Sunday, September 28, 2008

Social Networking

Are You Hooked Up?

In my quest to understand what it is that makes up a social network, I found there are thousands of sites that cater to very specific groups, topics, or hobbies and also ambiguous groups for anyone who wants to join. Are we lost in this ocean of networks bidding for our memberships? Yes, pretty much.

What is a Social Network?
The idea is based on the old adage… “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Meeting people online with similar interests to expand our knowledge in that interest is basically the cornerstone of social networking. But it is much more than just making connections for business or comprehension purposes. We can seek out people that we have lost touch with or people that we are separated with geographically. In short, a social network allows people to come together in common interests.

Which One Should You Join?
There are many platforms on which one can participate. Which one is the best?: The one that you are able to utilize best. Be it MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Reunion, LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Piczo, Twitter, Flickr, or one of the many others available, in order for the network to work for you, you have to have someone to participate with. That is the concept that makes these sites grow at astounding rates. One person will join, tell others about their experience, then they tell others, and on and on it grows.

You may be willing to join multiple groups to be able to connect with the different sets of people you desire. This makes the growth compound even further. Some examples are: Facebook and MySpace each having 115 million people to their respective sites each month. There are many sources stating the most current statistics. It is an ever changing morphing system which is very hard to measure. (September, 2008.)


Changes in Progress
In the past few months, Facebook and MySpace have discussed opening their ‘walled gardens’ to allow other networks access to slow the multi-membership trend. The member would be given the option to share profile information with other websites to allow for more contacts. Some users stated that they actually enjoy having multiple groups because they can separate the amount of information that one group is allowed to view compared to another group which might be more casual in nature providing their privacy policies are in place. Graph found here.

Basically, the concept is separating business contacts or online contacts with close friends and family. This idea can be achieved through sites like LinkedIn which caters to the business/professional side of making contacts and networking off of those contacts. There are even expert searches available. The problem with this site (which is the problem with all social networking sites) is that people need to join and put their information into the system for it to work. The criticism for this site is that if the member publicly promotes himself, it can get back to his current employer. If the member was looking to leave the company anyway, this aspect wouldn’t be as damaging.

Expectations of Privacy
This process of using social networks to open oneself up to the public is ‘an experiment that involves radically redrawing the boundaries between what is public and what is private.’ Typically, people under the age of 25 years old think everything they do on their computer is public unless they choose to make it private. Most social network users say they feel strongly about their privacy but often ‘forget’ how public their words will become once they are posted. Some users treat their sites as an outlet to vent their current state-of-mind and do not realize that when that mood is over, the thought has been recorded for others to view. (Kiss and Tell of Social Networks by Nick Galvin.)

Chart found here.
“Privacy is the ‘right of people to control what details about their lives stay inside their own houses and what leaks to the outside.’ We have no control over who can read our seemingly private words”…when privacy settings are left at the default of public. (A Privacy Paradox by Susan B. Barnes.)


Who Can Peruse the Social Networks?
Employers (current or future), school officials, law enforcement, parents, and others can view this delicate information and make judgments based on it. I read that a respected police officer ‘vented’ on a social network and was asked to step down from his position for using improper dialog. Those who carry firearms can be held more accountable to abstain from acting recklessly, even if it is only with words. Another case was where students who were involved in hazing were reprimanded by their college administration. Other users confess that sometimes they fabricate their posts to make them seem more exciting, or they were dared to do it. They do not think about who will read it or how long the information will be available. There are new rules defining what is public and what should remain private.

Friends, and Family, and Data Miners, Oh My!
An industry that is profiting from this free exchange of information is the data mining industry. They collect, analyze, and interpret the volumes of personal information posted publicly and use it as marketing information about different areas of our culture and reinforce brand images. This is not a new concept. Almost every purchase we make is already tracked by some means for marketing purposes. The difference here is information is usually more ‘private.’

