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October 30, 2006
IT#5: The Value of Social-Networking Sites -gfodell
I was searching Youtube.com for some videos a friend put up of himself and I noticed a few advertisements on the side and corner of the website. I thought to myself, "yeah, I know who Cingular is already, I'm not going to buy the product just because the logo is on a few websites that I visit." I had been doing some research and following the topic for a while, and recalled an article about how Google bought Youtube.com for $1.65 billion dollars. That seemed like an astronomical amount of money for a website with totally free usage, and I didn't see any reason for advertisers to pay the website to have logos and things nobody looks at. Well, apparently I found some people that agree with me. In the article Turning Social Network Traffic into Dollars, Stefanie Olsen cites many reasons why many social networking sites attract millions of users, yet can't find advertisers willing to spend money on them. Reasons she cites are:
- Advertisers don't usually want to associate their brands with sometimes-inappropriate user material.
- Only a very small fraction of the members of sites like myspace.com participate in the "affinity groups" set up to specify target markets
- Some people, like those at the Economist in the article Hanging with the in-crowd. believe that the social networking scene is so competitive, advertisers may be scared that most sites will fail in the long run.
To combat these fears sites like Myspace are taking creative approaches to advertising on their website. For example, companies that want to advertise a new movie can create sites for new movies that other members can visit, or create certain characters from movies that users can interact with, such as Wolverine from the new X-Men movie or game.
Myspace users will then be able to interact with these movie sites/characters, and developers are working on automated instant message systems, so that users can have "conversations" with these characters. I'm guessing this is targeted at a very young demographic, as I couldn’t imagine older users wanting to talk to a program pretending to be Wolverine. However, even with this slightly esoteric appeal these sites could potentially sell anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million according to Myspace.com estimates.
The lack of inflow of advertising dollars has yet to stop big media companies from buying these large social networking sites for large sums of money. As previously mentioned, Google acquired Youtube.com for $1.65 Billion, while News Corp. bought Myspace.com over a year ago for $580 Million. Mixi, the dominant site in Japan, went public last month with a spectacular debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
I wanted to find out why they were worth that much, because the functionality of the site seems quite simple. The majority of the money paid for these sites was to the rights of the established name/community, which makes sense, as names like Myspace and Facebook are recognizable by almost everyone between the ages of 13-25. Personally, I find it difficult to see why you would pay so much money for a business model that has yet to be proven, but apparently these large corporations know something about them that I don't. Only time will tell!
Posted by brennels at 09:13 PM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2006
IT#4: Social Networking privacy issues you may not have considered... -brennels
With the rise of social networking sites, the issue of privacy continues to be a hotly debated topic. Oftentimes the news likes to bring to the forefront issues of stalking and I would be willing to bet a majority of UofM students in any classroom could tell you what the term “facebook stalking” means.
While browsing the net I found two interesting articles one on Xanga and one on Myspace describing ways in which to track who looks at your profile. There are some differences between the two, namely the Xanga one is built into the website, while the Myspace tracker is produced by a third-party company called “Trakzor”. The basic idea behind them is the same however; you can see the profile of everyone who is viewing your page, and you can see how often they have frequented your page. The Trakzor version even gives you an option to track via google maps who has been viewing your page.
While I think these features are helpful if you feel you are being stalked and are concerned about your safety, they raise a couple interesting issues worth think about:
- First of all, although the nature of social networking sites can be debated, it is generally agreed upon that part of their allure draws from their ability for people to easily meet new people. Xanga’s use of an in-site tracking system will undoubtedly affect their site traffic by discouraging people to browse new users, for fear of being labeled as a “stalker”. Myspace traffic will probably not be affected as much, unless they come out with their own in-house software.
- Second, this kind of tracking can be seen as privacy infringement by those who are being tracked. This would be a better argument for those using Myspace because this ability is not promoted by the site, and thus users may be tracked without any knowledge. This is interesting because it is turning the tables on who has privacy concerns. This issue brings up the debate of weather or not a user has the right to pinpoint the home address of everyone that views their page. One on hand it is the user’s personal site, but on the other hand by posting their profile it is public information and there is an ability to make a private profile if someone was really concerned about privacy.
