Tag: people (Page 10 of 12)

Google: the ultimate ontology

August 26, 2007 / elias

A big issue with the semantic web is ontologies – the use of consistent definitions to concepts. For those that don’t understand what I’m talking about – essentially, the next evolution of the web is about making content readable by not just humans but also machines. However for a machine to understand something it reads, it needs consistent definitions. Human’s for example, are intelligent – they understand that the word “friend” is also related to the word “acquaintance”, but a computer would treat them to mean two different things. Or do they?

Just casually looking at some of my web analytics, I noticed some people landed on my site by doing a google search for how many acquaintances do people have, which took them to a popular posting of mine about how many friends people have on facebook. I’ve had a lot of visitors because of this posting, and its been an interesting case study for me on how search engines work. However today was something different from other times: I found the word acquaintance weird. I know I didn’t use that word in my posting – and when I went to the Google cache I realised something interesting: because someone linked to me using that word, the search engine replaced the word ‘friend’ with ‘acquaintances’.

Google’s linking mechanism is one powerful ontology generator.

BarCampSydney2

August 26, 2007 / elias

Things I learned at this BarCamp

It was a very different crowd from the first one.
It’s so easy to network – it was as difficult as breathing in, breathing out! I gave a presentation, and as a consequence, I had people throughout the day approach me and introduce themselves.
In the morning, collaboration was a bit of a hot theme. John Rotenstein from Atlassian asked the question of how do people define collaboration: “when two or more people work together on a business purpose”, was my answer. We agreed. Everyone else, kind of didn’t.
How to raise money – was the afternoon’s theme. Great points were brought up by Marty Wells, Mike Canon-Brookes and Dean McEvoy who led the discussion.
Some things mentioned:

Aussie VC’s lead you on. “Nice idea- let’s keep in touch” is their way of not burning bridges
VC’s work in a cycle that are in five or so year cycles – raise money at the beginning of the cycle
Rule of thumb: give 30% away on the first round, 30% on the second round
Advisor’s that give out Comet grants work on a 2% commission of future venture capital that you raise.
No one understands the advertising market – everyone in the room wanted something they could read to learn more (check back here soon – I promise!). For example, Google’s adwords programme is largely supported by the property market – the mortgage lending market that is affected by the current credit crisis, is going to affect start-ups relying on adsense as the money drops out of these ads.

I met Jan Devos, who randomly approached me and blew me away with what he has done in his life. Basically (and from the age of 17), he created an implementation of the MPEG4 compression technology (for non-tech readers – MP4 as opposed to the older MP3) and he licenses out the technology to major consumer appliance companies like Samsung, who incorporate the technology into their products.
I met Dave O’Flynn – self-described as a “tall Irish red-head” developer; Matt June – a former Major in the Australian military, and now pursuing a project based around social innovation; I discovered Rai of Tangler is a commitmentphobe; Mick thinks he can skip most of BarCamp because he thinks organising a wedding is so hard; Mike Canon-Brookes over beer revealed he is a Mark Zuckerberg wannabe; and Christy Dena one of the lead (un)organisers of the conference looks completely different from the person I thought she was!

I got a positive reaction to my half hour session on five lessons I have learned on successful intrapreneurship due to a large internal project I started at my employer, with people throughout the day getting into a chat with me about it. Richard Pendergast, who is starting a online parenting site, said he was going to write a blog on one the points with his own personal battle of creating credibility. Glad I helped! I said to him I was going to blog what I talked about it so we could turn it into a discussion, but I have decided, this exam I have to sit in 12 8 days might need to start getting my attention. Anyway, here were the five points I made, however given the discussion during the session by everyone, is a very rough framework as people brought up some great points when talking:

1) It is a lot easier to seek forgiveness, than permission when doing something in an organisation. Or in other words, just do it.

2) Be proactive, never reactive. By pushing the agenda, you are framing the agenda for something that works for your project. Once you start reacting to others, your idea will die.

3) The more you let go – the bigger your idea will get. Use other people to achieve your vision. Give other people a sense of ownership in it. Let them take credit.

4) It’s all about perception. It’s amazing how much credibility you can build by simply associating your idea to other things – and which in the process, builds your own personal brand to push through with more later on.

