Category Archives: Privacy

Ex Machina’s Script for Our Future

One of the more interesting movies I’ve watched in the past year has been Ex Machina. Unlike the abysmally disappointing Transcendence (how can you screw up Kurzweil – for God’s sake), Ex Machina is a tightly directed, frighteningly claustrophobic sci-fi thriller that peels back the moral layers of artificial intelligence one by one.

If you haven’t seen it, do so. But until you do, here’s the basic set up. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer at a huge Internet search company called Blue Book (think Google). He wins a contest where the prize is a week spent with the CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) at his private retreat. Bateman’s character is best described as Larry Page meets Steve Jobs meets Larry Ellison meets Charlie Sheen – brilliant as hell but one messed up dude. It soon becomes apparent that the contest is a ruse and Smith is there to play the human in an elaborate Turing Test to determine if the robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) is capable of consciousness.

About half way through the movie, Bateman confesses to Smith the source of Ava’s intelligence “software.” It came from Blue Book’s own search data:

‘It was the weird thing about search engines. They were like striking oil in a world that hadn’t invented internal combustion. They gave too much raw material. No one knew what to do with it. My competitors were fixated on sucking it up, and trying to monetize via shopping and social media. They thought engines were a map of what people were thinking. But actually, they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse, response. Fluid, imperfect. Patterned, chaotic.”

As a search behaviour guy – that sounded like more fact than fiction. I’ve always thought search data could reveal much about how we think. That’s why John Motavalli’s recent column, Google Looks Into Your Brain And Figures You Out, caught my eye. Here, it seemed, fiction was indeed becoming fact. And that fact is, when we use one source for a significant chunk of our online lives, we give that source the ability to capture a representative view of our related thinking. Google and our searching behaviors or Facebook and our social behaviors both come immediately to mind.

Motavalli’s reference to Dan Ariely’s post about micro-moments is just one example of how Google can peak under the hood of our noggins and start to suss out what’s happening in there. What makes this either interesting or scary as hell, depending on your philosophic bent, is that Ariely’s area of study is not our logical, carefully processed thoughts but our subconscious, irrational behaviors. And when we’re talking artificial intelligence, it’s that murky underbelly of cognition that is the toughest nut to crack.

I think Ex Machina’s writer/director Alex Garland may have tapped something fundamental in the little bit of dialogue quoted above. If the data we willingly give up in return for online functionality provides a blue print for understanding human thought, that’s a big deal. A very big deal. Ariely’s blog post talks about how a better understanding of micro-moments can lead to better ad targeting. To me, that’s kind of like using your new Maserati to drive across the street and visit your neighbor – it seems a total waste of horsepower. I’m sure there are higher things we can aspire to than figuring out a better way to deliver a hotels.com ad. Both Google and Facebook are full of really smart people. I’m pretty sure someone there is capable of connecting the dots between true artificial intelligence and their own brand of world domination.

At the very least, they could probably whip up a really sexy robot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Era of Amplification

First published in Mediapost’s Search Insider, May 1, 2014

AmandaToddVideoMediapost columnist Joseph Jaffe wrote a great piece Tuesday on the Death of Anonymity. He shows how anonymity in the era of digital has become both a blessing and a curse, leading to an explosion of cowardly, bone-headed comments and cyber-bullying.  This reinforces something I’ve said repeated: technology doesn’t change human behavior; it just enables it in new ways. Heroes will find new ways to be heroes, and idiots will find new ways to be idiots.

But there is something important happening here. It’s not that technology is making us meaner, more cowardly or more stupid. I grew up with bullies, my father grew up with bullies and his father grew up with bullies. You could trace a direct line of bullies going back to the first time our ancestors walked erect, and probably further than that. So what’s different today? Why do we now need laws against cyber-bullying?

It’s because we now live in a time of increased amplification. The waves that spread from an individual’s actions go farther than ever before.  Technology increases the consequences of those actions.  A heroic act can spread through a network and activate other heroes, creating a groundswell of heroism. Unfortunately, the flip side is also true – bullying can begat more bullying. The viral spread of bullying that technology enables can make the situation hopeless for the victim.

Consider the case of Amanda Todd, a grade 10 student from Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada. Todd had been bullied for over a year by a guy who wanted “a show”. She finally relented and flashed her breasts. While not advisable, Todd’s actions were not that unusual. She wasn’t the first 15 year-old to experiment with a little sexual promiscuity after prolonged male pleading. It certainly shouldn’t have turned into a death sentence for Todd. But it did – because of amplification.

