From Battelle’s Search Book:

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate.

Privacy and security is a complex subject.  I would venture, as someone who has gone through a bunch of software license negotiations, that most of the evil comes from clients.  Yes seriously. The vast majority of clients are ethical, but I have heard every request from prospects including "can you automatically make a copy of every inbound and outbound email of xyz person without their knowing" to "I want to install a keystroke logger on the IT managers PC. Can you help me?" and the old standby of "Y’all are great at SEO!  Do you do porn sites? (NO!)"

More recently we sent a fair license agreement to a prospect and they had it reviewed by some piranah lawyer who sent it back with carefully articulate points that basically suggested we just sign over rights to our own heartbeat to them now.  We refused to do business with them.

There are, perhaps, legitimate national security reasons to request data.  Yet Battelle’s point is "we trust you to not do evil things with our information." Evil is of course difficult to define, particularly when it comes to social software which is itself difficult to define.  Interestingly I find myself saying "you can’t define evil when it comes to social software but I know it when I see it."  Go figure.

I was doing research on this tonight to prepare for an interview.  Clearly ICANN is a topic that relates to branding, search engines and technology so I try to keep abreast of the latest.  But I found that research from Google, despite its all powerful status, was not as good for the LATEST information as Technorati.

In Google’s defense, the topic I was looking for was three (3) hours old.  Three hours.  Freshbot can’t keep up.  Technorati did get me to the correct URL for the latest information, or gossip even, on single letter domain names.  That was a cool success.  Google 0, Technorati 1.

… when Google tries to host my content, how much you want to bet they’ll also change what I say by adding links to things they like (for example ads) and removing unnecssary (sic) links (for example, the ones I put there). … Or, perhaps my site won’t be included at all, by some mysterious algorithm (like Google News) not deemed worthy of inclusion.

(link added by me) and http://www.darwinianweb.com/archive/2005/1118.html

Haven’t sites been publishing RSS feeds for years? Yes, but those feeds only included recent items. Google wants ALL of our data.

Google will probably come to their senses, but if ever anyone believed trust wasn’t a big part of branding, google may, or may not, be proving a point in the next year.

I love a PR victory story.  A PR strategy executed without repercussions.  Launch. Sell.  Let google deal with the security concerns. 

Google has purchased Riya based on several accounts.

So, now, in the great convergence, google has inherited both the google-chili-judge-and-entrant problem and the riya-we-don’t-realize-folks-don’t-like-big-brother problem. 

You have to admit, the Internet hasn’t been this fun since 1999.

Google Base

CNN write up: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/11/16/google.base.ap/index.html?section=cnn_tech

I wrote about this previously.

Google as Content Provider

Google originally created a valuable brand through buzz from alpha geeks using a minimalist interface that worked.  It worked, it helped us find stuff, because it leveraged something under the radar which was, at the time, hard to game or trick.  That thing was described as page rank which to oversimplify means links to your web site (content) are votes for your site and therefore the site is probably more relevant.  So links about a topic mean this content is good and you probably want it so we (google) will direct you (you) to it.  They provided a service to help us make the best use of our time seeking stuff.

We cared about google because we lack long attention spans and don’t want to waste time going through 5 pages of search results to get to the answer.  We are smart and impatient and want what we want and we want it now.

[Sidebar: that elephant is Lord Ganesh the Remover of Obstacles which just seemed appropriate for this post]

So google helped us get to our stuff.  But with its success became an awareness of the value of links, which led to over-eager search engine optimization techniques which devalued the very system that created it.  Like a nano-particle, the act of observation changed the object itself.  So google can no longer differentiate based on links and can’t come up with new innovation that doesn’t involve content creation.  This leads to the launch of http://maps.google.com and Google Earth, both of which I love.  They compete with Mapquest, but what do I care if two corporate behemoths fight it out?  Plus Mapquest has been a bit more innovative with a little competition with the traffic overlay for example.  All is good and the consumer overlooks the fact that Google became a content provider.  Their brand equity is still gold.

But the problem lingered in the back of their minds – they are aware of the challenge per this NYT article on Google which quotes them as saying:

"advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

The Gillmor focus on the attention economy

Gillmor, as self righteous as google by design, believes links are dead and that it is all about attention.  Nielsen was right all along, measure what people are watching (this assumes Nielsen is accurate, but stay with me on this one).  Measure what people are paying attention to, and mark that up as what has value.  Links are of course a measurable method of tracking attention but Steve would argue they are one of many.

