It has been a while since a new product has come out on the market in the search engine space that actually works well, and is actually fairly interesting in how they present data. Cuil was released to the public this morning, and it is truly something very cool.

Of course the first thing to do is the vanity search, and what was surprising about the results was not so much that there were hundreds of articles with my name attached, but some new folks showed up in the search response that I didn’t expect, gone were all the old junky things from 1999 and 1998, right at the top were all the new things for both me, my known Google ganger, and a host of new people on the web with the same name that either didn’t show up in Google, or were well past the 10 page limit that I seem to have when working with a search engine.

Is this a product that will give Google a run for its money? At this point, with all the search engines out there, it is probably the best contender that is in the smaller search engine space. While Yahoo Microsoft and Google vie for dominance, Cuil might just be the sneaky little search engine that could, and eventually take a good chunk of market share. Not only does it work, but the presentation layer is very easy to use, and very intuitive.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private. Source: Cuil

Some of the internal links to the site are broken when you click on the about us info links, you do get some good information about the company, so there is still work to be done. Otherwise, this is one search engine that is worth the time and test drive.

Tags: cuil, search, engine, search engine, better, best, cool, irish, knowledge, fun, entertaining, google ganger, toy

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Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge cited a couple of Russian publications touting Microsoft’s upcoming arrival in Siberia. Microsoft’s construction could happen somewhere between the southern Siberia cities of Irkutsk and Angarsk, according to the report.

The scale will be less than that of the other two datacenters in Dublin and Chicago. Power and Internet connectivity do not appear to be a problem, given that Microsoft touted energy stability as an asset in a Kommersant article.

With 10,000 servers, Siberia’s Microsoft outpost would have a tenth of what Dublin will support. But Microsoft’s datacenter should be the biggest one in Russia when completed, said CNews.

Microsoft’s choice of location boiled down to proximity to potential customers along with other factors, the report said. Irkutsk has the power and the telecom capacity to support connectivity to the datacenter.

Where those potential customers might reside on a geographic basis is another story. Irkutsk’s population density rates less than four people per square kilometer.

Perhaps Microsoft anticipates a lot of usage from Siberian visitors from the north, and Mongolians from the south. Or as one commenter on Slashdot suggested, maybe the deal is a quid pro quo arrangement between Microsoft and the Russian government: you crack down on software pirates, and we’ll invest in a datacenter in Siberia.

Stranger things have happened in the world.

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So from here onwards I am going to spend some time commenting on the superb reply that I got here in ITtoolbox from Jim Johnson over at Making the Business Case for Social Computing – Part Deux, which you can read over here as well.

In that lengthy comment, Jim comes to discuss how both social computing and Knowledge Management "are sitting on the edge of a major bottleneck in IT development" and he gets to describe that bottleneck as the gap between:

"—- separate knowledge and interests —- and —- agreed upon activities, processes and plans."

You would probably need to read the paragraphs that come after that particular quote, because they surely are fascinating. Towards the end of it all, Jim comes to propose a new concept called "Collaborative process development", which he gets to talk a whole lot more over at his weblog ActionMap Waves (Including an intriguing scorecard that, if anything, surely is worth while investigating further).

However, what I found really interesting and worth while noting as well is the following paragraph, just towards the end:

"With respect to the ROI of social networking and knowledge management, I recommend positioning social networking as a supporting tool for the new category of collaborative process development.

If social networking can be seen to accelerate collaborative process development, and reduce some of the 100′s of billions of dollars in waste in IT every year, I suspect that it will get the attention of the CFO."

WOW! There you have it, one very thoughtful approach towards proving the ROI of Social Computing that may well be worth while exploring further. It sounds pretty solid, don’t you think?

However, I am not totally convinced about it 100% and more than anything else because it is placing the focus on something that is just one of the main reasons why traditional KM failed over the course of the years (And those who have been reading this blog for a while would know where I am heading right now).

