers. It was sea-lanes and mountain passes. The Internet is another form of communication and commerce. And society organizes around the channels.”
– Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist
“Let me put it into perspective. So here we are when there are very few time-sharing systems anywhere in the world. AT&T probably said, Look, maybe we would have 50 or a hundred organizations, maybe a few hundred organizations, that could possibly partake of this in any reasonable time frame. Remember, the personal computer hadn’t been invented yet. So, you had to have these big expensive mainframes in order to do anything. They said, There’s no business there, and why should we waste our time until we can see that there’s a business opportunity? That’s why a place like arpa is so important.”
– Robert Kahn, former Bell Labs employee who worked with Vint Cerf on the TCP and IP networking protocols in the 1970s.
“The idea of leaving files for each other was pretty common in the time-sharing world. A guy named Ray Tomlinson, at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, figured out a way to cause a file to be transferred from one machine through the Net to another machine and left in a particular location for someone to pick up. He said, I need some symbol that separates the name of the recipient from the machine that the guy’s files are on. And so he looked around for what symbols on the keyboard were not already in use, and found the “@” sign. It was a tremendous invention.”
– Vint Cerf
“The hottest job title during the frothy days was—you’d see 25-year-olds who had the title of ‘vice president, business development.’ It was like sales without the quota. I remember asking one of these V.P., biz-dev guys how his company was doing, and he says, ‘Oh, it’s great, we’re into our third round of financing.’ And I said, Well, how about the revenue side? Are you profitable? He says, ‘We’re a pre-revenue company.’”
– Upside magazine’s Rich Karlgaard
“What do people use networks for? They use e-mail. They send files around. But until ’93 there’s no killer application that would draw in real people. I mean, people who are not academics or not in the technical industries. The World Wide Web turns the Internet into a repository, the largest repository of information and knowledge that’s ever existed. Suddenly, people who want to check on the weather or keep track of the stock market—suddenly, there’s a wealth of stuff you can do.”
– Lawrence H. Landweber, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin who founded CSNet, which connected universities without access to the Arpanet.
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(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Bill Gates lookalike explains cloud computing
If you don’t have the time (or patience) to explain to a CFO or CEO how hosted data and applications over the Internet works, this five-minute overview by Christopher Barnatt, author of ExplainingComputers.com, gives a pretty thorough look at the key services, benefits and issues associated with this concept. Includes discussions of software- and hardware-as-a-service, too. But seriously: Am I the only one that sees the resemblance to a certain software CEO here? Take away the British accent and this guy could be running the show at Redmond.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The ins and outs of Google’s I/O 2008 event
It usually takes a long time for a developer conference to attract a critical mass of interest and talent, but Google, in the first year of its I/O event, has managed to create a must-do item on every ISV’s calendar.
What Google brings to the table, of course, is not necessarily its product portfolio (although it has that) but a massive audience which it has built up through its search engine. If its products were already as successful as its search engine promoting the developer tools could be unnecessary. But I/O 2008 marks an important juncture in the Web firm’s history: this is the moment when it becomes less of a consumer resource and more of an axis around which the entire IT industry would orbit.
Google would never put it this way. The most revealing thing about I/O is not the black-and-binary dot T-shirts, the iPhone-like Android prototype or the marquee customer, MySpace. It’s the transition away from branded offerings to standalone names: Gears instead of Google Gears, OpenSocial instead Google OpenSocial. This is a posture meant to facilitate a more community-oriented mindset among developers, but don’t kid yourself. Google will be ultimately responsible for the success or failure of these tools as application enablers.
In some ways I/O 2008 reminds me of JavaOne, but despite Sun Microsystems’ partnership with Google there are some obvious differences. With Google, for one, the network is not only the computer; the browser is the operating system. And when you’re primarily focused on hosting applications online via cloud computing, there’s no need to invite Intel and HP (or Sun) to talk about their hardware. Instead, I/O is more like a second-line launch for Gears, Android, OpenSocial and AppEngine. For ISVs, the conference is the equivalent of Google’s grand opening for business partners and customers.
