Archive for January, 2010

A week or so ago I undertook a whirlwind visit to the UK and the Continent, giving two presentations about design patterns and social design, one in London on Tuesday, and another in Berlin on Thursday, each event sponsored by YDN (and the one in Germany co-sponsored by the local IxDA group).

The London event was in a wonderful gallery/cafe venue called Wallacespace filled with a standing-room only crowd. I was pleased to see a couple of friends from the international UX community there and the audience as a whole was wonderful, attentive, and ready with interesting, challenging questions for me when I was done.

Afterward we ate some snacks and drank some beers courtesy of YDN, before heading over to a nearby pub for more beers and conversation. This was my first time back in London in fourteen years and I was impressed by the vibrancy of the web-design community in what may be the “capital” of the Web in Europe.

The next day I headed to Berlin, where a pal picked me up at the airport and helped me get settled in my hotel in Alexanderplatz. It’s actually been 20 years since I was in Berlin! Back then, the Wall had only recently been dismantled and the east was frozen in a sort of time capsule due to economic stagnation. A lot has happened since Berlin reunited and resumed its role as the capital of Germany and arts mecca of Mitteleuropa. In fact, there was a fashion convention going on during my visit, so the airport and hotel were full of people who made me feel, in comparison, more like a geek than a designer.

East Berlin is now full of trendy gentrified neighborhoods. I had lunch at a burrito place (!) called Dolores that’s decorated with maps of the Mission in San Francisco. Clearly the internet-savvy crowd in Berlin feels a kinship with our own community in the Bay Area.

Berlin is also the home of a thriving local Interaction Design Association (IxDA) group, which helped secure the venue for my talk–(Newthinking Store) and helped promote and publicize my talk. I had a chance to meet some longtime virtual acquaintances from the IxD and IA communities in Berlin, such as Jan Jursa, of IATV and the Berlin IA Cocktail Hour.

The Berlin talk was also full, and again I was blessed with a generous and attentive crowd. More great questions. (We did the whole evening in English. Try as I might to speak slowly, I still probably spoke a bit too fast at times but just about all the German I know is noch ein Bier, bitte so it’s just as well.)

One interesting difference between the two groups is that the folks in Berlin asked me more process questions: How was the social design project organized? How did the wiki figure into the writing of the book? What’s an unbook? and so on. The questions in London tended to be more about the efficacy of design patterns in general and the application of social design patterns.

At both sessions, certain attendees had reached out to me in advance over Twitter and proposed questions that they had a chance to ask at the events. In London and again in Berlin I was asked the perennial question about whether the use of design patterns stifles innovation. My traditional answer, “No. Now shut up and do your wireframes!” got a laugh in both settings as well. (My real answer: “Not if they are applied as guidelines and with sensitivity to context.”)

One other curious difference between the two events was that the audience in London had nearly perfect gender balance, whereas the one in Berlin was, by my estimate, about 90% male. I’d like to learn more about what the differences are between the web design and development communities in the two cities that might account for that variance.

I’d like to thank YDN for sponsoring the trip, and O’Reilly Media for providing logistical support (and some copies of the book to give away as rewards for great questions). Interested folks can see my slides on Slideshare:

Several attendees in London took great notes of my talk and published them on their blogs or personal websites, including Jeff Van Campen, Suw Charman-Anderson, Michael Mahemoff, and O’Reilly’s Craig Smith.

Also, this may be as good a place as any to share my upcoming speaking schedule over the next few months:

• Next week Erin Malone and I will be playing our Social Mania game at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia.
• February 23 I’ll be speaking at the Bay Area Application Developers Adobe User Group’s monthly meeting.
• At Ignite SF I’ll do a five-minute 20-slide version of “Designing for Play.”
• I’ll be signing books (and talking about hacking the ukulele fretboard) at South by Southwest in Austin in mid-March.
• Mar 23 I’ll be speaking in San Diego on the Web App Masters Tour.
• May 3 I’ll be speaking on the topic of “Designing for Play” at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
• May 19-21 I’ll be up in Portland for Web Visions with my colleague, YDN evangelist Tom Hughes-Croucher. He’ll be presenting Let’s Run Javascript Everywhere
  on the phenomenom of server-side javascript. I’m presenting ideas on Designing for Play. Also, Erin Malone and I will be running our Designing Social Interfaces workshop, and Erin will be presenting her Go with the Flow talk.
• And on June 9-11 I’ll be back in London, presenting on Designing for Play and running a Design Social Interfaces workshop at @media, along with Tom H-C, who’ll be presenting an Intro to Server-side Javascript.

