Alex Kelleher’s Blog

A cliche we hear a lot is “content is king“.   I’ve heard it in speeches from Rupert Murdoch to Eric Schmidt, and it just seems to be an accepted fact.   It was said a lot in the late 1990′s to fuel part of the dotcom boom.  And in the last year or so, this meme seems to have taken an upward trend again.

But is content king?  If you look at the most successful brands and companies, I don’t think so.  It depends partly on how you define what a content company is:

• Google: doesn’t own, generate or create the majority of its content.  It seeks it out, takes a copy and indexes it
• Facebook: doesn’t own, generate or create content.  It provides tools for creating it
• Twitter: doesn’t own, generate or create content.  It provides a tool for creating it
• Microsoft: doesn’t own, generate or create content (on the whole, especially the profit-generating unts of Windows and Office).  It provides tools for generating it
• Apple: doesn’t own, generate or create content (on the whole).  Again, its profit-generating units are those that participate in revenue from other people’s content

… and so on.  There is a pattern, at least in the digital giants, for companies that make or provide tools or platforms to be the most valuable ones.

For example, out of the top 10 sites on Alexa’s global traffic list, only 2 could be said to be content…

… and from Interbrand’s best global brand list, only Disney sneaks in at number 10 with a real content pitch.

So maybe content can create kings (for Google et al would be nothing without it, arguably), but it isn’t a king itself.

admin Web

Color affects us all the time - from a red traffic light to the placebo effect of a pill (yellow chalk pills are the most effective antidepressants it seems).  And we all know that the meaning of color varies based on where you are in the world, or in what sort of society or religion.   The recently created  ”Colours in Cultures” chart brings this to life (click on the image to view the original)

So for instance, death is (in their categories)

• Black for categories: western europe/american/japanase and native american
• White for categories: hindu/chinese
• Blue for category: muslim
• Green for category: south american

“Love” is, apparently, either red, green, yellow or blue depending which category you’re looking at, and “intelligence” black, white, pale or dark blue.  So much for color consistency …

It’s also been known for a while now that color isn’t really seen by the eyes, but by the brain.  What that means is, even though the “hardware” of our eyes can differ hugely (by as much as 40x in terms of color receptors), most people will perceive the same type of color as a strong version of red, yellow, etc.  In addition, the brain is adept at handling the differences that lighting and context create – something called “metamerism”, which explains why objects of different color may look the same under different lighting conditions. 

An example of this sort of mind-bending illusion (click to see original) is below: the centre crosses of both objects are actually the same colour:

What this all means is that that the way we comprehend color is more based on society and context, than biology.  Add in geography into the mix, and color isn’t as stable a concept as it might at first seem.  And yet it can influence our driving in milliseconds, the effectiveness of the drugs we take, and ultimately most of the things we do every day, offline and online.

But it’s a deal more complex than red=stop and green=go.

admin Psychology, UI, Usability

Just recently I forecast the death of text in reading, but until that comes to pass, I’ll vent the current state-of-the art: ebook readers. I’m excluding the iPad for the moment given I haven’t seen one, and it’s not strictly an ebook (and arguably uncomfortable to read for long periods of time).

Problem #1
This is the deal-breaker for me: the screen refresh. Each page-change means watching a page that’s supposed to be a paper analog flash “black” and then “white” again. Every time. Flash. Flash.  That process takes anywhere from 1 second to about 4 on the readers I’ve seen.

Problem #2
Future versions of eInk will support colour.  I can probably wait.

Problem #3
Not all books are available as ebooks.  So, take both?  Seems heavy.

Problem #4

The “uncanny valley” describes the revulsion effect when robots get very close to being alike to humans. Actually something that is intentionally less accurate is more likely to be perceived as human-like.  Hence Avatar’s colors.

This same “uncanny valley” applies to ebook readers. They are getting close to paper, and therefore the differences (like the screen flash) stand out even more, as we jolt back to the reality that we’re not holding paper.

