Posts Tagged ‘memex’

Morning thoughts on data, identity and the almighty $$$

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

This was a comment on Identity Woman’s blog – I’m reposting here.

A snippet of IW’s post:

“Mary Hodder is one of the 8 experts Fast Company tapped to predict evolutionary trends for web 2.o in 2009:

Mary Hodder, Founder of Dabble.com and VP of Product Development, Apisphere

‘The future of social media is user’s owning their data, deciding who to send it to. Look for more companies that currently host the user’s identity to have less control over that, as things like Open ID take over and more companies try to compete by giving users more control over themselves. Look for ways users can own their own data, and companies that might offer that, sort of like a personal information bank’.”

—–

Sounds dead on to me.

I agree that one company or a small set of companies having preferred access/control over user data is not ideal. Sadly, I’m not sure that concentrated control won’t become the norm. Our economic and political systems have strong tendencies to concentrate power – it’s a recurring collective action problem where a small number of players (facebook, google, msft, etc…) have access to lower cost “cooperation” (collusion) than 6 billion citizens of the world – despite the fact that net social benefit would be maximized by a non-collusive approach.

Despite this historical tendency I hope that the power of the net to decentralize / distribute decision making power will lead to more user control over their own data. It’s an ongoing battle and the open stack, data portability, etc.. are all fighting the good fight here.

One other thought tied to biz models – I have a sense that the most fruitful pathway to user controlled data is focusing on $$$. Recast privacy concerns as monetary ones, where data=gold and control over your data translates into income.

Advertising offers a quick and easy entry point. Imagine a scenario where only the user controls access to their entire pool of data. Individual sites may have access to some subset of the data pool but ad delivery/targeting efficiency presumably correlates positively to the size of the data pool. Advertisers would then have a preference for targeting ads based on the complete data pool, which only the user has access too and which the user could $ell to the highest bidder.

There are some technical hurdles to providing translucent data (vs. full transparency) but we went to the moon & decoded the human genome so I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll be able to build secure, flexible, translucent identity/data systems in the near future.

Anyway, those are my morning thoughts on Identity & Data. Thanks for the great work in this space.
Best,
Chris Camp

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

In the name of Free Markets the SEC outlaws short selling, stock losses, financial failures, general negativity and frowning

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

I think I picked the wrong week to stop huffing spray mount.

The Markets and the Gods of Government have gone crazy:

“The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday issued a temporary ban on short sales of 799 financial stocks, a move against traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank shares.

The S.E.C. said the ‘temporary emergency action’ would ‘protect the integrity and quality of the securities market and strengthen investor confidence’.”

And there you have it. Thank god for free markets.

I offer a smattering of quotes related to the short selling ban and market “integrity” pulled from LATimes Financial Blog

— Eric Newman, who manages the TFS Market Neutral Fund, which includes both long and short positions in stocks: “The SEC has done a fantastic job blaming short sellers for nearly every problem in the financial markets today. It’s a brilliant PR campaign that links legitimate short sellers to ‘naked’ short sellers, that assumes any stock going down is only going down because of those pesky hedge funds and their short selling.

“The irony is that SEC is doing exactly what it claims to be against — manipulating the markets and propping up ailing financial companies that are now politically important because they are essentially backed by taxpayers” via government loans.

— Larry Harris, a professor of finance at USC and a former SEC chief economist, as quoted by Bloomberg News: “Proposals to ban short-selling are a highly politically motivated attempts to stop reality. To ban short selling is to in effect say that the government is going to try to determine what stock prices should be.”

— Richard H. Baker, president, Managed Funds Assn., which represents hedge funds: “MFA is deeply concerned by the crisis in the global financial markets, but equally troubled by the SEC’s unprecedented actions in response to the crisis. We stand firm in opposing restrictions to short selling and maintain that short selling is an essential risk-management tool and a critical component of ensuring market stability, not a contributor to market volatility. Further, restricting short selling has not been shown to provide an ultimate benefit to the stocks it is meant to protect.”

— Jonathan Macey, securities law professor, Yale University: Banning short sales is “an abomination. Short selling is a legitimate, critical market strategy that has incredibly important functions, including ferreting out information that could not be ferreted out any other way.”

— Jim Chanos, head of well-known short-selling firm Kynikos Associates and chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies: “We are very concerned that these emergency orders will not enhance long-term market integrity nor will they address the fundamental economic issues that have been afflicting our financial sector. We also believe that markets cannot withstand for long constantly changing rules in which each new regulation is announced in the middle of the night without any public comment or participation.

“Far from being the cause of the crisis, many short sellers were warning months and years ago about problems in this area. Simply put: short selling is a vital investment strategy that responds to market fundamentals and contributes to the integrity of stock prices. Investors are best served when they can hear both the reasons to buy and the reasons to sell any given security.”

Tags: , , ,
Posted in qarmiq | No Comments »

Mihooglia or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Search

Friday, September 5th, 2008

A very brief introduction to WoBID (Worthless Business Idea of the Day). It’s a repository for those occasional ideas that pop up and wait around for action…

WoBID pt 1: Mihooglia

Starting point: I was wandering the house the other night and this thought came to mind; “In some ways the whole game is about search and I’m not prepared to give it away for a song.”

