Google has added the moon to Google Maps! Make sure you zoom in to maximum size!
Archive for July, 2005
The Moon
Friday, July 22nd, 2005Podcasting and Implicit Feedback
Friday, July 22nd, 2005Podcasting is going to save the world … if only we
could find something to listen to!
Pricing and Differentiation
Thursday, July 14th, 2005Tom Evslin writes a
post on the importance of pricing, and in particular not
under-pricing oneself:
I won an argument with an IBM SE on the very
good grounds that I was more expensive than him; my
recommendations for system changes were implemented
(grumpily) and some of them worked. We got a much bigger
consulting job after that which I’ll probably blog about
some day because it’s an interesting story.The moral for today is one that every maker of luxury
goods already knows: price can create a perception of value.
As a consultant, you need high perceived value or no one
will give you the time of day let alone their watch. And,
if you don’t have the respect you need to get information or
to have your recommendations tried, you can’t succeed.
It’s a good point. Particularly when starting out, and
overheads are low, it is very tempting to sell on the basis
of price. We’ve done so in the past and the results have
been bad: the client hasn’t respected our time and
has given us the run-around.
If you’re in this situation you’re probably thinking
“if I raise my prices all lose all my
clients!” Particularly in fields such as web
development, where there is so much competition, this is a
valid concern. So what to do about it? Well let’s think
about why high prices work. As Tom says, it is because of
the perception of value they create. Which is to say it
seems to the client that your high-priced service is better
than the competition’s lower-priced one. There are many
other ways to give the client this impression. For example,
you can write articles that show the breadth and depth of
your learning. As you’ve probably guessed, Untyping is just
such as effort. Management gurus call this differentiation,
and the more competitive the market the more essential it
is.
So there it is. You can’t charge high prices if the
client thinks they’ll get the same service from your
lower-priced competitors. You must differentiate yourself.
Paradoxically price indeed is one way to do this, but in
many cases not the best way, and can be deterimental if you
haven’t already established a reputation in other ways.
Tags and the Post-Google World of Implicit Feedback
Thursday, July 7th, 2005Go to Yahoo and
you’ll see a riot of news stories, links to services such as
Yahoo Messenger, and right at the bottom of the page…
a link to the service that launched the company, the Yahoo
Directory. It is laughable now to think that a human
maintained directory could keep pace with an powerful search
engines and exponentially growing web, but for a long time
Yahoo’s directory was the web’s best way to find
information.
Early search engines considered only the text of a web
page when searching. They could find all the pages that
contained the words you were looking for, but they could not
tell you which ones were important, leaving you to sift
through the hundreds or thousands of results. In this
situation going to Yahoo’s directory was a short-cut to
finding the most important pages on any topic. It might
take you six or seven clicks to drill down through the
hierarchy but you’d get there in the end.
Then along came
keywords and Google will give you the all pages that match
those keywords, ordered by importance. In most cases,
Google is sufficient. The key innovation in Google is that
recognises that people indicate the pages they consider
important by linking to them. Google uses that information
to rank pages via the
algorithm. With millions of web pages individual variations
don’t count for much, and what you end up with is the pages
generally considered best.
There is a big idea behind the PageRank algorithm, which
is that people implicitly tell you what is important to
them. The Yahoo model was to explicitly ask people what is
important to them. This doesn’t scale. Implicit measures
scale better, and in fact perform better as size grows, as
noise in the measurements cancels out.
Fast-forward to today. One of the hottest things on the
web at the moment are services like
to tag pages or assign ratings to them. This is another
example of explicit feedback. You don’t have to look long
at the most popular
tags on del.icio.us to see that the demographics are
skewed heavily towards the geek end. Now explicit feedback
is great if you can get it, but while you can expect
obsessive-compulsive geeks like myself to meticulously
organise their links, but you can’t expect the
man-on-the-street to do the same. What is needed is
implicit feedback.
For services like del.icio.us that aggregating pages on a
common theme, there are a number of algorithms that will
apply PageRank in a topic-sensitive manner (for example, the
aptly named
PageRank). For services that maintain rating of pages,
there has been quite a lot of work on implicit ratings,
collated in this
recent survey. Several studies show
that reading time is correlated with interest. If you run a
web site, this is one statistic you can easily gather, and
one that the
spec includes. If you write web browsers there are bunch of
other measurements you can gather, such as scrolling and
bookmarking. Of course for most of us these measurements
are out of reach!
Explicit measures have one advantage: they are much
easier to get started with. If I rate a blog post as
"good", the meaning is unambiguous. If I spend 30
seconds reading it you need some sort of model to convert
that into a rating, and to build that model you need a fair
amount of data, knowledge of machine learning techniques (we
can help), and probably some beefy hardware to
handle large numbers of users. For small services this may
be too much, but for large services it is the way
forward.