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The Official Google Blog put up a post, entitled “The Future Of Search” today, talking about some of the questions and challenges that Google is tackling in their ever expanding quest to make search better. While reading it I couldn’t escape the thought that the science of search is really the science of human cognition. It is the science of figuring out how human beings think and ask questions, and then teaching a computer to understand those questions.

For example, if I were to ask you, “What color is that?” Before the question can be answered, we would need a context, ie: identifying “that”. Is it a dog, a car, or are we talking about the color itself? As human beings, we naturally interpret what the other is asking with little effort, because we think alike. If we were talking about a car, then the question would be about the color of the car, or a part of the car. If we were talking about colors, then I would be probably asking you to identify the name of the color, such as “magenta”.

But those are simple, linear questions and answers, and we humans are neither simple, nor linear. We could be talking about cars, and the example question could be popped in the middle of the conversation asking about something totally un-car related. In the normal course of events, you, knowing that I am perfectly aware that the car is red, would then ask yourself your own question: “What is he really asking?” You would probably look at me, to gauge where I’m looking, and then look there yourself to see what we are talking about now.

And that’s not even getting close to our liveral use of metaphore and analogy in our daily speech. “I’m seeing red right now” is one example. Teach a computer to figure that one out.

Our daily person to person interaction relies on mechanisms like this, with incredible levels of subtlety and sophistication. Without it, our conversations would be long, drawn out, stale exercises in frustration. Yet, that’s exactly what we have to endure with search engines: long, drawn out exercises in frustration. The search engines rely on us to be clear and concise in our queries because they cannot interpret “that” to mean “car”. They cannot really predict the ebb and flow of our thoughts, nor can they switch topics on the fly without first being told that there is a new topic. We are still at a point where we have to speak the computer’s language, rather than it speaking ours.

While there are a variety of projects going on around the globe as we speak trying to teach computers to understand natural speech patterns, and behave in very human like manners, they are still a far cry from anything resembling human style thinking.

If Google wants to really revolutionize the search engine industry, my advice is that they should invest heavily into the science of human cognition. Only then will they be able to teach a comuter to understand a the rainbow experience of human interaction.

I know I need to use Linkedin. I’ve even become a member, but I just can’t seem to use the site properly. It’s not the same as other social networks. Your reputation actually counts for something, and that makes me just a little paranoid…

The entire premise is this: you know someone, you recommend them. That’s pretty much it, as far as I understand it. Here’s where the paranoia part comes in. In other networks you can add contacts willy nilly, with little or no repercussions.  At Linkedin, if you add someone that you don’t actually know, then a member of my network, upon seeing them in my contacts may contact them tabout a job. If that job doesn’t go very well, it affects my reputation. And that makes me nervous.

Say, for example, I wanted to add Dan Neumeister to my network. A quick look at his profile suggests that he is a stand up kind of guy, somebody that I would not hesitate to recommend, except that I don’t actually know him. My next step is to see if anybody in my network knows him, and what do they have to say about him? And so on…

(Quick Note: I don’t know Dan, and am just using him as an example profile. No judgment, positive or negative, is to be implied or inferred about Mr. Neumeister, by this author.)

This is how Linkedin works, by personal recommendation and reputation. It takes more effort, but I suspect that the quality of results that you will get will be better for it. In the meantimes, I’m going to see what other people have to say about Dan…

Cheers, Marc

How often do you access the Internet from your phone? The closest I have ever come is using my son’s PSP to access my router when it glitched and locked my computer off of the Internet. In the western world, using cell phones and other mobile devices to access the Internet  is not a terribly common practice, but in other countries this is not necessarily true.

The Economist reports that the Chinese use cell phones as one of the primary means of getting online, and expect most new users, especially in developing countries, to do the same. The savvy website owner would do well to start preparing for these new markets now, before the gold rush starts.

You can read the article here: The Meek Shall Inherit The Internet.

