Social Mode

Planet Google by Randall Stross

This book is two things: boring and generic. As with so many “tell all” business books, this is nothing more than a collection of press release and business articles glued together with a not-so-insider narrative.

Stross provides us little insight and only leaves us with the rather benign self prescribed prediction from Google that it will take them 300 years to organize the worlds info.

For anyone who’s paying attention to business on the web, this book, at best, serves as a summary of Google’s well known product releases, legal bungles and proclamations. There’s no unique analysis of Google’s approach to intellectual property, no suggestion of better web crawling methods, no digging up of data center floor plans nor any interviews with users, government officials nor ex employees – any of which would have given us info would couldn’t otherwise dig up ourselves.
Google is by far one of the most difficult business set ups we’ve seen in history. Most internet users and knowledge workers depend on Google to make their living yet we all know the dangers of one company controlling so much access and housing so much data. This is a topic worth 50 books and yet we get only snippets of discussion on that in this book.

Hell, Stross doesn’t even question how it’s going to be possible for Google to last the 300 years when it only makes money by selling basic text ads. Are we all to seriously believe text ads can provide revenue to power this company for the next 15 years of technology changes, legal battles and employee costs? Much less 300 years?

This book could have easily attacked Google deeply on its complete bullying of intellectual property holders from libraries to the TV networks to Wikipedia authors. Google, for all its Don’t Be Evil, continues to thrive on the idea that if you get big enough (push enough traffic) you can do whatever you want with IP. They, perhaps, didn’t set out with that as the driving force, but it is what powers their business. Perhaps you might not even agree with this assertion. However, indirectly they have created a nasty underbelly market on the internet where lots of publishers, site operators, content “creators” all operate under that notion. Consider how much of its revenue comes from spammy, stolen content pages with Google ads on them, and you’ll see my point.

Stross doesn’t touch on any of this.

He seems to be so enamored with the idea of a company organizing the worlds info and is invites to company meetings that he doesn’t consider any of the deep implications of what it actually means to organize info, what it means to us to have a commercial operation organizing it, and how one actually can live by a motto of “Don’t Be Evil.”

I read this book in 5 hours. Don’t bother reading it. Pull up your browser, hit the business publication sites and Search Engine watch and you’ll get better insight.

Hey, and maybe for perspective use Yahoo!, Live.com, Ask.com to search. You’ll have done more homework than Stross.

Planet Google Review

–––––––

Jan 2
Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto is a lively, curious tracing of the antecedents to the current arguments of the interaction of faith and reason. Shorto concludes that extreme views on faith and reason miss the mark in their own world views – somewhere in between the extremes we can find answers. The thesis from Shorto draws forth from the historical account of what happened to Descartes’ remains. This is a very clever approach both as a story telling device and as a way to contextualize so many of the anchor-less statements we have today regarding faith and reason.

The book reads quickly as Shorto is a capable writer. The historical record is sufficiently deep and he avoids digging too deep of a philosophic or rhetorical hole that plagues so many other popular science history books. The basic tracing of the ownership of Descartes’ remains is incredibly bizarre and even without story telling embellishment makes you want to read to find out what happened. What makes this book stand out is the curiosity it inspires to go find out more about all the tangent plots and philosophic journeys. For example, we learn brief details on the creation of museums. I’d never really thought about when and why museums – strange places when you think about it – came about in the course of humanity going about its business.

I don’t at all agree with Shorto’s conclusions on the implication of the never ending battle between faith based worldviews and scientific reasoned worldviews. I do agree that the search for absolute truth continues to invite bizarre behavior – like the trading and use of Descartes’ skull as a relic and to make “scientific arguments” about brain size and intelligence. Shorto did inspire me to drag out a copy of The Method and remind myself about why a book written 350 years ago continues to be used a reference for modern thought and science. And though Descartes didn’t invent the mind-body philosophy he did package it up nicely enough to make sure some people now sign their emails with “I think, therefor I am” In fact, Descartes did such a good job of marketing the mind-body view of man a good portion of practicing scientists and most of America still believes in the Mind and that the body is a machine.

