Louise McGregor Digital

Fame Wars

I’ve been playing with Google Ngrams. If you’ve never heard of them, here’s an introduction to the concept.

Google have scanned about 50 million books, and a couple of scientists at Harvard figured out some ways to analyse that mountain of data – and Google have developed the ngrams tool based on this analysis.

I was trying to use it to compare fame, so testing pairs or groups of famous people from roughly the same era to see who was more famous. Stephen Hawking beats Stephen Fry, Galileo beats Copernicus most of the time, and Edison beats Tesla (to the consternation of true geeks). Moving into fiction, Captain Kirk beats Hans Solo; but Darth Vader beats both – apparently in the fame stakes it pays to be evil.

But one result amused me more than all the others; Michaelangelo vs Da Vinci. There’s a huge upkick in results for Da Vinci, in the early 2000s, right when Dan Brown published the Da Vinci code.

Da Vinci beats Michaelangelo

Remember that ngrams is referencing mentions of a term in the 50 million books scanned so far – so this huge jump in the number of times the term is used cannot be due to one book alone. Ngrams also lets you drill down and see what was published in that period with the term “Da Vinci”, and indeed a whole range of books on the subject of Da Vinci was published. Everything from biographies, to school books, to books analysing all the errors in Dan Brown’s book.

You need to use the drill down function when playing around with ngrams, I tested “meme” vs “gene”. Gene won, which was no surprise, but I found data for the word meme being used back into the 1800s which was a surprise. But on drilling down it turns out that it’s the French word “meme” that is being counted.

Louise McGregor Scam File

FunnyJunk.com broke its search engine

For a good analysis of the legal side of the Oatmeal vs FunnyJunk check out Popehat.

There’s a battle going on between FunnyJunk.com and Oatmeal. It comes down to the publication of Oatmeal’s copyrighted content on an aggregator site. Oatmeal made a grumpy post about it, FunkyJunk responded with lawyers. OK one lawyer. To which Oatmeal posted a grumpier post including a wildly annotated image of the lawyer’s letter.

But part of the lawyer’s claim is that the links Oatmeal posted do not link to any copyrighted content on FunnyJunk. This list includes content from other internet humor greats such as Dilbert, Hyperbole and a Half, and XKCD.

He’s right, those links are empty. So I used the search engine on the FunnyJunk site, I chose the term “xkcd”, I figured this was the most distinctive term to search on. However I repeated the experiment with other online comics and got the same outcome. As I suspected using FunnyJunk’s search engine for the term “xkcd” gives no results.

But there’s a search trick you can do with Google, to search within a website, and if I do this I get a very different outcome;

Google can find 43,000 references to XKCD on the FunnyJunk site. But is it really XKCD content? I clicked on one link;

It seems to be a whole page of XKCD’s comics, the distinctive style is evident even in the thumbnail images. I clicked on one just to check…

Oh yes, that’s a pretty famous comic,  you can see the original on the XKCD site. You’ll also note that the “top funny junk” on the left hand side is “oatmeal vs. FJ”, which FunnyJunk can’t find with its own search engine.

FunnyJunk’s argument is that the site only collects user-uploaded content and will remove any content that is uploaded against copyright following any DMCA request. Which is, I think, correct under the current law – they are not required to check content or take action until and unless the content owner makes a complaint. But why should an artist such as Oatmeal, who is trying to make a living by his work, have to also scan the internet looking for incidents where his content is stolen, and re-used by another site to make money? This is exactly the reason that our copyright laws need updating for the internet age (and no, SOPA is not the answer).

In the meantime, it seems that FunnyJunk has broken its own search engine, programming it to ignore terms used in Oatmeal’s original complaint. But the content is still there. Meanwhile the lawyer is demanding 20K, it’s not clear what for.

Oatmeal set out to raise 20K to donate to charities (bears good; cancer bad) rather than send to the lawyer, and reached that level in about an hour, it currently stands at over 120K. If you want to add to the pool of funds “against douchebaggery” as Oatmeal so elegantly puts it go for it – here.

Postscript 25 May 2016

FunkyJunk’s search engine works again. A search on “xkcd” gives search results of the distinctive comics.

A search for “the oatmeal” gives a number of results from The Oatmeal, the first result is part of his campaign against Funky Junk. I wonder what would turn up if I searched for “irony”. 

