Tom Foremski: IMHO

December 8th, 2009

Paris diary: Meeting French startups and the lingua franca of 'geek'

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 1:56 am

Categories: Culture

Tags: Paris, Geek, Web 2.0, Public Relations, Entrepreneurship, Blogging, Internet, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Management

[I'm in Paris all this week as part of the Traveling Geeks, a collection of journalists, bloggers, and PR people meeting with French startups and also attending LeWeb, France's premier Web 2.0 developer and business conference.]

I took the EuroStar train from London on Sunday afternoon and in less than 3 hours I was in the middle of Paris. That trip always amazes me and it is so much nicer, (and greener) than flying.

When I arrived it was raining off and on but that didn’t matter because I was back in Paris after a ten year break.

I had to find my hotel, about a couple of miles from my terminus at Gare Du Nord but being short on cash I decided to walk in roughly the right direction, trundling my wheeled travel bag across cobble stone streets, and relishing being in one of the great cities of the world.

Because it was Sunday, there wasn’t much traffic and there were few pedestrians, it was a rare and almost private experience.

I rattled along, enjoying the old buildings, and noticing the wonderful street names such as Lafayette, in honor of the heroes of the American revolution. And Place Stalingrad, and lots of narrow streets and tiny squares named after many fallen heroes from many countries.

At times it seemed as if the entire city were dedicated to the memory of all those that had struggled for liberty, equality, and fraternity

That evening I met up with my fellow Travelling Geeks. Eliane Fiolet, publisher of the excellent gadget news site, Ubergizmo in San Francisco, and a native Parisian, picked out a modest little restaurant for dinner.

There were about 20 of us, half local French geeks and entrepreneurs. And it wasn’t long before it felt as if we’d all known each other for years, laughing, showing each other family photos, and comparing notes about life in Paris and Silicon Valley. Yet another miracle of shared food, shared experiences, … and red wine.

Monday…

Monday was a very full day, lots of meetings with French startups, lots of presentations by French geeks. I’ll have more to say about some of the great business ideas we came across in later posts, but right now, I wanted to say how similar the Parisian geeks are to our Silicon Valley geeks.

They have the same way of dressing ( a tad more stylish), the same way of talking about technology, the same passion, the same understanding of the issues we think about and talk about all the time in Silicon Valley.

Even though we sometimes struggled with each other’s broken French and English, it was remarkable how we still shared a common language, and how much we understood each other. We all spoke Geek, this became our lingua franca.

I had a similar experience in the summer when I was with the Traveling Geeks in London and Cambridge.

It’s as if there really is an international fraternity of geeks, a common culture that celebrates innovation, and transcends language and borders. And that’s very encouraging…

November 30th, 2009

Is Turkey's search engine a backlash against US Internet firms?

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 11:17 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Community, Search Engine, Public Internet, Reuter, Internet, Tom Foremski

Reuter’s reported that Turkey is building it’s own search engine and it’s ready to go in 2010.

This could be a sign of things to come. And I don’t think it is due to a US backlash but rather countries, and even regions, gaining control over their Internet infrastructure.

Back in April, 2006 I wrote about Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon becoming the digital Wal-Marts of the Internet 2.0 era.

Just as Wal-Mart has had trouble moving into, and staying in some communities, the big US Internet players will face similar challenges as they try to target local advertisers.

Why should communities pay GOOG to run ads in their community? Why not keep the money in that community rather than send it away to please shareholders of a company 10,000, or even 100 miles away?

That’s essentially what Turkey is doing, but using security concerns as the main pretext. The more valuable benefit will come from owning its own piece of the Internet and vital applications such as search and e-mail, on which you can build a regional digital economy.

I can see many countries adopting a similar approach. And it’s not that expensive. Search technologies are better understood these days and can be bought off-the-shelf. And while a government led initiative might lack some of the operational efficiencies of a Google or Yahoo, the gain from running your own Internet infrastructure and applications will be worth it.

This approach can also apply to smaller communities, even say Northern California. In January 2007, as San Francisco was considering a Google-built metro Wi-Fi, I saw a potential for a People’s or Public Internet (PI).

The power of PI: The rise of community owned Internets

There is no need for a middleman, there is no need for a GOOG or YHOO tax on people engaged in their daily interactions with their neighbors. As offline and online worlds become better integrated through a plethora of Web 2.0 social network applications, it will enable a People’s Internet (PI).

Communities will succeed in owning their regional Internets because they can– the technologies are inexpensive and incredibly powerful. And there is a lot of value in the community.

What’s the value of San Francisco’s community of 800,000 residents as an online community? It’s huge.

