Tag Archive for google

| January 21, 2013
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Someone is going to get Mendelaid

Have you heard that Elsevier is buying Mendeley? No? Well, that’s probably because you don’t care.

In the hustle of daily start-up takeover news that has been the staple of TechCrunch and Mashable for the last few years, this one is small bikkies. But TechCrunch did report on it, which spurred others to re-report. Then someone started a feedback query in Mendeley protesting the rumour. It has 72 votes so far. Against the supposed $100million payoff, I doubt Mendeley has taken much notice of the protests. Blinded by green, you might call it.

I’m a user of Mendeley, but I’m not overly attached to it. It certainly is the best reference manager I’ve come across, but there are other tools out there, and really, what does it matter what I care about the deal anyway. The whole episode raises some interesting questions about the nature of academic publishing, and the players in that space. Not because Mendeley is “disrupting” academic publishing (according to TechCrunch’s source) but precisely because it isn’t as disruptive as it might be, as some have identified.

Despite my best instincts, I’m about to wade into an ongoing debate I have little expertise in, hopefully wearing all the appropriate personal protective equipment, especially troll-retardant. There is one very disruptive company operating in the publishing and information-sharing and gathering space that could do a very good job at spoiling the party for academic publishers wanting to own their own reference managing company – Google.

Google’s issues with privacy are well-known. Their mantra ‘Do No Evil’ has often been called into question. And, well, they’re a corporate blood-monster desperate to suck up all your spare cash and data and sell it to advertisers. But wait, there’s more: they are also very good at building truly disruptive products in markets they have little business being in. If Tom Tom or Garmin had seen Google Maps coming, investors would have sold out a decade ago. Microsoft’s Hotmail was equally as unprepared for Gmail and Google Apps. And their self-driving car technology has left the established auto-makers at the starting blocks. They haven’t quite cracked the social networking market, but they’ve largely infiltrated it by default anyway. Google Drive, Gmail, Google Plus, YouTube.

Then, there’s Google Scholar. It isn’t linked to from the Google.com homepage anymore, so you might think its on the way out, but Scholar has some very nifty features that could form the basis of a handy reference manager, with the added bonus of native connections to Google Drive. Researchers can already create professional profiles in Google Scholar, download citations to articles in a number of formats, and track the number of citations of particular authors and articles. Add to that the fact that Google is a publisher of new academic research.

Google Plus is already a niche network. It would be pretty simple for Googlers to link Scholar profiles to Plus and organise those connections around disciplines to build out an instant academic social network ready to become a reference manager as well.

Google’s mission is ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Aside from their core search engine, what better fits that mission than user-generated citation lists written by experts?

Category: Media, Social Media, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| December 27, 2011
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Social Networks in the Local Context

Recently, my local newspaper reported breathlessly on the development of a ‘local’ social network by a local web designer. The concept is that businesses will place QR codes on their marketing paraphernalia or in their stores and visitors would scan the codes to join that business in the network. It is an interesting idea, and I try to be supportive of anything that assists local business, but I’m rather sceptical about it.

We live in a unipolar world, and the superpower is Facebook. It has the user base to make it worth investing in for almost any business. That includes, of course, local business. With Facebook Places, Deals and Ads local business can optimise their presence to target and engage local users. Deals is not fully rolled-out in Australia yet, but it is getting there.

Local consumers won’t think to go looking on a standalone network for specials or exclusives, so why would business put themselves there? This point goes for Foursquare too. If you are targeting a geographically defined market, then Foursquare is still highly relevant because its Specials feature is more well-developed and deployed than Facebook’s.

This seems to be the key feature of the tool:

Mr Simpson said the potential would be that someone could walk past a cafe, see a code in the window, scan it with their phone and find they just received a voucher for a half price cup of coffee.

Google Places/Maps and Google Plus give local businesses visibility on the only search engine worth mentioning while Twitter too has solid local search ability. I can’t see the point in developing yet another tool for people to try to understand and use when all of these networks provide better existing functionality.

The developer seems to think Facebook only allows shallow engagement:

On Facebook you can have 12,000 friends, but you don’t really have 12,000 friends

This is a clever straw-man argument. It takes a statement that may or may not be true and uses that to confuse the matter. We aren’t talking about people becoming fans of Facebook pages with this tool. Instead, we’re trying to encourage customers through the door. The best way to do that is to consistently put your brand in front of them and build a positive image. Then, when they do walk past, they’ll also walk in rather than scanning the window to see what freebies they can get. If they the get a freebie by checking in, the bonus for the business is free advertising to the existing customer’s extended networks.