Conclusion: My Advice
My take on this cultural social networking system is that we, as adults, must be wise in that the written word or photos can be used in manners in which they may not have originally been intended. If you so desire, go forth and socialize, but do it intelligently. Do not forget that even though you may feel safe and private sitting in front of your computer typing out your thoughts, others do have access to them. Isn’t that the whole idea, anyway, to be social and interact with others? Be Smart, Be Safe.


Monday, September 15, 2008

Google--Technology It Uses to Search

Recently, I was informed that my beloved grandfather was diagnosed with macular degeneration. I’ve heard of the term but did not know the specifics of this eye disease. I wanted to become more informed for myself and for him. What did I do? I did what millions of people do everyday. I ‘Googled’ it. I used the Internet search engine to find the information I desired. What might have taken an hour to do manually: drive to a library, find a book with the information, and then read about it, took a matter of seconds using this technology. This is the modern way to search for information. Before Google, other search engines existed but did not possess the sophistication that Google’s founders, Larry Page & Sergey Brin, had in mind. They took an idea that at the time was thought to be ‘soft’ and made it into a multibillion-dollar company.

What's with the silly name?
The name is a play on 'googal' which is a mathematical term meaning 10^100 (ten to the power of one hundred), which is ten followed by one hundred zeros. The first version of Page & Brin's search engine was called BackRub because it focused on the backward trail of the pages. When the system started indexing the World Wide Web in 1995, it was estimated there were 10 million documents and an unknown number of links to them. In that year, the Internet was growing at a rate of approximately 2,000 percent. BackRub was renamed Google in 1997.
(Sept 2008 http://www.google.com/)

How does Google work?

As a user, I don’t necessarily need to know how it works, but in a marketing perspective, I need to know how I can get my site to be on the first page of the search results. How can I do this? It is based on relevance.

How is relevance determined?
Basically by a ‘voting’ system that counts the number of sites it is linked to and how often those sites are accessed by using PageRank. PageRank was invented by Larry Page, co-founder of Google. It is a trademark of Google and has a patent which is held by Stanton University. This link analysis creates a ranking system based on quality and quantity of other relevant sites.

How does PageRank work in relation to Google?

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves (deemed) ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.” (Sept 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/.)



This system is an algorithm which is similar to the Richter scale .The content of the page is not evaluated when PageRank is calculating the index for the page. There are over a hundred variations of criteria that are measured in the search result process. This is in part, to keep the process secret so that the search method is as accurate as possible without being unduly manipulated by webmasters whose sole purpose is to rank their page as high as possible. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/05/google-pagerank-what-do-we-really-know-about-it/

Yes, as with any aspect of business, there are ways to manipulate the system. This process is known as search engine optimization (SEO) and is used to improve the volume of traffic to a web site when accessed through a search engine. The SEO experts attempt to discern how to make target words or keywords more relevant through the index parameters. The idea is to increase visibility for marketing strategies in gaining more hits to the designated page or site. The experts study the patterns in Google and other search engines, and then develop a course to try to maximize the rank placement for their keywords within the search index database. This process is updated and revised periodically to mix it up for accuracy.

(FYI: I Googled the term search engine optimization and received: about 32,500,000 results. There must be some relevance to SEO to employ this many hits.)

You might have a website that is more relevant than most for your subject, but is virtually unknown. Your site will rank low on the search scale, but there are legitimate methods to put your site in a better light to get noticed. The term used by SEO experts for these approaches are called white hat techniques. To attract the search engine's spiders or crawlers, you must use the right keywords positioned in the right places. Meta tags are hidden bits of information that are used at times by search engines to pull relevant keywords. Some search engines skip meta tags because of historic misuse. Key placement of your product word in the title, headers, and content are very important. But, there has to be a nice balance so that the site does not end up using a black hat technique called keyword stuffing which may trigger a spider to label your site as spam (also known as ‘unsolicited commercial e-mail’). (September 2008, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/)

