Business: November 2007 Archive Page

Uh, no, it doesn't.

Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida.

The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people to love Facebook. A call for action, it is naive (right up there with the perennial freshman comp thesis statement, "Advertisers should stop hurting women's self-esteem by publishing images of idealized women"), and when judged by the standards of journalism, it is alarmist and one-sided.

Yes, young people should know why corporations want their personal information.

Sorry, but you can't put the real you on Facebook if you want to protect your privacy.

On Gamasutra, John Hopson says academics should not bother trying to get game designers to listen to any research that doesn't translate into more money for game companies.

When a researcher presents a product team with a set of research findings and recommendations, they are asking the team to invest time and money implementing their proposal. In order to convince the audience to spend that time and money, the researcher has to show clearly how that investment is going to pay off. This needs to be something beyond "this will help players identify more strongly with the main character".

The researcher must lay out the entire impact of the idea, from the cost of implementing the proposal to the resulting changes in player experience and the metrics for measuring that impact. Getting players to identify with the main character is great, but researchers have to finish the rest of the sentence: "This will help players identify more strongly with the main character which will result in an improvement in measures of overall player satisfaction and an increase in total playing time."

By the way, if the research doesn't include specific practical recommendations or a measurable impact on the final product, don't bother trying to sell it to the industry. From the average industry professional's perspective, there are only two things of value being said in a research presentation: the recommendations and their predicted effects. Everything else, the background research, the brilliant theoretical breakthrough, the clever development of the ideas, falls on industry ears like the "wah wah" noises made by Charlie Brown's teacher.

This is, of course, very practical. Game developers have to explain to their bosses why they should attend your academic talk on the history and social value of computer games instead of the one across the hall that tests a new formula for pixel shading or introduces a new technique for creating the reflections of flickering torchlight in fountains of blood gushing from an enemy's skin. (Okay, I'm exaggerating -- but not by much.) 

In the humanities, small groups of people (often grad students who are trying to find a footing for themselves) will organize a regional conference on a particular subject, and they will do it for the practical experience of learning how to run such a conference; they will do it in order to make a name for themselves in a small, emerging field; or they will do it to call attention to a subject they themselves are passionate about.  But industry conferences are, like industry itself, about money. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I learn quite a bit when I attend industry conferences  but I confess when I walk into an interesting session and find only a sales pitch for a product or company, I'm very disappointed. In my line of work, I most value the theory and background and insights, exactly what Hopson dismisses as "Wah wah."

Tom Brokaw, via businessandmedia.org:

"I was at The Washington Post earlier today," Brokaw said. "And in the lobby they've got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is ... 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought - 'Ten years from now, will it be here?' I don't know. Probably ... if you would do a hardcore analysis - probably not. It'll be probably digital 10 years from now."

While the second-most-common rating that Amazon customers have given this product is five stars, some 40% have given the Kindle one star.  The vast majority have not purchased the product, but are simply warning other would-be customers about bad experiences with previous e-book purchases, including e-books purchased from Amazon.

I still want one...

Via Newsweek:

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally--he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist--he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0.

In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd reflects on the show biz writers' strike.

Hillary Clinton had the bad luck to fumble a debate before the writers' strike knocked late-night comics off the air.

"I shudder to think what's happening to all the kids who keep in touch with world news by listening to reports of late-night comedians," said David Thomson, the film historian.

I watch so little TV that this strike will little impact on the way I spend my leisure time... but I am following the story because one of the issues is how writers will be compensated for online remediations of their work.

There's not a whole lot more to this short article from the Press Gazette, but it's another sign of Google's power:

Google is "hugely dangerous" and is one of the major preoccupations of News Corp, according to the editor-in-chief of Times Online.

Anne Spackman, speaking as part of a panel about the future of newspapers at the Society of Editors conference, said "the number one topic of conversation at News Corp is Google."

"Its move into DNA is a massive threat and I wonder whether we will all start feeling that they are behaving a bit too much like big brother," she said.

Cringely

Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on "childcare" then later on "insurance" they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all.

There are other issues like problems with Google Analytics, and the blogosphere, if you know where to look, is full of this stuff (check my links to the right, please). But what's worst is that this is all taking place in the context of a Google customer support system that is effectively broken. They say it isn't broken, but if it takes weeks to get an answer, customer service is broken.

Google's defense, of course, is that the company will make everything right once you prove to them that they made a mistake. But Google is defendant, judge, and jury. And even if they face reality and do the right thing, it may already be too late for smaller advertisers. An algorithmic change by Google can result in AdWords budgets that worked well for years becoming suddenly depleted. All of the advertiser's money is gone, often with little to show for it. Worse still, there is no money left for ads that might generate revenue. Google says it will do the right thing, but doing that six months later has no effect for a merchant five months out of business.

Google appears to simply not understand this. Maybe with so many big jets parked at Moffett Field they've forgotten what it is like to run a business on little capital. Maybe they don't care.