While the Android demo got a lot of the initial attention, it won’t mean much to the outside world until OEMs start producing some actual handsets. Gears is important, because it’s in the running with Adobe’s AIR as a way of creating apps that run offline as well as on. OpenSocial’s new REST (representational state transfer) API is interesting, but will be more interesting once social networking becomes a more mobile activity. The big deal is the opening up (and pricing details) of AppEngine, which will be yardstick by which other cloud computing efforts (including Amazon’s EC2/S3) are measured in the long term. For Google, the cloud is its zone. If it can’t own the market there, its other tools will be merely nice add-ons in someone else’s zone.
IT managers will start paying more attention to events like I/O once they have decided whether they want their applications and infrastructure to live in the cloud, which may also have a bearing on whether more developers do, too. Right now you’ve got many ISVs who are still rooted in the traditional Microsoft world of desktop-oriented programming of traditional productivity and other business software. Google is painting a different picture, of an ISV that focuses on mobility, social networking and working outside the OS. Showing up at future I/O conferences could end up saying a lot about the kind of developer you want to be.
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(2 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Facebook offers a primer in effective site redesign planning
Drop-down menus. Tabbed browsing. A content management tool. Come on, people: it’s not like Facebook is reinventing the wheel here.
As the social networking service prepares more than 70 million users for a site redesign, many people are bracing for a backlash. What the outcome of such a backlash will be is less certain. Will users delete their accounts? Not likely. Will they move over to a more cluttered competitor, like MySpace? Doubtful, since they have that option already. Although the redesign will no doubt inspire many complaints, Facebook should be smart enough to use such feedback as an opportunity to further fine-tune its product offering.
I have been involved in Web site designs for portals that attract far less than .05 per cent of Facebook’s install base, and I can tell you that people can become particularly vehement about the placement of a navigation bar, a logo or even a copyright notice. In Facebook’s case, it is dealing with the kind of problem a lot of IT managers would like to have: it has come up with a Web-based application that people actually love, and the trick now is to increase its functionality while making it easier to use.
For developers, obviously, there is a chance the redesign will mean reduced exposure of their applications on member’s main pages. Boo-hoo! Talk to the many ISVs who wonder why customers don’t take better advantage of the tools they get for free in packaged software applications. (I don’t think IDC or Gartner has ever bothered, but it would be interesting to how the percentage of unused features in a program like, say, Microsoft Word compares to the percentage of unused applications on Facebook.) The key to Facebook’s redesign will be whether it offers users an easier way to search or be alerted to the applications that would be most appropriate to them, rather than inundating them with options.
What Facebook really provides is the consumer equivalent of an executive dashboard – status updates, the ability to add or peruse new information and to organize and communicate with their network. Instead of business intelligence, it’s social intelligence, but dashboards aren’t effective if they can’t be browsed at a glance. Facebook will never have the stark simplicity of Google, but it needs to make decisions about how people prefer to manage their data, just as those involved in a corporate portal project have to adjust their templates accordingly.
The great thing about Facebook’s redesign is that it’s so public, and the company is making a wise move by keeping the redesign as open and transparent as possible. It has created a group on its own platform to discuss the changes, and will be giving users the ability to toggle back and forth between the old version and the new one once it debuts. That’s a lot better than what most office employees are offered, which is a forced-fed redesign of their Web sites or applications without consultation and little preparation for the transition. As case studies go, this should be a valuable one. Facebook became successful by connecting us to our friends. Now it needs to do an even better job of it – without making too many enemies.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Fifteen years of the Web, and Facebook 15 years from now
Without Tim Berners-Lee, we might all be slaves to Gopher by now.
You could probably celebrate an online anniversary of some kind every day, but April 30 marks the moment, 15 years ago, when Berners-Lee and CERN renounced all claims of intellectual property around the protocols that allow users to access information over the Internet. Until then, the best we had was Gopher, a spin-off from the University of Minnesota which gave away browsers for free but charged for its servers. The World Wide Web knocked Gopher aside like a troublesome rodent.
In a thoughtful, easy-to-read overview published on the BBC Web site, CERN director of communications James Gillies points out that CERN’s altruistic approach meant we had a uniform way of navigating the Internet, “instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.” We still, however, might end up with a Facebook Web.
