Krishwords

The Register reports

Oklahoma-based web developer Danny Carlton has succeeded in rejecting any user who visits his sites with AdBlock Plus installed, and he insists that each and every site owner has the right to do the same. Palant and his cohorts, Carlton says, shouldn’t be allowed to block AdBlock blocking.

“It comes down to whether they’re going to be like adults and support the concept of freedom, allowing site owners to block AdBlock users, or they’re going to be like children screaming for more bread and circuses,” Carlton told The Reg.

Bold emphasis is mine

I find this downright funny. This again goes back to the proprietary mentality where people believe that business models can only survive with restrictions. You can dissuade people from using adblock plus in many ways. Banning them outright is not one of them. You can develop ad technologies that can beat the shit out of adblock software, you can makes ads more engaging (we had a discussion about it in Seattle Lunch 2.0 meet at cardomains) and make readers participate in the ads, you can develop more sophisticated business models to monetize, etc. Instead, whining about the freedom to ban appears naive to me. I have already written about this topic at TechBizMedia.

Duncan Riley of Techcrunch says

Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers. So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators. If Google offers a comment service on “shared” items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.

Doesn’t this sound like Sam Zell’s complaint against Google News? I am not sure if Mike Arrington subscribes to this view of Duncan Riley. If he does, I would say that techcrunch is still in the Web 1.0 era while covering a lot about Web 2.0 companies. Isn’t Mike Arrington the guy who was pitching Digg as a replacement for New York Times? I wonder what he feels when his employee takes an entirely opposite stance when it comes to new social media technologies. Duncan dude, get over it. The way we consume media has changed a lot. The ideas about copyright has changed. As long as the original source is linked in the linkblogs, it is not a copyright violation. If linkblog is bad, techmeme is bad, digg is bad and we can extend such a logic to claim that the whole idea of social media is bad. It is not Google that should drop the idea. It is Duncan Riley who should drop the old fashioned thinking about media consumption. Times are changing dude. Being the torch bearer of Web 2.0 companies, it doesn’t look good to talk in Web 1.0 slang. Robert responds to Duncan’s comments here.

Electronic Frontier Finland has released a report that points to an interesting piece of data. The countries where corruption is high has voted in favor of Microsoft. Add to this the news reports about Microsoft employee who was caught offering compensation for partners who are willing to say “Yes” to OOXML. Sounds fishy to me.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) rejected the fast-track approval of the controversial Microsoft-supported OOXML document format as an ISO standard in a vote on 2 September 2007. During the voting process the reputation of ISO as a dependable technical standardization organization was questioned. For example, in Sweden a Microsoft representative was caught offering to recompense partners for voting yes to OOXML. Also a sudden interest from countries like Ivory Coast to the OOXML issue has been found suspicious. We studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries. We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal.

Image Credit: effi.org

Robert Scoble kicked off a discussion today with his prediction that Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook will beat Google. In the videos, he seems to be pretty convinced that Mahalo can beat Google. I disagree with Robert’s take on this. I had a few back to back tweets with Robert on the topic. In one of the tweets he asked whether several Mahalos can get together to beat Google. In this post, I am going to disagree with the thesis that “Mahalo can beat Google”. I am using Mahalo here but it applies to any human powered search engine with Mahalo’s approach to search.

Before I offer my views on the topic, I want to make the following clear.

• I completely agree with Robert that SEMs (Search Engine Marketers) are a pain and we need better search results.
• If, by any chance, Robert had meant that Google should be beaten in the search game, I am in full agreement with it too. We need to stop Google’s possible search monopoly and there should be heavy competition to force Google to continue innovating.

Having said that, I want to categorically state that Mahalo, in its current form, can’t beat Google. The reasons are many. Some of them include

• Human powered search cannot scale like machine based search
• Human powered search has built in bias in the system
• Human powered search will definitely lack in freshness
• Human powered search doesn’t mean much in non text search world like Image Search, Video Search, Book Search, etc.
• Human powered search is a ridiculous thing when it comes to desktop search.

There are many other reasons where Mahalo and other similar search engines will fail. However, these are the few reasons that just popped out immediately after watching Scoble’s video. Let us dig a little deeper on these reasons.

