Monthly Archives: May 2007

Google Trends

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Hmmm… The world is even odder than I had supposed. I’ve just been looking at what Google calls ‘hot trends’. Here’s how the company explains the list:

It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What’s on our collective mind as we search for information? What’s interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you’ll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the #7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of The Office. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the Hot Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your own.

If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [melinda doolittle], [halo 3 beta], and [ge dishwasher recall] were on the Hot Trends list. If you don’t know why, maybe you’ll learn something.

Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

My problem is that even with the aid of this explanatory technology, I am still puzzled by many of the search terms.

Our BBC report…

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.. was published today. The BBC Trust (whose predecessor commissioned the inquiry) says

The BBC Trust has published today (25 May 2007) the Independent Panel report into the impartiality of BBC coverage of business.

The panel, chaired by Sir Alan Budd, does not believe the BBC has a systematic bias against business. Its overall conclusion is that “most of the BBC’s business output meets the required standards of impartiality”. But the panel also says it “has seen a number of individual lapses and identified some trends which lead to repeated breaches of the BBC’s standards”.

In October last year the Trust’s predecessor, the BBC’s Board of Governors, commissioned the panel:

“to assess the impartiality of BBC news and factual coverage of business with particular regard to accuracy, context, independence and bias, actual or perceived; to assess whether the BBC portrays a fair and balanced picture of the world of business and of its impact on society more generally; to focus primarily on business coverage in mainstream output though specialist business programming should also be considered; and to make recommendations to the BBC Trust for improvements where necessary.”

The Trust discussed the panel’s report at its meeting on Wednesday 23 May.

Text and appendices available here.

How to control email

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Interesting thought on Stowe Boyd’s blog

JP Rangaswami has adopted an unusual approach to email.

JP has set up a stringent approach to filtering his email. He throws all email where he is CC’d directly into the trash. Basically, he only reads email directed to him, alone. Of course, for this to have any influence on people’s behavior, he has to loudly and regularly let others know that he is doing this.

More interestingly, he has opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.

My university email has become positively dysfunctional — partly because of the “cc” culture. Wonder if this approach would work for me.

Great Firewall of China (contd.)

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From Technology Review…

BEIJING (AP) — New rules by a Chinese government-backed Internet group maintain strict controls over the country’s bloggers, requiring them to register with their real names and identification cards.

The guidelines from the Internet Society of China, a group made up of China’s major Internet companies, contradict state media reports this week claiming that China was considering loosening registration requirements for bloggers to allow anonymous online journaling.

The society’s new draft code of conduct seen on its Web site Wednesday says Web log service providers must still get their users’ real names and contact information.

Critics say the requirement violates a blogger’s right to freedom of expression and puts them at risk of punishment or imprisonment if they post controversial opinions about politics, religion or other issues.

The society’s proposed code of conduct for blog service providers comes in addition to already existing government regulations that govern China’s Internet. The country’s official Internet watchdog banned anonymous Web site and blog registration in 2005.

Online bulletin boards and blogs are the only forum for most Chinese to express opinions before a large audience in a society where all media are state-controlled.

China has the world’s second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online. It also has some 20 million blogs, according to government figures…

How blogging changes the journalistic interview

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Jeff Jarvis had a thoughtful piece about the impact of blogging on journalistic interviewing. Excerpt:

Scott Rosenberg, founder of Salon.com, responded on his blog: “But mostly, it’s because reporters hope to use the conversational environment as a space in which to prod, wheedle, cajole and possibly trip up their interviewee. Any reporter who doesn’t admit this is lying, either to his listener or to himself.” Rosenberg extends his conspiracy theory to argue that phoners “have the additional advantage of (usually) leaving no record, giving journalism’s more malicious practitioners a chance to distort without exposure, and its lazier representatives an opportunity to goof without fear.”

Well, I say there’s a better way. The asynchronous email interview allows the subject to actually think through an answer – and, again, if information is the goal, what’s the harm in that? If the reporter has time to edit the words to be more accurate and articulate, why shouldn’t the source? Putting the exchange in writing also puts it on the record so no one can claim misquotation. Of course, quotes may still be taken out of context, but the solution to that is the link: why shouldn’t any quote in a story link to its place in the fuller interview? There’s the context.

I spent an hour yesterday doing an email interview and found it much more satisfactory than the conventional audio or TV version.

Another use for Twitter

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From Ethan Zuckerman

When I saw Alaa a few weeks ago in Doha, the first thing he did was grab my computer, log into Twitter and, as he put it, “let everyone know I’m still alive.” This is a good thing to do when you’re an activist who routinely gets detained or arrested. Alaa’s Twitter feed includes updates for his compatriots every time he goes to the police or to a demonstration so he can let people know where he is… and if they don’t here from him, perhaps they need to reopen the FreeAlaa blog.

Twitter is also potentially useful for activists organizing a demonstration, as it’s a lightweight mass-SMS sending system, which lets you warn your fellow activists where the police are and what path they should take. Probably not the purpose the designers had, but an excellent use nevertheless.

What the attacks on Estonia have taught us about online combat

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Good piece in Slate by Cyrus Farivar…

The Estonia case also shows how easy it is to cause massive panic on a shoestring budget. All you need to deploy a cyberattack is some malicious software, a bunch of zombie computers distributed around the world, and an Internet connection. Sure, you may need to pay for a “professional-grade” botnet—a network of computers that have been surreptitiously infected to run nefarious software. But surely that costs orders of magnitude less than the price of heavy artillery, battleships, and nuclear submarines.

Perhaps the most telling lesson here is how difficult it is to catch the perpetrators of online terrorism. Covering one’s fingerprints and footprints online is relatively simple, compared with getting rid of physical evidence. IP addresses can be spoofed, and an attack that appears to come from one place may actually originate somewhere else. As such, the Kremlin (or anyone else) can plausibly deny that they had anything to do with the attacks, even if the Estonians’ server logs show that the attacks first originated from Moscow. If the Russians don’t want to hand over data or documents—or even pick up the phone, for that matter—there’s not much that Estonia, or anyone else, can do to figure out the real story…

Spam still increasing, but users are less bothered by it

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That just about sums up the latest Pew survey.

The volume of spam is growing in Americans’ personal and workplace email accounts, but email users are less bothered by it.

Spam continues to plague the internet as more Americans than ever say they are getting more spam than in the past. But while American internet users report increasing volumes of spam, they also indicate that they are less bothered by it than before. Users have become more sophisticated about dealing with spam; fully 71% of email users use filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam. Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited email. Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users’ inboxes
several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email. Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam.

Full report here.

Blog valuations (contd.)

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I blogged recently about the Cyberwire valuation of this and various friends’ websites. One I forgot to feed into the calculating machine was Ray Corrigan’s splendid blog about IP madness. Ray, however, fed it in and was delighted to discover that his blog is worth over $70 million. I’m ashamed to say that I thought he was making this up, so I repeated the calculation just now.

The result? Ray’s site is apparently worth $76,785,151. I expect he’s already ordered that yacht. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.