Monthly Archives: August 2006

The User Is Not Broken

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My colleague Gill Needham, with whom I am working on an exciting new course called Beyond Google, sent me this, described by its (librarian) author as “a meme masquerading as a manifesto”. Excerpt

All technologies evolve and die.

Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.

You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.

You are not a format. You are a service.

The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.

The user is the sun.

The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.

The user is not broken…

Sony buys Grouper for $65 million

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Very good analysis by TechCrunch of Sony’s decision to shell out $65 million for the Grouper online video outfit. Excerpt:

The Grouper acquisition price is out of whack when compared to other recent video acquisitions. US Comscore data says Grouper had about 542,000 unique visitors in July 2006, compared to YouTube’s 16 million. Viacom’s recent acquisitions of iFilm (December 2005, 3.3 million U.S. uniques) and Atom/Shockwave (August 2006, 1.3 million U.S. uniques) for $50 million and $200 million, respectively suggest a per-unique-visitor valuation of $15-$20. Grouper’s per-unique-visitor valuation, by comparision, is roughly $70 – $120, depending on whether you look at June or July 2006 data.

It’s hard to use Comscore data for meaningful analysis as it doesn’t necessarily reflect total videos uploaded or viewed, and doesn’t reflect videos embedded on third party sites. I also only have U.S. Comscore data. However, noting those issues, the $65 million valuation on Grouper suggests a YouTube valuation of around $2 billion.

Of course, it looks like Sony was most attracted to Grouper’s P2P technology for movie distribution, meaning YouTube comparisons are inappropriate. $65 million is still a lot to pay, however, and bittorent, as well as services like Red Swoosh (covered here), are proven and effective means of moving large amounts of data over the Internet.

Guitar bands strike a chord

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Hmmmm…. Could this explain why there are four — or is it five — guitars in the Naughton household?

The rise of skinny-tied guitar bands such as Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs has fuelled the popularity of the instrument, with UK sales at an all-time high.Figures released yesterday show that musicians spent £110m on electric, bass and acoustic instruments last year. This was up from £102m in 2004. Sales may have also increased through the success of once little-known artists such as 19-year-old Paolo Nutini, who has been playing the guitar for just a few years and whose album has recently gone gold…

US marine corps calls up reserves

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The US marine corps has been forced to call up its reserves for compulsory service in Iraq and Afghanistan because it has not been able to find enough volunteers – a reflection of the strain the two wars are putting on America’s armed forces.

The marines’ involuntary call-up, seen as a “back-door draft” by Pentagon critics, is the first since the start of the Iraq war, and will begin in a few months when a first batch of up to 2,500 reservists will be summoned back to active service for a year or more. The army has already sent 2,200 reservists back to the front, of which only about 350 went voluntarily.

[Source]

Stock spamming works

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Sophos, a Massachusetts-based supplier of software for protecting companies and consumers from online threats, reported in July that 15 percent of all junk e-mail messages are now stock spam, up dramatically from less than 1 percent 18 months ago. Here’s a Technology Revew piece about some interesting research conducted by Jonathan Zittrain and a colleague. Excerpt:

Stock spam uses the classic “pump-and-dump” scheme. A spammer sends out a mass e-mail message touting a penny stock with low trading volume in hopes of convincing a handful of people to buy shares of it. If the spammer succeeds, the limited buying activity boosts the stock’s price and liquidity just long enough for the spammer to sell his own shares (or the shares of his client) at a profit. The stock subsequently plunges and those who bought it are usually hit with a loss.

In their study, Zittrain and co-author Laura Frieder, an assistant professor of finance at Purdue University in Indiana, sought to quantify the effectiveness of such campaigns. To do so, they analyzed more than 75,000 stock “touts” appearing in Zittrain’s e-mail inbox and a Usenet spam-sighting newsgroup between January 2004 and July 2005. The date and estimated size of each spam campaign was compared with the price and trading volume of the company shares being promoted over several days, including the day immediately preceding the campaign.

The researchers discovered that if a spammer bought a stock a day before beginning heavy touting, then sold the morning after the first day of touting, the average return on investment was 4.9 percent. And more effective spammers saw a 6 percent return.

On the other hand, if a victim were to invest $1,000 in a stock on the day of heaviest touting, that investment would be worth, on average, $947.50 in the two days following the spamming campaign. For the most heavily touted stocks, the same investment would fall by 7 percent, to $930. The study also confirmed that the volume of touted stocks responded “positively and significantly” to touting campaigns, meaning that trading activity increased.

“Our analysis shows that [stock] spam works,” wrote Zittrain and Frieder. “Among its millions of recipients are not only those who read it, but who also act upon it, suggesting a value to spamming that will create a powerful counterbalance to regulatory and technical efforts to contain it.”

UK bans Segway

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The Times reports that:

The Government has declared that the Segway Human Transporter — a £3,000 self-balancing scooter — cannot be used in any public place. […]
In Britain the Department for Transport has welcomed the scooter with a double- whammy, invoking the Highway Act of 1835 to ban it from pavements and EU vehicle certification rules to keep it off roads.

In a document, Regulations for self-balancing scooters, the department says: “You can only ride an unregistered selfbalancing scooter on land which is private property and with the landowner’s permission.” It rejects proposals that the Segway should be treated like the faster electric bicycle.

It says: “A self-balancing scooter does not meet requirements [for electric bicycles] as it cannot be pedalled.”

So that’s that, then.

Quote of the day

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“Why — in the age of the Internet — [does] the FBI [restrict] itself to a dead-tree source with a considerable time lag between death and publication, with limited utility for the FBI’s purpose, and with entries restricted to a small fraction of even the ‘prominent and noteworthy’? Why, in short, doesn’t the FBI just Google the two names? Surely, in the Internet age, a ‘reasonable alternative’ for finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine) to find a report of that person’s death. Moreover, while finding a death notice for the second speaker — the informant — may be harder (assuming that he was not prominent), Googling also provides ready access to hundreds of websites collecting obituaries from all over the country, any one of which might resolve that speaker’s status as well.”

D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick B. Garland introducing the FBI to a wonderful new investigative tool.

The judge was deciding a case involving four audiotapes recorded more than twenty-five years ago during an FBI corruption investigation in Louisiana. The plaintiff, an author, had sought release of the tapes under the Freedom of Information Act . There are two speakers on the tapes, one a “prominent individual” who was a subject of the FBI’s investigation, and the other an “undercover informant” in that investigation. The nub of the appeal was whether the FBI had undertaken reasonable steps to determine whether the speakers are now dead, in which event the privacy interests weighing against release would be diminished.

The FBI claimed that it had not been able to determine whether either speaker is dead or alive. It said further that it could not determine whether the speakers were over 100 years old (and thus presumed dead under FBI practice), because neither mentioned his birth date during the conversations that were surreptitiously recorded. It said that it could not determine whether the speakers were dead by referring to a Social Security database, because neither announced his social security number during the conversations. And it declined to search its own files for the speakers’ birth dates or social security numbers, because that is not its practice. “The Bureau”, said the judge acidly, “does not appear to have contemplated other ways of determining whether the speakers are dead, such as Googling them.”

And in a footnote, he helpfully points to the OED definition of “googling”.

Thanks to GMSV for the link.