First of all, Todd’s tormentor was a man who lived thousands of miles away, in Holland. They never met. Secondly, Todd’s indiscretion was captured in a digital picture and was soon circulated worldwide. As teen-agers have been since time began, Todd was mercilessly teased. But it wasn’t just at the hands of a small circle of bullies at her high school. Taunts from around the world came from jerks who jumped on the bandwagon. A teen-ager’s psyche is typically a fragile thing, and the amplitude of that teasing was psychologically crushing for Todd. Desperate for escape, she first recorded a plea for understanding that she posted online, and then took her own life. The act that started all this should have been added to that pile of minor regrets we all assemble in our adolescence. It should not have ended the way it did. Unfortunately, Todd was a victim of amplification.

My wife and I have two daughters, one of which is about the same age as Todd. Because they grew up in the era of Amplification, we pounded home the fact that anything captured online can end up anywhere. You just can’t be careless, not even for the briefest of moments. But, of course, teenagers are occasionally careless. It’s part of the job description. They’re testing the world as a place to live in – experimenting with what it means to be an adult –  and mistakes are inevitable. Unfortunately, the potential price to be paid for those mistakes has been raised astronomically.

Here’s perhaps the most frightening thing about this. Todd’s Youtube video has been seen over 17 million times, so it too has been amplified by technology. Amanda’s story has spread through the world online. The vast majority of comments are those you would hope to see – expressions of sympathy, support, understanding and caring. But there are a handful of hateful comments of the sort that drove Todd to suicide. Technology allows us to sort and filter for negativity. In other words, technology allows bullies to connect to bullies.

In social networks, there is something called “threshold-limited spreading.” Essentially, it means that for something to spread through a network, the number of incidences needs to reach a certain threshold. In the case of bullying, as in the case of rioting or social movements, the threshold depends on the connections between like-minded individuals. If bullies can connect in a cluster, they draw courage from each other. This can then trigger a cascade effect, encouraging those “on the margin” to also engage in bullying. Technology, because of its unique ability to enable connections between those who think alike, can trigger these cascades of bullying. It doesn’t matter if the ratio of positive to negative is ten to one or even one hundred to one. All that matters is there are a sufficient number of negative comments for the would-be bully to feel that he or she has support.

I don’t know what the lasting impact of the Era of Amplification will be.  I do know that Technology has made the world a much more promising place than it was when I was born. I also know it’s made it much crueler and more frightening.  And it’s not because of any changes in who we are. It’s because the ripples of our actions now can spread further than we can even imagine.

Who Owns Your Data (and Who Should?)

First published January 23, 2104 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Lock backgroundLast week, I talked about a backlash to wearable technology. Simon Jones, in his comment, pointed to a recent post where he raised the very pertinent point – your personal data has value. Today, I’d like to explore this further.

I think we’re all on the same page when we say there is a tidal wave of data that will be created in the coming decade. We use apps – which create data. We use/wear various connected personal devices – which create data. We go to online destinations – which create data. We interact with an ever-increasing number of wired “things” – which create data. We interact socially through digital channels – which create data.  We entertain ourselves with online content – which creates data. We visit a doctor and have some tests done – which creates data. We buy things, both online and off, and these actions also create data. Pretty much anything we do now, wherever we do it, leaves a data trail. And some of that data, indeed, much of it, can be intensely personal.

As I said some weeks ago, all this data is creating a eco-system that is rapidly multiplying and, in its current state, is incredibly fractured and chaotic. But, as Simon Jones rightly points out, there is significant value in that data. Marketers will pay handsomely to have access to it.

But what, or whom, will bring order to this chaotic and emerging market? The value of the data compounds quickly when it’s aggregated, filtered, cross-tabulated for correlations and then analyzed. As I said before, the captured data is its fragmented state is akin to a natural resource. To get to a more usable end state, you need to add a value layer on top of it. This value layer will provide the required additional steps to extract the full worth of that data.

So, to retrace my logic, data has value, even in it’s raw state. Data also has significant privacy implications. And right now, it’s not really clear who owns what data. To move forward into a data market that we can live with, I think we need to set some basic ground rules.

First of all, most of us who are generating data have implicitly agreed to a quid pro quo arrangement – we’ll let you collect data from us if we get an acceptable exchange of something we value. This could be functionality, monetary compensation (usually in the form of discounts and rewards), social connections or entertainment. But here’s the thing about that arrangement – up to now, we really haven’t quantified the value of our personal data. And I think it’s time we did that. We may be trading away too much for much too little.