Yes, indeed, that extra focus on tools and processes is what got us in trouble in the first place. We should not forget that social computing is everything but tools and processes. It is all about the people! It is a philosophy, a lifestyle, i.e. that growing urge from knowledge workers to go out there, connect with other knowledge workers, build further up their relationships and share their knowledge.

That is where a new form of ROI for Social Computing should be based on. If social software is all about knowledge workers involved in different various conversations, the least we could do to showcase a new form of such ROI (much more effective and efficient for social computing) is to place the focus where it should have been all along: on the people!

Those knowledge workers should be the ones defining the ROI of social computing, because, after all, they are the ones living it, so there isn’t probably a better way of defining what it should look like, since they know it better than anyone else. So a good start for CFOs to work their way through ROI for social software is to go where it matters: the knowledge workers themselves. But that would be the subject for another blog post at a later time …

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This time around it is disappointingly coming from a BBC article under the title Facebook ‘costs businesses dear’, which right away, of course, has made the headlines in Techmeme, too. And for a good reason.

If you check out some of the different links that I have referenced above, and I am sure there is plenty more out there that would be worth while a read, there is probably very little that I would be able to add into the conversation. However, this time around I thought I would try to point out something that lots of people seem to have forgotten.

Yes, indeed, that particular study (Not sure where the link to it is, actually) argues the amount of money lost by having knowledge workers hanging out in various multiple social networks, supposedly wasting their time instead of doing their jobs. But what about doing a much more interesting and relevant study that would calculate the amount of money lost, the countless hours gone by day in day out from different knowledge workers trying to find the experts to help them get the job done?

Why don’t we carry out studies that show and demonstrate the huge amount of losses for every single business out there just because their knowledge workforce did not know who to contact to get the job done faster, much more responsively and with plenty more quality? Do we have to remind business how much money they have lost over the course of the years just because one department didn’t know how to reach out to another to help out in a customer situation? How much money and time have businesses wasted on reinventing the wheel at the other side of the world, when that same business implemented a similar solution, but for a different customer?

Where do you feel that businesses would be at the moment if Knowledge Management would have been in the same status and with the same negative reputation as in the late 90s and early 2000s? How do you think different businesses are going to successfully make the transition into knowledge based companies in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century, if it weren’t for social networks and social computing?

I am sure that, as you have gotten to read through the last paragraphs, you would be nodding away and perhaps sadly identifying your own business suffering from that very same thing. Why don’t we have studies that try to portrait how much money companies have lost for not empowering knowledge workers to connect with one another, share their knowledge, collaborate and innovate as a a result of embracing and adopting social computing techniques?

Why is it that people keep insisting that a successful business is that one that just focuses on a bunch of processes and tools and nevermind about the people and their connections, when we all know that it is the latter, the people, that glue that makes it all work together.

How much longer would the corporate world have to go further, before realising the true potential of social networking; freeing up knowledge workers to do what they do best: share their knowledge with others and collaboratively innovate.

*That* is what Knowledge Management or Knowledge Management 2.0 is all about! *That* is the main reason why KM is no longer a discipline with plenty of negative reputation. On the contrary, KM is coming back, and big time!, into the spotlight, and the main reason for it is nothing more, nothing less than social computing.

Because whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay. It is the perfect complement of a crippled traditional KM system where tools and processes were what ruled and all a sudden there is this balance that knowledge workers are putting together back on to the table realising that the true potential for a successful KM strategy is to actually combine tools, processes and people and all of that through the interactions of social software tools.

So here is an open question to everyone out there … Would you rather prefer to have your knowledge workers wasting their time with their daily social networking interactions in whatever the tool and benefit in the medium, long term from those inter-connections, or would you prefer to have your knowledge workers wasting their time trying to figure where the experts are and how to get their knowledge to help fix that customer problem?

It is up to you. Really. But I tell you something, if I were running a business I know what my option would be. Encourage my knowledge workers to hang out in various social networks, dive into the conversations, use them responsibly and continue building further up on what really matters: connect with people to share their knowledge and collaborate, instead of having to struggle time and time again trying to figure out how to get the job done smarter and not necessarily harder.

