Remember Microsoft Works? You probably have it installed on your Windows PC right now. With the ubiquitous MS Office so dominating word processing and spreadsheet software, the low-end MS Works suite is largely forgotten. Things may be looking up for the neglected, runty sibling of MS Office. A CNET report, Online Works might be in the works, suggests that Microsoft may be considering adding a web-based Works suite free to users and supported by advertising.
Sep 152006
High growth, high traffic sites like MySpace and YouTube are poster children for the Web 2.0 concept of letting your users create your content. But, there are sometimes problems when one lets users post whatever they want – spam, inappropriate content, and, of course, content that is owned by others. There’s been speculation about whether content like commercial music videos would be allowed at sites like YouTube, and apparently that question will be answered soon. According to a FoxNews report, Morris: YouTube, MySpace Abuse Copyright, Universal Music will announce their plans for dealing with what they see as unauthorized use of their copyrighted content: Continue reading »
Last week, we wrote about Google’s use of a simple game to encourage users to participate in a social tagging experiment, and even offered our suggestion for a new Google Game. The high level of participation in a short time suggests that Google’s use of a game strategy resulted in much better results than had the tagging been merely a volunteer effort. While we don’t doubt that Google’s game signals more social games with a business purpose to come, that’s not where the real action will be. We’re reaching to the conclusion that the social networks and communities of the future are foreshadowed by some of today’s immersive games. An article in the current edition of Newsweek, Living a Virtual Life, makes exactly that point. The subhed for the story asks provocatively, “Is World of Warcraft a game, or is it a harbinger of virtual realities that we all might inhabit?”
Sep 112006
Many business executives dream of making the cover of a major newsweekly, but Hewlett-Packard Chairman Pattie Dunn would have passed on this week’s Newsweek cover in a heartbeat. Last week, we talked about HP’s PR fiasco, and as expected things haven’t improved for the ebattled chairman of the board. Newsweek’s cover story, “Scandal at HP: The Boss Who Spied on Her Board” has elevated the firm’s public relations disaster to a new level.
Sep 082006
HP didn’t just shoot itself in the foot, it blew its whole leg off. In what will surely go down in business history as one of the more bizarre exercises of corporate paranoia, Hewlett-Packard is in the midst of a public relations disaster after engaging in unethical and perhaps illegal behavior. In an effort to track down a board member who gave information to the press, investigators hired by the firm used “pretexting” techiques to obtain confidential phone records of HP board members. “Pretexting” is a form of social engineering in which an individual provides false identity information to access data that would normally be confidential. This incident is a case study in how an effort to control the firm’s image in the press resulted in negative publicity several orders of magnitude greater than it experienced before.
Sep 072006
A couple of days ago, we wrote about Google’s clever idea of enlisting its users to tag images with keywords by turning it into a game (see Google Image Labeler – Game-based Social Tagging). I think there’s little doubt that some useful data will come from the process that will let Google further enhance its Image Search. Presumably, the other sources of data they have for images are analysis of on-page clues (image name, ALT text, surrounding page text, etc.) and click data (image results are linked to another Google page, not directly to the website where the image appears). Still, one is often frustrated by the appearance of seemingly irrelevant images in search results. So, I’ve got a modest proposal for a different image game.
Sep 052006
Google Image Labeler is a fascinating concept. The basic idea is that two indivduals will be matched up randomly and be shown the same picture from Google’s index of Web images. Each user starts typing in descriptive words. When they match on a word, a hundred points is awarded and a new image is shown. This continues for ninety seconds, and the final score is shown. The user can start over, or not.
Sep 052006
In New Web sites seek profit in wikis, CNET News.com describes the efforts of hardy pioneers to turn wikis into profit centers. One such startup is wikHow, which lets users post “how-to” instructions and articles. Run with the same software as the better known Wikipedia, the site has generated 10,000 entries from users in English, Spanish, and German.