To this point we haven’t worried much about what we traded off and to whom because any data trails we left have been so fragmented and specific to one context, But, as that data gains more depth and, more importantly, as it combines with other fragments to provide much more information about who we are, what we do, where we go, who we connect with, what we value and how we think, it becomes more and more valuable. It represents an asset for those marketers who want to persuade us, but more critically, that data -our digital DNA – becomes vitally important to us. In it lays the quantifiable footprint of our lives and, like all data, it can yield insights we may never gain elsewhere. In the right hands, it could pinpoint critical weaknesses in our behavioral patterns, red flags in our lifestyle that could develop into future health crises, financial opportunities and traps and ways to allocate time and resources more efficiently. As the digitally connected world becomes denser, deeper and more functional, that data profile will act as our key to it. All the potential of a new fully wired world will rely on our data.

There are millions of corporations that are more than happy to warehouse their respective data profiles of you and sell it back to you on demand as you need it to access their services or tools.  They will also be happy to sell it to anyone else who may need it for their own purposes. Privacy issues aside (at this point, data is commonly aggregated and anonymized) a more fundamental question remains – whose data is this? Whose data should it be? Is this the reward they reap for harvesting the data? Or because this represents you, should it remain your property, with you deciding who uses it and for what?

This represents a slippery slope we may already be starting down.  And, if you believe this is your data and should remain so, it also marks a significant change from what’s currently happening. Remember, the value is not really in the fragments. It’s in bringing it together to create a picture of who you are. And we should be asking the question – who should have the right to create that picture of you – you – or a corporate data marketplace that exists beyond your control ?

The Inevitable Wearable Technology Backlash

First published January 16, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

piem-1024x705Okay, I’ve gone on record – I think wearable technology is a huge disruptive wave currently bearing down on us. Accept it.

And I’ve also said that stupid wearable technology is inevitable. Accept that as well.

It appears that this dam is beginning to burst.

Catharine Taylor had a humorous and totally on-point reaction to the “tech-togs” that were unveiled at CES. Her take: “Thanks but no thanks”

Maarten Albarda a similar reaction to his first go-around with Google Glass – “Huh?”

Look – don’t get me wrong. Wearable technology, together with the “web of everything,” will eventually change our lives, but most of us won’t be going willingly. We’re going to have to get through the “bubble of silliness” first. Some of this stuff will make sense and elicit a well-earned “Cool” (or “Dope” or “Sick” or what ever generational thumbs-up is appropriate). Other things will garner an equally well-earned WTF? And some will be imminently sensible but will still end up being tossed out with the bathwater anyway.

Rob Garner always says “adoption follows function” This is true, but each of us has different thresholds for what we deem to be functional. If technology starts moving that bar, we know, thanks to the work of Everett Rogers and others, that the audience’s acceptance of that will follow the inevitable bell curve. Functionality is not equal in the eyes of all beholders.

The other problem with these new interfaces with technology is that function is currently scattered around like a handful of grass clippings in the wind. Sure, there are shards of usefulness, but unless you’re willing to wear more layers of wearable tech than your average early adopting Eskimo (or, as we say here in the politically correct north – Inuit), it’s difficult to see how this can significantly improve our day-to-day lives.

The other thing we have to grapple with is what I would call the WACF – The Weird and Creepy Factor. How exactly do we feel about having the frequency of our butt imprinting our sofa, our bank balance, our blood pressure and our body fat percentage beamed up to the data center of a start up we’d never heard of before last Friday? I’m an admitted early adopter and I have to confess – I’m not ready to make that leap right now.

It’s not just the privacy of my personal data that’s holding me back, although that is certainly a concern. Part of this goes back to something I talked about a few columns back – the redefinition of what it means to “be” online rather than “go” online. With wearable technology, we’re always “on” – plugged into the network and sharing data whether we’re aware of it or not.  This requires us with a philosophical loss of control. Chances are that we haven’t given this a lot of rational consideration, but it contributes to that niggling WACF that may be keeping us from donning the latest piece of wearable tech.

Eventually, the accumulated functionality of all this new technology will overcome all these barriers to adoption, but we will all have differing thresholds marking our surrender to the inevitable.  Garner’s assertion that adoption follows function is true, but it’s true of the functional wave as a whole and in that wave there will be winners and losers. Not all functional improvements get adopted. If all adoption followed all functional improvements, I’d be using a Dvorak keyboard right now. Betamax would have become the standard for videocassettes. And we’d be conversing in Esperanto. All functional improvements – all casualties to an audience not quite ready to embrace them.

Expect more to come.

Viewing the World through Google Colored Glass

First published March 7, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Let’s play “What If” for a moment. For the last few columns, I’ve been pondering how we might more efficiently connect with digital information. Essentially, I see the stripping away of the awkward and inefficient interfaces that have been interposed between that information and us. Let’s imagine, 15 years from now, that Google Glass and other wearable technology provides a much more efficient connection, streaming real-time information to us that augments our physical world. In the blink of an eye, we can retrieve any required piece of information, expanding the capabilities of our own limited memories beyond belief. We have perfect recall, perfect information — we become omniscient.

