Also: Support the artists.

Buon appetito.

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As reported by Reuters, the journal Nature contacted over 700 scientists, and "84 percent said losing Google would ‘somewhat or significantly’ hamper their research and 78 percent said international collaborations would be affected."

One scientist even said, "Research without Google would be like life without electricity."

These findings could make it harder for Google to justify leaving China, given that the search giant would lose the moral high ground if it looks like its departure would do too much damage.  Plenty of people have argued that it’s better for Chinese citizens to have access to some information rather than none.

On the other hand, since Chinese authorities must not want to curtail their own country’s development (at least in this respect), the survey’s results could make them rethink their position.  Or perhaps be willing to give Google and free speech advocates a better compromise, anyway.

EBay Explores Human Nature, Likes What It Sees

Omidyar, speaking alongside John Donohoe, president of eBay Marketplaces, and Bob Kagle of Benchmark Capital, at the opening "Coffee Talk" segment of the eBay Developers Conference in Boston, pulled out all of the Pollyanna stops.

I know what you’re thinking, but save the references to Kool-Aid, flowers, handholding and Kumbaya for the comments section. Omidyar’s message of hope and eBay was a nice change of pace from a world enamored with the descent of celebrity heiresses and bombshell drama.

Omidyar said the driving mantra behind eBay, back when it was still a startup in 1995, was "people are basically good," and the continuation of that idea with an emphasis on trust is what will keep eBay afloat in the future.

Like any good collective myth creator (we apply "collective myth" in the positive sense rather than the pejorative, if you pessimists think otherwise – hegemony has its own noble function), Omidyar focused on success stories.

Our sources at the conference readily relay Pierre’s tale of a woman pulling herself out of public assistance because of the opportunity a service like eBay’s offers, where the barriers to doing business are effectively laid flat.

His conclusion, then, is split into two lessons eBay has presented mankind:

Lesson 1: Business is a force for good (Again, hold your comments, he said "business" and not "corporatism," as might be your first objection).

Lesson 2: Given the right environment, people can discover power within themselves to make good things happen.

Mmmm. Excuse me a moment as I rub that into my skin and like it, hope beyond reason, and reconsider my thoughts on altruism and human nature, and ponder whether or not turning 30 has really jaded me forever. Maybe I just need more coffee.

Kagle interjects to back up Pierre, reiterating the idea that people can simultaneously "do good and be successful," an idea that inspired eBay from its roots, and that the people on eBay genuinely want to help others.

Barring a few bad apples, we can imagine, like fathers sharing their parenting skills via Nintendo boxes of rocks, and opportunists selling locks of Britney’s hair. To eBay’s credit, the team weeds these out with good-faith vigor – though people are basically good, at least born as a good, clean slate, they are often polluted over time, like good ideas, and good websites. Cleaning and showering are ongoing human crises.

Nonetheless, Pierre believes in this innate goodness – a nice rebuttal to Original Sin – and believes eBay is "just beginning to impact the world, if you believe in people and trust each other."

That’s a tall order for the Aristocracy, Pierre, but so was the idea that housewives, paupers, the physically afflicted – well, anybody – could run a proper online business with eBay. And that’s working out so far…

Bob interjects again, says, eBay "brings the world together, and over time…will impact communities, cities, and even countries. And that will change the world."

Pierre was selling the idea better, but that’s okay. "Third parties," says Pierre, "consumers, developers, are the ones that will lead."

Scoff all you want, he could be right – has been so far – and at the least, it’s a nice battle cry.
 

The key to dominating any market online (now or in the future) is simple. It comes down to who has the highest average visitor value and who has the most traffic.

That is part of the reason I need to increase the price point of my ebook. There are only so many times you can see other marketers repackage and resell your information at a higher price point using aggressive affiliate marketing before you change your price point to more accurately reflect value.

I recently started a site with a friend of mine. Off the start it was frustrating doing all the tweaking needed to learn, but my friend so broadly believes in the concept of optimization that our site will probably out-earn older versions of its format by 400%. 4x the earnings on the same number of pages gives you serious capital for marketing investments and content production.

John’s other tip is that when people land on your sites "Are you truly making someone’s life better?"

I think that second point is one that is easy to miss if one is too shortsighted. Creating sites that are helpful / of significant value is something I want to work hard on, and has been core to the brand ideas behind my last couple major domain purchases.

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The submission itself looks similar to what I looked at before. Extremely high level; not much there for me to react to yet – they are still wrestling with (from my practitioner’s perspective) non value adding meta-meta work. (Yes, I suppose that being able to validate that if an XML type is acyclic then its derivations must also be is important… has to do with the graph-centric nature of internal IT data for those of you who are curious – but man, this is deep foundational work.)

Somebody please wake me when we start seeing some attempts to actually define service semantics.

I’m just sorry they didn’t submit this to the OMG instead, but with Microsoft on board no way that was going to happen, and I’m also not sure how interested the OMG would be in this.

All I can say is that I want to model these services once, in a common environment with my software system construction. Is that so much to ask? Now we will need a translation from UML deployment diagrams into SML – no big deal, I suppose – preferably through some DSM workbench that supports both UML and SML. The SML models in turn will feed my release management system and CMDB. 