Everything humans do is about search. The process of decision making: choosing between a variety of options and determining the best pathway. Search, defined broadly, is everything. Or almost everything.

Basic idea: We should be careful about picking winners in this space because once they’re entrenched it may be hard to get rid of them. Google’s WAY ahead in most stats that people care about. My paranoia worries about a second coming of Microsoft – not so much a concern about overt acts of evil but the slow down in innovation that usually accompanies large concentrations of market power.

In the midst of these thoughts I came to realize that I’ve become locked in. Psychologically locked in to believing that Google is hands down the best.

It didn’t take much analysis to realize that this deeply held belief, a belief that drives a good amount of my daily activity was lacking the sort of foundation it seemed to require. With their 10th Anniversary in the news I realized it has been almost a decade since I first started using google.

My first search engine affair was with Alta Vista. It was a short romance and the switch away from Alta Vista was painless for two main reasons: (1) google was obviously better and (2) psychological stickiness was low – I’d only been using AV for a year or so and hadn’t grown very attached to her yet.

I never really went for Yahoo or MSN – maybe 30-50 searches TOTAL, over ten years. Tried mahalo, powerset, dogpile, cuil, etc… just out of curiosity to try the new thing. 3-5 searches max – then gone. I haven’t consistently used another search engine for ten years!

With that realization I understood that I don’t have any good reason for thinking that google’s search results are actually better – measurably more useful/accurate. I do believe that I, and many, many others, have been swept up in a group think tidal wave. Google may actually be better but we’ve lost our ability to make a reasoned argument in support of that belief.

So… I made a personal pledge. Start using Yahoo. and compare the experiences.

and I failed. It bordered on impossible – I felt like a smoker trying to quit. Every time the brain thought “search” [1. As I became tuned in to every search - I realized I was searching *a lot*, in fact, I wish I had stats for how many times I did searches, the keywords, categories, dates, etc... The way some bank/credit card bills get broken down into zones of spending + more advanced data mining + visualizations. A lifetime of my personal search data. Fuck MTV, I want my data!.], the automatic typing of “g” and then “o” began…  I honestly couldn’t shake the habit.

Hitting Bottom: The first step is admitting the addiction.

Hi. My name is Chris and I’m a Google addict.

At the moment of revelation I wanted a utility that would allow me to run searches and kick back side by side results. A simple page with a search field that returns two pages of results. Glance to the left for Yahoo search results. Glance to the right for Google results. Aside from it’s power to loosen my addiction, it seemed damn easy to conjure up from a technical standpoint – imagine Blackle + Blackhoo.

And then the avalanche of follow-on ideas:

  • One search field to rule them all[2. and really, why stop there? Why not just one Smart Field. It'd be like Ubiquity (which is killer) and the google/FF intuitive address/search bar. Why not make it a universal syndication/search field - push to anywhere, pull from anywhere. twitter, email, yelp reviews, calendar, weather, everything. and an iPhone/mobile app to do the same. Death to the mouse! Return of the Command Line! or something like that. I disgress...]! A single point of access for everything search: mash-up Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Wikia and anyone else you want (including verticals)
  • User control of layout. Give the user fine-grained control over how the search results are displayed
  • User refinement of search results and advertising: preferred sources, trusted reviewers, user-driven ad targeting, suppress duplicates, etc…
  • Ability for users to layer[3. subply is an example of a video layering/ply product.] additional info on top of base results – both from third party sources (like Yelp, other users, etc…) or personal layers (annotations or any other data)
  • Vertical/Specialty search: Automatic inclusion of OR easy access to, preferred/relevant vertical search results (airlines, car rental (kayak-style) + give access to other “silos” – image, video, or domain specific (science, law, etc…)
  • Finally, securely open up the data with granular privacy mechanisms. Enable increased user control over their own data AND offer preferable returns on their efforts (i.e. For typing in searches (and using other data-generating web services) we give you FREE access to the service (which is obviously standard) + $$$. Return the maximum amount of value possible w/o having the system bog down in a chase for dollars and gaming of the system[4. Create a highly scalable ownership/profit sharing structure which efficiently incentivizes and rewards investors, builders, and users - more on this later.]

Recap: Since we’re at the 10 year point perhaps it’s a good time to look at where we’re at and what’s coming. Google nailed search but where are they headed? and where do we want to go?

A similar line of thought: from Doc Searls:

“Years ago, when the search engine category was a lot more competitive, I did a lot of comparing between contenders. For awhile HotBot was ahead, then AltaVista, then AllTheWeb/FAST… Not necessarily in that order, but you get the point.

Then Google won. Huge. They were just bigger and better than everybody at finding nearly everything.

But lately Google has frustrated me. When I do lookups for subjects, it gives results that include misspellings and other approximations, even when I use the “advanced” settings. Worse, it’s been useless at something it used to do perfectly: find old blog entries of mine.”

That’s all folks!

____________________________________________

Tags: , , ,
Posted in wobid | No Comments »