VirtualSound’s blog

Farhad Manjoo blogs for slate.com on technology issues, and he appears to focus on social media quite a bit. He wrote 2 recent posts that are interesting:

The first post was on the high costs of  hosting user generated video at YouTube titled "Do You Think Bandwidth Grows On Tress?" This post highlighted an analysis by Credit Suisse that concluded that Google lost $470 million running YouTube in the last year alone. Some of the statistics are amazing! According to Credit Suisse's estimates:

• 375 million people around the world will play about 75 billion YouTube videos this year
• YouTube feeds 30 million megabits-per-second into the internet for all of those videos. That's 30 Gbits/second!
• YouTube spends about $250 million a year to acquire licenses to broadcast professionally produced videos.
• The cost of running YouTube for one year exceeds $700 million.
  
• Advertising brings in about $240 million in revenues for 2009, according to the report.

The problem for Google and YouTube is that advertisers are hesitant to show their adds on the site. Nobody wants their brand associated with some of the wierder and more inappropriate content that ends up on YouTube, so they sell adds on fewer than 10% of the videos viewed. If they could increase click-thjrough rates by better targetting adds, or increase the percentage of videos with adds they may actually reach break-even or even run a profit. This leads me to Manjoo's second post.

Today (April 30) he posted an interesting bit of speculation that makes a lot of sense titled "Google's Trojan Horse" with a sub-title of "Did the search giant just sneakily launch a Facebook killer?" He notes that last week Google modified it's personal search feature, adding a link to your Google profile, if you have one, to the results. While this may seem like a small detail, he notes that there may be quite a bit more to it.

Manjoo quotes a Google engineer who blogged that Google is adding profiles to search results in order to "give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name." Manjoo speculates that Google is aiming to take on Facebook, and do it better than Facebook can. He may be on to something.

Google is by far the pre-eminent search engine, so the opportunity to add your own content to Google's people search results for you is pretty compelling. Manjoo went ahead and put references to his Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed onto his Google profile. Now Google can mine that data and find out all kinds of interesting things about Manjoo - who his friends are, what keywords he uses frequently and so on, without any further action from Manjoo.

Facebook and the other social networks can go that far as well, but Facebook can only use that data when you are on Facebook's site. Google's reach is much larger than that. They can use the infromation to target adds on Google and all of their other sites like YouTube and Gmail. They can integrate your profile information, and your friends profile information, with your Google search information (at least in theory, anyway) and the Gmail info, if you have a Gmail account, and deliver even more carefully targetted adds. Google can also probably spin this into a larger business, allowing other sites to use more carefully targetted adds for you, earning the other sites more click-through revenue for a small fee to Google. It's not clear to me that anyone else has the needed combination of top internet sites, technology  and advertising chops to pull this off, so competing with Google here will be tough.

It remains to be seen if Google really will compete directly with Facebook - as Manjoo notes they already tried once with Orkut, which mostly failed (unless you're in Brazil or India, it took off there). Still, you've got to expect Google to take advantage of this leverage and work furiously at making advertising more relevant and appealing, and Google is probably the only company in a position to make a gargantuan scheme like YouTube turn a profit. Let's hope they make enough that they can start moving more heavily into HD video - evn more network bandwidth required, which drives even more Cisco HW sales.

My son brought home a form from school that talked about having an "unplugged" week - a week with no TV, no video games, no computers. My son loves to play video and computer games, but he wanted to try taking a week off and being more active. Sounds like a nice idea, I thought, so we signed him up, my wife and I signed, and we sent him off to school with the form.

Imagine my surprise when he told me on Monday "remember dad, you can't watch any TV, play video games, or play on the computer this week!"

"I thought you took the pledge, not me" was my response. He shook his head, pulled out the signed form, and showed me what it said. The whole family had pledged to be unplugged for the week. Man, I have got to read forms more carefully!

So we spent a week unplugged. Mostly. I was surprised to find that my son handled it better than I and my wife did. I'd find myself hopping on my laptop and checking my personal e-mails or starting to get to a web site I follow, then remember and stop myself. Sometimes I'd go ahead and continue, pretending I was working. My wife would wait until the kids were in bed, then watch a little TV, and I found myself watching too - even shows I don't normally watch. My son made it through the whole week without any problem, spent much more time outside, hung out with his friends more, and was much more active. I guess I'm much more habituated to being "plugged in" or at least just passivelyt watching...

