Category Archives: IT and Internet

Annoyed by Google’s helpful improvements? Try the verbatim tool

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Sometimes the words I type into Google’s search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I’ve been using the ‘+’ operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working. Fortunately Google have introduced a fix with the verbatim tool. According to Google’s search blog:

In most cases, Google’s algorithms make things better for our users – but in some rare cases, we don’t find what you were looking for. In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly.

Since then, we’ve received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as

  • making automatic spelling corrections
  • personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
  • including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
  • finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
  • searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
  • making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

You can access the verbatim search tool under “More search tools” on the left-hand side.

According to Andy Baio at Wired, Google wouldn’t disclose why they phased out the ‘+’ operator "though it seems obvious that they’re paving the way for Google+ profile searches."

The Amazon future works

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The ABC’s Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing about the current state of affairs. On its bad days, at least, it really ought to be called Australia Frets.

Few could argue with this particular show’s basic premise.  Online book sales and e-publishing threaten book printing and book publishing. Like many people, I started buying books online in the 1990s – old books, niche books, cheap books. And like many people, I’ve now begun using Amazon’s Kindle e-book system. Amazon has 80 per cent of the e-book market. The Kindle format is annoyingly proprietary and rights-managed but incredibly convenient.

You can see where this is going, for me and others. I have a huge wall of books at home here which I rather like. It saddens me a little, but I will simply not be adding to my collection at such a rate in the future.

But then: so what? Saddle-makers aren’t doing as well as they used to, either. The Australia Talks discussion seemed to hint that the move to digital sales would rob authors of money, but never produced much evidence. Meanwhile, it gave very short shrift to the possibility that electronic publishing might help Australian authors get their ideas and creativity out to the rest of the world. It gave less attention still to the idea that cheaper books might help Australians compete in a global knowledge economy. It gave pretty much no time at all to the notion that an open society and digital technology allow ideas and creativity to flow more freely today than ever before.

This is the same lack of imagination and sheer spinelessness that bedevils the newspaper debate, and that Ian Rogers and I have opposed in our submission to the Independent Media Inquiry. It’s the foolish fear that the moment some familiar artefact disappears – printed book, printed newspaper – people will lose all desire to read, to think, to ask questions about their world. In my experience, people are better and more reliable than that.

The good news is that this as more people use the new technologies and channels, the success stories are piling up. The Australia Talks program’s comments section featured a telling story from an Australian author:

I am the author of 10 books. My books have sold to major foreign publishers and I was able to write full-time. But my disappointment was with the marketing of my work.  The covers too were terrible.

In the last year I have converted all my books into e-books and created my own covers that are a huge improvement on those supplied by the major publishers I was originally published by. I am also responsible for my own marketing and feel so much more in control of my own career. I don’t receive opaque royalty statements that even my agent admitted she couldn’t follow. So instead of relying on publishers who are always looking for the ‘next big thing’ instead of developing writers they already have, I can see with one click how my sales are going. – and I’m delighted to say that my career is flying again and I can access huge markets.

I can only say- thank you Amazon.

Update: Charlie Stross nicely describes Amazon’s strategy in book publishing. Summary: Jeff Bezos wants to crush competitors, and he has a strategy for doing it.

(Regardless of what Charlie says, we probably do need some sort of DRM system if authors are to publish ebooks and be paid for their work. As Charlie notes, there is ultimately no foolproof DRM system for books, or anything else. This is why thrillers are usually offered as e-books, while programming and IT titles frequently are not.)

Media Inquiry: Look forward, not back

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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion]

I spend my working life running an online media firm – WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day – with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. You can see the whole thing at the WorkDay Media site.

We’re trying to focus the inquiry a little more on what we might gain from the Internet’s transformation of communication, and a little less on what we might lose as newspapers inevitably dwindle.

It’s fairly obvious that Australians are relying less and less on information from “the mainstream media” – that is, existing newspapers, TV and radio stations. Instead they are getting and exchanging information from a far richer variety of Internet-based sources, from email newsletters to expert blogs to government and company records – plus, of course, Club Troppo.

This seems like good news. So why are we holding a media inquiry focused on mainstream media, and particularly on the newspaper industry?

The obvious answer is that the future for Australian newspapers looks pretty ugly. Once newspapers were the gatekeepers; now they are not. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″.

Many of those who fear for the future of “the mainstream media” in Australia – like academic David McKnight, or publisher Eric Beecher – are concerned about how we will reproduce the activities of big newspaper newsrooms as newspapers gradually go out of business. They believe this is a very important question.

But this focus on the media past signals a failure of imagination. Big newspaper newsrooms will not be recreated in online form. Facts, news, analysis are all going to have to come out in different ways than they have in the past.

And they will. They already are. You have to be enormously enthusiastic about the old media environment not to believe this: the new media environment, for all its faults, is far better than what it is replacing.

Media thinkers worry that online sources would never have uncovered a Watergate scandal. They’re probably wrong, in every way. Now more than ever, the truth will out. Richard Nixon’s corruption was mostly uncovered by official investigators; Woodward and Bernstein, great journalists that they were, were merely conduits. In the age of the Internet, Watergate might have evolved over weeks, not years. Just in the past year we have seen yet another new information innovation – Wikileaks – whose model suggests secrets will be harder than ever to keep in the decades ahead.

There will probably be times in the future when Australia will look back at some event, some scandal, some development in the society, and say that newspapers might have done a better job than the new information sources. But we suspect those cases will be few and far between.