I think this is a debate that isn’t going to end anytime soon, as the growth of social networking sites always carries with it the weight of “privacy”.
Posted by brennels at 02:27 PM | Comments (2)
October 17, 2006
Term Project Announcement
We will be focusing our tagging/blogs for the rest of the semester on Online Social Networking.
Posted by brennels at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
IT#3: Windows Vista and Privacy -gfodell
While searching a popular social website, I was surprised at how much information people put about themselves on the internet and wondered how easy it would be to steal someone's identity. So I started searching articles about identity theft and came across an article about the new Widows operating system called "Windows Vista". The article, titled "20 Reasons Why Windows Vista Will Be Your Next OS., stresses the idea that Microsoft took a huge step forward in the race against Mac and Linux systems for the most secure OS.
There are a couple main things that Vista does to protect users:
- It only allows websites to access the small portion of the harddrive that Internet Explorer 7 runs on. This will theoretically stop spyware and "cookies" from accessing one's information.
- The new IE7 and Outlook Express will scan current websites and link in email and warn users about websites that may be trying to "trick them into revealing personal data.
Vista in the Business World
The major advance Vista has besides the total 3-dimensional GUI is that it incorporates what Microsoft calls "Windows Meeting Space". It allows users to share information, including whole desktops, with other users over a network. This would allow business to standardize their computing and allow their employees to share information very easily. This networking includes video chat, network conferencing, and person-to-person messaging.
Vista also takes graphics and graphical interfaces to the next level. It allows the user, instead of using the menu bar at the bottom of the screen, to have a 3-D view, like this, of all programs for easy, and more fun, organization of running programs. If the desktop is this advanced, I can only imagine what we will be able to do with new multimedia programs like PowerPoint. With the rapid advance of technology, there will likely be many additions to multimedia programs allowing users to produce professional-grade documents, (such as those done by programs like Adobe Acroboat) without having to go outside of Vista. Hopefully it will take things like this to the next level, allowing people to use 3-D graphics in PowerPoint presentations.
There are many other small advances besides improved graphics and security, but overall, it doesn’t seem to me that Vista is going to be a full-fledged new "operating system". It seems more along the lines of updates and modification, much as Windows 98 was to Windows 95 (while Windows 95 was groundbreaking, Windows 98 constituted an update more than a totally new idea). Then again, as the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Only time will tell what impact Vista will have.
Posted by brennels at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2006
IT#2: Competing with Google and Yahoo in Advertising -brennels
This article is about Quigo, a new company that is gaining online advertising business from Google and Yahoo. Quigo’s product is called “AdSonar”, which competes with Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Content Match to come up with advertisements based on the text of a page. ESPN recently announced that it would begin using Quigo’s AdSonar instead of Yahoo’s program, and this has made many people wonder how such a small company can compete with the 2 internet giants.
The two main answers to this question are:
- Quigo is seen as independent rather than competition for many sites. Whereas Google and Yahoo have email/news/videos that compete with traditional news sites, Quigo benefits from only having AdSonar.
- Quigo can focus more intently on specific customers, providing them with more relevant ad placements.
I find this article particularly interesting because I have often been reading a webpage and seen advertiser links that are completely irrelevant and clearly the result of poor algorithms. For example, by looking at the page I mentioned above you can see one of the “advertiser links” is:
Private Label Promotional Lip Balm
Great for promoting your business or event. Use our online label...
logolipbalm.net
Clearly whatever algorithm used to place this ad here used the word “private” from the page’s introduction “Privately held search firm Quigo is….” quite liberally. This is almost laughable and it is unlikely that anyone viewing this article was interested in clicking that link.
It’s good to see that there are more companies trying to break into the online-advertising business, as hopefully through increased competition will become a better overall service. Right now the annoyance of online advertisements is exacerbated when they are completely useless, as in the example above. It would be nice to have a future where the advertisements you see on a page are directly related to your topic and actually of interest.