5) Hype build hype. Get people excited, and they will carry your idea forward. People get excited when you communicate the potential, and have them realise it.

Thank you to all those involved – both the organisers and the contributors – and I look forward to the next one.

Half the problem has been solved with time spent

July 28, 2007 / elias

On Thursday, I attended the internal launch of the Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook for 2007-2011. It was an hour packed with interesting analysis, trends, and statistics across a dozen industry segments. You can leave a comment on my blog if you are interested in purchasing the report and I’ll see if I can arrange it for you.

One valuable thing briefly mentioned, was the irony of online advertising.
Continue reading

Facebook poll: how many friends do you have?

July 15, 2007 / elias

One of Facebook‘s new features is the ability to create surveys, targeted to certain groups of people within the community site. One caught my eye today, which asked 1,000 random people “How many friends do you have?”. Although I am not sure of the conditions this poll was conducted under (ie, did only Australian’s see it?), 1,000 random people should theoretically be a fairly representative sample of the entire population.

Whilst the results immediately show some interesting information on the typical size of a person’s network (which is a discussion in itself), I am equally fascinated by the specific genders and age breakdown of people who answered the poll and the correlation with their network size. One theory I have of why people spend so much time on the site, is because people ‘collect’ friends. They are constantly discovering old friends through mutual friends – a friend’s list leads a person to another profile where they may discover someone they have lost touch with. Check the results first, before I continue:

Some of my interpretations of the results

Despite being open to anyone since late last year, university students still dominate the site as over half the survey was answered by people in the 18-24 age bracket
About 46% of males and 49% of females have over 200+ people. It’s impossible to have 200 ‘friends’ – no one can physically see 200 friends on a regular basis This tells me Facebook is now more about ‘contacts’ and keeping in touch with people you know. This makes it more than just a closed network of your close friends and more of a networking tool – validating what some commentators have been saying of late. I could spend a whole blog post explaining the implications of this, but basically, this means facebook is ‘the’ social networking site now and it’s only going to get more entrenched due to the law of cumulative advantage.
Of people aged 35 and above, 70% have under 99 friends – which is only the case of 41% of people aged 25-34, and 19% of 18-24. This is interesting, because the people in the 24+ age group didn’t have facebook when they were at university (which is why 18-24 is so dominant in this regard). Over time, you would expect the age groups to be fairly synchronised – in fact older people would have much larger networks. This tells me despite all the hype, Facebook is still not mainstream – there is a heck of a lot more growth to occur.
…and leading off where I started the blog posting: the fact that more males answered the poll (53%) – despite women generally outnumbering men in Western countries – implies men are more interested in knowing how many friends people have. So if you tie that with my ‘friend collector’ theory means more men spend time ‘collecting’…in other words, men stalk more!

Thoughts on attention, advertising, and a metric to measure both: keep it simple

June 17, 2007 / elias

Advertising on the Internet is exploding. Assuming you accept my premise that the Internet will be the backbone of the world’s attention economy – then, I am sure you can see the urgency of developing an effective metric for measuring audiences that consume content online. Advertisers are expecting more accountability online and there is increasing demand for an independent third-party to verify results. But you can’t have accountability and there is no value in audits, if one place measures in apples and the other in bananas.

The Attention Economy is seriously lacking an effective measurement system

Ajax broke the pageview model of impressions, the one billion-dollar practice of click-fraud is the dirty big secret of pay-for-performance advertising, and the other major metric of using unique visitors (through cookies) is proving inaccurate.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The Internet has the best potential for targeted advertising, and advertisers are moving onto it in stampedes – and yet, we still can’t work out how to measure audiences effectively. Measurement is broken on the Net.

(Although I am focusing on advertising, this can be applied in other contexts. An advertising metric is simply putting a monetary value on what is really an attention metric.)

Yet when we look at the traditional media, are we being a little harsh on this new media? Is the problem with the web’s measurement systems just that it is more accountable for its errors? After all – radio, television, and print determine their audience through inference which are based on sampling methods and not actually directly measuring an audience. Sampling is about making educated guesses – but a guess is still a guess.