Keyword stuffing is just like it sounds; stuffing the site with the words you want the search spider to recognize and then index. Some stuffers have used the same color for the text as the background so the text is invisible to the viewer but not to the search spider. Another unscrupulous way to generate traffic to a site is by using fake web pages that redirect visitors to a page they would not have gone to on their own. There is also a way to monopolize the search engine results once a reputable page ranks high, it duplicates itself over and over so that other competing sites will go further down the list and possibly off the front page of the search results. This is called page stuffing. Some search spiders are now capable of recognizing if two different pages have the same content. These are just a few of the reasons why Google must change their parameters and make the search spiders smarter as technology changes. Google wants the user to get the unbiased search result they are seeking as accurately and quickly as possible.

Before Google became widely known, portals like AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, and AOL viewed searching as a soft business with little to no profit potential. They thought of it as providing a route to travel away from their site. What could be profitable in that? Google found a way to make it lucrative by using advertising that was relevant to the search with ‘Pay Per Click’. The client only pays when they receive a hit to their ad. It is more profitable for the site owner to pay for this type of advertisement because the person who is clicking on the ad is already interested in their product so there is no revenue lost on blanket advertising that does not reach potential customers.

“‘Search is no longer a stand-alone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on ... the World Wide Web," John Battelle writes in The Search. "Increasingly search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world and our place in it. It's how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.’" (Sept 2008, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68792.)

Google timeline information and photos taken from http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html#1
(Left to Right- Sergey Brin, Larry Page.)


1995: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet at Stanford University.
1996: BackRub, the precursor to the Google search engine, is founded.
1997: Brin & Page rename BackRub to Google.
1998: Google is incorporated and moves into its first office in a Menlo Park, California, spare bedroom and garag
e.
1999: Google moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, and later to Mountain View, California; Red Hat becomes Google's first commercial customer.
2000: Yahoo Internet Life magazine names Google the Best Search Engine on the Internet; Google becomes the largest search engine on the Web and
launches Google AdWords & Toolbar.
2001: Google acquires Deja.com's Usenet archive and launches Google PhoneBook; Dr. Eric Schmidt joins Google as chairman of the board of directors
and is later appointed CEO. Google Image Search launches.
2002: Google launches Google Search Appliance,
Google News and Froogle, a product search;
updates new version to AdWords.
2003: Voted ‘most useful’ Word of the year for 2002. Acquired Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger.
2004: New milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images. Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares common stock @ $85 per share. Index of web pages reaches 8 billion.
2005: Milestone in Image Search: 1.1 billion images indexed. Google maps goes live. Google Earth's overlays help with rescue efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims.
2006: Picasa introduced in 25 more languages. Chat in Gmail. Dr. Larry Brilliant becomes executive director of Google.org. Oxford English Dictionary adds ‘Google’ as a verb. Gmail, Google News, iGoogle available on mobile phones in 8 more languages. Acquisition of YouTube. Release Google Patent Search.
2007: Gmail available to everyone. Traffic information introduced to Google Maps for 30+ cities in US. Google Hot Trends launches. Prime placement in iPhone. RechargIT unveiled.
2008: Five key initiatives announced. Google Sites debuts. Acquisition for DoubleClick. Google Earth adds new satellite information for recovery efforts. Google Translate has 23 languages. Google Finance has real-time stock quotes. Maps for Mobile updated. 1trillion unique URLs indexed. Google Suggest arrives. Chrome a new open source browser is launched. Upgrade for Picasa released.
10 year Anniversary Celebrated in September 2008.
Who knows what’s next…..something innovative that is certain.



The users of search engines today think this concept of making the volumes of information available at any time by a few key strokes as completely and utterly obvious. It is definitely a system that Internet users utilize almost every time they touch their computers. In some ways, Google has stayed the same as it started 10 years ago, but it has also grown to the needs of the users by creating more selected searches and libraries. Google has created a path that our society uses and now takes for granted. Google is now looking at ways to use the gathering of knowledge to fight diseases in third world countries. Perhaps in a few short years this concept will seem obvious, too.