Posted by brennels at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
IT(Search Tips #2): What kind of information can I find about a website? -brennels
While browsing del.icio.us I found a page entitled “A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available” and was immediately interested. This website has…well…just what it says: a comprehensive list of website statistics. The statistics are broken down into different categories:
- Technical Data
- Ownership/Hosting data
- Statistics/Popularity Data
- Search Engine Indexing Data
- Link Data
- Social-Tagging Data
- Third-Party Trust Metrics
- Important Directory & Site Listings
- Press & Media Mentions
- Alexa Rank - via Alexa (e.g. SEOmoz @ Alexa - 864th most popular site)
- See how popular the site is through Alexa
- See who is looking at Firefox pages through Google Trends
- See who has blogged about it through Bloglines Feed Search
- See what pages are most popular within this website through Yahoo! Site Explorer
- See who bookmarked this site through Del.icio.us
- And my favorite: see how this site looked in the past through the Wayback Machine
Posted by brennels at 06:38 PM | Comments (1)
October 09, 2006
IT (Search Tips #1): The Power of a Single Page -brennels
One of the most useful ways that I found to retrieve relevant/interesting information has not involved a search engine of any type, but instead takes advantage of the wealth of exterior information contained on a single page. (By exterior information I am referring to text/links that are NOT contained within the article)
Some pages are not very conducive to this process while others provide amazing amounts of information, as shown in the following examples:
If you were to come upon this New York Times article you would read about how Myspace has had an emerging trend of older users. Dissecting this page for related info doesn’t prove too fruitful. There are:
- A couple clickable ads that are sponsored by Google, most having nothing to do with Myspace
- ‘Related articles’ centering more around the technology sector in general than Myspace
- ‘Related searches’ which brings up ‘myspace.com, facebook.com, and related social networking sites
It seems as if the related articles/searches are just pages in which ‘technology’ or ‘Myspace’ is a keyword (very broad). Thus, delving deeper into the “emerging trend of older users on Myspace” is difficult to do by looking at just the exterior information on this page. Web-pages similar to this are reasons why people use search engines and other tools to find information. This kind of article is often an end-product, and to find additional information a user must go ‘back’ and keep searching.
However, all pages are not like this. Some pages allow you to explore a wealth of information, and a great one I found is this article about differences between social networking sites. Dissecting this page for related info yields a massive amount of information. Among it are the following:
- Recent entries by the authors of the article
- 5 clickable “trackback” links allowing you to see other people who have referenced this article in their page and what their page is about
- 27 Comments by different users offering up their thoughts/more information
- 5 Clickable links within these 27 comments that reference articles related to this topic
- An option to subscribe to the page comments so that you are alerted every time a comment occurs (keeping you up-to-date on the issue)
- The option to leave your own comments on the subject
As you can see, if you were interested in learning more about the differences between social networking sites, this page wouldn’t serve as an end-product, but rather a springboard to new/relevant information. I personally find that the best way to do this is to use a browser such as Firefox, which allows you to do multiple-tabbed browsing. That way you can click on as many links as you want and navigate through them easily.
Posted by brennels at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2006
IT#1 ESPN cancels Mobile ESPN -bilandre
This blog is in reaction to ESPN pulling the plug on their mobile phone line.
Wow! It seems as if it was only yesterday that I saw the first of many Mobile ESPN commercials, and now, it is getting the boot? The first time I saw an advertisement for Mobile ESPN, I have to admit I was intrigued. The idea was that if you subscribed to the service (for a monthly fee) you would get full access to ESPN.com, video highlights, and real-time scores sent straight to your phone. While I was intrigued the first time I saw this, I quickly realized that one could do essentially the same thing with a Blackberry, Treo, Motorola Q, or a T-Mobile Sidekick by logging into their web browser and accessing ESPN.com. One could do this on their PDA that they already used, on their internet that they already paid for, without being constrained to using Sprint or Nextel (which both seem to be going downhill in recent months). My sense of surprise at the beginning of this blog should not be mistaken for unhappiness regarding the situation, but more for the amount of time, or lack there of, that the “product” was on the market.