YouTube for example, wasn’t acquired by Google because of its technology, it was acquired because it was a large community of users.

The value doesn’t reside in technology but in community.

Communities can acquire the technologies they need; most technologies are commodities, available to all at the same price. San Francisco already has a high-speed fiber-optic network built by the city for city IT uses. It wouldn’t cost that much to expand it into full blown PI. The same is true at many other cities.

Commercial companies will have a place within a People’s Internet, providing services such as managing infrastructure operations, and keeping out the malware.

But it is the ownership and governance of a PI that is important; that’s what determines who gets what slice. Who gets the largest piece of the PI becomes important within every community and it ensures fair and ethical use of a vital communal resource.

And instead of relying on private companies, and trusting they will observe rules of privacy and free speech, a PI would automatically install its community’s rights, which would be the same online as they are off-line — a seamless transition.

November 28th, 2009

Will a fragmented media lead to a flowering of culture?

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 5:11 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Media, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Tom Foremski

“I’m not sure if we think about society, or that society thinks us,” that’s what I heard Malcolm Muggeridge say, when I was about 10 years old.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist and philosopher and I often saw him on British TV when I was growing up, talking about serious subjects.

That quote has stuck with me because it says something about us, it says that we are part of a society, and that we are a part of its messages. And society’s messages and its thinking is done through media.

Today, we have more media, in more forms, at anytime of the day — than at anytime in our history. Wow. What’s that going to do to us?

These are extraordinary times and I’m thankful for being here right now because we won’t see changes on such a scale ever again in our lifetimes.

(BTW I’m counting social media as Media - it’s all about publishing.)

A two-way media

Our media helps us to make decisions about important things: presidents, global warming, health, ecology, morality, and washing powder.

We live in societies because we are social by nature. We respond to each other and we influence each other.

Today we can influence each other more easily than ever before because our media is digital, it can reach anything that has a screen. And nearly anything with a screen can also be published from — we have a two way media.

Media is influential

Do you sometimes wonder about the “echo chamber” aspect of Techmeme, where it seems everyone is obsessed with the same stories, the same thinking? Well, that’s because they all read the same things and they all take part in the same media.

Media influences people, and people use media to influence other people.

The more exposed you are to the media the more likely you are to be influenced by it. That was the great insight of Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT. He said that intellectuals were more prone to propaganda because they read more, they were exposed to more media than others.

Now that we have more media than ever before, the likelihood is that we will all be prone to being more influenced than ever before.

And who is interested in doing the influencing? Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher said it was the government. He coined the term cultural hegemony to describe the activities of state governments in the 1920s and 1930s.

You can see this most easily during US political campaigns, where choosing the right word, the right phrase, is done with great care because it can make or break campaigns. But it goes on all the time — governments seek to exercise their influence at all times.

Today the concept of cultural hegemony includes corporations, many of whom have greater power than state governments.

Fragmenting the echo-chamber

With the fragmentation of media we might find an escape from the echo-chambers and the influence of society’s special interest groups. It could lead to a new flowering of culture, original thinking, unique ideas, and philosophies.

That’s what seems to happen when you have a revolution, when the cultural hegemony is overthrown. You see it in the English revolution, which led to an explosion of new thinking and beliefs, with the Diggers, the Shakers, the Puritans, etc. You had new communities, some believed in free-love, some in castration, some in communal sharing of resources.

You see the flowering of the arts after the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, and Hungarian Revolution… It sometimes seems that the fragmentation of media could be revolutionary and smash the cultural hegemony of our times.

Or it might not. Fragmentation of media is no protection if the messages are all the same, which is what they seem to be. The new media world might lead to closer control and tighter influence on our thinking. It might lead to narrow thinking and expression simply because everything digital can be tracked, measured, and logged.

The best way to stop being influenced by media is to cut yourself off from all media.

But that’s very difficult. In today’s always-on world we are obliged keep checking into the media every few minutes: emails, Twitter, SMS, headlines, Facebook, etc. These are all avenues of influence.

There’s probably no escape.

Which means that we either get our thinking right, and we prosper, and enter a new golden age of humanity, thanks to our media.

Or we don’t, and we end up with one massive echo chamber of crap and a tightly controlled society, thanks to our media.

We seem to be heading into challenging times.

November 27th, 2009

The high carbon-cost of search . . .

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 4:48 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Bandwidth, Index, SVW, Internet, Tom Foremski

Search is the most important Internet application and it is vital to the health of the Internet and to online commerce.

But looking more closely at search, and how the index is compiled, I’m beginning to realize it is highly inefficient and places a huge burden on the Internet.

