Category: google

Buddypress for Analytical Buddies??

Let us assume there are top 100 analysts in the world mostly using WordPress or Typepad or Blogger to make posts

Managing them is quite a challenge.

What is marketing ROI of analyst relationships for a Business Intelligence vendor- Curt Monash is the Aerosmith of Business Intelligence Analysts so he can tell it better.

How about a magical community where you just use their mostly Feedburner of Feedblitz RSS feeds to create a self automated community.

Serach Engine Optimization can be tricked by keeping that community website free from Google or Search Engines ( yes it can be done).

Use numerical etc as in Linkedin to spur rivalry by shifting their page positions up and down, or by clicking repeatedly on some posts to manipulate their views on blog posts.

What would SAS pay to have all SAS analysts in one webpage. or SPSS to have all SPSS analysts in one webpage.

Six months later suddenly open the website for search engines, and the RSS feed has downloaded all the posts of all the top 50 analysts of the world. Google advertsing wont matter because hey we have a mega vendor sponsor- while individual bloggers / analysts have no collective strength now as the community is too big.

So much blah blah-

What software would you use.

you can choose between

Ning.com ( but it mostly non Blog feeds based)

or Wordframe.com ( which interface and name sounds suspiciously like WordPress software)

Or you can choose a customized WordPress Solution called Buddy Press.

Here is the software-

BuddyPress

BuddyPress will transform an installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.

BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact. Read More ?

Note this was just a generic case study for making a case for open source based community softwares. Resemblance to any thing is a matter of coincidence – except for Curt Monash of course.

Cost of Customized WordPress Software for communties is a big zero- it is free and open source and tjousands of plugins can be installed and maintained for it.

See an existing installation here

www.decisionstats.com/community

or at www.buddypress.org

Saving Sergei Sergeivich

One of the most brilliant mathematics students of all time was a person named Sergey Brin. Today at 36 years old, and more billions than he ever cares for- he should ponder his mother’s wish for him to see him complete his Phd is more important or is his own indispensability to Google. The Google share price having fallen by 50 % over the past one year, what more could it fall.

An year or two is all it takes, and with his genetic tendency to Alzheimer’s disease – time is running out for Sergey Brin to leave the board room for the classrooms he left one decade ago. If Google cannot take one year without him, then Google is not as stable as we think.

What if Einstein started opening startups, or Fermi decided joining Board room was important than theorems- Where would we all be ?

In any case, this is a Facebook cause –

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/281925/8347178

Sergey Brin Needs to Finish his Phd 

Bringing back the most brilliant math scientist  in our generation  for other causes

Positions

1. Non Abusive
2. Scientific Debate
3. Science versus Commerce
4. Should a brilliant scientist be seduced by money?
5. If all teachers become businessmen, what will happen to the children

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Category:
Public Advocacy – Philanthropy Volunteerism and Public Benefit
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Also see Mr Brin’s academic paper-

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Adobe Air for Art- Tweeters

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A batch mate of mine working at Adobe India’s Noida development product management had tipped me to Adobe Air, but I thought it was typical Adobe hubris- but after several months Adobe Air clearly seems to be stealing a march over any other RIA ( Including Silverlight on which I have written and tagged before)

Above- Screenshot of how a Twitter Desktop Client, TweetDeck looks like.TweetDeck helps organize twitter friends in groups thus helping make sense of the twitter screen.

Man with Cat- Matt Cutts, who cuts spam.

Recent Tweet by Matt-

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/2008-founders-letter.html

And on Cats, a repeat

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Saving the New York Times from itself

The iconic newspaper New York Times, flagpole for progressive, liberal and communist thinkers (depending on where you stand) is under attack again.

It is under attack from the stupidity of its old school old fashioned presses, who believe cutting thousands of trees every year to make loss making newspapers is better than just putting the News on a Kindle, on an iPhone, on an RSS feed. Apparently online advertising is a difficult topic for the Pulitzer prize winning newspaper to master which has Nobel writers in its hallowed mustachioed and sometimes dowdy columnists.

 

If the NYT just shut down its paper division and shift to a paperless world, it would save lots of money, and earn lot more money from the online world. They can ask their own technology columnists and strategists if this is possible- and ask Google for help. Google with it’s Al Gore links, environmental standing and hunger for more and better online advertising can definitely team up (but for those anti trust worries alas)

So here is a Facebook cause- Save the NYTimes.  You can join up here –

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/170855/8347178

It has 37 members already and I created it some time back in December 2008. If you love newspapers and want the NYT to shape up, then join up.

 

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An open source and better Search Engine

Search Engines are difficult subjects to talk about – there are multiple experts and there are multiple vendors from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Cuil and there are newer innovations like Cosmix -Blended Search and there are Wiki Search (Including the Digg bar and same features introduced in Google now). Content itself has exploded from websites in 1999 to websites, blog posts, RSS feeds, tweets, Facebook profiles, online communities, voice, podcast and video. Quantitative measures to measure, index and rank the new types of content require that the algorithms behind search be made open source but with strict creative commons licensing and using third party developers to create search algorithm extensions.

This idea seems difficulty to implement but it has been there and done before. No one creates Palo Alto like research labs anymore- all scientist and researchers have to first sign away “copy"cat”rights before beginning their research.

The year 2009 is different from the year 1999, and PageRank is no longer a maths based algol- it is a marketing brand. Time for the Stanford dropouts to go back to school and get some more math and some less marketing (and less pranks on Wolfram please) in their search engine. And Paul Allen who created the building in Stanford where the Google algol was first thought, he needs to spend some Bills and venture fund a new wave of innovation in search engines. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe. I just need a better search engine than Google right now.- Perhaps Herr Schmidt take some time from viewing mountains in Mountain View and measure customer satisfaction instead of just measuring market share in non competitive and likely to face anti trust scrutiny in US and Europe very soon. So better give some of the ranking algol features open so all websites implement the SEO tactics magically revealed and create a better world wide web- thus negating the information asymmetry in a closed source search engine.

Chrome Experiments

Here are some nice data visualization methods elaborated in http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

 

I created one using Social Collider for searching @smartdataco and generated this data mapcoolied

The site  ( which goes by the tag of  Not your mother’s Javascript) is created by Google ,Creator of Chrome Browser.

 

In light of these deeply held beliefs, we created this site to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers.

These experiments were created by designers and programmers from around the world. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.

Here is an experiment called Canopy available at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/canopy/

It generates Fractals

 

Another more useful experiment is Social Collider which enables you to search Twitter for specific words, and create a data map for that

New Search Engine ?

Here is a new search engine called Kosmix which claims to help make the world more organized. Now I gave it the Google story test which means I compared it’s results to Google’s results for

1) Google / Kosmix

2) Jim Goodnight /Sergey Brin

3) Regression

4) Data Mining

Results were frighteningly good. Some screenshots are below. What Kosmix does is aggregate searches across various platforms like the Net, and adds Images, Videos Results so it looks like a report compiled on specific search word rather than a list of links like Google does.

Take a look.

 

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Clearly Kosmix is the winner because it adds Google Search, You Tube search and Google Blog Search results as well to its results. I have talked a long time back on the need for Google to give more customization especially for business research users ( see item 10 b).

Google continues to be a list of Ranked web pages, while Kosmix is a new organized information source.I just hope it does not end up like www.cuil.com which started with a  big hype and is now claiming to be the biggest search engine in the world with the largest index  , but not the biggest users I guess.

http://www.cuil.com/info/features/

Any search engine that places a category of Indian film actors when you search for “Ajay Ohri” can not do too well ! Period.

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