Although I set up a Facebook profile in order to administrate our publication’s group, I had put off filling out the details because it’s not a way I tend to communicate. A friend of mine – who has recently surpassed the 1,000 friend mark – changed my mind, when he pointed out that there are many people he knows he can contact through Facebook, but who tend to be unavailable any other way. Although I’m more of LinkedIn guy, that got me thinking, so I have added more information to my profile.
The World Wide Web was set up to read things in cyberspace, but a lot has changed in 15 years. After years of discussing its promise, social networking is putting the emphasis on relationships rather than information. Even as some organizations ban Facebook and similar sites, there is a growing recognition that a shift is talking place in online communication. Just as there was a time when we realized that some people were more likely to respond by e-mail than return a phone call, some people are using social networking services to avoid interaction by more traditional means.
The difference is that we tend to congregate as users not in open, public services but in those owned by a single company, like Facebook. If CERN had invented Facebook, its focus would probably not have been on the advertising opportunities but the chance to enlarge the online conversation.
In a recent interview with Esquire, Vint Cerf admitted there was no great “ah-ha!” moment when he and others set the Internet in motion. “They see the Internet now and think, Well, thirty-six years ago someone imagined what it would look like in 2008, and that is what drove the process. It wasn’t like that at all.” The same holds true for the Web. Although we tend to think those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it, we have to make sure as we wax nostalgic about the early days of the online revolution that we don’t lose sight of the principles which guided it.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: A seranade for beta testers everywhere
So all I know is that a German company called Popula is planning to launch an online event calendar, or something like that. Until it arrives, you can enjoy these extremely weird, oddly melodic tributes to those who decide to work with technology before the rest of the world does. This is actually part thee of “The Early Adopter Song,” which appears to be a cross between the Backstreet Boys and . . . . Sprockets?
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Yahoo! A social networking strategy that makes sense
There’s a reason you don’t often see someone compile a top-10 list of the coolest Yahoo applications. Yahoo isn’t cool enough to attract cool applications, and until this week it wasn’t that easy to build on top of them. Now that it is promising to remove the first barrier, it might be possible for Yahoo to overcome user inertia, too.
At the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco the portal player’s CTO, Ari Balogh, announced a plan by which Yahoo will build on its existing open API strategy and streamline the process by which developers create tools on its various platforms. It will also bring all its user profiles – a Yahoo visitor’s e-mail account, instant messaging, Flickr albums and so on – under one virtual roof.
Though it is being touted as a radical depature, Balogh’s strategy is very much in keeping with Yahoo’s traditional modus operendi. While Google pushes visitors out to other sites through its search engine, Yahoo was more concerned with keeping visitors within its borders, whether it was to read news or look at photos. It took a wrong turn with Yahoo 360, which would have been a great social networking service if it hadn’t lagged so far behind MySpace and Facebook.
Like a lot of other startups that flame out (but which receive far less attention), Yahoo was forcing asking users to create yet another profile, when few of them have time to do any of that. Instead, the company has realized it can mine its installed base and the information they have already entered into its database. This is, effectively, a master data management project, one that recognizes how much easier it is to get more business out of an existing customer than it is to find new ones.
What a difference a couple of years make. Not long ago Yahoo was behaving like enterprises in the early days of the Internet, who would announce a Web site redesign as though they had created a new model of automobile. Now the company has realized it can get a lot more mileage out of simply following the lead of the social networking services which have sped by it. If Yahoo doesn’t get swallowed up by Microsoft – which may have its own API strategy for a combined entity – it might become a much more interesting player. That’s not to say Yahoo entirely gets this market.
“We don’t think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension. It infuses every element of the consumer’s experience on the Web,” Balogh told IDG News Service. Wrong. Social is not just a destination but a series of destinations, which is why more developers are thinking about Facebook than MySpace, and why they’re probably thinking more about both MySpace and Facebook than they are Yahoo. There’s no point in creating, say, the next Scrabulous if you put it on a platform where no one’s going to play it. Social networking is about real estate. Yahoo’s three biggest priorities right now are to prove it is an choice location, location, location.