I’d love to know how much processing power and how much bandwidth is used by the dozens of spiderbots crawling the web and compiling their own index.

If I look at my server stats, the amount of resources spiderbots take is huge. SVW is visited by 16 spiderbots daily and they consume 45% of my bandwidth (they return only 6% of total user traffic.)

Not every site will receive as many spiderbot visits but it would still represent a very large burden. It’s a huge inefficiency at the heart of the Internet.

And with that comes the carbon cost of the energy required to run the servers and communications networks — all to service an inefficient search industry.

What if there were a single search index held in common and administered by a non-profit that everyone could access? Surely that would negate the need for anyone to crawl the web and access the same data to construct their own search index?

The energy savings globally would be massive. And it would free-up resources, resulting in a faster Internet and one that has room to expand, without needing to invest in any new servers or communication lines.

Google founders originally believed that search should be in the public domain. Google could still be Google because its value lies in its unique ability to analyze the search index and rank the results, and serve up ads.

Surely it would be more efficient to have a single search index held in common than to have the current system where as much as 1/2 of bandwidth is consumed to create multiple indexes of the same data?

And it wouldn’t affect the business of the search engines, in fact, it could result in a platform that spurs innovation, allowing smaller companies to create new algorithms and improve search — the single most important application on the Internet.

- - -

Please see:

What if the search-index was run by a non-profit? GOOG founders once supported that idea

November 24th, 2009

A single search index would speed up the entire Internet

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 9:55 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Index, Internet, Tom Foremski

I was looking at my server logs the other day and saw that 16 spiderbots visit every day. And it’s astonishing how much bandwidth and processing they consume.

They are responsible for more than one third of the hits and consume 45% of total bandwidth!

Multiply this out across the scale of the Internet and it is easy to see that the spiderbots are a huge drain on the resources of the global Internet. All because they are making their own search indexes.

But what if the search index were in the public domain, administered by a non-profit and everyone had easy access to the same data? It would result in an immediate zero-carbon speed boost for very little cost. You’d have to install billions of dollars in new equipment and communications lines to get the same result.

A single search index available to all, would also create a platform for innovation. Startups could develop new types of algorithms and applications without having to go out and spider their own index.

Google’s founders originally believed that the search index should be operated by a non-profit. They could spin off their index and still be Google because the value lies in the analysis and the ranking of the results.

A search index operated by a non-profit would alleviate a lot of problems Google is facing in regard to indexing out-of-print books, and also delisting by News Corp and others.

Google’s founders would be able to fulfill their ideals, and put their mission to index all the world’s information back on track. Plus, the entire Internet gets a huge zero-carbon speed boost. And they get to keep all their money.

How often does anyone get a chance do do something as massive as that?

November 23rd, 2009

What if the search-index was run by a non-profit? GOOG founders once supported that idea

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 1:04 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Larry, Search, Tom Foremski

The recent debate about News Corp. threatening to leave the Google index, and Google’s problems in attempting to index out-of-print books are all related to its commercial status.

What if the search index were held by a non-profit? A lot of those probelms would go away.

It’s interesting to note that Google’s founders once believed that search should be non-profit. Take a look at page 39 “Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain” by Richard Brandt (referral link).

Andrei Broder, who led the team that created the AltaVista search engine, the best of its time, talks about meeting Larry and Sergey. “When the discussion turned to the topic of making money from the technology, Broder found that Page had a profound difference of philosophy on the subject. “It was a very funny thing about Larry,” Broder recalls. “He was very adamant about search engines not being owned by commercial entities. He said it should all be done by a nonprofit. I guess Larry has changed his mind about that.”

Brian Lent, now CEO at Medio Systems, came across the same thing when he met with the Google duo.

“The problem with the Google search engine at the time, Lent recalls, is that Larry and Sergey didn’t want to commercialize it, and Lent was anxious to become an entrepreneur. Their mantra at the time was more socialistic than entrepreneurial. “Originally, ‘Don’t be evil’ was ‘Don’t go commercial,’” says Lent.

When he was at Stanford University, Sergey Brin wrote a paper: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”

In that paper, he argued against an ad-supported service as a corrupting influence. “Advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” he wrote.

Could this be a possible future outcome? Could a non-profit search engine “out Google Google?” I think it could.

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November 20th, 2009

Tech Awards: Al Gore's a bore, "cash prizes" . . . and amazing laureates

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:35 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Speech, Al Gore, Sales Channel, Financial Services, Entrepreneurship, Sales, Finance, Management, Tom Foremski

Last night I attended the Tech Awards Gala, which celebrates technology benefiting humanity, with the award of five $50,000 “cash prizes.”