Image credit: Jeff Van Campen

Christian Crumlish
Pattern Detective
design.yahoo.com

Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).

But when you look at the sales material that Mahalo pitches to corporations, in the 19 page PDF reads like an à la carte menu of SEO services, rather than sales material from a company ignorant of of SEO.

It includes a slide which highlights how well Mahalo Answers questions rank in Google titled “SEO value,” as well as the following statements (followed by my comments):

• Questions are imported from Partners’ Answers Community into Mahalo Answers, enabling 100% share of voice and high SEO value. (filling Google with duplicate content)
• Category Selection Based on Keyword Intelligence and Customer Goals (doing keyword research, an SEO service)
• Community seeded with high-value questions and answers (does the word “seeded” mean asking fake questions?)
• By carefully policing the site, Mahalo keeps out inappropriate content, thus increasing engagement and utility. (no mention of the half million+ pages indexed in Google which contained scraped 3rd party content?)
• We can help our partners increase their search engine rankings with these high quality pages. (that is the actual text from their slide titled “HowTo”)
• Mahalo’s team of editors will find the most highly-trafficked search terms and keywords for your brand, industry or product and build corresponding high-quality pages that will rank well. (isn’t that exactly what “scummy” SEO companies do Jason?)

Given that Mahalo is now branded as an SEO play (in their own words), and that they scrape millions of content listings to publish on their pages, are creating tons of other duplicate content, have actively engaged in link farming, and are not above “seeding” questions based on keyword value, why should Google trust *any* of their business practices going forward? Especially when their SEO services enterprise was launched on the back of calling SEOs scumbags.

How can the Google web spam team members look themselves in the mirror each morning hunting smaller webmasters and ignoring operations like Mahalo? It must begin to feel arbitrary at some point, no?

I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media’s CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: “what if google decides they don’t like you anymore?”

Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just “borrows” your content without permission and keeps all the cash.

In the past Google hated content scrapers pretty bad. How bad? Well a guy named Teeceo used to make scraper sites, and here is how Matt Cutts described his work:

In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find.

Imagine taking that approach to hunting search spam all day long, and then ignoring the *fact* that Mahalo is scraping millions of third party listings and using them as content with no editorial filtering.

Then I started thinking about why the Google spam team could ignore something as outrageous as Mahalo, especially when it was built by a guy who was a false anti-spam evangelist. Is it because Jason is a good guy? No. Is it because there is some actual editorial vetting of the content? no. Is it because Google is getting a cut of the AdSense revenues? Google doesn’t need the short term cash flow (look at all the affiliate AdWords advertisers they just torched), so that is too cynical of a view.

Yes Google wants display inventory (their biggest opportunity for 2010 according to the quarterly call), and these “content” websites have already given themselves over to Google as inventory. But it must be something deeper than that. So I started thinking about it from a longterm strategic level…

Google won’t penalize sites like Mahalo (even though they blatantly violate Google’s guidelines) because Google *wants* to use the works of companies like Mahalo, Demand Media, and Aol to lower the value of other content and bankrupt a lot of the traditional media companies.

Why would Google want to do that?

There is excessive duplication in the marketplace. The faster that duplication is driven out of the marketplace the more desperate companies will be to cut deals with Google. And while there is a down market Google can drive companies out of the market and just claim that it was the economy that did it (much like how Mahalo used the down economy as an excuse to fire most of their editorial staff and replace them with content scraping robots).

Once a lot of media companies are bankrupted, the market is far more efficient, and there are fewer mouths to feed, that means Google can squeeze greater profits margins out of the media ecosystem by getting a fatter cut of the ad revenue.