That sure messed up my theory that my son was much more into being plugged in than I was. I found it surprisingly hard to stay off-line, so I'd cheat quite a bit. By the end of the week I was doing pretty well, but my son handled it with no problems and no cheating.

So I learned something about myself and my son, spent less time watching TV and playing games, and more time messing around with my son. All in all it was a good experience and I'll definitely repeat it next year if the school promotes the unplugged week again. We also have a semi-unplugged week over the summer when we go to our cabin - no computer, no video games. It does get some Canadian channels, so we usually watch a little TV or rent some videos, but we are quite unplugged from our normal life styles.

I came to IM fairly recently, and I just can't get used to <Enter> = send. For years in all of the code editors, e-mail, and word processors applications I use all day, <Enter> = start a new line. It seems like every day, one of my first few IMs will be half written or missing context and totally garbled. After that I get annoyed and try to pay attention, cutting the error rate down to only a few more that day. On typical IM sessions with one or two co-workers it's no big deal.

Now there are twitter-like IM variants, like Yammer. I'm on the Cisco Yammer tool which means my instant mistakes are visible to a broad group, including management up quite a few layers. You can't delete them or anything. I sure would like a UI option: <Enter> = start new line, with a <Send> button visible.

Other than that I like Yammer and recommend it.

Cisco has some great policies and programs when it comes to volunteering. I've glanced at Volunteer Matching a time or two, but I haven't participated through Cisco so far. I volunteer for a couple of charitable (or at least non-profit) organizations I support, so I'm curious what programs might apply.

If I can get the right on-line forms filed and the programs satisfy various requirements, Cisco will track my volunteer hours and donate $10 per hour volunteered to the charity involved. Donations up to $1,000/year are available for individuals, and $10,000/year for teams. That's pretty nice, maybe my favorite non-profits can get some additional benefits from my volunteering.

It also led to the local Seattle volunteer committee, but that's a topic for another post.

April 23 is bike to work day in the Seattle office. Someone taped up signs saying so on the office door, which is official enough for me.I haven't biked to work in perhaps a decade, when I lived and worked somewhere else. I'm pretty out of shape and (cough) older, too. Still, I like to support a good cause!

I normally walk to the bus stop in Kenmore, my home town (a suburb of Seattle perhaps 5 miles form the city) and ride to downtown Seattle, then catch a bus uptown to the Belltown neighborhood and the Seattle office. The Kenmore to Seattle bus has a bike rack, so a nice compromise is available: ride the bike to the bus stop in Kenmore, then when I get off down town don't bother transferring, just bike on uptown to the office. Total bike distance is maybe 1.3 miles, bus distance is close to 9 miles.

So I rode my bike to work today. It rained, and riding North up the bike lane on 4th Ave. in downtown Seattle leaves something to be desired - construction has it ripped up all over the place, so you're forced out into the lanes of traffic. Not too bad, but between the traffic and the rain I was a bit out of my comfort zone. Got to work fine. If the weather cooperated more that would help, and I should consider starting earlier so that there is less traffic downtown. Definitely got into the office much more awake than normal - breathing moderately hard, heart going faster than if I'd been walking.

So that made me feel virtuous - even though in green terms, I rode the same bus and biked rather than walked, so it didn't really cut down emissions or anything. What it mostly did was got me some good aerobic exercise and got me to work 45 minutes faster - walking I'd have missed the bus, catching the next one 30 minutes later, and lost more time waiting for the transfer. I feel better for it, and I like the extra time. Definitely worth repeating as the weather improves.

So feeling virtuous already, I figured it was time to look into Cisco's Volunteer Match program. I think I'll blog about that in a separate post...

EE-Time Europe posted an article about a serious outage at T-Mobile. Most German mobile voice, text and data services were out for 6 hours.The failure was caused by "the Home Location Register, a data base that correlates individual SIM cards and phone numbers." They lost 2 of 3 servers that provide the Home Location Register service, and that brought the whole works down.

The "Home Location Register service" is the fundamental wireless network identity service. As each mobile phone joins the network, the SIM that identifies the phone securely is used as a reference to look up you account details - are you a customer, how are you billed, what services are available. No SIM-to-account correlation means no ability to provide services or to bill for minutes. This has to be one of the more critical services for a cell phone provider.

What caught my eye was this: "It took a long time to get hold of the system engineers to locate and eliminate the server problem: The respective experts could not be reached via their mobile phone connection."

