broadstuff

Article in GigaOM about where datacentres will be built notes that Siberia is a useful area:

Power is seen as the biggest constraint when it comes to building data center capacity. As a way around this conundrum, large consumers of Internet data center capacity have located their facilities closer to energy sources. For instance, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have built data centers in Quincy in the state of Washington near a hydroelectric dam where they pay a lot less for power than, say, in Silicon Valley. Google has built a massive facility in The Dalles, Oregon, another location close to power source.

There are 3 issues with Datacentre power needs:

(i) They need ever more power as they get bigger and pack more processors per square foot, and this means serious electricity - big ones consume the needs of cities or large industrial plants today.
(ii) Electricity has high transmission losses over distance, so its far more efficient to be close to power sources.
(iii) Nearly every watt of power sent into a datacentre is transformed into heat and needs to be removed, and this conumes as much (if not more) power than the datacentre computers. Being in cool climates and close to cooling sources helps hugely.

Thus, instead of great big mines, steel towns and smelting furnaces in the wilds, will we see datacentres and their attendant troglodytes being banished to Siberia?

it is not so far fetched to imagine that these and other companies could plan on building data centers in Russia. Microsoft has already made its intentions very clear and is planning a data center in Siberia. Google has been slowly expanding its presence in Russia including a recent purchase of Rambler for $140 million. Of course, the big problem is a lack of massive Internet backbone pipes in and out of Russia, but that might be an issue that could be addressed easily.

(Never mind the political/economic "features" of doing business in Russia....)

But, as the 90's showed us , given a speculative boom you can lay huge amounts of network cable very fast - and the transmission losses on data are far, far lower than for electricity. Big picture - the endgame for the big datamills is in cool climates next to serious powerplants. But that leads to strategic bottleneck issues so we expect to see other, smaller datacentres located elsewhere as well.

We also now also eagerly await the opening up of the Canadian Tundra (Hudson Bay Datamining and Searching ) and Antarctica as Datacentre havens too. And maybe even the north of Scotland.....

News from TechCrunch pointed to the long awaited launch of Cuil (nee Cuill), pronounced "kewl" ( or "cool" if you are from the US ) a new general search engine out the blocks - with 120 billion pages indexed apparently. This couldn't come at a better time given Google's emerging propensity to bias results to favour its own content. Thus, it was time for a road test. I chose 3 topics:

- Buttermilk Pancakes, the subject of Dare Obasanjo's Knol test.
- Freeconomics, a subject dear to the heart here
- Rosicrucians - why not.

Buttermilk Pancakes

The first thing to notice is that Cuil's search page is black (as is that on our real time search engine design - clearly they have good taste . The next is that the results page is not top to bottom linear, but presents a page of results, with picture thumbnails if they exist:



Two things hit me - firstly, that there were no Knol based entries on the Cuil front page. Secondly, my Google results, although deliberately searched on "The World" and not "The UK" setting, looked nothing like Dare Obasanjo's search, mine had far more BBC and other UK based pages served. There were only 2 common pages between my Google page and Cuil. I had to manually switch over to Google.com to replicate Dare's search - so clearly searching "the world" from the UK is still very UK focussed - why is that?

What was more interesting after that was that the difference between the Yahoo, Cuil and Google search pages were fairly negligible apart from the Knol entry on Google. (In fact, my most delightful discovery on this journey was the Yahoo drop down context menu when you enter a search term).

Freeconomics

Google did the "Right Thing" here and brought up our blog article on this on the front page I couldn't find our article on the first 3 pages of Cuil, and the only one I did find, on page 4, is a far less trafficked or referenced article. Yahoo found our article top of page 2. As to the other articles on the 3 engines, there is clearly not a Knol yet ( ) and the results were similar, but not the same - I must admit to some surprise seeing Cuil record The Evangelical Outpost twice on this topic:



(I was reading Cuil down each column at a time to define order......)

Rosicrucians

I was looking it up anyway, so tried all 3. Google and Yahoo's first 2 posts were sponsored, and then they got straight down to business - an article on Rosicrucianism on Wikipedia. Cuil couldn't quite bring itself to get the Wikipedia article on "Rosicricianism" but opted instead for the article on the Ancient Order of the Rosicrucians on No 3 - sans any sponsored pages.