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The word(s) came from Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google China; everyone can agree on that.  And no one has details as to what companies Google has taken a shine; Fu Chenghao of the Shanghai Daily reports, “Lee declined to name any of them, saying they are in the fields of search, entertainment, the online community and others.”

The only problem, then, is the matter of chronology.  Chenghao states that Google “has invested in another four to five Chinese Internet firms,” and an article in China Knowledge uses the same phrasing.  Sumner Lemon, the IDG News Service’s Beijing correspondent, has seen a different calendar, however.

“Google reportedly plans to acquire one or two Chinese companies and invest in up to five more over the next year as part of efforts to gain ground on rival Baidu.com in China,” writes Lemon.  Past tense, future tense, I dunno.  All three sources have been reliable before.

But there’s one more piece of information that has come out of the confusion: according to the Shanghai Daily, “Lee said there’s no ‘upper limit’ for recruitment for the Shanghai facility, which joins two other Chinese research centers in Beijing and Taipei.”  So Google China is either out of the loop in regards to Google’s hiring issues, or the branch is operating under different financial restraints.

It took five years to collect some 80,000 incidents from 1970 through 2004 and assemble them into the Terrorism Knowledge Base, at The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT).

Resource Shelf noted the unveiling of the Terrorism Knowledge Base. The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism based at the University of Maryland put it together.

"We’re not just counting up the number of attacks. We’re looking at a long list of specific details, as well as social and economic considerations that may help us understand the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of terrorism," Gary LaFree, director of START, a University of Maryland professor and a criminologist by training, said in the announcement.

Some interesting facts have emerged from early searches of the database, according to LaFree:

Already, searches of the database have offered some myth-busting findings: average age of a terrorist group is one year or less; 74 percent of all groups known to launch attacks between 1970 and 1997 lasted for only 1 year or less; majority of attacks resulted in zero fatalities; 1.2 percent of cases resulted in the death of 25 or more people. Terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.

While a lot of information is now open to the public, some data will be limited to access by the Department of Homeland Security, which funded the project, and other elements of the Intelligence Community.

My keynote panel seemed to go well, here’s a five minute video clip.  We announced that VisiblePath is joining SuiteTwo to go beyond wikis, blogs and RSS into Social Networking for the Enterprise.  In a breakout panel we had a chance to explore it further, but the interesting part was the participation from Cisco and P&G, two leading companies that are pragmatically adopting best-of-breed social software.  Both of them agreed with the need for further standards in this area, such as Amo.

Thanks mostly to the effort of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, Web2Open was a success.  My favorite session was learning about KnowledgeAsPower, something that wouldn’t have made its way to the big stage, trying to apply Web 2.0 to a real problem in politics.  How elected representatives interface with their constituency.

Sarah Schacht noticed a significant disconnect from the policies made just miles away between New Hampshire and Vermont.  Vermont has a greater number of representatives to citizens and potentially as a result was able to develop some better health care legislation in touch with citizen needs.  In the pre-progressive era (1890s) we had the highest voting rates in US history, between 90-94% of eligible voters did.  Largely because elected officials were closer to their constituents.  Town halls were actually held in town halls, or even barber shops.  The Civil Rights movement was borne of this era.

Today the population relative to elected officials has grown, and technology has become more of a problem than a solution.  The media has decreased their role in helping communicate on state issues to constituents. The best help for a citizen who wants to engage on a given issue is the website of a legislative body, but they are just official factual messages that have a 48 hour lag from staffers to website.  So they created a site for the State of Washington that lets a citizen subscribe to a specific issue or bill they are interested in and participate by sending Legislators email.

But the other problem is your average politician is consumed with email.  They use Outlook, and only have 1.5 staffers to help manage 800-1,300 demails per day.  With 90-120 day legislative sessions and lobbyists consuming time — their outbound communication is limited to once or twice per session — via newsletters, mass emails and town hall meetings.  She demoed their potential solution for the first time.  Citizens send email through a slightly structured web interface.  The legislator gets a dashboard for their email, with a row for each bill, enabling them to scan relative interest in different issues, number of emails pro/con and the ability to respond directly to different emergent groups.  I shared Politicopia with the session, which could be a great complement to their effort.