This attention stuff sounds cool.  But now tell me how YOU got through High School English class?  You were physically there but your attention sure wasn’t.  So physical presence is not an indicator of attention.  What killed the value of links as a differentiator was “awareness of links” causing a devaluation and not necessarily even through abuse. Just being aware of the concept changes our behavior.

To be fair, you CAN measure attention if you have a two way channel with the viewer or participant.  Hence Microsoft’s interest in the attention economy because they provide server and desktop software.  They have both sides of the connection.  (Disclosure the same can be said about our company’s Tendenci software although we only see the server side.)  You can’t measure attention through voluntary disclosure such as attention.xml unless it also includes a toll.

The Collective Action Problem of TIME

Mancur Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups discusses situations where individuals taking action that is in their personal best interest may cause a less than optimized result for the group.  We all have sheep that graze in a pasture until someone buys a bunch of extra sheep and the pasture is ruined from over grazing – is the classic example of a collective action problem.

Mancur believes that for some collective action problems they must be solved with legislation or tolls; appealing to everyone to “do the right thing” is about as effective as an American recycling program.  Collective action problems are system problems and their nature can’t be changed so quit fooling yourself.  Face the facts.  Schools are needed for our kids; we must tax the population to provide the schools so everything doesn’t fall apart after we are dead.  Education is a collective action problem that is solved through taxation.  Roads are crowded so start charging a toll and raise the price of gas.  Problem solved.

Timing is everything.  Bill Gates has a lot of money, but he has limited time.  Time is the be all and end all.  Every religion that had a god visit earth has them constrained by time.  Even Redwood trees can only pay attention for so long before they run out of time.

Time, attention, is by its very nature a collective action problem for the individual.  Everyone is clamoring for your time, your attention, by every means.  This results in over grazing of the individual and the group’s time.  (Please excuse the mixed metaphors – I should have paid more attention in that English class.)

Google as arbiter of time

So google provided the collective action solution, a third party impartial rater of content, albeit measured through links, to help the individual shepherds find a pasture for their sheep that could be grazed.  Their search engine told us how we could spend the next precious 30 seconds looking for an answer to our question that was probably what we wanted.  Google acknowledged that we have limited time on earth, that this was a problem, and provided us a legislative-like solution through governance for the collective action problem of time.

So now Google is being asked by the street for continued growth.  They are looking at content creation.  Blogspot worked out horribly for them when after being purchased it quickly became synonymous for splogs (spam blogs to increase search engine rank).  Blogspot received double hit of no tolls (free) and a conflict of interest in search results with an obvious result.  Now Google, based on the success of Blogspot, has decided to go up against eBay and Craigslist for classified advertisements.  No really, what the hell are they thinking?  SEO’s will post fake classified advertisements all day for the link backs (just ask Craig!). 

The Warren Buffet Results

Mr. Buffet is always said to look at the long term.  So the situation with time, google and collective action has to play out in a number of ways.  Links will keep value, but not as much.  Gillmor is right about attention but will never come up with a clear way to measure or make use of it without endorsing a monopoly that tramples civil rights so his comments are fun, but not actionable.  And google will have to do one of two things:

1. Google gets out of the content creation business.  Realize the dangers as described above, spin off a new company with all that extra IPO money but don’t be ostrich-like and expect their charming brand will solve a problem that has befuddled mankind since the beginning of time.  And that problem is time itself.

   or

2. Google stays in the content creation business, which causes a delayed but inevitable drop in their search engine traffic based on individual’s actions and distrust.  You can’t be a contestant and a judge in the same contest.  It would take a skilled debator to convince anyone that judging your own contest does not constitue "evil".

My advice for a new blogger or content provider is to avoid any google content providing properties like the plague.  You will note this is posted on typepad, not blogger.  I’ll pay money to be associated with quality and to avoid apparent conflicts of interest.  If you believe in the brand that is you, you should too!

Hopefully someone will explain the nature of humans, the concept of time and collective action theory to google before they ruin a perfectly good brand.  Before we all stop paying attention.

Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too

<snip> This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.

I can see the suits on Madison Avenue shaking all the way from Texas.  Happy Halloween guys.  The article goes on to talk about some of the potential conflict ahead.

Not content to just suck advertising dollars from Web search, Google is using its windfall to pay for an eclectic range of ambitious projects that have the potential to radically disrupt other industries. Among other things, it is offering to build a free wireless Internet network in San Francisco, plans to scan nearly every book published and is testing a free classified advertising system it calls Google Base.

CNN also covered Google Base in a very no-nonsense manner pounding home the conflict this will cause with Google’s clients like eBay and Craigslist.  Nothing like a good fight on the horizon.