Privacy

Cuil tries to set itself apart from Google here, its policy stated as:

.... our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

My name

Searched for my name, didn't feature in Cuil till page 4 (where it brought up my Twitter account). Yours truly is on page 1 on Google and Yahoo via Broadstuff. I note my Indiana artist, Australian and Argentinian namesakes are still there on page 1, so Cuil clearly does not love blog based links very much.

(Update - a few other things....)

- If you mis-search for Coase's Laew (as opposed to Law) Google knows what you're after, Cuil gets totally confused, Yahoo thinks you are after Case law.
- "Apple" got not one record on page 1 of the actual fruit on Cuil.
- when I searched for the Tuatha de Danaan on Cuil, the graphic was a planet of the apes type monkey - thats not the fair Faerie people, its the Fir Bolg

Conclusions

Well, any search engine that can't reference our blog is clearly a non starter for the cognoscenti! Apart from that glaring omission, I think its search is "mostly harmless" - it doesn't bias for Knols, and it comes up with roughly the same stuff as the others (though not as much or as often as the 120 billion links may imply). The question for Cuil is - whats the differentiator here? I don't think pretty pictures helps that much, and the layout leaves me largely unmoved.

Privacy could become a competitive issue, but I think its still a minority sport - noting how little care the munchkins have with Facebook and Google privacy today, I (sadly) conclude its one of these things that exercises the digerati but few others.

In fact, the biggest aha for me from this is that Yahoo has come on apace since the last time I looked at it.

(For the record - I've used Dogpile for 10 years very happily)

An aside - David Kelly notes that Cuil say their name in theory means "knowledge" in Irish. Um - that bit o' me that is forever gaelic tells me that Cuil means corner or recess or rear. If it's Cuill (the original company name) then that's straight out of Irish legend (the coming of the Tuatha De Danaan) where Mac Cuill was named after a tree, the hazel (or Coll) which in Celtic Mythology gives you wisdom from eating the nut, which the Salmon of Knowledge did. So, a bit roundabout, but in some recess of the name Cuil is the concept of knowledge, though it'd drive you nuts to find it and it all seems a bit fishy

Update thought - catching up on all the comments on this blog and elsewhere (try typing Cuil on Summize), I am left scratching my head as to why Cuil launched now (when it would seem it was too early) and why not go "beta". After all, you only get 1 shot at the launch mojo. Still, to be fair, people were moaning about Google vs AltaVista et al as late as 2002 if I recall correctly.

We reflected earlier this week on the potential conflict of interest Google's Knol throws up as it turns them into for-profit content aggregator as well as search company, amongst early evidence that it favours Knol results over others - now more grist to this mill today. Aaron Wall copied an article onto Knol that he had previously published, essentially a duplicate of his Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com).

The result was, a day later, the Knol version of this ranked highest in Google searches despite the other 2 articles being around a lot longer. To say this is unlikely unless Google favours its own content is putting it mildly. As he notes in a fairly restrained way:

Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm. Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source.

You can see what's going to happen - reverse tragedy of the commons - because Knol will reward you via Adsense, its a clarion call for the fast buck crowd. We predict we are going to have open season on other people's stuff being stuck into Knol by new authors, who have proclaimed themselves experts in their field. As Mahalo's Jason Calacanis notes:

It seems that Google, the greatest web-business ever created, is not satisfied with owning over 70% of search--now they want to own the first couple of pages in their search results.

(By the way, Jason's advice - forget your own stuff, get into that Googletent)

Now if he can see this coming............ but is this the thing that will make people disbelieve the "Do No Evil" mantra, which has already been put under some pressure?

Seductive though Knol clearly is to Google, I think if it is biassed, Google risks reducing trust in its core search business, and that is a huge risk, as from that the bulk of the Ad revenue still flows.

I rather liked Ian Betteridge's take on the perennial "are bloggers as good as real journalists" (Scoble Edition): Sez Scoble:

Journalists who fight this system (and readers who don’t check out the comments) are missing the point. This is a participatory media, not a one-way one, and, while it has a different editing system (the editing is done post publishing, not pre publishing) it’s pretty clear to me that this system arrives at the truth a lot faster than anything on paper does.