Read this book.

Read other historical records on Descartes, modernity, the French Revolution and early mathematics – you’ll be surprised, perhaps horrified, at how much of 300 year old thought still shapes our culture.

Descartes’ Bones Review

–––––––

Jan 2
Mike Shannahan, former coach of the Denver Broncos, held a press conference today to discuss his firing.

This is one damn fine way (gracious, strategic, experienced) to handle getting fired.

Of particular note is Shannahan’s grasp of what it means to “deserve” something.

On if he deserved to be let go
“The thing about deserving is it really doesn’t matter about deserve. I feel good about the job I have done. The thing is, you have to make some tough decisions when you run an organization. You have to do things that are in the best interest of the organization, and I felt that that was right and I understand the direction he went. I have no problem with it because he is the best owner in sports. What I have to do is regroup, think about the things that I want to do. Relative to this team, Pat is going to keep the offensive staff intact as much as he can. We are going in the right direction. He is going to make some changes obviously on the defensive side. He is going to do what he thinks is going to give the Broncos the best chance to be Super Bowl champs. Sometimes you have to make those tough decisions. I have been here for 14 years, I had 14 great years and it has been fun. It has been a great ride. Twenty-one years all-in-all, when you go back to those experiences I don’t give anything up. Do you deserve it? We didn’t win for the last three years. We were 8-8, heck we were a .500 team. You get judged by performance, and I didn’t get the job done, that is the bottom line. Your job is to win and to win championships and we have not won a championship in awhile. The next place I go to, that will be the one thing that I am thinking about—What gives me the best chance to win a championship?”

How To Get Fired

–––––––

Dec 31
I can’t remember if I posted about Stellarium before. Sorry for a repost if I have.

Stellarium is one of the coolest open source projects out there. In fact, I’m not sure how good a commercial version of this would actually be. Some things are just better as academic and labor of love efforts.

If you like star gazing, deep space imaging, telescopes and generally “where are we in the universe” stuff, download this thing and play with it.

Stellarium – Open Source Star Gazing

–––––––

Dec 26
Here we find yet another lively discussion questioning whether Agile Programming is real.

Let’s just tackle the various claims and arguments head on.

The behavior involved and contingencies bringing about leaner development are real. The name “Agile” is marketing. The recent economic turbulence reinforces quicker time to market and lower costs. However, the evolution of software development was/is being shaped even if the economy didn’t stink as a result of changing needs, better tools, and better talent pools.

As for statics claiming Agile has a better methodology – those all need to be qualified by their context. Creating software in short sprints without extensive documentation doesn’t always lead to fewer defects over the lifetime of a code base, for example. Often the comparisons of projects cannot be done because the context of project and the eventual life of the software is so drastically different.

Generally all software development involves:
- Shipping code that works “good enough” for intended use (good enough being defined by “criticalness” of the software”)
- Providing documentation for others to understand what the software does (documentation takes different forms, but there is always documentation)
- Fixing stuff that doesn’t work (all software has bugs)
I propose that if you don’t do those 3 things, you aren’t doing software development. You might be doing proof of concepts or experimenting, but it’s not software development without those 3 things.

Whether you engage in rapid development, you’ll eventually have to document should you want other people to understand your code. (it might be a series of emails or a wiki, but there will be documentation). If we do waterfall but the product is missing key features, you’ll sprint to add those at some point. Users must use the code for you to know if it works. And so on… the point here is that no matter how you come at a project, software development has to have certain things accomplished or it doesn’t produce workable, usable, sellable code.

Furthermore, “agile” probably happens through waterfall processes and vice versa. You can’t very well build an entire code base from scratch and never do a build and check. And you can’t very well scrum your way to a marketable and packaged code base.

In fact, I challenge anyone to find me a project/product completely built in one method over the other. One of the commentators in the linked article brings up the example of salesforce.com and their service building. They do employ some agile approaches now but the core wasn’t built via agile.