To facilitate this, we need to move our cognitive abilities to increasingly subterranean levels of processing – taking advantage of the “fast and dirty” capabilities of our subliminal mind. As we do this, we actually rewire our brains to depend on these technological extensions. Strategies that play out with conscious guidance become stored procedures that follow scripts written by constant repetition. Eventually, overtraining ingrains these procedures as habits, and we stop thinking and just do. Once this happens, we surrender much of our ability to consciously change our behaviors.

Along the way, we build a “meta” profile of ourselves, which acts as both a filter and a key to the accumulated potential of the “cloud.” It retrieves relevant information based on our current context and a deep understanding of our needs, it unlocks required functionality, and it archives our extended network of connections. It’s the “Big Data” representation of us, condensed into a virtual representation that can be parsed and manipulated by the technology we use to connect with the virtual world.

In my last column, Rob Schmultz and Randy Kirk wondered what a world full of technologically enhanced Homo sapiens would look like. Would we all become the annoying guy in the airport that can’t stop talking on his Bluetooth headset? Would we become so enmeshed in our digital connections that we ignore the physical ones that lie in front of our own noses? Would Google Glass truly augment our understanding of the world, or iwould it make us blind to its charms? And what about the privacy implications of a world where our every move could instantly be captured and shared online — a world full of digital voyeurs?

I have no doubt that technology can take us to this not-too-distant future as I envisioned it. Much of what’s required already exists. Implantable hardware, heads up displays, sub-vocalization, bio-feedback — it’s all very doable. What I wonder about is not the technology, but rather us. We move at a much slower pace.  And we may not recognize any damage that’s done until it’s too late.

The Darwinian Brain

At an individual level, our brains have a remarkable ability to absorb technology. This is especially true if we’re exposed to that technology from birth. The brain represents a microcosm of evolutionary adaption, through a process called synaptic pruning. Essentially, the brain builds and strengthens neural pathways that are used often, and “prunes” away those that aren’t. In this way, the brain literally wires itself to be in sync with our environment.

The majority of this neural wiring happens when we’re still children. So, if our childhood environment happens to include technologies such as heads-up displays, implantable chips and other direct interfaces to digital information, our brains will quickly adapt to maximize the use of those technologies. Adults will also adapt to these new technologies, but because our brains are less “plastic” than that of children, the adaption won’t be as quick or complete.

The Absorption of Technology by Society

I don’t worry about our brain’s ability to adapt. I worry about the eventual impact on our society. With changes this portentous, there is generally a social cost. To consider what might come, it may be beneficial to look at what has been. Take television, for example.

If a technology is ubiquitous and effective enough to spread globally, like TV did, there is the issue of absorption. Not all sectors of society will have access to the technology at the same time. As the technology is absorbed at different rates, it can create imbalances and disruption. Think about the societal divide caused by the absorption of TV, which resulted in completely different information distribution paradigm. One can’t help thinking that TV played a significant role in much of the political change we saw sweep over the world in the past 3 decades.

And even if our brains quickly adapt to technology, that doesn’t mean our social mores and values will move as quickly. As our brains rewire to adapt to new technologies our cultural frameworks also need to shift. With different generations and segments of society at different places on the absorption curve, this can create further tensions. If you take the timeline of societal changes documented by Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone” and overlay the timing of the adoption of TV, the correlation is striking and not a little frightening.

Even if our brains have the ability to adapt to technology, it isn’t always a positive change. For example, there is compelling evidence that early exposure to TV has contributed to the recent explosion of diagnosed ADHD and possibly even autism.

Knowing Isn’t Always the Same as Understanding

Finally, we have the greatest fear of Nicholas Carr:  maybe this immediate connection to information will have the “net” effect of making us stupid — or, at least, more shallow thinkers. If we’re spoon-fed information on demand, do we grow intellectually lazy? Do we start to lose the ability to reason and think critically? Will we swap quality for quantity?

Personally, I’m not sure Carr’s fears are founded on this front. It may be that our brains adapt and become even more profound and capable. Perhaps when we offload the simple journeyman tasks of retrieving information and compiling it for consideration to technology, our brains will be freed up to handle deeper and more abstract tasks. The simple fact is, we won’t know until it happens. It could be another “Great Leap Forward,” or it may mark the beginning of the decline of our species.

The point is, we’ve already started down the path, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll retreat at this point. I suppose we have no option but to wait and see.