Maybe another way of looking at it is that the old way of doing advertising is no longer effective. Although we can say pageviews are broken due to AJAX, the truth is it was always an ineffective measurement system, as it was based on the traditional media’s premise of how many viewers/subscribers theoretically and potentially could see that ad. As an example of why this is not how it should be: when people visit my blog via Google Images, they hang around for 30 seconds. People that search for business issues on the web that I write about, like stuff you are reading right now – spend 5+ minutes. If both are equal in terms of page views, but the later actually reads the pages and the former only scans the content for an image – why are we treating them equally? My blog is half about travel, and half about the business of the internet, which is why I have two very different audiences. Just because I get high page views from my travel content, doesn’t mean I can justify higher CPM’s for people that want to advertise on internet issues. Not all pageviews are the same – especially when I know the people giving me high pageviews, arn’t really consuming my content

Another issue is that advertisers are so caught up on who can create the most entertaining 30 second ad, that the creativity to get people entertained has ovetaken the reason why advertising happens in the first place: to make sales. The way you do that, is by communicating your product to the people that would want to buy it. If I placed advertising on this blog, from people who want to do web-business related stuff, they should only pay for the peope that read my blog postings for 5+ minutes on the Attention economy, not for the Google images searchers who are looking for porn (my top keywords, and how people find my blog, makes me laugh out loud sometimes!).

When we create a metric that measures attention, lets be sure of one thing: the old way is broken, and the new ways will continue to be broken if we simply copy and paste the old ways. New ways like click-through ads that appear on search results, and account for 40% of internet advertising is not how advertising should be measured. The reason is because it is putting the burden of an effective advertising campaign, on a publisher. Why should a publisher not get paid, with the opportunity cost of not using another ad that would have paid, because of the ineffectiveness of the advertisers campaign strategy at targeting?

When measuring audience attention, lets not overcomplicate it. It should be purely measuring if someone saw it. As an advertiser, I should be able to determine which people from which demograph can see it my ad – and yes, I will pay the premium for that targeting. If it turns into a sale, or if they enjoyed the content – is where your complex web analytic packages come in. But for a simple global measurement system, lets keep it simple.

Concluding thought

If I stood at the toll booths of the Sydney Harbour bridge naked, some people will honk at me and others won’t. If I can guarantee that they can see me naked, that’s all as a publisher I need to do. It’s the advertisers problem if people honk at me or not. (Not enough honks means as a model I should still get my wage. They just need to hire a better looking model next time!)

The Wizards of Oz

May 27, 2007 / elias

The Internet has enabled a new world-order, causing people from the CEO down in almost every industry, an amazing amount of grief. The music industry, the newspaper industry, the telecommunications industry – heck, even tangible non-digital products like books – have been challenged at the core. However what these CEO’s have begun to realise, is that the Digital Age is no longer a threat, but a vehicle for growth.

Innovation is a key source of competitive advantage. And if you are an established company, innovation is hard. What takes six months of trying to convince the right people, jumping through hoops to keep internal stakeholders happy, and then finally releasing a half-baked product that is dramatically cut down from your vision – could be done by a bunch of college students in a garage over a weekend. Economies of scale is no longer an advantage in the Information Age – small, agile teams are.

In America – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, News Corp, IAC and the rest – rely on acquisitions to fuel their innovation. An amazing amount of innovation is occurring on the web at the moment – not just new products but new business models. And the above mentioned companies have realised that acquiring a start-up early on, is a cheap way to innovate – as well as a great way to recruit.
But what about Australia?

Like America, we have a strong Internet industry with some clever entrepreneurs. But unlike America – no one is acquiring them. Could it be executives of this country’s leading companies just don’t know how much talent is available onshore? Well working in a professional services company that advises these companies, I am sure of it. Even a tech-savvy person like me is still discovering the amazing amount of talent and potential in my city, let alone country.

So here is to educating – both you and me – as I begin to start profiling innovation in Australia To make a suggestion for me to review on my blog, post it here

Have you tried to implement enterprise blogging?

May 26, 2007 / elias

Martianus: Hey guys, I think the earth goes around the sun.

Establishment: Don’t be ridiculous – everything revolves around the earth. Your idea sucks. Get back to work and let us take care of astrology, because we know best.

Nicholas: Dudes – seriously. It doesn’t make sense. Why don’t we take a different approach?

Establishment (between themselves): We’ve got a problem. These kids think that the earth moves and goes around the sun – as if someone was sitting in a car still, and the earth and trees walked and moved! Ridiculous!