Problem #5
Ebook readers don’t like it when you drop them in the bath.

Problem #6
See Problem #1. If it weren’t for that, I’d have bought an eReader a long time ago.  I’ll probably buy an iPad, but not for book reading…

admin UI, Uncategorized, Usability

Reading has had a long history, no doubt.  But here’s why I think it’s future may be shorter than its past.   The stages of reading:

Reading = interpreting drawings
Writing in symbols or pictures to communicate messages started some 70,000 years ago they reckon, with the first proven examples about  7,000BC.  An example of such writing from the “Tartaria Tablets“, dating from 5300 BC:

So at that stage reading was about cartoons, pretty much…

Reading = interpreting symbols
Symbols (otherwise called glyphs) that stand for something abstract – like letters, then emerged around 3000BC.  The “Vinca Symbols” are one of the first steps towards what we know today as an alphabet:

Phonetic writing (where characters represent sounds, which in turn represent names for things) then evolved from tablets (oh yes, the iPad of its day) to books to newspapers to magazines.  Through rock to papyrus to paper, from printing press to colour laser.

Reading = text + image + video
But letters aren’t enough.  Reading today means getting informtion from a screen full of text, images and video.  Ebooks aside (more about that in my next post), that’s what the current generation means reading.

NEAR FUTURE: Reading = interacting
Even today’s state-of-the art reading (the internet) is lean-forward and stare, with the occasional click (or finger swipe) to navigate around content.  We like to think of it as interactive, but really its static.  It may be targeted or personalized, but usually barely so. 

For the first step towards truly interactive content, and the next phase of writing and reading, take a look at the Microsoft Courier demo below.  Apart from making Apple’s iHype (iPad) seem like a brick, it feels to me that this is the dawn of Personal.

(http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/dec196af)  This will change reading forever.

Reading = dead?
Let’s not forget reading is just a way of getting information into our brains.

The problems with text (specifically our Roman alphabet) are:

• Too many languages, too much translation effort.  We all travel to much to not share a language
• Text doesn’t  convey tone/intent/emotion/color
• Text is slow to absorb and inefficient
• Spelling is clumsy (like txt spk, which iznt gr8, u no)

 Text, images, audio and video wil merge – into something new.  Something more efficient.  “Reading” will be what slow-minded people of the past did.

Communication will happen in its most efficient possible way (which has always be the case) – likely directly into our brains in a format perfectly suited to our neurons.

Reading, as we know it, will be dead.  Even the written word may fall by the wayside.

admin Psychology, Web

Thought I’d check out Bing’s view of the world, since it recently became 11% of search by some accounts.  And, I have to say – bing [sic] it on, as more search provider options can only be a good thing.

So, Bing’s alphabetis unsurprisingly mainly the sames as Google’s, apart from the following, notable exceptions (I’ve excluded most of the entries that are either the same or very similar).  The listings are first (second) – and then Google’s for comparison.

• bing (bank of america) – best buy (bank of america)
• google (gmail) – gmail (google maps)
• irs.gov (itunes) – imdb (itunes)
• netflix (nascar) – netflix (nfl.com)
• orbitz (office depot) – office depot (opm)
• pogo (pandora) – pandora (photobucket)
• utube (usps) – usps (ups)
• www.google.com (walmart) – walmart (weather) 
• zipcodes (zillow) – zillow (zappos)

And for numbers:

• 2009 calendar (2012) - 2010 calendar (2012)
• 53.com (50 cent) – 500 days of summer (50 cent)
• 7 wonders world (7 zip) – 7zip (7deadly sins)
• 89 (84 lumber) – 80’s music (80’s fashion)
• 9 news (93x) – 90210 (92.3)

In summary, people who use bing are more worried about a year behind (2009 calendar instead of 2010), taxes (irs.gov), travel (orbitz), nascar instead of NFL, and finding their way back to www.google.com…

Also, bingers want to know about the 7 wonders of the world, googlers about the 7 deadly sins.  Huh.

admin data mining

Start typing something into google, and the now established “autocomplete” or live suggestions or whatever it’s called today pops up.  I thought I’d take a look at the Zeitgeist, and see what each letter brings (and the #2 result in brackets).  All pretty big-brand, although the second most common search beginning with an “r” is “reverse phone lookup”?  Seems like an unanswered mega-site right there. 