Human powered search engine in the Mahalo mould cannot scale like an algorithm based search like Google. Even if we assume that Mahalo grows like how Robert expects in the next four years, with 100K “volunteers”, it still cannot cover all topics in the world, it still cannot cover all languages in the world, it still cannot cover all the specifics in a particular topic, it cannot cover all the variations of a particular query, etc.. It might cover a search query “HDTV” much better than Google. But I searched Mahalo with queries “Dent on HDTV” and “Scratch on HDTV”, an hour back. It returned back saying there are no matching results. Even though it offers better results for HDTV, it fails miserably when you get into specifics on HDTV. Imagine the variations in queries on HDTV from all over the world, “HDTV with a spot”, “HDTV with a broken edge”, “HDTV and Bestbuy problem”, “HDTV with loose switch”, “HDTV’s remote not working”, “I just peed on HDTV”, etc. There is no way Mahalo can scale to take care of such specifics on even a single topic, along with everything else. Comparatively, HDTV is an easy problem to solve. There are much more difficult problems in this world which Mahalo cannot solve or may not bother to solve. Let us say I make a web page about a topic HDTV that contains a sentence like “not gone triple ribbon belt mother cook with mould acumen”. If someone searches for HDTV, my page may show up after the first 50 pages of Google results and not at all on Mahalo. But if someone searches for the sentence I mentioned above with double quotes, it will show up in the Google results and there is almost zero chance that it will show up in Mahalo (unless if my content is a killer content except for that particular sentence I quoted above). Now imagine endless new queries. Ask.com CEO claimed that 60% of their searches are unique. Even Google seems to have claimed that 20-25% of their total queries were not made before. Mahalo cannot even attempt to solve the search engine needs of all the internet users in this world, even if it scales like what Scoble hopes. It is like trying to build a 200 storey building without involving any machines and just with one brick at a time. It is just not humanly possible. Scaling problems will ensure that any attempts to create a completely human powered search engine is a failure.

To highlight my arguments, I am adding the picture of the result I got in Mahalo when I queried “mod_security rules for SQL injection attack”. You can see how badly it failed for this query. The scaling of Mahalo in the next 4 years, which Robert describes, may answer this particular query well. But, there are billions of other queries which may throw up similar results even after four years.

Human powered search like Mahalo has inbuilt bias which is difficult to manage. Jason feels that this bias can be managed with stuff like transparency, ethics codes, hiring people well, firing bad people quickly, early warning systems, etc. He claims that they take a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) on stuff like abortion, 9/11 and George Bush. I agree with him that with stuff like transparency, ethics code, etc., you can take a NPOV on few things like the queries he has quoted. Bring in diversity of queries and the different points of view attached with it. Now bring scale these number of queries. There is no way you can maintain NPOV consistently on all the topics and various queries associated with these topics. Jason even suggested the idea of Mahalo Ombudsman and included Jeff Jarvis as one possible candidate, which he rejected immediately. Even if he makes it ombudsmen instead of ombudsman, the scaling problem will ensure that the bias will stay in the system. Add to this the issues like embargo. For example, the embargo on Iran might prevent Jason to hire guides from Iran and this may result in inferior Mahalo results as far as topics related to Iran are concerned. But, an algorithmic engine like Google can just crawl the websites in Iran and have better results on the topics related to Iran.

Human powered search engine like Mahalo cannot keep the content fresh. Google crawls the web more frequently to keep its contents fresh. Now, I think, we can even inform Google about how often it should update our websites and this helps Google to update its results with fresh contents. There is no way Mahalo can keep the content fresh on all topics and related to all queries. The scalability problem described above, will make sure that the Mahalo content is stale except for a smaller percentage of terms.

I think it is pretty obvious that human powered engines like Mahalo cannot do much in the areas like Image search, Video search, Book search, etc. Add to this, the search in other languages, reverse phone number look up, etc. I don’t even have to talk about how ridiculous it will be to consider human powered search when it comes to desktop search.

Robert ignores the longtail concept when he talks about human powered search engines replacing the algorithm based ones. The very concept of longtail came into existence due to the phenomenon called internet. Under such a scenario, betting the future of internet on something that uses the hits and ignores the longtail (remember his discussion on social fabric? He talks about bumping the results up based on the number of people who trust a particular person (Michael Arringtons and Robert Scobles of the world)). I do agree that Google uses pagerank which can, in some ways, be likened to the hits in the longtail concept. However, a well structured query in Google will also get results from the longtail of web pages whereas it will not be fetched in the social fabric approach of Mahalo. This is a very important point and I just hope I have put it forward clearly.

So what is the solution to the search engine problem? Is Mahalo doomed for failure? What about 100s of Mahalos? Well, I am not an expert in search engines to offer a solution to the problems, in the current day search engines. But I strongly believe that human based search engines like Mahalo cannot replace (or beat) algorithm based search engines like Google. My solution is still algorithmic based. My hunch feeling is that the future search engine will be a collection of vertical search engines which may use Robert Scoble’s trust concept to optimize the search results. As I told Robert in our twitter conversation, Mahalo can, at the very best, be a Google optimizer but not a Google beater. Vertical search engines, with Mahalos in the front for optimization, may offer the much needed solution to our search engine problems. Humans cannot replace machines in the search engine world. Mahalo may serve well for a niche market but it is not a Google beater. At best, it can be termed as a Google optimizer.

What is your take on Scoble’s thesis that Mahalo and other trust based human search engines will beat Google? Do you agree with him? If not, why do you think human search engines cannot beat Google? What do you think will be the Google killer?

PS: It is 2:15 AM. I will correct any mistakes in the morning.

The blogosphere got a bit excited today with an article on New York Times about the plans of Google and Microsoft to offer an online personalized health care records for consumers. This excitement was further enhanced by a post by Philipp Lenssen with screenshots of a prototype of Google Health service.