Galileo: Hey I’ve been speaking to a lot of people, and everyone reckons the earth orbits the sun. It’s so painfully obvious. Can we please update our textbooks?

Establishment: Excuse me? Have you not looked at Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and Chronicles 16:30 that state “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.” It’s how we’ve always said it. We can’t let you challenge the Holy Book. The Holy Book is law, and only we can interpret it.

Galileo: What’s the big deal? I mean, I’m just saying something that makes sense. Look – everyone else is saying it. It’s not like I’m suggesting we need to implement blogging within our enterprise, to unlock our potential. Now that would be ridiculous!

Establishment: Listen – there is no point changing our world view. If we started telling people that, could you imagine? A famine would start, and nineteen percent of people would get a heart-attack because of the dangers of thinking like that – we can’t take that risk. The father almighty in his wrath would shake our flat earth, and ruin our existence. Even if it were true, why change? It’s not like it would make any difference. Now scram.

Galileo: You guys don’t get it – it could really help people, and it’s not a big deal. I can’t believe the fuss.

Establishment (between themselves): I don’t get what this kid is on. Let go and tell his superiors to have a word with him. We can’t have this type of thing happening again.

Two hundred years later
Establishment: Yes thank you – we are the pioneers. Our team took some risky moves to experiment with a new way of doing things early on – we often forget that it was us, the establishment, that started all this. If it wasn’t for us realising things needed to change, so much innovation would never have occurred. Just think – Einstein never would have worked out the theory of relativity. Thank God for the establishment and the foresight we continue to have this day.

Grand thinking requires space, flexibility and time.

May 19, 2007 / elias

“Grand thinking requires space, flexibility and time.” Our fast-paced life has forgotten that reflection is a very important concept for not just quality in our work, self-improvement, and ultimately innovation – but also for our health.

More people need realise that a person has to slow down, if they want to go further. Having said that though, if “thinking” is so easy – why don’t we have more great ideas? The quiet engine of the mind works just as hard – people just don’t recognise the effort being expended because you’re not sweating.

New measurement systems need a purpose

May 14, 2007 / elias

Chris recently proposed a new measurement system for attention, after yet another call to arms for a new way of measuring metrics. This is a hard issue to gnaw at, because it’s attempting to graple at the emerging business models of a new economy, which we are still at the cross roads at. Chris asked us on the APML workgroup on what we thought of his proposal, which is interesting, but I thought it might be better to take a step back on this one and look at the bigger picture. Issues this big need to be conceptually clear, before you can break into the details.

Television, radio, and newspapers are the corner stone of what we regard as the mainstream media. For decades, they have ruled the media business – with their 30 second advertising spots, and “pageviews” (circulation). Before the information age, they were what the ‘attention economy’ was. None of those flamin’ blogs stealing our attention: content and advertising flowed through to us from one place.

The internet is enabling literally an entire new Age of humanity. A lot of the age-old business models have been replicated, because we don’t know any better, but people are abandoning them because they are realising they can now do so much more. So the key here is not to get too excited on what you can do – rather, we need to think why what we need to do.

Let me explain – advertisers sold their product on a TV/radio commercial, and a newspaper page, because it guaranteed them that a certain amount of people would see it. Advertisers advertise because they want to do one thing: to make money. It’s just how capitalism works – profit is god – so do what you can to make higher profit.

But back then, the traditional mainstream media was the only way they could reach audiences on an effective scale. However advertising on the Sunday night movie is the equivalant to dropping a million pamphlets out of a plane, hoping that the five customers you know that would buy your product, end up catching it. Back then, no one complained – it was the best we could do. It sucked, but we didn’t know any better.

The internet changed that.

Advertisers can now target their advertising to a specific individual. They don’t care anymore about advertising on a mass scale; what they would rather is advertising on a micro scale. Spending $20,000 on 10,000 people you know that want to buy your product, has a much better Return on Investment than $2,000,000 on 1,000,000 people – of which 10% don’t speak the language of your ad, 20% aren’t the target group for your ad; and 30% are probably offended by your ad and will ruin it for the 40% they you were targeting in the first place.

Sound crazy? Well Google making $10 billion dollars doing just that is crazy.