A Decade with the Database of Intentions

First published September 27, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s been over 10 years since John Battelle first started considering what he called the “Database of intentions.” It was, and is:

The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

When Battelle considered the implications, it overwhelmed him. “Once I grokked this idea (late 2001/early 2002), my head began to hurt.” Yet, for all its promise, marketers have only marginally leveraged the Database of Intentions.

In the intervening time, the possibilities of the Database of Intention have not diminished. In fact, they have grown exponentially:

My mistake in 2003 was to assume that the entire Database of Intentions was created through our interactions with traditional web search. I no longer believe this to be true. In the past five or so years, we’ve seen “eruptions” of entirely new fields, each of which, I believe, represent equally powerful signals – oxygen flows around which massive ecosystems are already developing. In fact, the interplay of all of these signals (plus future ones) represents no less than the sum of our economic and cultural potential.

Sharing Battelle’s predilection for “Holy Sh*t” moments, a post by MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan this Tuesday got me thinking again about Battelle’s “DBoI.” A recent study by Google and EA showed that using search data can predict 84% of video game sales.  But the data used in the prediction is only scratching the surface of what’s possible. Adam Stewart from Google hints at what might be possible, “Aside from searches, Google plans to build in game quality, TV investment, online display investment, and social buzz to create a multivariate model for future analysis.”

This is very doable stuff. All we need to create predictive models that match (and probably far exceed) the degree of accuracy already available. The data is just sitting there, waiting to be interpreted. The implications for marketing are staggering, but to Battelle’s point, let’s not be too quick to corral this simply for the use of marketers. The DBoI has implications that reach into every aspect of our society and lives. This is big — really big! If that sounds unduly ominous to you, let me give you a few reasons why you should be more worried than you are.

Typically, if we were to predict patterns in human behavior, there would be two sources of signals. One comes from an understanding of how humans act. As we speak, this is being attacked on multiple fronts. Neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and a number of other disciplines are rapidly converging on a vastly improved understanding of what makes us tick. From this base understanding, we can then derive hypotheses of predicted behaviors in any number of circumstances.

This brings us to the other source of behavior signals. If we have a hypothesis, we need some way to scientifically test it. Large-scale collections of human behavioral data allow us to search for patterns and identify underlying causes, which can then serve as predictive signals for future scenarios. The Database of Intentions gives us a massive source of behavior signals that capture every dimension of societal activity. We can test our hypotheses quickly and accurately against the tableau of all online activity, looking for the underlying influences that drive behaviors.

At the intersection of these two is something of tremendous import. We can start predicting human behavior on a massive scale, with unprecedented accuracy. With each prediction, the feedback loop between qualitative prediction and quantitative verification becomes faster and more efficient. Throw a little processing power at it and we suddenly have an artificially intelligent, self-ssimproving predictive model that will tell us, with startling accuracy, what we’re likely to do in the future.

This ain’t just about selling video games, people. This is a much, much, much bigger deal.

Captiva: 27 Days and Counting

First published April 7, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As of today, we’re  27 days away from the kick-off of the Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Fla. Yesterday, after several weeks of going through pitches, we locked down the agenda.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, we’re trying to put a little more vertical in our perspective for this summit, taking our view to a higher level than is typical at most search-based conferences. The theme is Re:Invention, with sessions on the Re:Invention of Marketing, Organizations, Customers, the Search Experience and pretty much everything else.

The format is the same we field-tested last spring — think TED for Search.  In total we have 39 sessions spread over the 3 days, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes each. I’ve asked presenters to be thought-provoking, future-focused — and, if appropriate, even controversial. For those three days, we’ll ponder how everything we know may be reinvented in the very near future and what it means for each of us.

We’ve worked to bring different perspectives to the stage. We have publishers speaking (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook will all be there), as well as agencies, academics (Wharton and Ball State) and a few vendors. But we also have marketers. In fact, almost 20% of our agenda is marketers talking specifically about their experiences and their view of the future, including presenters from IBM, 3M and Logitech.

Over the next few columns (with the exception of next week, but more on that then), I’m going to spotlight some of the presentations that will take the stage at Captiva:

Sharon Drew Morgen: Buying FacilitationTM: A New Sales Paradigm

I met Sharon Drew Morgan (virtually) last year and was instantly astonished by the clarity of her view of the sales process. Sharon has been working on understanding the decision process of buyers for most of her professional life. Her Buying Facilitation approach is one of those astoundingly logical frameworks that almost everyone overlooks. I guarantee it will forever change how you think about marketing, nurturing and sales.