UPDATE: Since posting this, it’s been pointed out to me that there are only 2 humans in the list (Tiger Woods and Lady Gaga, good going!), although they are both second placers.   Have a look at Mark and Darren’s excellent BLN blog to see versions from other countries.

UPDATE2:  Added some numbers and characters – and notice that Google Ads now appear in the autocomplete (try typing in 000 (i.e. three zeros) into the google.com homepage…

• amazon (aol)
• best buy (bank of america)
• craigslist (cnn)
• dictionary (disney channel)
• ebay (espn)
• facebook (facebook login)
• gmail (google maps)
• hotmail (hulu)
• imdb (itunes)
• jcpenney (jet blue)
• kohls (kmart)
• lowes (lady gaga)
• myspace (mapquest)
• netflix (nfl.com)
• office depot (opm)
• pandora (photobucket)
• qvc (quotes)
• realtor.com (reverse phone lookup)
• southwest airlines (sears)
• target (tiger woods)
• usps (ups)
• verizon wireless (victoria secret)
• walmart (weather)
• xbox 360 (xm radio)
• youtube (yahoo)
• zillow (zappos)

So what about numbers?

• 12 days of christmas (123 greetings)
• 2010 calendar (2012)
• 30 rock (3 lyrics)
• 4chan (411)
• 500 days of summer (50 cent)
• 60 minutes (6abc)
• 7zip (7deadly sins)
• 80′s music (80′s fashion)
• 90210 (92.3)
• 0 balance transfer (007)

And I guess I should do the other common characters too…

• .net framework (.net framework 3.5)
• @properties (@live.com)
• &nbsp (&hearts)
• ¬_¬ (¬ alt code)
• ?, !, “, $, %, *, ), (, ~, # etc – nothing…

admin data mining

Twitter, for all its fans and detractors, generates a LOT of data.  It may only be a very small percentage of the world’s population who tweet a lot, but even that can be representative of interesting/important trends and changes.

Oh, and by the way, is twitter worried about this twitter.com traffic trend (courtesy of compete.com)?

But in terms of mining the human chatter that happens through Twitter, who is doing anything interesting?  I didn’t find much:

1. TweetDeck‘s  TwitScoop

Dodgy naming aside, this column in tweetdeck is one I keep switched on.  But a keyword tag cloud isn’t exactly world-shattering in 2010.  Still, it’s there, and while the screengrab above doesn’t tell me much (and I’m still not sure what/who “snead” is, even after a search), it’s a good finger-on-the-pulse.

2. TrendsMap

Now this is more like it (and a better name).  A google mashup with (another) tag/word cloud floated on top, it gives an overview or trending topics, along with a real-time snapshot of individual tweets.   And no, I’ve no idea why blasphemy is a hot topic in Ireland right now…

 3. Neoformix

Now this guy I have a lot of time for.  He’s particularly well known for his “Twitter Stream” graphs, which shows word usage trends over time, as below. 

However, head on over to his projects page, and you’ll find charts that include “time of day word correlations” (as below), “Twitter Venn” (twitter Venn diagrams) and a host of other tools. 

So, I know Jeff at Neoformix isn’t the only guy doing interesting analysis of Twitter data, but what surprises me is how few people seem to be working on it – at least that I’m aware of.  Sure, the fact that the word “drunk” is tweeted most between midnight and 5am isn’t going to change the way we see the world – but what about if a brand name suddenly takes off?  Or the word “recession” is on a downwards trend, or “flu” on an upwards trend? 