I have a couple of blogs that are more or less defunct, and I’ve been considering selling them off. I’ve never sold a blog before, so really I have only a rudimentary idea of how to proceed, but I think that it’s something worth considering. But how do you go about selling something that only exists in the virtual world, and more importantly, how do you value it? How do I figure out what a fair price is?

I ran across a formula a little while back that can give you a rough idea of what your blog is worth, but unfortunately I don’t remember exactly what it is. It was something like “daily traffic x 10 = Blog value”, so if you have 1,000 visitors a day, times 10 would mean that the blog is worth $10,000. Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite right. there are too many other variables to consider, such as SEO considerations, backlinks, etc.

For example, the SEO value of techne-eikon.com is zero, because that is not a phrase that anybody would ever search for. For the potential buyer, the value of the blog is more than likely to be closely related to how viable is it as a commercial space.

I think that I have me some research to do…

I have, however, run across a few people who do this very thing as a sideline. They purchase a domain, develop a blog, drive traffic to it and sell it a few months down the road, once it’s cleared the Google sandbox. this could be a good way to make some extra dollars, especially if you’re the type of person who likes constant change… Things to think about…

cheers, Marc

As I reported not so long ago, my web host was experiencing some problems, problems that resulted in difficulties accessing my sites. While I maintained the faith that they would resolve the problem in a timely fashion, I did have a Plan B in place, just in case: Move to a new web host. While I never did make a final selection, I did find a valuable hosting review site that greatly helped the process along.

Web Hosting Geeks is a no-nonsense review site categorizes various hosts according to several criteria, the default being by best value/price. If you need a specific feature, there are links in the side bar that lead to sections such as “Top 10 Web Hosting”, “Multiple Domain Hosting” and the like. The site is easy to use and loads very quickly, making finding what you are looking for less of a chore than it might be otherwise.

But I think that my single favorite site feature is the ability to add your own reviews to the information already there. This gives me the confidence to know that the ratings are coming from real people, not affiliate marketers, and that is an incredibly powerful selling point. I’m guessing that WHG has an affiliate relationship with most if not all the hosts there, and that’s ok. But if all the reviews were only their words, I wouldn’t be inclined to trust the reviews as much, because the motives would always be slightly suspect.

By adding reviews from real people they are leveraging the trust factor, something that is critical in this kind of site. This, plus the straight forward, no-nonsense feel of the site makes it my first stop, should I find myself needing a new web host any time soon.

Cheers, Marc

Google Chrome is the release name for Google’s very own home grown browser, due for public release tomorrow. With it the mighty G hopes to revolutionize the web surfing experience, and put the user in control. One of the key features is making each tab its own mini program, so that if one misbehaves, it doesn’t destroy the entire browser, other tabs included. Each tab will have its own URL box and navigation controls, as well as its own history.

The basic premise behind Chrome is that the old way of writing browsers wasn’t working anymore. Originally, the web browser was designed only for text and some graphics. Over time that role has expanded to include video, audio and flash animations, things that were not even conceived of at the beginning. Today’s browser has bcome a bloated piece of programming, stuffed tot he brim with various plugins and helper applications just to handle the demands of the moodern internet.

Chrome aims to change all of that. While plugins will still be required, they will be implemented in a such a way that the browser will not suffer for the exercise.. the primary aim of Chrome’s design, according to Google is one of speed, stability and user transparency. That last one essentially means that they aimed to create a browser that you could forget you were using while you were using it. In other words, you could concentrate on getting stuff done, without having to jump through browser created hoops.

Your start page will automatically be personalized to you, based on what you like to do, and where you like to go. It will learn these things over time, and once it has a good idea of what your favorite sites are, when you open up your browser they will be there, all arranged on your start page ready for you to click open at your leisure. So if you habitually check your Gmail, and log into facebook as the first things you do every morning, then those two will show up on your start page as clickable bookmarks.