Roger Dooley: Neuromarketing: The Brain on “Buy” 

Neurosciencemarketing.com is one of my “must read” blogs. Its author, Roger Dooley, has been covering the science of neuromarketing pretty much from day one.  We share a fascination for how the brain works, especially in a marketing context. Roger will bring us up to speed on where neuromarketing is at these days, and speculate on how it might reinvent marketing in the future.

Aaron Goldman, Craig Danuloff and Matt Lawson – The Slippery Slope of Privacy 

These are actually three presentations with one common theme: What are the implications of privacy, and how will it impact advertising? Fellow Search Insider (and rapper) Aaron Goldman kicks off with exploring the differences between privacy and personalization. Then Craig Danuloff unpacks a fascinating idea we chatted about recently at another show: how might your digital “footprint” change the way we look at personalized marketing? Finally, Marin’s Matt Lawson explores Apple’s view of privacy, a timely conversation considering how intimate we’re getting with the company’s various devices.

Of course, as with every Summit, it’s not so much what happens on the stage as what happens off it that defines the value of the show. Count on departing Saturday feeling challenged and better connected than ever.

Our Indelible Lives

First published June 3, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s been a fascinating week for me. First, it was off to lovely Muncie, Ind. to meet with the group at the Center for Media Design at Ball State University. Then, it was to Chicago for the National Business Marketing Association Conference, where I was fortunate enough to be on a panel about what the B2B marketplace might look like in the near future. There was plenty of column fodder from both visits, but this week, I’ll give the nod to Ball State, simply because that visit came first.

Our Digital Footprints

Mike Bloxham, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks (the last two joined us for our most recent Search Insider Summit) were gracious hosts, and, as with last week (when I was in Germany) I had the chance to participate in a truly fascinating conversation that I wanted to share with you. We talked about the fact that this generation will be the first to leave a permanent digital footprint. Mike Bloxham called it the Indelible Generation. That title is more than just a bon mot (being British, Mike is prone to pithy observations) — it’s a telling comment about a fundament aspect of our new society.

Imagine some far-in-the-future anthropologist recreating our culture. Up to this point in our history, the recorded narrative of any society came from a small sliver of the population. Only the wealthiest or most learned received the honor of being chronicled in any way. Average folks spent their time on this planet with nary a whisper of their lives recorded for posterity. They passed on without leaving a footprint.

Explicit and Implicit Content Creation

But today — or if not today, certainly tomorrow — all of us will leave behind a rather large digital footprint. We will leave in our wake emails, tweets, blog posts and Facebook pages. And that’s just the content we knowingly create. There’s a lot of data generated by each of us that’s simply a byproduct of our online activities and intentions. Consider, for example, our search history. Search is a unique online beast because it tends to be the thread we use to stitch together our digital lives. Each of us leaves a narrative written in search interactions that provides a frighteningly revealing glimpse into our fleeting interests, needs and passions.

 Of course, not all this data gets permanently recorded. Privacy concerns mean that search logs, for example, get scrubbed at regular intervals. But even with all that, we leave behind more data about who we were, what we cared about and what thoughts passed through our minds than any previous generation. Whether it’s personally identifiable or aggregated and anonymized, we will all leave behind footprints.

 Privacy? What Privacy?

Currently we’re struggling with this paradigm shift and its implications for our privacy. I believe in time — not that much time — we’ll simply grow to accept this archiving of our lives as the new normal, and won’t give it a second thought. We will trade personal information in return for new abilities, opportunities and entertainment. We will grow more comfortable with being the Indelible Generation.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps we’ll trigger a revolt against the surrender of our secrets. Either way, we live in a new world, one where we’re always being watched. The story of how we deal with that fact is still to be written.

More Food for Thought on Google’s Web History Announcement

Yesterday’s announcement from Google about including Web history in search personalization marks a fairly significant development in disambiguating intent on Google.  Consider the implications.  One of the issues I had with the initial implementation of search personalization was that it really only worked when there was existing search history.  That really only covered one in five searches for most of us.  That also meant that personalization showed up most often in areas where you tended to do a lot of searching.  For example, if you search within your industry a lot and tend to go to the same sites over and over again, you would find the site lifted on to your top page of search results.  Of course, if you were doing the typical “vanity” search to see where you rank and you end up clicking on your own site, this would have the effect of lifting your site into the top 10 results.  If anything, this implementation of personalization works to make navigation search a little more efficient.  But I’m not sure it went too far in disambiguating intent, which is the holy grail for any search engine.

With the introduction of Web history, it’s a whole new ballgame in disambiguating intent.  This allows Google to move far beyond the well tred search path and actually taps into your current browsing behavior to try to determine what’s on your mind right now.  If Sep Kamvar’s personalization algorithm is as powerful as I suspect it is, this could dramatically alter the results that you’re seeing.  The promise of personalization is greatest when it can be applied in areas that are new territory for you.  It helps Google interpret just the kind of site you want to see, given your behavior at the present time.

