Author: Ajay Ohri

https://linkedin.com/in/ajayohri

Creating Online Communities

Sometime back I had asked the question- How much do you think would it be to have the top 100 bloggers on SAS language on the same page, in a manner that the RSS feeds get updated on their own. The answer is here-

Wordframe. I had covered this software before in comparison to Ning.com and they proved favorable.

This is a small startup, East Europe and US based since more than a decade and very hard working. They allegedly wanted to become open source and had plans to create third party applications when I checked with them in January but this may be on hold for a new product launch.

Would sas.com pay for 1000$ set up fee and 200$ monthly fee for getting the top 100 SAS bloggers on their sascommunity.org website.

Would oracle pay for 1000$ set up fee and 200$ monthly fee for getting the top 100 Oracle bloggers on a website sponsored by them.

How much would Aster Data pay for say 100 bloggers about Hadoop ( ahem- assuming there are 100 people who CAN blog about Hadoop- a bit like Einstein’s 5 people in the world can understand his theory of relativity).

Check this site out.

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Advertising Feed back Loop: Facebook and Adwords

In Systems design a feedback loop is something that measures the difference between expected and actual output and adds it back to the system to enhance it’s performance

For a better more accurate definition see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback

Here is how Facebook measures the satisfaction whether I got for an ad on my page- note fraudelent or systematic cheaters would be eliminated by the law of averages.

It places a very small thumbs up or thumbs down on an ad on right hand corner.
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When I place a thumbs down on an ad ( note it shows only graphical ads)-it asks me why i didnt like the ad

Was it

1) Misleading
2) Offensive
3) Uninteresting
4) Irrelevant
5) Repetitive
6) Other- allows text mining of free form allowing subjective feedback.

However if I type say Business Intelligence on Google – I get the following

http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=business+intelligence&meta=&aq=0&oq=business+intell

Open Source Ad on Pentaho at prime spot just above the results. Makes me wonder how much open source will spend.

Search Results-
Wikepedia entry usually at the top ( but no ads there*)

Search Optimization means SAS Business Intelligence is now fifth from top- which is the first mention of a BI vendor there ( Note cost to SAS is zero as you can see below). In the remaining top 4, two are similar http://www.businessintelligence.com and http://www.businessintelligence.co.uk as the title page tag remains more important than sheer consumer behaviour to Pagerank.

Right Column Sponsored Links ( These guys spend more money than SAS to be on the sponsored links and still end up in a less favourable ad page than in top vendor on search results page)-

1 http://www.brgglobal.com
2 SAP.com/India
3 IBM.com/cognos
4 http://www.BusinessObjects-India.com
5 http://www.softsmith.com
6 http://www.syncfusion.com/BizIntell
7 http://www.intelligententerprise.com/

(Note from Ajay*- A senior IIM Alumnus CK Prahlad (the first batch in fact) – first expounded the concept of core competence-

Now-what is Google’s core competence.
I believe that Google should simply donate all its information on wikipedia, and offer Google Knol to it- rather than just wallow in sunk cost theory or expect an immediate return from this transaction. It will get lots of goodwill- and maybe the Google Wikipedia Knol will take off.

Similarly sell Orkut to Facebook and just take the advertising and search functions to be combined in a seperate spin off called Google Search before Microsoft forces the Europeans and Justice department to do so.

Or continue to moon the giant.)

I didnt like the Adwords ads or the order they were in. But there is no way in Adwords for me to give feedback to it. Facebook listens. Will Adwords listen.

For the past one week I have been fending off repeated denial of service attacks on Decisionstats.com

My email addresses are widely known thanks to my participation on technical forums and my willingness to reach out and make friends ( 8500+ on Linkedin alone).

While the attacks were particularly vicious including email accounts, server changes, ip addresses to deny certain geographies, poisoned RSS feed/scripts, and scripts in folders to re direct posts.

Thanks to the fine team supporting me and some friendly advice from bloggers at Google- the worst is over. I have not hesitated to bash Google at will over its big size and even added a few cartoons on them – (even now I think they should sell Orkut to Facebook and add Twitter to create a spinoff Google Social Media for an IPO and take that particularly search and advertising)

But Google Search and Gmail and Google Analytics and Particularly Youtube are free- and thanks to them knowledge has spread way around the world. Also working behind the scenes the Google team spends a huge amount fighting spam and all for free. Or a bit of advertising on a website.

Thanks a lot Google men, and here is a You Tube video ( which you may have seen many times before but still) that celebrates the one ness of a global online community ( despite the occasional sith attacks)

saP or saS or sasR or saaS

Some pending news and posts- It appears that the company SAP is moving closer to major acquisitions. This includes launching more and more applications that are analytical in nature as well coming together in an alliance with hardware major Teradata. Teradata off course is a very close partner to SAS Institute. So could SAP and SAS and or Terdata be moving closer to a major announcement on BI and BA merging.

The open source database movement with Hadoop is the one which can be the real game changer in the managed database industry and AsterData is the company to watch here.

However R with its modular extensions is a different paradigm in language developement and SAS no longer has the nimbleness or flexibity in creating such apps- at the same time it has lost a fair deal of credibility in the young academia (due to R) as well cost sensitive consumers (due to WPS)

The succession issue of Jim Goodnight continues to be the biggest problem for SAS Institute- Jim is not getting younger and his second line is not expected to be of the same class as the Sall/ Goodnight partnership. Of all the major companies in software, Jim Goodnight stood alone in remaining private and thus managed to escape distractions of share prices while building up the franchise. Surviving oil shocks, cold wars, three recessions Mr Goodnight has cared for his local community as well despite being active in SAS and fending off sustained attempts by open source languages.

. An automatic partner for Mr Goodnight should have been Google or even Google Labs with the Brin/Page duo being the top data miners ( commerically) of this generation as Sall/Goodnight were 30 years ago.

SAP may spend a lot of its cash but the supply chain paradigm is best served by SaaS and exemplified by Salesforce.com and Force.com developers.

As the ancient Chinese said- May you live in interesting times.