 

Louise McGregor social media

Monitor This

Social Media has moved from a personal tool to a business tool, the discussion in companies is shifting from whether to use social media to how. Social Media as a business tool tends to focus on either customer service or marketing campaigns. But there’s an emerging use of social media for reputation management.

Successful reputation management starts with listening. For a company, particularly a complex multinational company that means using some tool – there’s no way you can read the millions of tweets, hours of video, millions of facebook updates, and blog posts which are published every day.

We chose a monitoring tool that would give us real-time monitoring, sentiment analysis, multiple languages, and local support. In all the reviews and analysis online that we researched the same companies came out in the top group. The company we’ve chosen, Radian6, is invariably in the top three.

It takes some thought and work to set up any monitoring tool, and the setup is even more complicated if your company’s name is also a generic word. Eg; monitoring UPS picks up postings with setups, situps and grownups.

But you must listen wider than your own company’s name. You should be adding a list of key words that includes brand names, tag lines, key personnel and product names. And always always watch for combinations with the scary hashtag #FAIL.

Listening is step one, but you must also decide on when and how you’re going to take action; our general approach is to respond when we can be helpful, and ignore but monitor when we can’t. For a more detailed diagram of how to respond the US Airforce has shared theirs, it’s in the form of a decision tree and it’s fantastically simple.

What does this mean for individuals making critical posts? Be aware that companies will be listening more and more often, and it’s not just companies that are listening governments are also developing social media monitoring. The Department of Homeland Security recently released a list of their keyword terms, some of which seem remarkably innocuous but in combination may indicate an emerging issue. Although it may make you think twice about posting how sick you feel since straining at a lot of exercise at the power gym.

Image monitor

Louise McGregor Buzzword

SoLoMo

Have you heard this term yet? I have and every single time I have to unpack the three words that contribute to the term to understand what the speaker means.

Social – Local – Mobile. It’s an attempt to coin a single word that combines the potential of these three trends. It’s being called a revolution that “picks up where hyperlocal left off”

Or not. I’ve only heard the term used by Americans, and at one conference recently it was met with blank stares from an audience drawn from 10 or 12 European nations.

The New York times gives a definition, helpfully pointing out that it’s “unique to the mobile device”. Makes sense – my desktop doesn’t move more than about 5 cm in either direction.

The examples I’ve found seem to be new businesses focusing on entertainment, few service organisations or established businesses seem to be using this at all.

  • Forecast is a fun and simple way for friends to share where they’re going.
  • SCVNGR is a game about doing challenges at places
  • Foodspotting; Find and recommend dishes, not just restaurants.
  • Localmind is a new service that allows you to send questions and receive answers about what is going on—right now—at places you care about.

Those listed are all US-based, they all use the geo-location (local) function of your phone (mobile) to let you send some form of message (social). Like any social tool they rely on a critical mass to be truly useful; in the same way that the first fax machine was useless, and only started to become useful as others came into use. So it’ll be interesting which of these (if any) survive.

I’m also curious to see whether an established business will build an own tool – my guess is not, they’re more likely to find ways to advertise and provide services through whichever SoLoMo tools emerge as having the numbers to make it worth while.

Will the term catch on in Europe? Who knows, among non-English speakers it may require just a little too much explaining. In any case I’m not the only one who cringes when I do hear it. Techcrunch have already called for the term to die.

Post script September 2018: It never caught on, I think because smartphones became so normal that we don’t need a specific term.

Image earphones via pixabay 

Louise McGregor Editorial

Design Fail

About 4 website generations ago, ie; circa 2006, there was a fashion in design of internet sites to disguise the website’s navigation in an image, with the navigation text only revealed on mouse over. A style named “Mystery Meat Navigation” by Vincent Flanders who has preserved some extreme examples on his aptly named “Web Pages That Suck” site.

It was bad, impossible to use from the user’s perspective, like having blank signs on the motorway. Thankfully the fashion died.

Well almost. It still turns up on particularly arty sites (bands and photographers apparently), and a ghost of that fashion came back to haunt me recently – a very small site, that provides mostly text-based information. Their home page was designed at great expense as an image, to be fair there were a few visual clues within the image, but it was only by mousing over that you could really “find” all the navigation. Once you clicked you were into a text-universe with no navigation – other than your browser’s back button.

I could have cried.

I tried to persuade the web-manager not to launch the site as is; to re-design the home page and sort out the navigation. I offered to help her figure it out.