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say you’re looking at buying a new vehicle.  Let’s further say that you’re fairly early in the consideration phase and your visit a lot of sites like Edmunds.com and Autobytel.  This tells Google that you’re looking for information and you’re probably looking at sites that could be comparing your alternatives.  If you’ve already visited sites like Edmunds.com, Google would probably lift those sites into the first search results page.  If Google’s algorithm truly makes a move towards a recommendation engine, what it can then do is find similar sites you may have never considered, based on the characteristics of the sites you have been visiting and make you aware of these sites.  That’s where the real win for the user comes in personalization.  It’s not just providing you a shortcut to sites you are already aware of, it’s in making you aware of new sites you never knew existed, ranked and prioritized according to the PageRank algorithm.  With Web history, Google can track your progress through the buying cycle to be able to match the information site you’re looking for to where it believes you are, based on your current click stream data.

There are other implications that are very interesting to advertisers.  Click paths tend to indicate the life events that you’re currently in the middle of it.  The life event could be a major purchase, planning a holiday, buying a new house, planning for a wedding, or graduating from university.  In each of those instances, there are a number of linked consumer needs that tend to go together.  There’s been a significant amount of research done on how life events generate predictable consumer patterns.  Web history gives Google a window into exactly what is happening in your life right now.  I had written a column about how surprised I was with the glimpse that search history provided into my mindset at any given time.  If you combine that with Web history, you would have a very finely detailed snapshot of both big and small events in my life for any time period.  It gives Google the ability to precisely target search results based on exactly what’s happening to me right now.

But let’s face it, it’s not the search results that Google is focusing on.  Google is altruistic enough to make organic search results the testbed to play with the personalization algorithm, but the monetization opportunities in this are mind-boggling to say the least.  When you combine the ability to precisely target and interpret the mindset of any given consumer with the multiple touch points that Google now owns to provide advertising messaging to that prospect, you have a marketer’s dream scenario.  When I asked Marisa Mayer about this she made it clear that organic results are what they are working on now, but they don’t want their advertising network to be too far behind the curve.  I’m still working my way through the interview making notes but I did want to get this post up because I think from a user perspective there’s some important information here.  For me, the promise of personalization is moving Google to be a true recommendation engine when it gets confident in disambiguating my intent based on my current behavior.  Folding Web history into search history moves Google a quantum leap forward in being able to do this reliably and consistently.

The interesting question will be to see what kind of user pushback comes from the privacy concerns.  Danny Sullivan touched on this a little bit in his post.  Will the trade-off of increased search accuracy be enough to have lots of users opt in? Obviously this is what Google is counting on and that’s why they’re introducing the enhancement in the organic results first.  If they can provide a clear win to the user, than the trade-off seems a lot less formidable.  And when they’re introducing that usability lift in something as benign as organic search results, it seems a little less ominous and invasive.  If they can get us using Web history by giving us a win-win on our search functionality, is a greater likelihood that we’ll leave Web History turned for when they do decide to start rolling it in to their advertising presentation algorithms. Enough users will have it turned on it will give them the critical mass they need to appeal to the early adopter advertisers who want a take it for a spin.

Brain Numbing Ideas on a Friday Afternoon

I can’t help but get the feeling that when we look at online marketing, we tend to get blinded by the technology and lose sight of what’s really important: how it affects people.

Right now there’s a flurry of attention surrounding YouTube because of copyright issues and other factors.  And YouTube isn’t alone in this.  The majority of things I did in my in box focus on technology.  What will be the next killer platform?  I see mobile search, I see online video, I see social networking. It’s hard to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s really important.  I find it useful to step back a little bit and see how these things affect real people: people not like you and I, who are caught up in the promise of technology, but people like my daughter’s principal, people like my mom, people like my next-door neighbor.  People who are wary about technology and who will only embrace it if it makes their life better in some way.  This is not to discount the importance of technology, because it truly has turned our lives inside out in the last decade.  But there’s a distillation, a time when we have to get comfortable with change.  The dotcom boom and bust was not because of the lack of technology or its inadequacy.  To technology all things are possible.  But to people, it’s all about what’s in it for me.  And that, ultimately, is the success factor that has to be considered in all this.

So, is YouTube hot?  Is online video hot?  Is social networking hot?  All these things are, but not because of the technology that lies beneath, but rather because of the social change that they empower.  Consider online video for example.  A couple of items in my in box talked about how, at this point, we won’t watch television online.  Even the person at Google who was responsible for online video admitted that at this point, even with Google’s tremendous resources, online video at the quality that we’ve come to expect is not a scalable proposition. 