Currently this shift is risk free because almost nobody understands how the marketplace works. Sure Paul Kedrosky and Mike Arrington blogged about the search results getting spammier, but until you frequently read the above listed sequence on sites outside of the SEO industry there is no damage to the Google brand in them turning the internet into a cesspool.

Once it starts harming the Google brand then I suspect them to act quickly and decisively. And sites like Mahalo will see a sharp drop in traffic. Jason better milk it while he can. The clock is ticking.

On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model

Let’s use a different industry to illustrate what is happening.

Let’s say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don’t mention who the band is and on their website, they put up a link to download the song… but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, “hey, playing good songs gets us more listeners and more listeners gets us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let’s do this more often.” So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve.

Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.

In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.

Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.

The analogy isn’t 100% perfect…but it *is* pretty darn close.

Jason is not 100% Jim McCormick, but he isn’t 0% either.

Today and tomorrow, Yahoo! is hosting the second Open Cirrus Summit, attended by cloud computing thought leaders from around the world. Computer scientists from leading technology corporations, world-class universities, and public sector organizations have gathered in Sunnyvale to discuss the future of computer science research in the cloud. The breadth of the research talent is expanding this week, as the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University officially joins the Open Cirrus Testbed.

Open Cirrus Summit attendees
Image credit: Yahoo Developer Network
View more photos from the Open Cirrus Summit Cloud Research Event @ Yahoo!

The event will feature technical presentations from developers and researchers at Yahoo!, HP, and Intel, along with updates on research conducted on the Testbed by leading universities. Specifically, the Yahoo! M45 cluster, a part of the Open Cirrus Testbed, is being used by researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, and the University of Massachusetts for a variety of system-level and application-level research projects. Researchers from these universities have published more than 40 papers and technical reports based on studies using the M45 cluster in many areas of computer science, with several studies related to Hadoop.

Yahoo! is the world’s largest contributor to Apache Hadoop, and last year we open-sourced a production-ready version of Hadoop, the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop. We’re especially excited that the global community of researchers using Hadoop has expanded because of the Open Cirrus Testbed.

Systems-level research projects on the M45 have included:
• pipelining data between map and reduce stages of Hadoop jobs to improve user interaction
• deploying log-analysis techniques to improve performance of Hadoop clusters
• applying RAID techniques to improve the Hadoop distributed file system

Sample application-level research projects include:
• using the cluster to continuously extract knowledge from Web pages, the Read the Web Project
• experimenting with new natural language processing models
• exploring large-scale graph algorithms
• analyzing Wikipedia group dynamics benchmarking statistical machine translation techniques
• performing large-scale document analysis
• prototyping statistical machine learning algorithms and studying computational sustainability

The Open Cirrus Cloud Computing Testbed is a unique initiative because it enables research beyond the application-level, allowing experimentation with the system software itself. A complete, open-source cloud computing software stack is also emerging from work at Open Cirrus. This stack consists of four layers:
1) Pig, the top layer, is a parallel programming language for expressing large-scale data analysis programs. Pig was designed and developed by researchers at Yahoo! Labs;
2) Hadoop, the layer below Pig, is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that can run Pig/Map-Reduce programs.
3) Tashi, an Apache Incubator project and the layer below Hadoop, is a cluster management system for managing virtual machines;
4) Zoni, the bottom layer, available in the Apache Incubator within Tashi, is a service that manages VLAN-isolated computer, storage, and networking resources.

Pig, Hadoop, Tashi, and Zoni are all open-source projects available for worldwide cloud computing research and experimentation.

Yahoo! has built one of the world’s largest private clouds and uses the cloud to accelerate innovation and improve its consumer and advertiser experiences. Almost every part of Yahoo! now touches the cloud. All of us involved with Open Cirrus are excited to be at the forefront of cloud computing research and proud of the unique contribution of our testbed and our software stack. We look forward with great anticipation to future research from the Open Cirrus team.

Ron Brachman
Vice President, Yahoo! Labs and Research Operations, and Head, Yahoo! Academic Relations