New online players would already be even more numerous in traditional media areas such as politics, public policy and business if not for the presence of mainstream media, particularly newspapers, whose large online presences are hugely subsidised by their traditional businesses. This is certainly the biggest bar to the expansion of many online information ventures, including WorkDay Media.

Australia has entered an age when media can be created, transformed and transmitted far more easily than ever before. Australians who believe in the importance of an informed society should treat the 2010s as an era of huge optimism and opportunity. For there is every reason to believe that the Australian society of the next 20 years will be better informed than ever before.

Facing such a future, it makes little sense to try to impose a more restrictive regime on the dwindling existing “mainstream media”, or to subsidise its continued existence. We can improve the Press Council. We can have governments make more information available to citizens. But there is no need to choose this moment to impose either a new regulatory regime or a new protection scheme.

This is a moment to embrace the information future, not to embalm the media past.

Going Astro: Astroturfing and the blogosphere

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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad. "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in these major areas of policy are being shaped in meaningful ways by astroturfing."

In the UK the Guardian’s George Monbiot writes about a whistleblower who worked as "part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients." And in the US, a blogger at the Daily Kos wrote that US defence contractor planned to create an army of sock puppets using persona management software that makes it easy for a single user to manage multiple fake online identities.

Recently there have been rumours circulating in Australia about political astroturfing on blogs, Twitter and other social media. At Larvatus Prodeo, commenter Mr Demore suggests there are examples of astroturfing in comments at the ABC’s Drum website; "particularly in relation to mentions of climate change."

Is it just another internet conspiracy theory or is there something to it?

Continue reading →

Repentance: John Skully edition

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John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview TranscriptPerhaps it’s the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it’s innate in many  of us, but I’ve never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It’s natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to them. I think of people like LBJ saying (IIRC) “I guess the kids were right all along”, or what I fondly imagine was Alan McAlister’s mortification at his own racism. Anyway, here’s John Skully on how wrong he was.

Scully: Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.

They exhausted all of the obvious high-tech candidates to be CEO… Ultimately, David Rockefeller, who was a shareholder in Apple, said let’s try a different industry and let’s go to the top head hunter in the United States who isn’t in high tech: Gerry Roche.

They went and recruited me. I came in not knowing anything about computers. The idea was that Steve and I were going to work as partners. He would be the technical person and I would be the marketing person.

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”

Remember, he was the chairman of the board, the largest shareholder and he ran the Macintosh division, so he was above me and below me. It was a little bit of a façade and my guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?

My sense is that when Steve left (in 1986, after the board rejected his bid to replace Sculley as CEO) I still didn’t know very much about computers.

My decision was first to fix the company, but I didn’t know how to fix companies and to get it back to be successful again.

All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.

All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.

I made two really dumb mistakes that I really regret because I think they would have made a difference to Apple. One was when we are at the end of the life of the Motorola processor… we took two of our best technologists and put them on a team to go look and recommend what we ought to do. Continue reading →

Kaggle closes its Series A round

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I know you’re all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going.

The answer is “very well”. We’ve just announced the closure of Series A funding.

And you can read all about it in the New York Times, the Independent or Gigaom.

Further information from our newsletter below the fold:  Continue reading →

Laurie Oakes is missing the point

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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media. Laurie Oakes is afraid he’s right.

In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture, Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentators like Fawkes "who happily runs stories without the kind of investigation and verification mainstream journalists are supposed to require", will break stories and scoop the mainstream media. Eventually the trend will spread to Australia and the result will be a race to the bottom.

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The David Solomon Lecture: Government 2.0 a couple of years on . . .

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Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s time.

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Whether or not I can speak with sufficient insight to be worthy of giving the David Solomon lecture, I possess at least one qualification. I have known David for over thirty years.  As is the way with the illustrious, I knew of him before we met. He was one of the leading political journalists of his day. Yet at a time when he was as well recognised as any, as some were settling into that long period when one’s reputation rises as steadily as one’s powers decline, David was already charting a new course.

While the rest of the first year wannabes struggled, David went from one triumph to another, with the minimum of fuss. I think he was also working for the Financial Review. Then he combined his new qualifications with his journalism to found a landmark publication – a newsletter of analysis of High Court decisions. Interpretation being a foundation of legal thinking, David’s newsletter was a little like the legal commentators of centuries past, influencing the development of the law with its professional interpretation of important cases as they were decided.

I was then re-united with David in 2009 on the Government 2.0 Taskforce.  David had just produced an historic report on open government in Queensland. To her credit the new Queensland Premier Anna Bligh realised his report in law without any serious compromises despite what I imagine were the cautions of her more timorous advisors. That legislation was highly influential in a wave of new Freedom of Information legislation subsequently enacted in most states and at the federal level. This embodies in law the new understanding that – to quote the new Federal Act, “information held by the government is to be managed for public purposes, and is a national resource”.

David was a great help in the Government 2.0 Taskforce helping us keep sight of the wood for the trees. There were a tense few weeks in which what had been an outline was converted into the first proper draft of the report.  Given the mess the early mass of material was in I recall the music that David’s words were in my ears when he told me at a dinner in the Canberra Lakeside Hotel that the report was really starting to take shape. At last I was achieving the standards he’d set at ANU in 1975.

Finally but most importantly, despite his current august title and role in Queensland as Integrity Commissioner, David is, to use a technical term also developed amongst my peer group all those years ago at ANU – a genuine cutie.

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My topic tonight is Government in the age of Web 2.0. Continue reading →