The use of QR codes to direct users to the appropriate website is neither new, nor innovative. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the potential of such tools for local businesses.

I wish the developer well in his efforts to give local businesses effective tools to connect with customers, but I cannot see any value in this particular approach, except for the value to his own company.

Nonetheless, I signed up just to see where it goes, and I encourage you to sign up also, if you’re interested. The website is www.qribit.com.

Developer Tony Simpson demonstrates his new tool

Developer Tony Simpson demonstrates his new tool (image by Southern Highland News)

Category: Business, Community, Social Media | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| December 12, 2011
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Tripping Up

Last year, I signed up to the web service TripIt, which promises to help organise (and share) travel itineraries.

I travel far less frequently than I’d like to, but I love technology and enjoy playing with new tech. So, I signed up to TripIt and downloaded the Android app. At the time, the service asked you to forward emails whenever you wanted it to automatically create an itinerary. I was fine with this, since I figured users have the right to choose which information they share with the service. Nonetheless, I still connected it with my Google Account, trusting it to only access information in the way it said it would. At some point, I suspect TripIt asked me to authorise the change, but it was probably a case of TL;DR, as with most Terms of Service documents.

This week, I received an email from a travel provider with booking information for someone else’s trip. I regularly receive such information because the person in question doesn’t have easy access to email or printers. This person’s security and privacy is very important to me. TripIt promptly scanned the email and imported the details into their service. Not cool.

Obviously, you can say that the whole situation is my fault, since I obviously didn’t look carefully enough at the way TripIt operates before I agreed to use the service. (Who does?) Further, when it at some point asked me to review changes, I didn’t do that properly either. However, when net services rely on trust and handle personal information, they should more carefully consider the needs of users (in this case, for privacy) rather than hiding things away in lengthy TOS.

I haven’t yet deleted TripIt, because I’m still interested in its potential, and I hope to be able to use it a little more in 2012 and beyond. But I have reconsidered the potential dangers of such services. Should I take to using TripIt more often, I will be ensuring I choose what information it accesses, and I will only be sharing itineraries with very trusted people (my partner and my family).

TripIt allows users to disconnect their Google Accounts (I haven’t done so yet because I wanted to see what else would happen, once I was sure the information wasn’t being shared widely). I’ve set up some tests, and I’ll update this post with the results.

Have you had any issues with web services sharing or accessing more data than you realise?

 

UPDATE: TripIt responded to my blog post. You can read their response here.

Category: Social Media, Web | Tags: , , , , , ,
| February 11, 2011
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When Big Media Aren’t the Biggest

This post was written for a uni assignment and I liked it a lot, so I have republished here:

Terry Flew and others have argued that old-world global media companies such as News Corporation, Disney and Time Warner are intrinsically part of, even drivers of, globalisation processes1. They have used media companies that primarily trade in traditional media (such as television, printed newspapers, radio broadcasts and outdoor advertising) to make complex arguments about the infiltration of globalisation processes by the media in general and portray globalisation as a series of processes most easily understood through the prism of the internationalisation of such companies and their media products.

However, these arguments seem to ignore the very existence of prominent media companies that have only come into existence because of globalising influences. Corporations such as Google and Facebook would not exist if not for the internet, which itself is a major characteristic of the era of globalisation. To establish whether Google is indeed a media company, we must only look to their self-proclaimed quest, which is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”2. By organising “the world’s information” and disseminating it, the company is also mediating that information. If we take a media organisation as being one that mediates and disseminates information across vast communication networks, Google is one of the purest examples.

Furthermore, as well as organising and sharing existing information, Google actively contributes to information production. It’s video-sharing site YouTube is probably the most obvious example of this, but Blogger and the Google News services are others. While Google News repackages information produced by others, the ways it is viewed and organised via Google properties demonstrates a productive process. Similarly, Facebook is predicated around creating and sharing information across user networks. Primarily, the information shared on Facebook and many other social networks is relatively personal in nature and intended for a relatively limited audience (the very public nature of such disclosures is a matter for another blog). Nonetheless, it is created by users (who are effectively creating content on behalf of the corporation) and disseminated by the existing structures of the network.

In any discussion of media corporations and globalisation, it is foolish to ignore the very real impact of very large media3 companies that are, by their nature, products of globalisation and clearly contribute a significant amount of media content to the internet.

  1. Flew, T. 2007, ‘Globalization and global media corporations’, in Understanding Global Media, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp66-97. [↩]
  2. Google, 2010, Corporate information, accessed online 01/09/10, available: http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/corporate [↩]
  3. Google is larger than NewsCorp, as shown in respective (linked) Google finance figures for the two [↩]
Category: Media, Uni, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
 

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