Now for the bad news: all of what I just told you is based on a comic book that Google leaked some time ago, so I have no idea how much of it (if any) actually made it to the release version. I also don’t know if it will be a Windows only release, or if Mac and Linux will be so favored. I’ll update this post once I know more…. In the meantimes I’m lookng forward to playing with Google Chrome, and taking it out for a spin. If they have a Linux release ready, I’ll be writing a review at my earliest opportunity. Stay tuned!

Cheers, Marc

UPDATE: it seems that Google Chrome is not availabe for Linux at this time, so until it is, all I can do is download the Windows version and  play with that. Because I run Windows as a virtual machine, I don’t feel that any reviews would be fair or accurate, and so my take on Google Chrome will have to wait for the Penguinized version… *sigh* Sorry about that, folks.

I am probably as close to the ideal customer that any business could ever want. Once I decide I like your product or service, I am loyal to the core. It takes some serious screwing up to shake me off to find a new supplier of said product or service. I would probably be the perfect customer if I spent more money than I do, but I’m too budget conscious for that, heh.

The reason that I bring this up is that my webhost, 1 and 1 Internet, has been experiencing some problems recently. In fact, had you tried to access techne-eikon just yesterday you would have found a whole lot of nothin’. This sort of thing has been going on for a couple of weeks now, with the site lagging, or failing to load properly, but yesterday was the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that it was just gone. I couldn’t even log into the back end kind of gone! I was not happy.

Up until this point, I had never had a problem with 1 and 1, but a vanishing site is something that even the most loyal of customers cannot simply ignore or trust that they will fix it. I put in a call to tech support and politely asked what the hell was going on. I won’t bored you with the full conversation, just know that apparently there is/was a broken server in the system, and it just so happens to be the server that t-e lives on.

Why wasn’t it fixed a couple of weeks ago when it first started acting up, you ask? Good question. I know because I asked it as well. It seems that (according to the tech) due to the precise nature of the problem they couldn’t figure out which server it was on until it became bad enough to track. Putting that into Marc speak would probably translate into, we had no freaking idea what was going on. But apparantly, things are good now, so life can return to normal.

As I said earlier, I am a loyal customer. I have been with 1 and 1 for several years with nary a problem, so I will give them some grace here and refrain from jumping ship just yet. But I will be keeping an eye on them, and if this is the way things will be going… then I will be going to a new service provider. All of which brings me to the lesson of the day…

It does not matter how “perfect” your customer is, they will only be a customer as long as you are meeting their needs. If you have a solid history of good service, then your customers will be more likely to give you some wiggle room when things do go wrong, but that will only extend so far because the customer is a customer for his own reasons, not yours.

To put it another way, I buy your products and services because of my needs, not yours. If you fail to meet my needs I will go to the competition no matter how many times you try to tell me, “We love you!” Face it, I, and every other customer in the known universe, is inherently selfish. It is always a question of what can you do for me. I don’t care about your bottom line. I don’t care about your track record and if you are failing me, then I really don’t care about other people’s opinion of your service. I only care about what you are doing (or not) for me.

As long as a business owner can remember that and act accordingly, they will prosper. Otherwise… See Ya!

Cheers, Marc

My eldest son and daughter went job hunting together yesterday, and as these things sometimes go, they ran late. They started late in the day, and eventually decided to stop for something to eat at the mall. Being young adults with all the time in the world at their disposal, they naturally lingered over their burgers, enjoying the conversation, until they suddenly realized that the mall was closing!

Arising from the table, they commenced walking the mall in the hopes that some of the stores were still open and accepting resumes. There was one shop in particular that my daughter wanted to apply to, but unfortunately it had just closed it’s doors. Spying staff still at the back of the store, my son grabbed one of P’s resumes and slipped it through the crack in the door. He then proceeded to bang on the door and point to the resume lying on the floor.

I’m still scratching my head over this tactic. I can’t quite figure out if his persistence would be viewed as proactive or just the antics of a persistent idiot. Personally, I have always admired his “can do” attitude, but what about the shop manager? Think about it… it’s the end of the day, the doors are locked, and here’s this guy demanding that you work just a little more. How would you feel?