More Twitter Mining, please…

admin Uncategorized, data mining

There’s a whole lot of talk about “real time” just now – from Google’s realtime search, to games, processing power, and medicine.  And yet it strikes me that “realtime” (or is it real-time or real time?) is overused, and often meaningless.

Wikipedia defines realtime as “when things respond to events as they occur“.  Well, I respond to events as they occur to me, but sometimes hours or days late…   Dictionary.com defines it as “of or pertaining to applications in which the computer must respond as rapidly as required by the user or necessitated by the process being controlled.”  Hm.  Well – if the user required a response only the next day, would that still be realtime?  Selecting “shutdown” on my PC shuts the PC down in about 5 minutes, which when I’ve walked away from the PC is as rapidly as required, but is hardly realtime.

It seems like the realtime I thought I knew is actually some concept which spans almost any sort of delay.  My definition would be something much closer to “simultaneous” or “directly after”. In other words, within a short enough time-period that an average observer would say that the result/response happened right after the cause. 

So if I click a mouse button to select something on screen, I expect that something to respond immediately.

And what is immediate?  Well, as an example in tests of human reaction time (often by catching a falling ruler between finger tips), the average human reaction time tends to be in the range of 0.2 seconds, or 200 milliseconds.  So it might be fair to say that anything that happens within that time period would be pretty immediate, or without perceptible delay.

So given that definition of realtime, what is ACTUALLY realtime?

- Twitter is mainly not as most updates are actually read out-of-sync
- SMS and email are mosty not, for the same reason
- Communicating by talking IS generally realtime
- Google’s search is barely realtime, if at all – it’s just very recent
- The feedback we get from machines can be realtime – from clicking on things, to turning the steering wheel, to turning on a light….

Actually, thinking through the options – there’s not much in life that is actually realtime…

admin Science, Technology, Web

As we try and link ourselves ever closer to technology, the industry of human-computer interfacing is developing rapidly.   I thought I’d check out the state-of-the art brain-PC interfaces, on the basis that if any of them seem good enough, they may change the way we use the internet forever.

1. OCZ Technology – Neural Impulse Actuator (£73)

Pitched as a gaming device, this headband combines a electromyograph (which detects the electrical potential generated by muscle cells), an electroencephalogram (which records electrical activity across the scalp), and electrooculograph (which detects electrical activity associated with eye activity).  Phew.  That’s the pitch anyway, although I think it may be simpler – it essentially detects electrical activity at 3-4 spots across the forehead, and uses software to try and discriminate between the different sources of that electrical activity: your forehead muscles, your eyes, or indeed your brain.

Various reports including this one from OC3D suggest that after a LOT of training, the headband can allow you to shoot enemies in games by slightly raising an eyebrow, or clenching your teeth.  Response times (promised as at the speed of thought) haven’t been shown to be much faster than mouse, even after quite some training.

Verdict: Unproven, probably too simplistic, but an interesting start

2. Emotiv Systems – ($299)

Emotiv have been developing their headset for a couple of years now, and it’s finally being released on New Year’s Eve.  Again, their target is console games, and Emotiv use both scalp electrical activity, and sensing of facial expressions to deliver gaming control.  Their 2008 launch was delayed because “The public demo didn’t go as planned; the device simply didn’t work in front of the media who attended the press conference”.  Hm.

As it hasn’t been launched, it seems that few independent review have been done, so the jury is still out.  However, just on the basis that it detects facial expressions, it probably has greater potential than OCZ’s

Verdict: Unproven, but facial expression recognition could be interesting

3. Neurosky Headset – ($199)

Neurosky appear to have built the biggest ecosystem around their headset – games, integration with music visualization, bluetooth cellphone integration.  However, their headset only has 1 (yes, 1) sensor, which supposedly shows your “emotional state and how you react to the world”.   This really is the most remote from believable “brain control”.

Verdict: Interesting (and smart commercially), but ultimately just a toy

Conclusion
I started looking at this area thinking I’d find a bunch of companies trying to commercialise “thought control”.  I only found three key players, and none of them represent what I can see as being a realistic attempt at getting mass-market mind control of computers.