Sure, “Agile” is a nice marketing concept AND it is a useful label because it helps people communicate. If there’s one challenge that plagues all software efforts, it’s communication. The communication most likely to go haywire is the context in which people are developing. So having a company, client and team understand when phases of a project are in “agile”mode is a useful thing to keep people playing by the right rules for the situation. The term also allows us to encompass a long description in a simple word. That has a certain economy to it.

Agile is something. Is it something new, probably not. Is it something you use, yes, you might not have had one word for it yet. Now you do.
Agile – is it something?

–––––––

Dec 22
Here’s a nice intro to functional programming on Dr. Dobbs.

In any functional programming language, you are likely to encounter these features:

* First-class functions, or higher-order functions: Functions can serve as arguments and results of functions.
* Recursion as the primary tool for iteration.
* Heavy use of pattern matching, although technically it is not a defining feature of FP.
* Lazy evaluation, which makes possible the creation of infinite sequences and other data structures.

At the end of the article on page 2 you get a nice discussion of Mathematica as a functional programming language.

It’s been noted a lot lately in technical publications that functional programming will continue to grow in importance due in large part to the need for parallel computing. Functional programming is well suited for massive parrallel computation for a variety of reasons and the article does a good job highlighting some of those. Of course, it comes at a price to developers – the learning curve.

It’s not a trivial exercise to switch from OO and imperative styles into functional. And the lack of huge repositories of free code makes doing a quick commercial application fairly challenging.

What Is Functional Programming?

–––––––

Dec 21
The CNN article “Charting the psychology of evil, decades after ‘shock’ experiment” ought to be retitled “Charting the psychology of web reading on a Dull Friday”

Stanley Milgram’s research was remarkable and valuable. It has been replicated. It has been quoted and interpreted to ad nausium. Now in an effort to sell copy during the hiatus between presidents some genius has resurrected it and given it a fancy name with “evil” in the title. Now it has a zillion hits and is replete with “coulds” shoulds” oughts, may, and other conditional phrases that allow the reader to be led down a path to a possible chance-finding of a new version of a car crash.

Words are powerful. It is a sign of Dumbness when people hoping to land on an island of absoluteness grasp on to anything that is presented as binary:

Good vs. evil

right vs. wrong

Chevy vs. Ford

normal vs. abnormal

Democrat vs. Republican

Worker vs. management

Muslim vs. Christian

etc. vs. etc

It’s here again. We use the research rather than this sadly disturbed illiterate interpretation to keep authority figures off alter boys, teachers off cheerleaders, bosses off new-hires and rent-a-dicks away from ‘civilian combatants’ in detainment.

But, because we have the 1890 concept of behavior as being based on religion, traditions, and good and evil, all these perverts continue to exist aided by the writers who need to finish off the month with a dippy article in order to look like they know how to read.

All this has to do with implied and explicit rules and a false sense of personal and divine responsibility that has been part of the teachings in schools and churches and synagogues for 400 years at least.

Pay attention to the consequences to understand behavior. Pay attention to the rules that the “other” person is working under to understand behavior. Pay attention to the knowledge that you have millions of rules you don’t know about and those rules are not likely the same as anyone else’s rules – at the moment they are your rules. Pay attention that the different rules you attend to on Monday don’t exist on Sunday.

When reading about “What the heck is going on out in the world? – consider that some grad students or volunteers got paid to be in an experiment 29 years ago. They wanted to do it right in front of all the PhDs and they wanted the money and they wanted to show they were smart and on and on. Hundreds of rules were working including doing what you were told that our parents locked down early on.

When you define things arbitrarily – the things like evil, good, honest, hero, sinner, saint, patriot, freedom fighter, and all the other meta-terms keep their fuzziness so that you read what you bring to the article. (By the way, that is another experiment to read up on….) While having specific and empirical definitions is not going to happen, using your noggin for something more than a baseball cap rack can’t be beat.

