Hola Readers!

We have some housekeeping updates… I made some changes to Inkhorn’s feed yesterday.  The feed now incorporates the “Links” stream that can be found on the right hand column of the homepage.  Together, at last.

To celebrate this grand reunion (in German, “Wiedervereinigung“) I’m donating 100% of this one page script to the internet (available via Google code).  It’s written in python, and makes heavy use of Mark Pilgrim’s excellent feedparser library.  This is not an industrial strength solution, but it suited my needs much better than any of the industrial strength solutions out there.

Let me <phil @ this domain . org> know if you encounter any wierdness, or think that this feed combo is one giant step backwards.  And hold onto your hats, this feed is going to take off like a rocket!  We’re talking like three or four posts a week!

That was the exception I was born to write!

Jared Spool has an interesting piece up about how changes in Amazon’s rating systems led to a rather large increase in sales.  By his calculations, Amazon makes approxiamately $3 Billion dollars a year by bubbling up good reviews to the top.  Jared Spool also picks up on the fact that Amazon makes it easier to find bad reviews of the product, and this ultimately helps their bottom line:

In our studies of Amazon shoppers, we found many start by looking at only the negative reviews, using them to try to “talk them out” of buying the product. Interestingly, Amazon now has a feature to easily see the more negative reviews together.

I go straight for the negative reviews (a technique I picked up from Chris).  If people’s nit-picky comments are the worst you can say about this product, then it really can’t be all that bad.   Having worked in publishing, I know that endorsements are often crony paybacks.

My jaundiced eye may be out-of-sync with the general population.  According to Jared, “one out of every five customers decides to complete the purchase because of the strength of the reviews.”  So if small tweaks are worth so much and the reviews are so important, why does Amazon bury them at the bottom of the page?

I am very excited to announce the availability of the Hyperconverter.

The Hyperconverter converts your Microsoft Office documents (.doc, .xls, .ppt) to PDF for free.  Ben and I have been working on making this process as painless as possible.  The Hyperconverter works entirely online; there’s no software download, and no registration required for small files (less than 3 Megabytes).  You just upload your file and download the PDF, lickety split.

Try it out, and let me know if you have any questions or feedback: phil AT inkhorn DOT org.

Happy converting.

This is a growth trend that most CEOs would give their eye teeth for:

That’s one year’s growth! Of almost a 1000% percent. Sure, it may be “a poor man’s email“¹. But these days, who cares if you’re poor as long as you’re enjoying life. Being rich is so passe (This is just between you, me, and the lampost, I would give my eye teeth for a market capitalization of $91 Billion).

One of the more difficult things to grapple with is what twitter is. Or perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t. David Pogue used one of the most valuable spaces in tech industry coverage talking about what twitter isn’t, and a little bit talking about what it is. Anytime that people spend talking about what you’re not, you know you’re in a good place. That means that people care enough to try and figure out just what exactly you’re up to. And having people care about you is the heart and soul of any good internet business. People talk a lot about creating the passionate user. Well, what happens when you have millions of passionate users? Can you change the world?

Let me humbly offer my opinion on what twitter is; it’s a place where you can type 140 characters and send it out to the world. The genius is that it’s only 140 characters. Whoever thought that strong limits could be so enabling? OK, so I know we had shout boxes before this. And I also know that they were particularly spammy. Twitter solves this problem by being opt-in. And it lets SMS solve a problem that email created; free communication. The law of unintended consequences is very much in effect with email, never has something so free been so costly. What do I mean by costly? First off, we passed on the material cost to the providers who have to deal with spam, back-up, and everything else. Perhaps more important is the time cost, I hear more people complain about how much time they spend on inbox management. This may be changing.

We took a straw poll at my Tuesday Night Dinner club about how much people use their email. And the results, while by no means scientific, are still significant. Some people are avid emailers, and they rarely SMS. Others, SMS like the Dickens, and rarely check their email. And a lone straggler, rarely emails and never uses SMS (she’s the last person in the world without a cell phone, bless her heart). As a follow-up we talked about who uses “The Tweeter” (sic). I was the only one to raise my hand. This is fundamentally good news for the service; in the emerging world of twitter, the network effect has yet to really kick in. Keep in mind, that for millions, quite possibly billions, of people their cell phone is their only computer.

If you think the twitter cottage industry is huge, it’s going to get much bigger. All for the love of 140 characters.

In the world of twitter, nobody has really stepped up as a competitor. And perhaps the secret to twitter’s success is that it is neither publishing (blogging) nor communication (email). It’s pubmunication! (Please don’t ever use that phrase seriously.) A fact that someone as tapped in as Eric Schmidt seems not to get.

So really, what’s twitter for? The answer is your words. Do with them whatever you like. But if you think that it’s all sillyness, then you’re missing the point. It has the power to gain people their freedom. And if you want to know what people are thinking about a particular topic, there’s perhaps no better place to take a quick snapshot. Just search for something (say, “Obama“), and then sit there for ten seconds. Did you see the updates? It’s the world in real time. On the internet. Not some cobwebbed index that’s hours old.

¹ Even if he was speaking as a computer scientist, twitter poses some of the most interesting questions out there. It’s practically parlor talk to speculate on how you would “scale twitter“.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Muthu Muthukrishnan talk about Google’s approach to designing algorithms for advertising auction design.  Muthu basically described the process as being similar across all the major search engines in terms of their ad sales.  In short, what the major search engines do with the right half of the page.

One major feature of generalized second price auctions (pdf) is to discover a good’s (in this case a keyword’s) true price and to minimize gaming the system.  I won’t go into the mechanics of auction design, the talk does a much better job than I could.  What seemed particular interesting to me is that Google wants keyword prices to be relatively stable.  The introduction of the generalized second price auction is designed to dampen price fluctuations.

