Google: Power and privacy

A country club on the fringes of London has been the meeting place for all sorts of powerful and interesting people from all over the world for the last two days.

They included political figures like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, business leaders from Sir Richard Branson to Jean-Bernard Levy of Vivendi, media bosses like the BBC's Mark Thompson and Carolyn McCall of Guardian Media Group - and even royalty in the form of Prince Charles and the crown princes of both Spain and Norway.

Who could attract such a crowd? Google, of course. Its annual Zeitgeist event is becoming a rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos for movers and shakers who want to know where the most powerful business on the web is heading.

On the final afternoon, even a few journalists were allowed in for what seemed like a routine demo of products that many of us had already seen - like Google Squared, the "structured data search" which might blow Wolfram Alpha out of the water when it launches, or Gmail Video Chat, which is already out there for anyone to try.

Then, without warning and just as the journalists were in danger of nodding off, two billionaires slipped quietly into the room, and we all perked up. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, and Larry Page, the firm's co-founder, had come to answer our questions..

No, Larry Page revealed, he hadn't tested Wolfram Alpha yet, though his co-founder Sergey Brin had tried the computational knowledge engine - and, of course, any competition was welcome.

Google Video Chat was better quality than Skype and yes, "quite significant" numbers of people were using it - this was Eric Schmidt's response to my sceptical query about the product. Others wanted to know whether Twitter, now increasingly seen as a "breaking news" service by its users, was forcing Google to focus on real-time search.

Larry Page said that speed and relevance were Google's watchwords - the company even gave out stopwatches to its employees to stress that message - but he didn't seem too worried about Twitter.

One subject on just about everyone's mind, however, was privacy. A German journalist appeared particularly concerned that her house could be seen on Street View - to such an extent that Eric Schmidt seemed eager to deal personally with getting it removed.

Street View is just one issue which is helping to crystallise the concerns of both consumers and regulators about the threat which the search giant might pose to privacy. But Larry Page, in particular, seemed determined to prove that he wouldn't let the business be shackled by such concerns.

To the journalists, and later to the whole Zeitgiest crowd during an onstage chat with Eric Schmidt, he enthused about a couple of Google geo-location products: Latitude and an Android application called Tracks, which tell your firends where exactly you are.

And, when asked about EU pressure to reduce the length of time that Google holds on to data, he had a clear riposte. That sort of policy, he explained, could make the data less valuable not just for his company, but for anyone wanting to predict events like a flu pandemic by examining patterns in searches over a long period: "I don't feel the public as a whole and the regulators have engaged in enough of a debate to know what the issues are."

Faced with the prospect of more regulation, guess what? Google thinks that that's a really bad idea. "Historically, when markets get regulated, the rate of innovation slows dramatically," Eric Schmidt told us."We don't think that's a good outcome - we think a better outcome is for us to use good judgement. We take what we see as the consumer interest as our guiding principle."

Google's billionaire bosses are amiable fellows, willing to engage with journalists on just about any issue. But as their company reaches into every corner of our online lives, they are bound to face more questions about how they wield their power. Telling the regulators that Google knows best what's good for consumers may not wash.

There's money to be made from blogging - uh, right?

Late last month Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's notoriously inept campaign pollster, published an article in the Wall Street Journal asserting, "There are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters."

Penn's lunacy, buttressed by the claim that almost half a million Americans used blogging as their primary source of income, prompted howls of derision from bloggers.

"Fantastically bogus and clueless," Mickey Kaus wrote on the Slate website.

But as the ranks of print journalists dwindle, and the army of Lilliputian opinioneers swells, wouldn't it be nice to know if there is money to be made blogging?

I have been monitoring the career of ace Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern, a cast member of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip, whose transition to Internet journalism has been rocky at best. Are there gold nuggets buried in the digital dross?

There is a small aristocracy of early-adopting bloggers who have become successful online publishers, such as Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos or Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. If you can get a media giant such as New York Times Digital or the Atlantic magazine to pay you to blog, good on you. There are well-read academic bloggers such as Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who blogs for free. He writes textbooks, he has a nice day job -- it's all good, as the kids say.

Then there is everyone else. Millions of them.

The website Technorati pegged bloggers' median annual costs at $80 and the median average revenue at $200. Bloggers with advertising spent a mean of $1,800 on their sites and harvested bigger bucks, about $6,000 a year. Enough to feed a family of four. Mice.

How do you make money? By driving traffic to your website.

Web tool 'as important as Google'

A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.

"Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

"Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.

Dr Wolfram said the "trillions of pieces of data" were chosen and managed by a team of "experts" at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.

Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.

Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove 'linguistic fluff'

"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote earlier this year. "It computes answers - it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."

Learning language

The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.

This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.

For example, a relatively simple search, such as "who was the president of Brazil in 1923?", will return the answer "Artur da Silva Bernardes".

This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.

Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people's questions.

"We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case," he said.

In addition, he said, the system had got "pretty good at removing linguistic fluff", the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.

Searching for 'Blair Bush' could give a different result...

Simple text

However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.

"Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say 'I don't need all those extra words'."

Instead they tended to use "concepts" similar to how most people use search engines today.

But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was "disappointed" by Dr Wolfram's "dismissal of English syntax as 'fluff'''.

For example, he said, suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?"

"Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama," he said.

...than searching for 'Bush Blair'

"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."

Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be "the world's first web-based question answering system". It has been on the web since December 1993.

Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.

Dr Katz said it answers "millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world" on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.

It is also able to compute answers from several sources in a similar way to Alpha.

Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.

For example, Powerset uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.

The company is attempting to build a similar search engine "that reads and understands every sentence on the Web".

In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.

Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.

"In a sense we are at the beginning," he said.

What Is The Cheapest Ecommerce/online Payment Service?

For an ecommerce design the first criteria is to identify the market, the competition and the business goals. Accordingly the website can be developed. E-Commerce web design is much more than just putting the company brochure on the net or adding an internet shopping cart to the existing product catalog. You will find many sites on the web that can help with ecommerce and have great web design information.

When designing a ecommerce web site the specific goals have to be identified, determine how best to meet the goals depending on the budget and then find which software to use and services to commission to design the web site.

A business web site can:
• Generate leads. One can pre-sell one’s business services and products to generate telephone; email or online form leads from customers.
• Generate sales quotes. Solicit or generate automated quotes that will generate a customer sale or lead.
• Generate advertising revenue. One should display online content and free services.
• Generate customer traffic. This can be done through search engines and business directories to pre-sell products. Traffic is then redirected to the main web site or product web pages.
• Provide a store front with an ecommerce shopping cart. A catalog that is fully automated with customer purchases and communications processes.

A website may be like a traditional store. But there are more considerations with ecommerce web site design than with a traditional store. The eCommerce website design has to be customer friendly and present a professional image, have a good sales copy and should make it easy for the customer to make the desired response. It should be search engine friendly. Most customers go through search engines like Google, yahoo, MSN, so the strategy should be to generate search engine traffic. For that a search engine optimization expertise is needed.

There are thousands of web site tools like shopping carts, content management systems, payment processors, online bulletin boards and advertising management tools. Some are cheap, others are expensive. Costs are important considerations for any e-Commerce web site design solution. It is possible to purchase web site tools and services by subscription. There is no need to make long term commitments with subscription software or services.

There are a few website design options. You can do it by yourself with web design software like Microsoft FrontPage or outsource the entire web site development to a web design company. If you want to design by yourself then you can buy website templates, web design software and do it or you can buy web solution services. You can also consult a consultant. As with any other business, this also has risks. You have to clearly know your objectives, have enough business knowledge to evaluate web service suppliers and business tools and maintain a positive cash flow.

Earn Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

Many individuals are going into online businesses and online marketing which is known as Internet Marketing (IM) to make money online to supplement main income or depending on IM as a primary source of income.

Why? Because internet marketing offers a lot of benefits! Listed below are some of them:

1.The world is your oyster, you can market your products to anyone who is on the internet. This equates to a wider market base which means more profits.
2.It is much cheaper to set up a business on the internet than it is to set up an actual business establishment.
3.You do not need to have your own products to get started in internet marketing, Many people make a healthy income by just selling other people’s products. This normally requires setting up an agreement with an online retailer or merchant, and once its done, you can immediately start making money by selling the merchant’s or the retailer’s products.

The method of selling other people’s products online is know as affiliate marketing, it is the fastest growing way people make money online. By definition, affiliate marketing is an agreement between both the internet marketer (who wants to sell products) and the online merchant or retailer (who has products to sell)

To start making money online with affiliate marketing, one simply has to sign up as an affiliate with a merchant offering affiliate programs or join an affiliate network where they have many affiliate programs in different categories that you can pick and promote. One such popular network is Clickbank. Many of these affiliate networks are free but some requires you to pay a nominal membership fee.

Some affiliate programs or network will require you to submit your website’s address and description as a verification that your website is active and relevant to their products. Others do not require this verification process and you are free to choose the affiliate program you want to market.

The merchant normally provides his affiliates with banners, text ads or special html codes (linking to the merchant’s site). The affiliates with then place these on his website and earn commissions when targeted traffic or sales are directed to the merchant’s web site.

How do youmake money online with affiliate marketing? It depends on the type of affiliate marketing program you’ve signed up for. Most affiliate marketing programs compensate their affiliates in different ways:

Pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-sale (PPS), or pay-per-lead (PPL). In pay-per-click affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever he directs traffic to the merchant’s site. PPS and PPL affiliate marketing programs work rather differently. In PPS, the affiliate only gets paid when his referral converts into an actual sale. In typical PPS affiliate programs, the affiliate would usually get a commission for each conversion. PPL affiliate programs work the same way, although affiliates are paid a fixed fee whenever his referral converts into a lead for the company.

Some affiliate marketing programs are two-tier programs, wherein the affiliate is also allowed to recommend other affiliates to the merchant. In such affiliate programs, the affiliate would not only be paid for the traffic or sales that he would direct to the merchant’s site but also for the traffic or sales directed by the affiliates who signed up with the program through his recommendation.

Yet another way of earning more profits with affiliate marketing is through residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs are affiliate programs where the affiliate gets paid a number of times for as long as the merchant keeps the customer the affiliate has referred to his site. One form of residual program gets the affiliate paid a commission every time the referred customer purchases something on the merchant’s site. Another form of residual affiliate program gets the affiliate paid a percentage every month for as long as the company keeps the referred customer.

There are many ways one can make money online and affiliate marketing is the most popular method. How much money you can make also depends on your internet marketing and SEO skills. I will be covering the two topics in future articles.