As they say on ESPN’s NFL Countdown… “C-mon Man!”

This site and this author will contribute by provided one of the many versions of “BALONEY DETECTION COLLECTION”… stay tuned…it’s coming to you and, as always, it is FREE…

CNN and Evil – Snivil…

–––––––

Dec 19
Here we see another example where people are looking for a phenomenon that doesn’t exist – EVIL.

Do people harm others in the real world and experimental settings? sure.

Does that constitute evil? no.

The conclusion of the studies never mention evil.

“What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience,” Blass said.

It is the junk writing and sensationalist interpretation of data that assigns the evil label.

What the subjects were doing in these experiments was behaving under contingencies. Assigning a label of evil or hero or immoral doesn’t help explain what’s actually going on.

Get over the search for evil or good. Get on with the search for why and how we behave.

Junk Science of “Evil”

–––––––

Dec 19
Could socialmode.com be the next breakout on the Interwebs?

Social Mode Crushes Traffic Expectations

Be part of the dream! Comment! Suggest! Link to us! Put us on Digg!

hahahah!

Is kinda nice to see some traffic, even though all the money goes to WordPress.com right now.

Oh well.

SocialMode’s Hockey Stick Moment?

–––––––

Dec 18
Ah, Ad Networks!

Glam gives us this juicy insight into what’s happening over in ad network world. It’s not going to be a fun 2009.

Despite the slower economy, Q4 was the strongest quarter we have had—we will end the year in a triple digit ad revenue growth rate year over year, and also very strong sequentially. We believe Glam is one of the few digital companies with this level of growth in revenue today. The reason is the focus on making our customers-—the agencies and brands successful online, being the number one for women, the scale of reach, premium inventory, targeting technology, custom solutions and our strong publisher network.

Unfortunately, despite their claim for best quarter ever, it’s not really that impressive. Most online advertising in their categories went up due to holidays and more spend online each year. It’s not Glam specific. I see enough detailed data in this industry to know that Glam isn’t crushing it more than anyone else.

The reality is the ad networks and brand advertising online are in for a massive new year’s hang over. The spends are spent. The registers ring for a few more days. Then we’ll start to see what we really have.

Glam and other ad networks will lose business because publishers will slowly get better with online sales and delivery (because they have to!) while the ad market softens in q1. Glam’s eCPMs will be locked in a market rates because it’s buys and sells are massive and not really all that specialized. Worse most (not all) of its network sites are bottom of the barrel publishers that will themselves struggle or go under. In fact, 80% of them are complete SEO spam or worthless blogs and Google’s SearchWiki and other efforts are burying these sites.

(Note: You can tell when a networks traffic is mostly garbage when it hides the Site Affinities on Quantcast – those are the sites users visit in addition to the one publisher. If you want to hide them, it usually means you are buying traffic or have lots of trashy SEO.)

Glam will not go away, but its not going to recover its valuation ever. It has already built its business and it won’t be able to overhaul itself to whatever comes next. Brand advertising online requires big brands and Glam won’t be able to hold on. The race to win the advertisers is getting very tough now that the old publishers are racing as fast as possible to compete in social media and direct ad sales.

Lastly, Ad Sales is a talent driven business. It’s about who your ad sales people know. The technology, the publisher network, and the name isn’t really a differentiator. So as the salaries and commissions come way down, the sales folks will bolt and take their network with them. I’ve seen this happen at least 10 times in my direct experience and there are countless examples with Y! and others playing out right now. Killer sales people keep the brand ad game in business and Glam doesn’t appear to be the place to earn the big bucks. If you want proof, dig into the heads of sales and the top performing businesses, you’ll see revenue directly correlates. It’s true in TV, Radio, Magazines and Online.

Maybe I’m wrong and Glam can buck the massive trend in brand ads taking a dive online (both in eCPM and overall buys…). I doubt it and I won’t be buying my traffic from Glam any time soon.

Glam Is First But More To Follow

–––––––

Dec 18