Organic Search engine is the future here ?

In the past week I had the opportunity to visit some friends at the Media Labs at MIT.  In speaking with them I proposed a new paradigm in search that of using social communities as a means to search in a more meaningful way.  What I mean is that if you were to build a search engine over a collection of social networks similar to Ning (which has over 1 million networks active now) .  The reason that I say this is that in my work in social networking I am a member of over 40 communities of networks, and in certain instances I find that when I want an answer to a question I just send out the query to the right community and get a high quality answer and do not have to traverse a collection of links that have a more generic answer to my question.  Now I will concede that if I was looking up the hours a particular business was open I would not want to bother the communities that I participate in but if the question if on a more complicated nature then I would.  So if we were to look out at the vast sea of social networks out there as a repository of knowledge that we are a part of wouldn’t that organic engine be of much great value then a search based on link analysis?   What do you think ?

Cyril

President

Dimension Eleven
A place where science matters !

Social Evangelist the New Holy Grail of Online Advertising

We are hearing that the new gold mine of the online world is the social graph.  Ok, but what do we want to do with it and how do we even get access to it?  There is a purchase cycle of Awareness, Consideration and Purchase, (you can find the details on my linkedin page in a presentation I wrote a few months ago)  http://www.linkedin.com/in/cyrilsimone , this cycle is influence by our friends, relatives, and collegues especially in the consideration phase of deciding what product or service will fill your needs.  Now if you want to use these influencers you can not rely on the few hundred people each person knows, nor do you want to work on 200 + million individuals in the hope that they will influence the right people and more importantly the right amount of people.

So what do you do ?  As I spoke of above in a tradition sence a person has around 200 people that they are “connected” to physically and that is based on strong connections with each other.  But now through our participation in social networks we have formed weak connections (same school not necessarily the same years) with thousands and sometimes even millions of people.  This new phenomenen has created unique individuals that through time and dedication have become influencers in these communities.  Well if you want to sell your product, service or widget sell the person that influences that large community and sell that individual the old fashion way.  Once you have sold the Social Evangelist they will influence their community and your product will come out on top, but beware.  Your responsibility does not stop here, because as quickly as the Social Evangelist has told their commuinty how great your product is if the service or quality of the product is not there then in the time it takes to hit update on twitter you are toast !

Online Audiance Measures is Comscore, Neilson and Quantcast the Right Direction ?

What numbers should we be looking at

There is a real issue this days and a lot of talk about online advertising and its effectiveness in actual sales.  Along with the discussion on the method of advertising i.e. banner ads (low effectiveness if any) adwords (medium effectiveness) and now social media marketing (effectiveness TBD) is how do you show value and what determines rates?  Well many people feel that traffic is the Holy Grail of the online world.  The more I study social networking the less I feel that pure volumnes of traffic is what you want.  I mean after all I might accidentally type the wrong url and land on a page or click on a link in a email and be sent somewhere and it does not by any means constutue a interest in what is on that page.  Yes the numerical analysis and statistics on large numbers deal with the wayward  online vistor but I still think there is a problem.  Why would you want to drive million of people to a site not knowing if they have any interest in the products being sold there.  It seems to me that this is like throwing a dart at the wall with a blindfold on hopeing it will hit your target.  This is where social netwroks come into play and not just the large netwroks like myspace and facebook but the focused netwroks like petnation and the many smaller netwroks on a site like ning or used by a company like thinkpassenger.  IF you knew that there where 50,000 people aerlly interested in a topic and are willing to engage and talk about their specific needs wouldn’t you sell to them ???  I really understatnd network dynamics and from pure numbers POV there is valuable data on what is going on but I think that engagement with people in social networks or groups is much more direct.  For instance if you knew I was in a group on facebook for the TV show NCIS wouldn’t CBS want to target to those 40,000 people in various ways ?  What are your thoughts……

Social Media

Influence the Sale through social networks

We have seen the growth of the social network market dramatically over the last few years.  With it we now see that a social network is more than a web page.  In fact the people that participate on the network had added value to product or killed them if their influence is over a large enough population.  With this realization some of us have looked at this “influencers” as a new means to advertise.  Most people that are marketing via the web are coming to the realization that banner ads are not driving sales in any significant way.  So what do you do?  Well the use of social media and in particular engaging the “influencers” and selling them on the merits of your product drives more sales than a banner ad.  This is not a new concept selling your product based on the endorsement of a friend, but now due to a concept of weak ties in a social network that “friend” has the ability to endorse your product to millions of “friends”.  But it doesn’t stop here for the people in the network or the sellers of product.  There is now a responsibility to follow up on that sale and determine that the quality and satisfaction is high.  If not as quickly as your product is endorsed it will be killed by the same people.  I am fascinated by social networks and the potential what do you think ?

Networks Communities and Creativity where does it start

If one were to hop in a time machine and set it to 1955 or so and location Greenwich Village NY you would be in the midst of the start of a significant creative movement in literature, art and music.  With people who said things like this The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones that are mad to live, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like the fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars….. -Jack Kerouac.  So how is it that we can look at society as a whole see these movements or the precusor to them and assist them to maturity.  My questions are how do these group start and what makes their creative capacity so great.  I have started a new group in ning http://creativefringe.ning.com/  think about it and pass the word along and share your thoughts.   So I have been talking with a lot of people about what is creativity who is creative in your mind and why and what needs to be in place to foster creativity.  When I look at network effects one of the most difficult aspect of network science is the casacade, identifing the moment before something takes off….