But, you gotta read and participate in those comments! Lots of old-schoolers don’t like that dirty work.

All very true, but as Ian notes:

But the problem is that "a story" has a life far, far beyond the original post. For a popular blogger like Scoble, the original words are likely to be picked up and reposted hundreds of times.

Watching the development and correction of stories, there's something interesting that I've always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that's 100,000 people who believe the original story - and unless Scoble's readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that's a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

This situation is really compounded if the original post comes from someone without a vast readership, but which gets picked up by a well-read blogger. In this case, if the well-read blogger doesn't pick up on the correct, it's likely that the word will never have a chance of getting out - and the original, false information will be far more widely spread.

I don't know what the solution is by the way.....both are right here. In practical terms it probably means blogging will be less trusted than more formal reporting overall (though heaven knows journalism has enough inbuilt biasses), or at the very least readers will learn to know to cross correlate.

....But my darling, its when when I think of thee (Trad Irish folksong)

So, another highly public walkaway from Twitter:

Just Wednesday, Twitter, while not on purpose, removed mine, and others’ followers in some sort of mistake that took a day to fix (I’m guessing someone erased too much data in the database via a bad query on live data, and they had to restore from Tape backup to get it all back). This hit the breaking point for me - they violated the most important thing to me about Twitter, my followers (which are also those I follow and have a deep interest in), and I just can’t trust that things like this won’t keep happening in the future. They crossed the line, whether on purpose or not, and it’s time for me to take action.

(If I recall, they had devised an algorithm to delete spam followers). Anyway, unfortunately.....

after only one day I realized I could not do it cold-Turkey. I have a good number of followers on Twitter that have some interest in me (and I thank you so much for that support - it really means a lot to me), and regardless of whether I want to leave or not, abandoning Twitter would mean abandoning those followers, and I just can’t do that to all of you

Ah, the tyranny of the social network - you may be able to port yourself, but that doesn't mean you can port your followers.

I recall Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid announce he was leaving Twitter too, and he was back within a fortnight. As Terry Pratchett noted in his book Small Gods, one is defined by one's followers, and one has to be in places where they can follow you.....

An afterthought - the issue is that it's not in any of the walled garden players' interest to solve this, as the current situation increases stickiness for them - the solution must be an open standard social net, cf the GGG that Tim Berners-Lee proposed.

Its been clear for awhile that the Google Pagerank system is (i) being heavily gamed and (ii) is no longer giving the best result from its basically link volume/value based analysis. Microsoft has also spotted this, and has come up with Browserank:

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet--with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people's behavior.

"The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance," the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore.

Will this propel Microsoft to top spot? Who knows - the interesting thing to take away is that Microsoft (and others) are starting to take Google on with new search ideas - an encouraging trend. ASnd itsa worth remembering that all that advertising wealth still depends on search excellence.

And there is an increasing probability - as more people search for New Search - that the innovation will come from without Google, and they may not be able to buy it themselves. The way Google is structured today, search drives Ad revenue. Lose search and Ad revenue goes with it - that is Google's Achilles heel. All else in the Googleplex is still largely noise in the revenue producing sense.

One suspects therefore that strategically, Google is increasingly trying to separate the (current close) links between search excellence and Ad revenues, but we suspect that will be some time comng, and very hard for text based Ads.

Google released its pay-for-performance version of Wikipedia, called "Knol", yesterday. (A Knol is Google's term for a unit of knowledge apparently. How many tweets are there in a Knol, anyone?).

I was at the "Wealth of Networks" event and chatted to a few people - digital economists of various stripes - about the game theory of its business model, - ie:

- it pays people if they write articles and those get click through
- it allows multiple competing articles on any subject
- the author can retain control over the content

Google of course believes this will increase content quality, but I must record that many of the people I spoke to yesterday had some misgivings - a very plausible alternative scenario is that when people write for money, not love then:

- people will write about topics that are highly trafficked regardless of cultural value
- they will write content that aims to drive traffic - ie it will be sensationalist, not factual
- because anyone can put up a soapbox, it will be far harder to discern fact from fiction, opinion from reality.
- voting and other feedback will be largely irrelevant as people vote for what they like, not what is correct or valuable

In other words its possibly more a declaration of open season for creationism and related "fact based" cr*p, political slag, slebnews and hyped-to-the nines reporting. Its a sort of reverse tragedy of the commons - because content production is subsidised, there will be overproduction of content and adverse selection based on what makes money rather than what is valuable.