So now that we have cleared that up – let’s get back to the issue. We now know one of the reasons why we need measurement: advertisers want to target their advertising better. Are there any other reasons? Sure- sometimes people want to measure what their audience reads for non-monetary reasons – they could just trying to find out what their readers are interested in, so they can focus on that content. Statistics like that is not narcissism – it’s just being responsive to an audience. Or then again, it could be pure ego.

So when it comes to measuring content, there are two reasons why anyone cares: to make money, or to see how people react to your content. However it’s the first type that is causing us problems in this issue. And that’s because how long someone spends on your content, or how many people view your content, is no longer relevant as it was in the mass media days. What is relevant is WHO is reading your content.

I don’t think you can have a discussion about new ways of measuring the way content is consumed, without separating those two different motives for measurement. I like Chris’s proposal – knowing how long someone spends reading my blog posting is something I would find interesting as a blogger. But that’s pure ego – I just want to know if I have a readership of deep thinkers or random Google visitors that were looking for a picture about shorts skirts. (As an aside – one of my pictures is the number one Google image result for “women in short skirts” – thank God it goes to my Flickr account now, the bandwidth that used to eat up was crazy!)

So before we come up with new measurement systems, lets spend more time determining why we are measuring. Simply saying we are better measuring what consumers are giving their attention to, is only part of the problem. We need to first determine what value we obtain from measuring that attention in the first place.

The power of feedback

May 13, 2007 / elias

Validation of a persons self-worth is a key aspect of being human. Why do we like praise, but not criticism? Because the former validates our self-esteem, the latter contradicts it. Insecure people tend to seek more validation from other peoples opinions – because they need other peoples opinions to validate their self-esteem. Wonder why the modest don’t boast? It’s because their validation is not derived from having to tell you so that you know. They already know you know, and if you don’t agree, they don’t care – they’re self validated.

However no matter how secure you are with yourself, everyone loves a bit of validation – it’s just some people need it more than others, or possibly, we all have different ways in how we validate ourselves. Some fish for compliments on their looks; others validate themselves through great achievements. Validation of who we are, is what drives almost everything we do. That’s why an atheist should never bag out religion to a believer – the argument about whether God exists is irrelevant; what is relevant, is that by criticising the existance of a religious establishment, you are actually criticising a person’s self-identity that has been built on that establishment, by effectively de-validating their belief system.

Motivation systems are complex, and I by no means claim to be an expert – but I do know, that the power of feedback is one of the most effective ways of motivating an individual, especially when it comes to content creation. In the context of web-services, recognition and validation are key: people will stick around on your site, if they feel a greater sense of self-worth because of it.

There are two ways people feel validated on online communities: analytics and responses. Analytics in the sense of statistics: page and profile views, unique visitors, popular content. Most bloggers arn’t really making money out of their blog – so why is software that provides statistics on their readership so popular? Because knowing people read your blog, is a form of validation. A bit like how an insecure teenage girl feels validated by the attention she gets from sleazy older men. Right now, I am writing this blog entry because a reader asked if I could write more about the interaction between psychology and successful web start-ups. His comment validated my opinions, spurring me to write more on the subject.

Likewise, Myspace users will post a “Thanks for adding me” comment on a new friend. Why? Because it means more people will visit their profile. The reason I can say there are ulterior motives to just thank someone, is because they could have said “thanks for adding me” as a private message. So it then begs the question of why do they want more people to visit their profile? Because people get an ego boost seeing their page count go up.

Statistics to something you’ve created, are a quiet form of feedback. The more views, the more validated you feel by that. Popularity is a great feeling!

A second type of validation, is a bit more direct: it’s through the interactions with people. When people create content – photos, blog postings, whatever – nothing is more satisfying for them than a comment.

Features like Flickr’s recent activity are also apparently, what makes it so addictive. Again – it’s a form of validation. By responding to something someone has created, you are giving value to that creation – that feedback can make someone justify the effort, by providing recognition.

Sometimes the most powerful way a boss can keep their employees satisfied, is by a simple “thank you”. Recognition for effort expended by someone, can sometimes be all that someone needs to keep going.

Think you have a killer web2.0 app? You might. But unless a user feels like they are getting feedback on their existance and content creation, their first visit will likely also be their last. Feedback feels good. People want to feel good. So go and make them feel good about themselves.

About