Technology in the service of humanity seems a better description because all the 15 laureates chosen, communicated a quiet humility, patience, and a stubborn purpose in making a big difference in the lives of people. It was awe inspiring.

Many of the ideas were simple but powerful: distributing camping lamps with rechargeable batteries and recharging them every day at a central location so that kids can do homework and parents can read or work; attaching a code to medicines to check their validity through a simple text-message; and much more.

Unfortunately, only five of the laureates won a prize yet each of them deserved it and more.

Country-sized GDP ballroom

The Tech Awards are grand affairs, full of Silicon Valley “royalty” with some 2000 people decked out in black-tie and glittering gowns. If that ballroom were a country, it would vault into the top 100 in terms of GDP, for that evening.

Which is why it always strikes me that $50,000 per prize is a bit stingy, it hasn’t changed since 2001. But I have a solution:

- Place a pen and paper at every dinner place setting and play a game of picking the laureate you think will win.

- You get to see a short video focused on each laureate, you tick the box next to the one that’s your favorite.

- If you pick all five correctly your table congratulates you and you take home the central flower setting.

- At the end of the awards, you then have an opportunity to make a contribution to your favorite laureates. You fill out your credit card number, fill in the amount of your contribution and the money is divided among the laureates.

It’s a great opportunity to raise money because everyone is emotionally moved by the story of the laureates. The organizers are literally letting money walk out the door when it could be left on the table, collected, and donated. That’s my 2 cents.

The rest of the evening wasn’t as good as hearing the stories of the laureates. The presenters of the awards, big names like Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, which founded the Tech Awards, were tedious attempts at inspirational speeches. All the right words but lacking in anything else.

The worst of the lot was former vice-president Al Gore, who received the Global Humanitarian Award.

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November 19th, 2009

Rewarding tech that benefits humanity

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:39 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Fuel Cell, India, Mobile, Battery, Health Care, Tech Awards 2009, Driptech, Fuel Cells, Healthcare, Benefits

The Tech Awards 2009 features a grand gala where five prizes of $50,000 each will be given to the best examples of technology used to benefit humanity.

Also, Al Gore will recieve the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

You can watch it live at 6.45pm this evening: The Tech Awards 2009 | NBC Bay Area

These are the The Tech Museum Awards - Technology Benefiting Humanity | Press Room“>winners:
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November 19th, 2009

Techmeme's 6 editors signals potential trouble with Google PageRank

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:24 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Algorithm, Google PageRank, Google Inc., TechMeme, Gabe, Engineering, Tom Foremski

Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, a popular news aggregator, yesterday announced he had doubled the number of editors to 6 people.

This is a very significant announcement because it shows that there is a problem in using search algorithms to discover new content. The problem is that there isn’t enough linking happening between web sites (except by spammers).

Techmeme has been a staple of the tech news scene for many years. Gabe Rivera ran it by himself, relying on his search algorithm that monitored a fixed number of influential blogs and news sites.

He told me that to get the best results within a sector, you needed a large enough pool of blog/news sites otherwise the results would be unreliable.

The Techmeme algorithm counts the links to other blog posts coming from this core pool of influential sites. And thus Techmeme could run fairly well all by itself with occasional tidying up by Gabe.

I noticed about a year ago that blogs were linking less and less to each other, they were becoming a lot like old media, which hated to link to other sites. I asked Gabe about this.

I ran into Gabe last week at an event at the St. Regis in San Francisco and asked him about the state of the blogosphere. I pointed out that there seem to be few “real” bloggers left. Original bloggers such as GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, etc now all seem to be just online news sites and they read like an “old media” news site.

Gabe agreed, he said:”Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don’t–they only link if they have to.”

…And with fewer links, that means he has had to continually tweak his algorithm.

“I get around the problem by looking in many places for links or references to news stories, in places you might not normally look.”

It looks as if Gabe ran out of places for his algorithm to look, because he has had to double his human editors to help find interesting new content.

Microcosm of search…

Techmeme is very much a microcosm of the search world. If Techmeme has had to go from 1 human editor (Gabe) and now to 6 in about a year, then this signals that all other search engine algorithms are in trouble, especially the biggest one of all: Google and its groundbreaking PageRank.
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November 18th, 2009

Wow! Top execs say they are influenced by social networks

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 1:36 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Social Networking, Network, Social Media, Survey, Tom Foremski

This new research study from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is important because it shows that company executives are influenced by their online networks.

And the trend is growing. The influence on business decisions by online communities is at its highest in three years.

The research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro.

Here are some key findings from this survey 365 business professionals:

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