Now it was ever thus in for-profit Media ecosystems, but has been somewhat rarer in the Encyclopedia world to date...... in fact, some analysts yesterday likened Knol more to pay-per-blog services oor businesses like Squidoo than Wikipedia per se.

More worrying still is this research out today from Danny Sullivan that implies that Google will give Knol topics high ranking status, compared to (say) Wikipedia ones:

I found 1/3 of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results. I came away feeling that being on Knol does indeed give pages an advantage they might not get if they'd been hosted on some other brand new web site.

I was surprised to see a post covering how Knol's How to Backpack was already hitting the number three spot on Google. Really? I mean, how many links could this page have gotten already? As it turns out, quite a few. And more important, it's featured on the Knol home page, which itself is probably one of the most important links.

As Danny notes, its very difficult to believe that a Knol article, after 24 hours in the wild garners more links than say, oh, a Wikipedia article. unless it was assisted in some form.

Google giving its own for-profit service a leg up vs large-trafficked competitors - surely not

Actually, thats a very serious point - if there was just the slightest suspicion that Google's search was anything except neutral, I suspect that strategically they would create a major own goal - Ad revenue comes from trusted search - no trusted search, no searchers - no searchers, no Ad revenue.

These are early days, and hopefully these are teething problems, but I must flag a concern - Google is full of very bright people, and they could quite easily have calculated and mitigated these issues if they had wanted to.

It is part of the startup mantra, that at page 5 or thereabouts in the startup pitch the VC wants to know what patents they have, and this is seen as the certification of quality for the bona fide startup.

However, this could be a fairly non-sensical strategy in today's world. A conversation I had yesterday at the Wealth of Networks conference yesterday was very though provoking:

Dr Ludmila Striukova of UCL noted that most IP law was designed for large organisations and that in today's world, in effect, a patent today guarantees nothing except the option to argue in court for your intellectual property rights, and for companies with limited resources, that option is nearly valueless.

Also, did you know that most patents in the US and Europe are published about 18 months after filing, yet granted on average only 3-4 years after filing? Add to that three other things about patents:

(i) When you register a patent, at some point it is published for all to see. There are quite a few large corporates (whose own R&D budgets have been repurposed) and troll companies mining new patents to see if they can find gold. This is a lot easier than it once was, as patents are all online. Broadsight's own Paul Lancefield has built a patent search and comparison engine for example.

(ii) Although you can get insurance to pay for defence, or engage pay-if-you-win lawyers, by that time it is too late. For a startup, the impact of merely having a pending patent infringement lawsuit can be disastrous, as the risk of action alone will be enough to deter many investors.

(iii) Not all patent mining is done in countries where you could actually go to law anyway.

Given that filing and maintaining patents are non trivial costs for a small companies, this made me wonder if this was still the best strategy.

The whole patent credo comes from an earlier world, where it was "hard science", not easier to replicate software or business processes, that was the New New Thing being patented. In this pre-internet world the transaction costs of troll-searching patents in a space was also far harder.

To be sure, the trolling problem is worse in the US than in Europe (though it seems the pendulum is swinging back) in the US, but its an interesting thought for a startup not to bother to patent.

So what to do? VC's will still want some form of validation, and though traction may be a far better form today, it is still necessary to show some form of business viability. The problem with getting a legal opinion (apart from the cost) is that it is no great guarantee, as infringement decisions when challenged can be very unpredictable.

One of the benefits of a patent search capability is you can see whether there would be any patents that conflict with yours, and see if there is a valid gap, without you actually having to file patent or paying for a legal opinion. At Broadsight for example, we can see what patents lie in a particular space.

Paul's view is that, at present, startups should still patent because:

- We don't think not patenting is the alternative. Indeed that amounts to simply giving-up before the might of the
mega-corporate. Patents confer a legal monopoly right and though they are expensive they provide the only means for the small guy, start-up or independent programmer with a really good idea to create space such that big technology companies can't stomp all over them.

