The evolution of search will refine the spectrum of quality in media

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Search is not getting better, or it certainly seems that way. In the evolutionary battle between search engines and search engine marketers, the search engines are not keeping ahead, and crap content is finding its way into the top of search results. This makes search users unhappy, opens the way for alternatives to the dominant player in the Western world, AKA Google.

In a blog post on search engine spam by its principal engineer Matt Cutts Google says it is ready to respond, in particular to filtering out low-quality content. He says:

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago.
…
However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months.

To the first point, people’s expectations are continually getting higher, and so they should be. And it turns out that people’s perception that the problem is getting worse is true.

Google’s response is two-fold: cracking down on duplicate content, and downgrading in search results what Google algorithmically determines to be “low quality content”. The video describes Google’s initial changes on this front that happened around 1 May of last year.

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Bring in the serendipity dial – for search, music and beyond

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At the client workshop I ran earlier in the week, I raised the concept of the “serendipity dial” (something I have written about many years ago in the context of creating enhanced serendipity, and more recently asking Last.FM to introduce a serendipity dial.)

Source: sixdegrees.hu Click on the image for a very large size version including artist names.

The image above shows the similarities between different musicians, as determined by the users of Last.FM. If you like an artist, you are very likely to like other artists positioned close by, and far less likely to like artists positioned on the other side of the chart. This is an example of collaborative filtering, whereby many users behaviors can be used to predict what others with similar musical tastes will like.

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Global Talent

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

GLOBAL TALENT

Talent is everywhere. As organizations shift to networks, transcending workplaces, success will be driven by how well they can attract the most talented, those who can choose where, how, and why they work. Real-time translation software will enable true multi-cultural teams. Wealth will flow to the talented, wherever they are.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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The 9 kinds of context that will define contextual search

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Yesterday I did the kick-off presentation and workshop at a strategy planning session of a major online media company. The intent was to provide some different perspectives on trends in digital media as input to their deliberations.

One of the many topics I discussed was the rise of contextual search.

Looking back over the last decade, I think it’s fair to say that the search experience has not evolved much. Sure we’ve had the shift to real-time indexing, experiments with multi-category results, predictive text in the search field, and a few other innovations, but if I was sitting in 2001 wondering how search would develop over the next 10 years I would be sorely disappointed to find out how little actually happened in that time.

Clearly it is a nonsense to always get the same search result, irrespective of who you are and all of the conditions surrounding the search. Yet for all major search engines there is currently minimal difference in the results from the same text string search performed by different people, in different conditions, very likely looking for different things.


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Predictions for media industry in 2011

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On December 30 Gulf News published a compilation of local and worldwide media personalities’ forecasts for the media industry in 2011. Contributors including Bertrand Pecquerie, Director of the World Editors Forum, Kris Viesselman, President and Creative Director of San Diego Union Tribune, and Gilles Demptos, Director of Publications at WAN-IFRA.

This was my contribution:

Ross Dawson
Future Exploration Network, Chairman
I firmly believe that the future of the media industry as a whole is extraordinarily bright. We are discovering quite how media-hungry humans are, and we can now see that business will revolve around the flow of information and ideas. Yet a segment of the media industry — notably some of the newspapers and broadcast TV companies in developed countries — are experiencing severe challenges, not least because they have failed so far to dramatically change themselves to adapt to a new world. My fervent hope is that these organisations take the often radical steps required to transform themselves and grasp the massive opportunities available today to dynamic media participants. Some of these troubled organizations will successfully make the transition. The reality is that more will not. Those media companies that are already thriving, together with a flurry of new start-ups, will participate in creating an entirely new media space, and taking their share of the value from that. Social news curation, crowd sourced journalism, multi-platform distribution, personalized advertising and tablet media will be just some of the key trends shaping the year ahead.

What is the difference between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0?

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There is an interesting Quora discussion going on What are the distinctions between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0? As in most Quora discussions some of the top people in the field have weighed in.

I had to chip in myself – here is my comment.

Business terms have a life of their own, just as the meaning of words evolve depending on social usage. Each of these terms has a different meaning to what they did just a year ago.

I find it interesting that many people seems to think that Enterprise 2.0 is more about technology than business. My standard definition of Enterprise 2.0 has two parts:

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Zeitgeist 2011: anxiety, mobility, blending, indulgence, immersion, wrath, nudity and more

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As you no doubt know, the delightful word “Zeitgeist” comes from the German, meaning ‘spirit of the times’. And in these extraordinary times it is useful to distill the spirits of the day.

As such we have re-created our Zeitgeist for 2011 as a slideshow, as it’s an easier way to digest the 11 themes we put forward.

See the Map and ExaTrends of the Decade for a longer timeframe view forward, as well as the original Zeitgeist document.

The 11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011

View more presentations from rossdawson.

What do you think? What will define the Zeitgeist for the year ahead?

What are the jobs of the future?

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I just did an interview on the industries that will grow and shrink this decade – I’ll provide a link to the story when it comes out if the magazine puts it online, or if not write it up as a blog post later.

It made me remember an interview I did a couple of years for an article on the jobs of the future. They just took a brief quote from my interview:

Futurist Ross Dawson of the Future Exploration Network says that when social networks burst onto the scene, roles as community managers or social network managers became a necessity.

Such roles are still new, he says, but companies and celebrities alike are advertising for professionals to help them manage their consumer and fan online chat.

“You can have thousands of friends on Facebook and MySpace,” Dawson says. “A celebrity will have people that help them manage their MySpace site as they have a lot of people to interact with and not enough time.”

Here is the list of jobs of the future that I told the journalist about:
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Why is the technology world so obsessed with fruit?

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This is a classic. The One Ronnie show on BBC has an awesome skit playing on how current technology is so often described by fruit.

I laughed until I cried.

Random thoughts on changing web platforms and blogging

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I’m back writing on my blog after 2 1/2 weeks break. For the first time ever for my personal blog, I’m using a WordPress interface.

I’ve used several platforms for my blog since I launched in 2002, with the last three years on an increasingly dated version of Movable Type.

So over the holirday period I bit the bullet on technology on several fronts:
* We moved my blog, including over 1,000 posts since 2002, onto WordPress. We currently have 4 Movable Type and 8 or so Worsdpress sites, and are starting to shift to to WordPress only.
* We migrated all the blog comments from Movable Type to Disqus which will be the commenting platform from now.
* We shifted my web host from Media Temple to Rackspace, moving 20 or so websites including blogs, companies, books, events, forums and more.
* We moved all our email over to Google Apps.
* We are about to start using Zoho Projects, having paid for and barely used Basecamp for two years.

I’ll hope to get back later to say a bit more about the reasons for all this. But for now I though I’d share just a few prominent thoughts about the experience.

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