To be honest, this failure by ESPN does not really affect me or anybody I know, as I never deliberated in my head whether I would be signing up for this service. I am about as big a fan of the ESPN brand name as can be, but I just found this service, at an additional cost of $40/month, to be unnecessary. You can't blame ESPN, and if I worked there it might be a project I would have been interested in producting, but I feel that they put too much money into this project too quickly, without testing the market enough. Also, the marketing strategies were not necessarily the best way to go, as I got tired of watching the same commercials over and over again on ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN News, and ESPN classic. In the article, it says there is a chance that ESPN will reintroduce this concept once 3G services are the norm, but I don't think they should. It was a gamble that unfortunately failed, but ESPN is so strong in other aspects of media that they should consider this a sunk cost and move on. There are too many cheaper more accessible alternatives to get the same information you’d receive as a customer of ESPN Mobile, and I don’t see this project working (at least at its current price) at any point in the future. ESPN, my advice to you, just keep doing what you have been doing for years, SPORTSCENTER!
Posted by brennels at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2006
Welcome
Term Project Group
Section005 Group136
Authors:
- Brandon Rennels
- Andrew Bilinsky
- Gregory Fodell
Posted by brennels at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
Hardware Questions
1. What hardware differences are there between Intel’s soon to be released “quad core chips” and the existing “dual core chips”, and how do these differences create performance improvements?
Intel's Quad-Core Chips Coming Soon
AMD and Intel have both been working on developing quad-core chips, they say that these chips will be the future of computing. New and faster chips are constantly being developed, but it is difficult to know how these chips work and what improvements there are from one chip to another.
2. Is quantum computing a technical possibility or is this more science-fiction?
The future of computing: Quantum leap
I was reading about the future of computing and came across this article on quantum computing. With the rapid advancements of computers it seems as if anything is possible these days, although it is difficult to tell which of these possibilities are feasible.
3. How does Bluetooth technology work?
Intel Demonstrates New Bluetooth Hardware and Software Technology for the First Time - Company Business and Marketing
Bluetooth technology is growing across the business world, and there are advertisements everywhere for products with Bluetooth, especially products associated with computers and cell phones. This article outlines the beginning of Bluetooth technology and brought the issue to our attention.
4. What is bandwidth?
LIVEWIRE - File-sharing network thrives beneath the radar
This article talks about how file-sharing programs such as BitTorrent use up a large amount of bandwidth (estimates of up to 1/3 of all internet bandwidth), which brings up the question of what bandwidth actually is and how one program can use so much of it.
5. What causes blade servers used in data centers to overheat?
Behold the server farm! Glorious temple of the information age!
I have read about server farms in a business magazine, and this article discusses the growth of server farms and the challenges faced with serve maintenance. Server farms have gained more media attention recently because of rapid expansion of the web (specifically google and Microsoft), and these farms require a lot of maintenance and vast amounts of energy.
6. How does fast FAST (FIX Adapted for Streaming) protocol new data compression technology developed by FIX Protocol Limited Work?
Exchanges Are Adopting the FPL's FAST Protocol to Speed Up Market Data Rates
I was researching technology used in different exchanges and found exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange are adopting FAST protocol to speed up market data rates. Exchanges are looking to reduce bandwidth and easily manage their data, because there is such an increase market volumes and there is more information than ever before.
7. What is the difference between parallel pixel pipelines and parallel vertex processing engines?
The Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money: October 2006
This is part of a description for the Powercolor x800 GTO video card. This article caught my eye because I’ve been interested into PC gaming but never understood the description for graphic cards, which made me an uninformed buyer.
8. How does ‘malicious code’ work?
With Online Friends Like These…
With the expanding popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace, hackers are given new opportunities to infect users’ computers with malicious code. Malicious code is often talked about subject, and there are warnings for it on all anti-virus software, but I don’t know how this code works and how it affects your computer
9. How do the C++ servers incorporating live-live transaction distributed memory work in equity’s trading?
Equities Trading Technology
Sales and trading is an industry of great interest to me. This articles describes the various departments of Goldman Sachs equity trading technology group, GS uses the aforementioned technology in their US shares trading, but I’m not sure how it works/benefits their equity trading.
10. How would a Linux system be transported onto an iPod?
Doctoring an IPod to Run on Linux
After my iPod crashed I was looking at various hacks and came across this page. I know that Linux is an operating system but am unsure of how it works and more specifically, how it would be able to function on an iPod.
Posted by brennels at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)