sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

I was just reading through the Google Adwords help when I came across this screengrab from their targetting application. It seems that you can target Google ads by racial or ethnic background.

I’m very interested in whether other people are surprised by this information. I’ve never heard of advertising being targetted like this, as explicitly as this. Perhaps it’s normal in the US market, but for the advertisers I work with in the UK, I’ve never heard of it.

I assume Google are profiling publisher websites rather than their users for this service.

About 20 million people seemed to have made it down to the South Bank this weekend for the Thames Festival, though it doesn’t seem to have got much news coverage. They closed Southwark Bridge on Saturday for a food fair, and it was so busy they had to stop people going up the steps from the Embankment. A highlight was the Transe Express performance, in which several crazy musicians and trapeze artists were suspended in a metal contraption with winches and pullies, to play some drums and bells. Very odd.

I’ve been having a conversation with a colleague at Agency.com about whether Facebook has established such a dominant position as the community site to use, that it won’t be knocked off that position. The idea we’re discussing is that so many people now use Facebook, that the hassle of moving would be too great for anyone, and the open application platform they’ve rolled out means that much future innovation will happen inside Facebook in future, rather than on new platforms.

I have a long-standing scepticism about dominant trends. Altavista used to be the top search engine, and IBM used to make all the PCs. I don’t think there are many unassailable positions in business, especially in a space as innovative as the Internet.

Yesterday I was reminded of the reason for my scepticism. I went to an event organised by the British Computer Society, about the next 50 years of technology. All sorts of exciting things are coming (including personal jet-packs, of course) and some of these will make serious impacts on our lives. Some of them, like the super-exponential increase in computing power and Internet bandwidth, will drive incredible innovations that we are only starting to see today. Video, interactivity, mobile, device convergence will all be important drivers for change

This is great if you work in digital business, but what has it got to do with Facebook? The answer is that all this innovation is going to lead to new social ideas, structures, devices that we can’t imagine today. Some of them will come this year or next year. And Facebook has as little chance, or as much, as anyone else of creating those innovations. In fact, because they have an operational business to manage and grow, their chances of innovating might even be lower than those of a couple of kids in a garage somewhere.

So if you’re thinking you’d never be able to survive without Facebook, it’s only a matter of time.

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This is a movie of slides plus video from my presentation last Thursday. It was weird spending so much time listening to myself speaking again when I made this: I hope it sounds better to you than it did to me!

I participated in a discussion last night about property and web 2.0, sponsored by my friends at Zoomf.com. I presented a personal view of what we mean by web 2.0, and Mike Carter spoke about how it’s impacting the property business here and in the US. We were joined by Andy Etches from Brightsale and Ben Brandt from Rat & Mouse, the popular London property blog. Annie Turner from GoMoNews hosted the conversation and it was a very enjoyable evening.

I never know what to expect from panel discussions. Last night I felt I was involved in a discussion about a rapidly changing business, which isn’t totally sure where it’s going to end up. Read more »

Lots of people will already know that a lot of spam is sent from machines (sometimes called zombies, but mostly people using them are quite unaware) that have had a virus installed on them. This is common because it makes it harder for anti-spam software to spot which machines are sending what spam, and because sending lots of spam takes lots of computing power. Writing viruses that create zombies that send spam is a lot cheaper than buying lots of machines.

Lots of people are probably also aware that much spam is concentrated on the sale of drugs that help with sexual performance, including the famous Viagra tablet. For some reason, cheap viagra (which is mostly fake anyway, I’ve read) sells better than other things that spam emails are promoting.

Viagra is made by Pfizer, and a report just out (thanks to the Register for the story) has shown that a lot of the Viagra spam is coming from zombie machines inside Pfizer. They don’t even know they’re sending it, apparently. Though I guess they do by now. So the guys that make Viagra, have had their machines taken over by criminals, who are using them to sell Viagra

The Internet really is all about unintended consequences, isn’t it?

In June I wrote about technology that is analysing music for record companies, and suggested that it would also be really useful in search and recommendation for end-users like us. Last.FM have just launched a version of their software that uses the same principals for track recognition, and the details are at Blognation. This isn’t the best application for the technology.

What I’d like is for Last.FM to create an audio fingerprint for each track they stream to users, and then use that to create better recommendations. When users “love” or “ban” tracks, Last.FM could use the preferences and the fingerprints to try to find music with similar characteristics, to play more tracks like the loved ones, and less tracks like the banned ones.

That would help me discover music I had no chance of finding before, as a natural extension to the collaborative filtering they currently use. Playing me tracks that other people love, when those people love the same tracks as me, is helpful, but it needs huge quantities of data to be really useful, and isn’t therefore much help with the long tail. If a track only gets played 5 times a day, the fingerprint will be a lot more interesting than the ratings, and recommending similar tracks with similar fingerprints would be great.

Instead, what they’re doing is using the fingerprint to identify a track, then picking up the user’s tagging data to improve their own. Users play their own music (in itunes, for example) and Last.FM fingerprint it. They then upload the user’s tags from their own music, and apply them to music on their database. Effectively, they’re using the technology to enhance their own music tagging data.

A nice idea, but not the one I’d really like them to build.

I’m one of the panelists at tomorrow night’s seminar on Property and Web 2.0, hosted by Zoomf.com. There are a few spaces left, I gather. I’m giving an overview of what web 2.0 is, Mike Carter’s going to apply that to the property market, and the other panellists will be introducing their work as well. Then Annie Turner from GoMoNews will chair a discussion. I’m expecting an interesting debate about how the property business can make the most of all that web 2.0 stuff.

We’ll be recording it all for later podcast.

at http://blog.markhopwood.com/i_love_web_2point0/