She gave me two reasons for going ahead with the launch;

  1. They’d already spent a lot of money getting it designed and they didn’t have money to start over.
  2. Their manager liked it.

Both of those are incredibly bad reasons to proceed with a website launch when your precious new design is not user-friendly.

One of the key principles for designing usable websites is to tell people what they’re getting before they click. As Steve Krug points out in his utterly brilliant book “Don’t make me think”, we keep designing websites as if people read all the information, but people assess our website as if there were driving past a billboard at 100km/hr.

(I’m paraphrasing, I lent my copy of “Don’t make me think” to someone who obviously needs it – it’s never come back.)

Image Blank sign showing the old route of Hwy 55 into Downtown Mpls /Andrew Munsch/ CC BY-NC 2.0

Louise McGregor TV

Apprentice – The finalists

None of this year’s finalists match Stuart the Brand for sheer watchability, they all seem hirable – although only one looks like a true entrepreneur to me. However of last year’s finalists I thought Susan Ma was stronger than Tom Pellereau, so what do I know.

Tonight is the interview round, where several of Lord Alan Sugar’s associates grill the candidates and dig into their business plans.

We don’t get to see much of the candidates business plans – which is one of the flaws of the current show set up. I’d like them to do a Dragon’s den style pitch to camera so that we could have some idea of what their pitching. But judging the finalists based on their track record, their performance during the show and what I can find out about their background the clear winner is Nick Holzherr. Although why he’d want the job is anyone’s guess. He could probably raise money for his projects in other ways.

Tom Gearing
LAS appeal Confident and well presented, without being posh. Has shown some ability to think strategically and accept the outcome if the strategy doesn’t pay off (the art task).
Before Apprentice Director of a fine wine investment company.
Head slap Showing off in the art-buying task to the point of alienating the artist, and thinking that was building a rapport
Track Record Won 7, lost 4. As Project manager won 2, lost 1. Has survived two trips to the board room.
Interview I was known as a BNOC = big name on campus. Margaret questions whether “N” stand for name.
Big idea Hedge funds for fine wines – making them an asset class. Not a completely original idea, wine has been an investment opportunity for a while.

Nick Holzherr
LAS appeal Experience and some success in the world of Technology – an area that LAS is nostalgic about.
Before Apprentice Technology entrepreneur; has already created several companies.
Head slap He hasn’t created any hate vibes, he’s behaved diplomatically with project managers in difficult situations. No head slap I can think of.
Track Record Won 8, lost 3. As Project manager won 2, lost 0, only one trip to the boardroom (on the final task).
Interview 145 million pound return in 5 years. Decent return – said with eyebrows raised.
Big idea A website that allows you to add ingredients to a shopping list from any web-published recipe. Something like foodient I guess.

Ricky Martin
LAS appeal Has a little bit of the ‘rough diamond’ character that reminds LAS of his younger self.
Before Apprentice Recruitment Team Leader
Head slap The semi-scripted banter about bad backs. More cringe than head slap.
Track Record Won 6, lost 5. As Project manager won 1, lost 2. Has survived four trips to the board room.
Interview Compared himself to a God, unsurprisingly Margaret Mountford pulled him up on that.A comment on his use of “Ricky”, yes, it’s official he uses it deliberately to be more memorable. Fake alert.
Big idea Huh? recruiting? ethical? sustainable?

Jade Nash
LAS appeal Fights her corner in the boardroom. Shown negotiating skills (the daily-offer/Groupon challenge).
Before Apprentice Business Development Officer
Head slap “I can work it out if it’s round numbers” comment in the daily discount challenge.
Track Record Won 5, lost 6. As Project manager won 1, lost 1. Has survived three trips to the board room.
Interview Ooops, no numbers in the business plan
Big idea telemarketing service centre

Postscript; The winner was Ricky Martin. Once again the worst performer on the tasks among the finalists won. (Last year Tom Pellereau won, despite losing 8/11 tasks, beating Helen Milligan who lost just 1 of the 11 tasks). Which indicates that the tasks are irrelevant which could be for one of three reasons;

  • LAS chooses to ignore them
  • the tasks themselves do not test entrepreneurialism – in which case the tasks should be redesigned.
  • there is much more weight put on the business plan. If so shouldn’t more than 1/2 of an episode be devoted to the plans?

Sources;
Performance data; Wikipedia
Candidate Biographies; BBC
Photo originally from BBC, I find multiple uses of it on various sites but no rights information.