Global Nerdy

Googlebombing won’t be the same anymore. Here’s what Matt Cutts wrote on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs), but if you’d like to get more details about this topic, read on.

He goes on to state that since Googlebomb phrases are mostly “well off the beaten path,” they were considered to be a minor annoyance. Even so, there was a perception that Googlebomb results — such as a search for the phrase “miserable failure” returning George W. Bush’s page as the number one result — were some sort of editorial being published by Google. Hence the change to Google’s algorithm.

Cutts then answers an important question: Why doesn’t Google just edit these search results by hand?. The answer, while obvious to most programmers, may not seem so to laypeople. Simply put, with the number of users and searches and new ideas that come up every day, keeping an eye for for Googlebombs and then writing some code to circumvent them is impractical. The approach that most programmers would recommend is one of “enlightened laziness” — see if there’s a way that Googlebomb detection can be automated.

In many cases, it seems to work: searches for miserable failure and “miserable failure” (note the difference — one’s in quotes, the other isn’t) — now point to pages on which the Googlebomb is discussed rather than a page about George W. Bush, the target of the Googlebombing. Same for talentless hack and “talentless hack”.

But how about the Googlebomb in which I have a personal stake? By this, I mean the phrase deadbeat ex-housemate, for which the personal weblog of my deadbeat ex-housemate — who owes me thousands of dollars for rent, utilities, the largest domestic phone bill I have ever seen (really, did you have to call London during business hours?), my being saddled with having to pay the phone company a $500 deposit just to get long-distance service and a borrowed laptop that was never returned — was the number one result. Is his blog still the number one result?

Yes, for both deadbeat ex-housemate and “deadbeat ex-housemate”. Honor remains satisfied!

I guess we're going to have to drop Cory's name into casual conversation more often.

Hmm…no link to the review of Overclocked running in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly (which was started, incidentally, by another Web celeb, Jeff Jarvis), so here's what Noah Robischon is saying:

If you want to glimpse the future of copyright policing, video-game sweatshops, robotic intelligence, info war, and how computer geeks will survive the apocalyse, then this collection of shorts is your oracle. Studio Pitch I, Robot meets Dr. Strangelove. Lowdown The four-page opening fable is as absorbing and prescient as the gruesome 76-page war story that ends the book. Doctorow is rapidly emerging as the William Gibson of his generation. A

Kubrick, Asimov, and Gibson, all mentioned in reference to Web Celeb and Young Global Leader herr professor doktor Doctorow. Oy.

*Friends of Cory

A lot of blah-de-blog about Norway declaring Apple's DRM illegal, most sourcing this OUT-LAW.COM (WHY THE ALLCAPS GUYS?) post:

Apple's digital rights management lock on its iPod device and iTunes software is illegal, the Consumer Ombudsman in Norway has ruled. The blow follows the news that consumer groups in Germany and France are joining Norway's action against Apple.

The Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbrukerradet, lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman on behalf of Norwegian consumers claiming that the Fairplay DRM system acted against the interests of consumers. It said that the fact that the technology stopped songs bought from iTunes being played on any player other than an iPod broke the law in Norway.

The Ombudsman has now agreed, according to Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor at the Consumer Council.

This snippet from a Tuesday AP story adds another detail about the Norwegian situation (which sounds a lot like a really bad spy/thriller/novel/movie starring Matt Damon):

Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said Norway gave Apple until September to change its polices, or face possible legal action and fines in the country.

“It cannot be good for the music industry for them to lock music into one system,” he said.

A Financial Times article seems more definitive:

The ombudsman has set a deadline of October 1 for the Apple to make its codes available to other technology companies so that it abides by Norwegian law. If it fails to do so, it will be taken to court, fined and eventually closed down.

Nine months before “possible legal action” seems slightly less urgent than “Apple DRM is illegal in Norway,” so this already sounds like less of a story than it might otherwise be; Apple has plenty of time to press their case with the Norwegian authorities. Large commercial interests seem to have good success with convincing governments of merits of their point of view.

Let's assume that Apple doesn't simply pull the iTunes Store out of the Norwegian market, and that it licenses FairPlay to other vendors (and, I assume, other DRM schemes are opened up on similar terms) globally. How much better off are we as customers?

Obviously we'd gain some interoperability. I happen to think this is a non-issue in the digital music market, since the big systems (iPod-iTunes-iTunes Store vs Windows Media PlaysForSure vs Zune-Zune Marketplace) all offer roughly identical catalogs. More importantly, all players support the unrestricted music formats you get from ripping CDs or by other means. 