Google winner takes all

Hey everyone I hope that you have had a pleasant summer and are ready to get back to the world of technology.  I wanted to write a quick response to the new browser that has just come out from Google.  First of all in their own style the user guide is a 38 page comic strip very new media of them.  I started to read the comic then got sent the direct link to install the browser and went for it.  I have seen some ringing endorsements especially from Tim O’Rielly  (see below from twitter), they seem to of hit a chord here.  But they have done one more thing to step to a winner takes all strategy for the web.  I spoke earlier about the size of their network being vastly bigger then any social network today, well now they will control the entrance to the web and that is big.   I ran Chrome for awhile and it started off slow then picked up speed.  The other thing that I noticed is that a large amount of chatter came out about how to adjust the privacy setting since a lot of data was going back to google.   Yet Chrome is very unique I think that the modular architecture is ahead of the web industry and may very well be what everyone else needs to do .

Retweeting @migueldeicaza: Google’s Chromium source code is beautiful; Very elegant; Very succinct; Almost K&R-ish in spirit. about 16 hours ago from twhirl

degree degree degree is getting hot in here??

One of the most popular aspects of networks is this notion of degrees.  Now there is a few ways to look at the degrees the most popular aspect is the degrees of separation.  The popular history behind this starts with Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram and his small world experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment .   The original history starts with a short story call “chains”  by  Frigyes Karinthy  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigyes_Karinthy .  What Stanely said is that the world and all the people in it make up a network and this network connects everyone through a series of connections via your firends and aquatenances.   This became the basis for his small world experiment  and for the popularization of the degrees of separation.  The most popular of these degrees is the six degrees of Kevin Bacon in which a few college student gained there fame by stating that they can link any actor with Kevin in 6 steps or less.  There are two great books to read on this topic “Six Degrees” by Duncan Watts and “Linked” by Laszlo Barabasi.  The important point here is not that we can reach any person in six steps or less, it is interesting but not the critical bit of knowledge that was gained from this research.  What was found is that in these networks not everyone is a equidistance and some people have more links to them then others.  This concept has lead to the notion of hubs. So our world is small but not equal.  Our networks are not all represented by random distributions and two of the most popular (world population and the web) are not equal from the point of view of the links to every node.

This brings us to another degree and this degree is small in nature but very very important this is the in and out degree of each node in a network.  If you wanted a sucessful web page you would want bi-directional link and the degree of your site would be the number of links that come in to your site.  What becomes important is how many links to where they go.  Obviously if they go to another web site that has no outbound links and a very small number of in bound links that would not be very good for your site but on the other hand if you had a link to a large active (large number of in and out bound links) web site that would be very very good for you don’t you think???

Does Traditional Finance really Matter?

Given the new developments in network theory and complexity analysis of large datasets, does the traditional analysis of financial data matter.  When we look at data collected at companies it represents a action that has taken place in the past and now we are forcasting that something may or may not occur because of it.  Now if we were to analyze trends as they occur and work off of that data it would be more relevant.  For instance traditionally someone buys something and the transaction is recorded and after a somewhat extensive financial analysis it turns up in a financial statement.  If we use network analysis and complexity theroy to analyze consumer data as the action occurs we can predict behaviour real time and be more accurate for consumer behavour for instance.  It is important to note that in order to do this you need a active data network that people use on a regular basis.  This is what a few companies have, most notably  google (see last post) done.  Then all you need (no easy feat) is the computing power and the application of some high level mathematics and you are there.   You can analysis on real time data not after the transaction data.  Your thoughts???

Who ever has the most links when he dies wins??

Myspace has around 120 million active profiles linking to the site  and facebook has around 110 million links to the site.  Now we have google, google will tell you that they have indexed about 60% of the know web, which is about 6 billion web sites. ( i need to make a correction here given the launch of Cuil – they stated that they index 120 billion pages (I wonder how many of the pages are indexed by a unique path?? but that is a new post to come soon) so let’s run the numbers with Cuil’s 120 billion pages) Let’s look at the number now 60% of 120 billion is 72 billion web pages how many are not linked to google well the important links are bi-directional they go to google and google to that site.  ok well I know that google has links to around 72 billion web pages if they didn’t the search to that site would not work.  How many link back AS MANY AS GOOGLE LET”S!  so google has a network that is about 600 times the size of the largest social network when it comes to links and it is not all in one direction.  More to come

Why Googles network is the most important asset

Everyone thinks that search is the most important asset google has but it isn’t heck they license their page rank algorithm from Stanford in an exclusive agreement only until 2011.  Well I think the Stanford endowment is about to get a bump.  Now as I started in my last post a free scale network has some very interesting mathematical properties.  These properties explain a lot of what google does.  For a free scale network to maintain it’s viability it has to be connected to other free scale networks and they strengthen each other.  example google and youtube.  Now the more connected the network the stronger it is.  This leads to a winner takes all possibility.  So why should google have books that have expired copyrights?  Hmmmm because it draws people (links) to the google network and more and more links to google.