Would really like some discussion on this one.

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Nature was surprisingly open about how poorly the trial had gone. “The intention was to explore the interest of researchers in a particular model of open peer review, whether as authors or as reviewers,” a Nature article stated. “It was also intended to provide Nature’s editors and publishers with a test of the practicalities of a potential extension to the traditional procedures of peer review.”

It turns out, however, that it might not be practical at all. Nature “sent out a total of 1,369 papers for review during the trial period,” but only “the authors of 71 (or 5%) of these agreed to their papers being displayed for open comment. Of the displayed papers, 33 received no comments, while 38 (54%) received a total of 92 technical comments. Of these comments, 49 were to 8 papers.”

A Techdirt reader raised an objection that seemed valid: “It’s because NO ONE KNEW ABOUT IT!!” “Posterlogo” then wrote that “this had nothing to do with the scientific community failing to embrace open access peer review. It had EVERYTHING to do with not getting the word out well enough.”

The Nature article addressed that issue, though, saying, “The trial received a healthy volume of online traffic: an average of 5,600 html page views per week and about the same for RSS feeds. However, this reader interest did not convert into significant numbers of comments.”

The failed experiment at Nature does not mean that wikis (and/or the peer review model) are “bad,” of course, but it’s a clear indicator that this trend may not be well-suited to act as a bandwagon.

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After that week, I had continued talks with Dina and Michael from Blip.tv about what they are doing, been talking to the Podtech.net (there’s me and John Furrier at Vloggercon) people for ideas and further discussions on what they are doing, and then went to the Blip.tv/Dabble party and spoke with GeekTV‘s Eddie Codel – all about video blogs and what is going on with them.

But, one thing that I noted to Rohit Bhargava – who was at Vloggercon for a client – was the missing PR people. Yes, there were PR people at the show … but mostly for clients. And, full disclosure – I wasn’t there for a client, but to learn. Where we the PR people that were there to learn more? Why weren’t there more PR people there learning about video blogs, and what is being said, how the technology is changing, and what we can do with video blogs.

Rohit has a great post on his observations from Vloggercon, and ValleyWag has a great post on the flipside of the insular nature of vlogs. But, for PR people, both of these are important issues.

Video blogs or vlogs or video podcasts – while still a nascent field in consumer generated media – are a growing space, and has potential to really explode. If you look at YouTube – ignore all the copyright material, and look for the original content – you find a massive audience that is watching. When you go to Blip.tv, you see various channels that include cooking, personal, travelogues and other fun videos.

Okay, so PR people should be paying attention to video blogs, because there are opportunities: outreach and conversations. Yes, vlogs are also a place you can reach out to, and get information to and help tell the story.

Or, well, you know it could be easy to transfer the whole video library for media – the atypical b-roll – to a media center video blog. Instead of doing the full link-up and crew, you can shoot for a vlog and have those clips available for the media. That’s the difference from the past to now: you can provide the videos to the media and the public, and give them the tools to create their own media. Help them own the brand as well.

But, well, there were not enough PR people there to learn these things.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

According to Business 2.0, YouTube is facing a rebellion among the formerly faithful. What will that do their rates? More importantly, where is the flock heading next?

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

Wikipedia is just as good as Brittanica, so the story goes. At minimum, Nature had described Wikipedia content as “no more unreliable” than that in the venerable Brittanica. Now it has been suggested in The Register by Brittanica that Nature’s research leaves much to be desired:

Nature reported that of the 50 articles it sent to independent experts, Brittanica’s had 123 errors to Wikipedia’s 162. Some of the errors were differences of opinion instead of mistakes, Brittanica also claimed:

Nature’s choice to run the article without noting how it differed in preparation from the academic work it usually presents probably has caused the most problems. RoughType blogger Nicholas Carr posted in February about discovering that detail:

Ultimately, Carr observed just how Wikipedia could be a much better source of information, if it followed the open source model more rigorously:

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Of particular interest, this piece shows a nice use of Google Earth to view a “slice” of atmospheric data in a virtual Globe environment. Next month, biologist Erik Born will be wielding a crossbow and firing satellite tags into the hides of walruses, having maneuvered his rubber dinghy through the pack ice off western Greenland.

By tagging the walruses, Born will be able to track the animals’ movements and behavior from afar over several years. He will keep an eye on them using the same free Internet tool that has opened the eyes of millions to the possibilities of digital geography (and the sight of their house from above) – the Google Earth virtual globe… of interest is this quote found deep in the article… “Google Earth has no analytic functions and is not designed to replace professional GIS software; in fact, it should be a boon to the software makers.

“Google Earth is just the most fantastic thing I have ever seen,” says Jack Dangermond”… very true and akin to the old saying, let the buyer beware… thus, Google Earth definitely has secured a place in the geospatial workflow process, however, it’s not a solution to replace existing technologies, rather, it’s a complement. Used wisely google earth is extending the reach of GIS in areas that until now have not felt the benefits of GIS. See the article at Nature.

Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com