Yes, if you eventually wish to move from one system to another, you'd have to forsake your investments in restricted content, but that's often true in technology. Moving from Mac to Windows or Linux, or from Quark to InDesign means leaving some of your bits behind. At best, the tools your moving from give you some way to export in a format supported by the tools you're moving to. Of course, you may lose some bells and whistles (formatting, macros, metadata, whatver), but that's lock-in we've lived with for years. Some companies even make a living out of reverse-engineering and converting incompatible file formats.

A far better (and less command-economy-style) solution would be to let people reverse-engineer DRM so we could preserve our investments in content. I can't cite the specific law in Norway, but I'm sure that, like the DMCA did in the US, that solution illegal.

Source: Apple DRM is illegal in Norway, says Ombudsman | OUT-LAW.COM

As I mentioned in a recent post (ostensibly about Netflix' on-demand video service, but really about the digital living room):

If there's one hard lesson that TiVo has taught us, it's that the cable company (and, more often now, the phone company) doesn't like giving ground to others in the living room; not when it comes to watching TV, anyway. TiVo does the most creditable job, but, generally, third parties have a hard time going toe-to-toe with the cable companies when it comes to set-top devices.

Well, today I caught this item in Reuters' MediaFile blog:

Yankee Group analyst Joshua Martin says the standalone DVR product category will cease to exist by 2010, “and its dissolution will result in the end of TiVo as we know it.”

Why? Many reasons, Martin says, but it is the so-easy-a-caveman-can-understand-it arithmetic that dooms the pioneering DVR maker:

Cable and satellite providers: BIG. Tivo: small.

Behind the marketshare numbers (18MM DVRs in 2006, less than 2MM were from TiVo) lies the fact that people will accept “good enough at a lower cost” over “better but for a premium.”

TiVo's products and services are, by all accounts, superior to those you get through your CableCo DVR. My Time Warner DVR comes from Scientific Atlanta (now a Cisco company), with software from Aptiv (nee Pioneer Digital). The box is ugly, the software is only tolerably usable now (previous generations have performed like pigs), and the thing seems to need a cold reboot every month (how stupid is it that you have to reboot your TV?), but it also costs nothing up front, and costs less per month than TiVo does.

Time Warner was even able to beat TiVo at its own game on a couple of fronts: I didn't need an external cable box to take advantage of digital cable goodies like on-demand free and premium programming. It was also ahead of TiVo in offering dual-tuners, so you could record two shows simultaneously. Those two come courtesy of Time Warner's integratio of cable services with the DVR hardware.

Between bundling, billing, and distribution, TiVo (and anyone else trying to slide a box under the TV) faces some formidable gatekeepers in the cable companies.

Source: Yankee Group to TiVo: buh-bye… – Reuters Blogs

I'll write more on it later (and so will many others), but for now, let me point you to the big story of the day: the Australian paper The Agereported that Microsoft offered to pay Rick Jelliffe, CTO of the Sydney-based company Topologi to edit Wikipedia articles on the new Office XML format, the often-derided Open Office XML.

Someone should show this to Scoble, who pronounced AppleTV “dead on arrival” a couple of weeks ago since it only does 720p and not 1080p:

I don't mind that Vista's probably more aware of the machine on which it runs than any of the previous versions of Windows. My complaint is that the UI team decided that it must notify me of every last thing going on, no matter how insignificant. For instance, a little notification that says “Information: A jack has been plugged in” appears when I plug my headphones into the headphone jack:

I knew that, buddy. After all, I plugged it in.

To be consistent, the UI team made sure that there was a message appears when you decide to unplug your headphones: the “Information: A jack has been unplougged” notice…

I've only done some cursory Googling, but I can't seem to find any written design rationale behind such a notification. I thought that someone decided that since plugging devices into the FireWire or USB ports usually causes a notification to appear, they should be consistent and have a message appear for devices plugged. However, plugging and unplugging USB devices for which drivers are already installed doesn't cause a little notification window to appear; Vista simply plays a single pizzicato string note when you plug them in and two pizzicato string notes when you unplug them.

It may be some kind of security measure. Maybe it's meant to warn you in cases where the machine is out of line-of-sight of the keyboard, mouse and display (wireless keyboard and mouse, really long VGA cable?). In such a setup, you'd probably want to know if someone's jacked into your machine, trying to listen to or record whatever sounds or tunes are playing. It could be the basis for an RIAA-scripted horror movie: “Get out quickly! The pirate's in your house!”

Whatever the reason for this feature's inclusion, it makes it seems as if Vista's trying too hard to impress you.