Right now, our health care records are at the mercy of doctors and insurance providers. US federal law allows us to request our health care records. However, these records are only available in a paper format. Even with the doctors and insurance providers, it is kept either in a paper format or in a proprietary software format. There is no option for patients to have their health records in the digital formats. After some egging by the Bush administration, some of the providers have moved the health records online. For example, my health care provider is offering my health records online. But it is not the case for everyone. Even among those providers who offer health records online, we are at the mercy of insurance companies or health care providers. There is no independent centralized personal health record “repository”, with the user (patient) having a complete control of who has access to what information about their health. This is the area which is interesting to both Google and Microsoft. Both the companies are working on a system to provide this opportunity for users. Please read the New York Times article for more information on this. I would also like to point out to Adam Bosworth’s detailed post on this topic. Fellow TechBiz Media blogger, Deepak Singh, has written quite a lot on this topic. Unlike Deepak, my interest in this area is more on the peripheral level. I will discuss about certain issues that are of interest to me and offer my opinions related to the privacy issues associated with an online Personal Health Record (PHR) system.

The first and foremost concern for me is that the health care records should be stored in a system that adopts open standards. Efforts are underway to develop open standards based methods to extract RDF data from xml documents. It is very important to develop Microformats to manage healthcare information. A company that uses open standards to store health data on their online system will gain the confidence of the users. This will ensure that user’s vital health care information is not locked down under a proprietary system and it is accessible without a need for a particular vendor providing applications.

The second and equally important concern is about the search engine offered by such vendors. It is very vital that a vertical search engine that could provide accurate information is made available. It is no easy task and companies like Google, Microsoft and many startups are working on this area. Since we cannot take chances with our health, the accuracy of the search engines becomes important. I expect Google to have an advantage in this area, even though Microsoft seems to have made some important acquisitions in this regard.

The final concern is about privacy. Many people have written about it. In fact, the fight over privacy could be the reason for the delay in the implementation of online PHRs. Some people are worried about putting all our health related information under a single company. I am not too worried about it. I would be comfortable with Google having my records than my insurance company or a health care provider or a startup as long as Google offers me a complete protection of my privacy. I am not all too worried about govt.’s ability to scrutinize my health records either. Anyway they will get my health records even if it is stored in a paper format. In fact, a big chunk of Americans don’t mind govt. looking into their health records including their genetic information (via link). As long as I have confidence that the company that offers online PHR will not mine my health data and not allow anyone else to look at it, I am fine with the privacy implications. It is up to Google or Microsoft or any other company, clamoring to hold my PHR data, to convince me on the privacy issues. It is a big mental shift for most of the people. Since I have understood about privacy in this Web 2.0 era and  I am comfortable with the new age ideas about privacy, I am not all too worried about it when it comes to online PHRs. As long as I have a system where I can control who views what from my health care records, I am ready to use such a system.

It is time we make a paradigm shift about how we manage our health care records. It is time we learn more about our health and take into our hands the power to make intelligent and informed decisions about our health. To do this, an open standards based vendor neutral PHR with a good search engine and a good privacy policy is needed. Once we bring in this paradigm shift, we can then start wondering about how we can use the “artificial intelligence” of the semantic web to help us manage our health care better.

I would like to hear about what you think about online PHR systems and your concerns about it.

LinuxWorld has a Q & A session with Linus Torvalds

Some people get a bit too excited about MS, I think. I don’t think they are that interesting. And conversely, some MS people seem to get really hot under the collar about open source. … I’d rather just worry about the technology. The market will take care of itself. Giving customers what they want is the way to make progress, not to try to control them or try to spread propaganda or FUD.

This looks like a good response to people like Matt Asay, who get excited about Microsoft and use their media position to attack Open Source Developers and other architects/promoters of open source. I still welcome Microsoft to the open source fold but not on their terms. They have to completely agree to the open source philosophy and embrace it. Any other tactics will get repulsed in spite of attempts by new media entrants to portray the real open source community in a bad light.

Deepak has a very good post on Google’s plans for scientific data. It is heartening to know that Google is working towards a future of open scientific data. Check out the post for more information.

Marketing can be conversations but all conversations cannot be marketing.

I missed much of the brouhaha on how paid elite bloggers to participate in the People Ready campaign. I don’t doubt the integrity of people like Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, etc. Their credentials are so strong that events like this will not affect them. But I would have expected them to put a disclosure in the posts. That would have added to the credibility. You can call me old school. I do understand that marketing is conversation but all conversations cannot be marketing. Under such a scenario, how do I know that the conversation I am having with a person I trust, is a marketing one or his sincere opinion. I liked the response given by Om Malik on this issue. It definitely raised my respect towards him. In fact, Dave Winer nails this issue correctly when he says

Second, and this is the really important one. It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.

I just posted my thoughts on Yahoo-Ebay merger at TechBizMedia. You can check the post here.