- Software patents have got a bad name simply because for years most companies thought you couldn't file for them, which in turn has meant there was a huge fertile ground available where those who could afford to do so could (and did) "backfill" filing for inventions that weren't. The real danger now, I think, is this indignation is driving an anti-patent backlash which is playing right into the hands of the corporate leviathan. The fact is patents won't be abolished, but large technology companies are using the anti-patent feeling very effectively to lobby for changes that will benefit them, whilst massively undermining the small-guy and the start-up.

- The open source advocate driven backlash against software patents is playing hugely into the hands of the corporate leviathan and you can be sure it will be the small-guy and the start-up that suffers.

- Many of the the so called "Patent Trolls" are in fact companies which, through a licensing arrangement, aggregate and protect patents owned by the likes of you and I and independent programmers. Defence costs are a fact of patent ownership, and these so called "Trolls" actually provide a legitimate and useful service much like the services which provide for the refactoring of debt for small businesses. What is more, the very presence of these companies demonstrates patent ownership is viable for the small-guy. Its more the large corporations interest to vilify them.

Food for thought indeed - in essence, patents are not ideal for small companies, but its the best thing they have, and not all trolls are your enemy.

Forrester has researched OS penetration in large enterprises (saw this on Computerworld) and the view for Vista is not encouraging:

Fewer than one in 11 of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, according to survey results released Wednesday by Forrester Research Inc.

Of the 50,000 enterprise users surveyed by the Cambridge, Mass., analyst firm, 87.1% were still running Windows XP at the end of June, compared to 8.8% for Vista. According to author Thomas Mendel, that implies that the majority of PCs upgraded to Vista were those running older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or 98.

"Vista is 'new Coke,'" Mendel wrote, comparing Microsoft's flagship operating system to the ill-fated soft drink.

Not just large enterprises - Vista's legendary difficulty to integrate with small office and home networks and other issues is putting off many SME / SOHO's as well, we understand. Still, at c 8.8% penetration, although its 1/10th of XP 's 87%, it's still nearly double that of the Mac's 4.5%.

Update - just seen this story on El Reg - apparently the reason the Vista OS is doing less than well is because its marketing has not been positive enough. Are they kidding? The real lesson here is that all the king's horses and all the king's men still can't sell a cr*p product!

Here's to Microsoft following Coke's example and re-opening the channels for XP.

From the BBC:

Six of the UK's biggest net providers (BSkyB, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse, and BT) have agreed a plan with the music industry to tackle piracy online.

The deal, negotiated by the government, will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music.

But the music industry wants people's internet cut off if they ignore repeated warnings, something the web firms say they are not prepared to do.

No change there, then - so what is different?

The plan commits the firms to working towards a "significant reduction" in the illegal sharing of music.

It also commits the net firms to develop legal music services, the BBC has been told. The BBC has been told that the firms have agreed to ensure their customers know it is illegal to share copyrighted music. It is believed that the memorandum also requires net firms to go further in their attempts to tackle illegal file-sharing.

At the same time the government is also expected to start a consultation exercise that could result in laws that force net firms to tackle music piracy.

We heartily endorse the formation of legal music services to compete with iTunes, and are delighted the government will tackle music piracy. A good start to tackling piracy would be to examine the absurd prices music companies goug.... charge for online music, when most of the cost of physical reproduction and distribution has been stripped away in the online model.

This is not a one sided game, the music industry is as much an actor in its own travails as are those evil and venal members of the public. In fact, as iTunes showed, if you charge reasonable prices for a decent service there is a market to be made. Failure to address this issue will make any law an ass.

But you know all this - and as Al Stewart once sang, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. (You can buy that legally over here)

Update - the Indy suggests there will be a £30 flat fee licence for music downloading:

Internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing.

Ministers are backing proposals that would enable millions of broadband users to pay an annual levy which would allow them to copy as much – previously illegal – music from the internet as they wanted. The money raised would be channelled back to the rights-holders, with artists responsible for the most popular songs receiving a bigger slice of the cash.

Some are wailing and gnashing teeth of course but that seems quite a sensible compromise. So long as the creators do see it.....