Sometimes we get caught up in the hype of cool social tools and forget that what we are doing is providing alternatives to email for social interaction, armed with backlinks, pings and feeds.  And the real value is when you can apply them to solving a specific problem. 

While my personal interests tend to draw me to such projects, if it wasn’t for Web 2.0 Expo trying a hybrid open source business model with Web2Open, I wouldn’t have found it or a way to contribute.  One person told me that a session by a guy who runs a comic book store was the best he saw in the event overall.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if it became a feeder for the big stage.

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The integration will allow online shoppers access to the personal experience of others as they shop for items online. Integrating user-generated reviews into the Aggregate Knowledge Discovery Services platform will add value to customers shopping for products online.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/aggregate-knowledge-and-bazaarvoice-partner-2007-03/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/video-advertising-to-grow-2007-03 http://www.webpronews.com/video-advertising-to-grow-2007-03#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2007 14:52:47 +0000 Mike Sachoff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=35831 TV producers are seeing value in shows after they air. Just as DVDs boost movie revenues, DVD sets of TV shows are selling well, along with iTunes downloads of individual shows for $1.99.

Rebroadcasts are proving beneficial for TV show sponsors who support hosting on the TV shows sites. This will likely grow the online video advertising beyond its current status.

• Brad discusses how the thank you page is the most under-utilized page on the web, tips us off to Google’s retail specific knowledge base for adwords, and how to find your quality score.

• Matt disects Google local’s algorithm
• Jim talks about why new sites suck for search
• 11 Ways to increase your conversion rate – great stuff from T-bo

• 5 ways to promote your local biz for $888 a year – plus a local gold mine from Mr. Gray. He also asks – are you a baiter or a flasher?

• Is the world out of good ideas? – if you haven’t found this yet, Brant writes some nice stuff including posts on valuation for an exit, and how to handle an NDA

• Jarrod drops his definitive guide to blogging

• Joe has a nice roundup of Google filters

• Darren Dalasta tells us how to know if your friend is an SEO

• Brian coins the Paris Hilton rule, shows us how to drive traffic without SE’s, and illustrates competitive webmastering (aka SEO) for Jason Calacanis

• Andy explains how to escape Google’s supplemental results

• Shoemoney is a genius, and provides the goods with the Adwords arrow trick

• How social media impacts SEM from one of the guys who would know best.

• Searchviews and reprise media gives us the superbowl ad scorecard (curses to whoever dropped Rand’s ad)

• Muhammad Saleem has joined up with Pronetadvertising, and is writing some fantastic stuff on social media including a post on digg narcissim among others (see ego hook)

• Loren’s guide to link buying rocks

• I could probably link just about anything Kathy Sierra writes – favorite recent post – Inspiring your user-evangelists=

• Brian Clark advises differentiate or die, and gives his usual great ideas on titles (note to self – listen to his podcast with Neil and Cameron on Rush Hour)

• Aaron talks about using scraper to improve relevance and probably some other awesome stuff I didn’t read:)

• Congrats to Duane on an SEO book deal (please educate the masses!!) – hat tip to Bill

• 50% off Reviewme -sweet! (no aff)

• Everyone involved in search marketing should thank their respectful Gods that we have Danny around to defend the reputation of SEO (cause the rest of us are too damn lazy or busy to try to convert those who don’t "get it") – Thanks Danny!

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About the Author

Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl made his first horrible looking website full of animated .gifs in 1997, and after fours years of failure and experimentation ended up in the world of SEO and internet marketing in early 2001. He is currently an independent marketing consultant from the SEO school of thought. Todd earned a bachelors of business adminstration from Northwood University in 2003 while running an web design and consulting firm Meta4creations, LLC. Todd is a speaker at both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies conferences.