Somehow that seems amusing to me. I'm sure it wasn't amusing  to T-Mobile, more like a nightmare. The cell phone service cratering was hard to fix because the cell phone network had cratered. Seems like backups are the most notable issue here: only having 3 servers to handle SIM correlation, when loss of the service brought everything down - should've been more backup servers! Urgent need to get experts in during off hours to fix things, but they can't easily be reached until we fix things - should've had a backup contact method that didn't rely on the cell phone network. Of course, like most disaster response problems, this is much more obvious in hind-sight.

While reading a news web site I noticed one of those little teaser ads that try to get you to their site:

We Tested 35 Colon Cleanse Products & Found 5 That Actually Worked.
www.TheColonReport.com

Man, I sure wouldn't want to be the person evaluating those 35 products!

I'm curious how long it takes for content to show up in search engines. I'll use this post as a test case. The title and tags include "Search Engine Latency" and I'm curious how long it will take to show up in searches. I'll check Google and Yahoo and update this with results on occasion.

I did a brief search and found this:

1. Very few blogs are indexed daily. Not all blogs (or web sites) are indexed even weekly. Many SERP hits to our blogs may have been indexed months ago, and are alive in cache only.
2. Blogger, and other web site hosts, doesn't extract backlink data from the search engines every day either.
3. Each spider visit doesn't re index the entire blog. Many visits may just index the main page of the blog, with occasional visits following the archive and other sidebar links, and maybe the various text based internal links to other blog posts.

SERP is an acronym for search engine result page. Useful information, and the author of the blog talks about static and dynamic links and why some don't work, well worth a read. If his data is accurate it may take days for this blog to show up.

****** UPDATE ******
It showed up in 1 hour on Google, when I did a blog search with "virtualsound search engine latency" - pretty quick turn-around. After 6 hours there was still no sign of it on yahoo. I quit checking after that. Interestingly enough, after 4 days it was included on Yahoo as part of an aggregate of Vox technology posts, not as a separate item.

Amusing animated gif on a blog site I couldn't read:

Somehow this amuses me.

2008 ends with a whimper. Our banks have failed, our car companies failed. Make no mistake, when they come to Washington lobbying for the bail-outs to "avoid failing" they've already failed. Does anybody see any sort of correction to the system that allows us to believe these newly bailed out companies won't just sail their ships further onto the rocks? Should we start pools on which one will come back for another bail-out soonest?

An economic system that allows your corporate leader enough income to retire within a few months is foolish, it encourages him to engage in high risk short term positive/long term negative behavior. While gaining in the short term at huge cost in the long term is a bad idea normally, a corporate CEO's compensation is mostly determined by the companies stock value for the next few quarters, so this behavior pays off. You get what you pay for, of course, and we continue to pay for high risk foolish behavior as we bail out sector after sector of the economy.

Here's a simple idea. We've already established the point that the Federal Government can draw salary lines with minimum wage. It's time for a maximum wage law. A maximum wage should be flexible, so we want a system that allows a company the ability to increase or decrease their maximum wage, but we don't want to make it too simple or quick to raise.

How do we set a maximum wage?

Currently some research is done into the ratio between the maximum and minimum rates of pay at corporations. Let's set our maximum rates as a ratio of the minimum, that allows a company to raise it's maximum wage by raising it's minimum wage.

What do we set the ratio to?

Take the lowest ratio in the G7 and set ours to 10% below that. Phase it in over 4 years, and have it "lag" the statistics by a year, going into law automatically if congress doesn't act. So if Japan is the lowest at 25 to 1, the US would go to 22.5 to 1 the following year. If a company is paying $18K as it's lowest annual full time wage equivalent then they can pay a maximum wage of 22.5 x 18000 = 405K. If they raise their minimum to 36K they double the maximum to 810K. Keep a year lag on this as well - if the employee wages are raised, they have to stay at or above that rate for a year before the maximum rises, but the maximum drops immediately on any minimum wage decrease.

This has an immediate effect on corporate governance. As the CEO I need a fairly sustainable increase in the minimum wage to increase my own maximum wage.

While I think this is a good idea on it's merits, we could start by limiting the law to those entities that got bailouts: the car companies, the banks, the wall street firms, AIG. We can impose a law requiring them to implement the maximum wage law, they've shown they are not capable of handling corporate finances without our help.