Archive for 'Opinion'

Mar14

Gord Hotchkiss

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A Search History of TED

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze. TED’s Back Story The TED story, for those of you not familiar with it, is pretty amazing. TED was originally held in Monterey in 1984, the brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks. Some of [...]

Mar03

Gord Hotchkiss

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The Nobler Side of Social Media: Voices in a Choir

Last week, I took Social Media to task for making us less social. This week, I’m in Palm Springs for TED Active and on Day One, saw three very real examples of how the Internet is also connecting us in ways we never imagined before. They provided a compelling counterpoint to my original argument. Eric Whitacre is a composer and conductor. In Lux Aurumque (Light and Gold) he conducts a choir singing his original composition. The choir, 185 strong,  never sang together. They never met each other. They live in 12 different countries. Whitacre posted a video of himself conducting [...]

Feb25

Gord Hotchkiss

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How Smart Do We Want Search to Get?

Imagine if a search engine was smart enough to be able to anticipate your needs before you know you need them. There it sits, silently monitoring your every move and just when you get a hankering for Thai food (burbling up to the threshold of consciousness), there it is with the hottest Thai restaurants within a 2-mile radius. You didn’t have to do a thing. It was just that smart! Sound utopian? Then take a moment to think again. Do we really want search to become that smart. Sure, it sounds great in theory, but what would we have to [...]

Feb25

Gord Hotchkiss

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The Paradox of Social Media: The More Social it Gets, The Less Social We Become

I have teenage daughters. At least, I assume they’re still my daughters. They hang around our house and eat our food. But, to be honest, it’s been awhile since we identified ourselves to each other. Between Angry Birds, SMS and Facebook, there’s precious little actual conversing going on in the Hotchkiss household. I barely recognize their faces, lit up as they are by the cool blue digital light of an iPhone screen. I assume that, at times, there’s a living being at the other end of their multi-texting, but I’m not really sure. Yesterday, I overheard this in our lunch [...]

Feb22

Gord Hotchkiss

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A Page from Google’s PR Book

Somehow, I’ve gotten myself squarely in the middle of Bing and Google again. Sometimes I should just keep my big mouth shut. The latest brouhaha is Google’s calling Microsoft a bunch of “cheaters” because they’re copying search results. I called it “silly”. And it is. Pretty much everyone in the search universe (outside Mountain View) agrees that this is much more about Google trying to give Bing a black eye in the media than any serious threat to intellectual property. But somehow, as Google was swinging, they’re the ones that ended up with the shiner. If this were a one-off [...]

Feb04

Gord Hotchkiss

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Google’s Mission and the Economic Colonization of the Web

Aaron Goldman and I agree – it’s time for Google to rethink their mission statement. But we disagree on the reason. Goldman thinks it’s time “to call a spade a spade” and for Google to come clean on their intention to grab as many ad dollars as possible.  From this perspective, the change in the mission statement is really just to better align it with Google’s business. I think “organizing the world’s information” needs to be changed for a different reason. I think there are inherent limitations in it that may serious impact Google’s revenue stream in the future. A [...]

Jan25

Gord Hotchkiss

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The World Out of Context

Did you see Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes? No? Neither did I. Neither did about 98% of the population of North America, according to the ratings numbers. Yet I would bet in the past week that we all knew about it, and we all talked about it. But we’re basing our judgments, opinions and conversations on something we’ve, at best, read online, heard about through the network (virtual or otherwise) or seen on Youtube. We’re experiencing the simultaneous pleasure and pain of Ricky’s Golden Globe Roast through hearsay and sound bites. This isn’t an isolated incident. More and more, [...]

Jan24

Ian Everdell

2

What Star Trek Can Teach Us About Buyer Behavior

The voyages of the Star Trek Enterprise took viewers to distant galaxies, exposed them to alien species, and taught them countless life lessons (right?). But did you know there were also lots of lessons in there about buyer behavior? Allow me to explain… Red shirt, no real purpose = death. Granted, in Star Trek, including an alien battle makes the episode more exciting. But the story line is developed by the main characters, not that ensign you see for 6 seconds before he gets killed. The aliens didn’t have time to deal with insignificant, pointless Away Team members. Think about [...]

Jan14

Chris Pinkerton

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What Search can learn from TV – Part 1

The most popular question in search is “what’s next”? There are thousands of opinions, blogs, studies and even conferences devoted to this very topic. The masses tend to head toward the thought of defining the perfect search experience, or perfect search engine. Is this really what is needed, the perfect search engine? How people access content, and how relevant and current that content is, will be the constant factors in this evolution. But can we actually see into the future by learning from the past? Teach Me, Mr. TV Executive According to the viewership numbers from Nielsen, U.S. Television grew [...]

Jan13

Gord Hotchkiss

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High Risk & High Reward: Fully Engaged Buying

Last week I talked about High Risk/Low Reward purchases and said that when you’re in this quadrant, your “buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards.” True, but at least there is some consistency in the behaviors – risk trumps all. When you’re navigating through a High Risk/High Reward purchase, you can be forgiven for appearing schizophrenic in your decision making process. We swing back and forth from logic to what can only be described as love with the volatility of a pendulum. If ever we were fully engaged in a buying process, this is the time. It’s [...]

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