I suppose that we will never truly know, barring a call from the shop, but I think that in the long run his persistence will work well for him. Yes, it will annoy some people, most notably the lazy people, but who wants to work with a bunch of slackers anyway?

To date his proactive persistence has landed him with opportunities that few of his peers ever see. At the age of 17, he was apprenticed to a Master Goldsmith for a time until family concerns forced the goldsmith to call it off. He worked for a team of translators, bringing Japanese Manga (comics) over to the North American audience, without knowing a word of Japanese! (He did much of the graphics work, erasing and filling in speech bubbles and the like). And the list goes on, all because he is not willing to wait for opportunity to find him.

And that, I think, is the big secret: Don’t wait for opportunity to find you. Hunt it down, grab it by the throat and yell Gimme! It won’t always work, but it will work just often enough that you will find opportunities that others could only fantasize about. Whether or not it will work with this particular job application remains to be seen, but upon reflection, I think that it was the best thing he could have done, because at the very least he will be remembered, and that is half the battle.

Cheers, Marc

It’s only 12:00, and so far I have slept through my alarm, unplugged the toilet, dealt with 2 router lockups, discovered that we are almost out of coffee and to top it all off had to fix the PC’s sound system. I’ve only been working for two hours! Of that time, I’ve actually been productive for a grand total of perhaps 20 minutes.

It just seems like today is a day for putting out many little fires. In all honesty, I’m kind of proud of myself because I haven’t had a meltdown (yet). I chalk it up to a relatively new perspective on things that I have been practicing for the last several months. Essentially, it runs like this: these are all small problems that are easily fixed. I can always get my “mission critical” work done later. That’s one of the advantages of working from home. The world will not come to a screeching halt if I don’t get it done right now.

If I need to work into the night, I can. If I want to sleep in (I don’t usually), I can. As long as I get my stuff done on time, it doesn’t matter when I actually work.

But it’s still frustrating. You have a plan, a goal to get XYZ done today, and it just seems as though the entire universe is conspiring to thwart your every effort. My new attitude seems to be working well enough, though. These are things that I can’t control, only fix. So I fix them. Staying calm allows me to get back to work when things settle down.

Back in the day when everything ran my stress-o-meter well into the red, by the time the fires were put out, I was so wound up that getting anything useful done was impossible. So my new mantra is, relax and stay focused on the end goal. Deal with what’s in front of me and move on.

Since adopting this attitude, my productivity hasn’t suffered, even when putting out fires. Speaking of which, I’ll be off now… the vacuum cleaner just threw a belt… Coming, honey….

Cheers, Marc

In my last post I mentioned that a blog, or weblog, was intended to be primarily an online journal. That statement has been sitting in my mind for the bulk of the day, niggling away at me until I decided to pay closer attention to it. I must now recant my earlier statement, at least in part. To say that a blog is to be nothing but an online journal is to put too narrow a definition to the medium, for a blog can be much more than that without stretching the original idea of “blog”.

We typically think of a journal as little more than a diary, but what is a diary but a place to put down thoughts that are important to us? Not everybody tells their life story in a blow by blow fashion. For some, a journal or blog can be a generic “brain dump” of whatever happens to be on their radar at the time. I use t-e in this fashion sometimes.

But perhaps a better example can be provided by Roomy Naqvy of Delightful! Informative! Funny! Witty! Enriching! From what I can see, Roomy uses his blog as his own personal bookmarking service, keeping track of various sites that he finds while perusing the ‘net. Some of the sites he refers to don’t interest me, some do, but most are worth checking out either way.

He also keeps notes there about his own blogs performance, so it is a specialized chronicle of his progress through the blogosphere. And what blogger hasn’t done that?

So, despite my hasty words earlier, I have to confess that blogging can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. The only caveat that I will add is that you should at least know what you’re talking about (unlike some marketers I know).

Cheers, Marc