Part of the problem is that it’s hopelessly simplistic to try and read the brain by measuring electrical activity across the scalp.    Of course, it can result in some simple communication or control of a cursor on the screen – which is a life-saver in the caseof severe disability or paralysis, where it’s enabled a patient to communicate.  However, the ability to do complex tasks just isn’t possible yet (or ever?) without invasive brain surgery – or a far greater number of more sensitive and calibrated sensors across the scalp.

However, there is hope in sight.  DARPA, for instance, has $4m in 09/10 for “Silent Talk” – a project that aims to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.”  And DARPA generally does interesting things with its research budgets – cars that can autonomously navigate complex environments being probably the highest profile example.

I’m watching this space – the day we can control computers using a mix of keyboard, mouse AND thought (I don’t believe that thought will, for a long while, replace manual control) is that day that the internet becomes truly fast and immersive.  I can’t wait.

UPDATE: The crew at Neurosky were switched on enough to catch this post, and send me a whitepaper with some stats in it.  Seems their single electrode compares favorably with a Biopac, a well-used medical wet-electrode EEG system.  I don’t have time to analyse the data, nor can I verify it – but if it’s true, then good job Neurosky (I’m actually more impressed with the fact they caught this post).  I’m still unsure about how useful the technology is today, though…

admin AI

So I’ve got my results from 23andme – having sent off my sample some weeks ago.  (Thankfully, nothing too shocking in there!)

So, here’s a taster of what you get:

1. Clinical Reports:  The screenshot table below is a snapshot of my risk for various conditions, such as:

• Type 1/2 Diabetes
• Certain forms of cancer
• Crohn’s disease, etc. 

They are the data that clinically 23andme are sure enough of to actually lay them out this formally.  I’ve blanked the particular conditions, but you get the gist.  Also included in this section is information on:

• Traits (such as the ability to taste certain bitter flavours, lactose intolerance)
• Carrier status of certain conditions such as Bloom’s syndrome and Canavan disease
• Drug response to such drugs as Plavix (a blockbuster heart drug)

2. Research Reports – this is analysis that “has not yet gained enough scientific consensus to be included” in the Risks section as above.  It includes things such as:

• Blood pressure
• Dependencies and addictions
• Asthma
• Headaches

3. Ancestry- this shows you a map of your maternal and paternal ancestry, as below – along with (as in all other sections of the site) a healthy dose of background and eductional material

4.  Surveys – the site has a lot of surveys, mainly health/psychological, and the results of those are both interesting to see, and obviously are fuelling 23andme’s knowledge of how genes influence all kinds of health conditions.

5. Sharing – a fascinating part of the site, and one I haven’t yet had time to dig into.   You can select to share your genome with anyone else on the site, at a basic or full level – which enables a bunch of functionality. 

The somewhat obvious extention of this is to work out what the combination of your genetic makeup and a potential partner’s will put your potential children at risk of, with the Inheritance Calculator

Now that adds something to the mate-selection process, huh. 

Actually of all the features and content on the site (and there’s a lot of it), the two elements that raise most people’s eyebrows when I tell them about the service are the disease risks, and the inheritance calculator.   As odd as it seems, I think both represent something really pretty important: the ability to help guard against future risk. 

If I know I’m at a slightly higher risk of some disease because of my particular genetics, AND I know something that I can do about it (eat more broccoli or whatever), why wouldn’t I do that?  Or prepare my kids for it?

I spend my waking hours looking at ways to work out how people behave online and use that information, and to me the analysis of genetic profile is a (long) extension of this – it’s part of the mix of technologies that will enable us to understand US better.

Overall I’m highly impressed with the site – there’s a ton of information there, and obviously by submitting surveys and detailed further information the site will improve.  Over time, they’ll add the ability to analyze and risk-profile more health conditions. 

On a lighter note (but the same topic area!), I’m about to try out facionic.com – results when I get them…

admin medicine