Google doesn’t want their advertisers to be programmers and mathematicians, they want them to be advertisers.  In other words, create a market that’s fair and you enable people to devote their time and energies to do what they do best.  To my ear, this sounds much like Adam Smith’s proverbial invisible hand:

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

Smith wants the market not to be the object of someone’s machinations, rather it’s efficiency is effectively invisible.  To this end Google wants their auction to be as true as possible in regards to price, and to do that they don’t want to tinker with it endlessly. Hence the motivation for Muthu’s talk; to invite academia to study the problem of an idealized auction.  If Google was tinkering with their auction all the time, this would provide incentive for some advertisers to constantly be trying to game the system.  While this would be good for a few, it would be highly annoying for many.  People would lose trust, and drift away from the service.

Contrast this with the left half of the page.  On this side, the search engines are constantly pushing out updates.  And people are constantly trying to move up the rankings.  Some, in the famed ‘black hat seo’ community, are trying to game the system; much to the annoyance of search engines and users.   Oh, the crooked timber of humanity!  To get to the top of the rankings is to be king of the mountain.  On the right side of the page, it’s often better to be in the middle of the pack.  Conventional wisdom has it that the top ad clicks are often the result of a casual seeker, while a real information hunter would be willing to read through the listings to find the most appropriate source.

While I’m sure a user’s trust and the stability in the system are important goals for search, relevance is king.  If you can acheive a 1% or 2% increase in relevance, the search engines would not hesitate to try and capitalize on it.   Here, the mechanisms may not be known to the public, but they are far from invisible.   A small tweak to the algorithm is discussed endlessly.

I find this dynamism between the right half and the left half of the page particularly interesting.  I guess when anything is seen and used by millions of people a day, interesting patterns will emerge.

One last note… someone in the Q & A period asked about personalization and auctions.  Here, the jovial Muthu bristled a little.  He stated that he didn’t like personalized news or other forms of personalization.    And that all that we were talking about in this case was a relationship between bidders and keywords.  In addition Muthu turned the discussion of personalization in the direction of recommendation engines; this is not necessarily a new development, but it ties in with the idea that recommendations and advertising are very closely related.

Paul Graham, speaking on start-ups:

As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack.

Paul Graham’s a smart cookie, and has been involved in countless more start-ups than I have; but I would proffer that it doesn’t even need to be something ‘new’.  Observing deficiency itself seems like a worthy enough project.  If it happens to be something novel, then all the better.

The piece is worth reading. One of the thrusts of the essay is that Graham speaks of start-ups as an enterprise of self growth:

Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That’s the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.

Understanding people and responding to their needs is basically an ego-denying role.  An exercise in maturity, if you will.  Having a grand vision is basically egotistical.  Here one thinks of the CEO as enfant terrible, throwing a hissy fit whenever their beautiful vision isn’t executed exactly.  Of course, these are stereotypes, or perhaps more appropriately, archetypes.  

It’s interesting to me that we look to start-ups as institutions of growth and self-subjugation, and established companies as testaments to their CEOs.  It amazes me how often Steve Jobs and Apple are viewed as one in the same.  This is no doubt a result of careful public relations, but the 35,000 employees there must be doing something other than walking around in an infinite loop.

And Microsoft of course is closely tied to Bill Gates, even if he’s left day to day operations.  Here’s Bill Gates speaking about his accomplishment:

We’ve really achieved the ideal of what I wanted Microsoft to become.

Are the models for success between start-ups and established companies really so different?  Or are we creating stories that seem to fit the bill, magnifying certain qualities in order to make our stories square with the reality we want to see?

In the not so distant future, business cards will be made by robots.  Lucky for you and me, this time has already come.  My friend Steve has created a business card robot.  For those of us who need to make a business card quick, it’s easy enough to update your info and download a PDF.  No registration required.

Last week I attended the Boston Meetup for Python programmers.  About 35 people packed into the attic of betahouse to hear Ned Batchelder’s talk, “A Whirlwind Excursion through Python C Extensions“.  The talk, while it gave me a crick in my neck, was brief, informative, and took away some of the mystery surrounding the C underbelly of python.

I won’t give away any spoilers, but there were a couple of items that came up in the talk that weren’t in the slides.

• Writing C extensions for python is a lot like creating the python language itself.
• Actually, it’s the same as writing the python language itself.
• That means that you can look at the python source code for help and ideas.
• When writing extensions in C, you have to think like a python programmer. You still have to do all the C-things that you would normally have to do (e.g. manage memory), but you have to understand how objects are going to be used in their native, pythonic, context.
• When using ctypes in python, you have to think like a C programmer.
• Ned’s talk didn’t cover anything to do with IronPython and Jython

 All in all, a very useful primer.  If you’re interested, Ned will be giving the same talk at PyCon.

Nicholas Carr:

what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there’s much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What’s much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path - the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

Well put.  There is much to admire.  There’s also a lot to wonder about. Like if you’re just going to end up at Wikipedia, why do you even need Google?

Most searches don’t even really care about other sources.  A deep search of the web is only necessary 40% of the time (see slide #25).  30% of searches are navigational; people type in a URL into a search box and then click on that URL in the search results.  I’m occassionally guilty of this behavior; I don’t know if it’s because I find it easier to go to the top right of the browser window, or if urls are often ungainly and I want a correction if I mess it up.  And another 30% end up at Wikipedia (and this figure ignores Wikipedia’s 20% growth in the last year).

See also Jakob Nielsen on the importance of information variety.

A quote from Leslie Orchard:

Minimal effort lowers mental cost, which promotes more noise, but also encourages more input (or any input) and thus more signal overall.