We interact with video in a far different way online.  For example, YouTube is all about the viral spiral.  It’s all about that cute little two to three minutes of video: something that is either funny or outrageous or awful.  There’s no tremendous requirement for engagement for this.  YouTube is the repository for a million different “in” jokes.  It’s the basket where we collect what titillates the fancy of our collective consciousness at any given time.  It gives us an easy reference point so we can take what interests us and forward it to others if we think they are interested as well.  We’re not ready to watch a one or two hour documentary on the web, simply because we’re not used to interacting with our computer screen in that way.  Our computers are things we do things on, not things we watch passively.  A commitment of two to three minutes to watch a little video screen is fine, but we don’t look to the Web for passive entertainment.  That’s not to say we won’t, some day, as connectivity and convergence moves our channels beyond the current paradigm and as we evolve and learn to interact with them in new ways. 

And it’s there that we start to pick apart at what truly makes technology, at least as far as it’s manifested on the web, really interesting.  It stitches together the fabric of our society.  It’s a synapse that allows our collective brain to fire more effectively than it did before. Communications can zing back and forth between us at a far faster rate.  What we find interesting, what we find intriguing, what we find funny, what we find painful to watch is now available for anyone to see.  It’s cataloged and categorized for our convenience.  It occupies a finite space in the virtual world that we can point to and say, “Look at this, it impacted me and I think it will impact you to.”

I recently had the opportunity to watch Dr. Gary Flake from Microsoft talk.  He started his presentation with the claim that the information technology revolution that we’re currently in will be more significant, as far as the change factor for our society, than anything that has gone before.  More important than the Industrial Revolution, more important than the invention of the printing press, more important than television.  To me the real power of the Internet is that it’s rewiring our society in ways we could never dream of and in ways we never anticipated.  To focus on the wiring or the technology of the Web is to take the mechanic’s view of the world.  To a mechanic or a car buff, a vehicle is a wonderful thing because of the internal combustion engine, because of the horsepower and how fast it can go from zero to 60.  They focus on what it is.  But when you look at how the automobile has affected our society, it’s not about what it is, it’s about what it does.  The automobile brought the world closer.  It allowed us to travel and see new things.  It allowed us to live in one place and work in another.  The macro change that the automobile engendered had nothing to do with how an internal combustion engine worked, it came from moving people from one place to another quickly, cheaply and efficiently.  It mobilized our society in a way that never existed before.

Likewise, the Web is not powerful because of Web 2.0 technologies, or speed of connection, or the ability to host video.  It’s important because it connects us in new and different ways.  It moves power from where it was stuck before into new hands.  It breaks down existing power structures and distributes that power amongst all of us.  It puts the individual in control and allows one individual to connect with another, freely and without paying a poll to the previous power brokers.

The really interesting thing about the Internet is the underlying social current, the groundswell of change that is redefining us and how we live together.  These fundamental factors are exerting a tremendous force within our day-to-day lives.  They’re precipitating change so fast that we haven’t been able to step back and see what the full impact to us will be.  We can’t see the trickle down effect of the things that are happening to us today.  The Internet is changing the very DNA of our society, and we are unable to take a long-term view of what those current mutations will mean for us.  One only has to look at the generational difference between the 45-year-old parent, myself, and my 13-year-old daughter, the first generation that has been fully immersed in online technology.  She interacts with the world in a completely different way.  She searches for information in a different way and evaluates it differently.  She takes these things for granted because she’s never known any other way.  What happens when this entire generation emerges as the shapers of our society?  What happens when they take control from us, with their innate understanding of what the Web makes possible, and redefine everything?

Here are three things that I believe are the foundations of social change being pushed by the Internet:

Access to Information

The amount of information we currently have access to is mind-boggling.  Never has so much raw information lived so close to us.  You can now think about any given topic in the universe of our consciousness, and that information exists just a mouse click away.  And, as the saying goes, information is power.  It empowers each one of us to take a more active role in our destiny.  This information has completely changed how people buy things.  It’s completely changed the relationship between vendors and buyers.  More and more, we go direct to the source, as educated, knowledgeable buyers who know exactly what we want and what we will pay for it.  The challenge on the Internet is that not all information is created equal.  There’s good information and there’s bad information.  However, we are becoming extremely good at being able to differentiate between the two.  We’re becoming amazingly adept at being able to recognize authenticity and we can sniff out BS.  In picking through the multiple threads of information that are available to us out there, we can recognize the scent of truth and quickly discount hype, spin and sheer lies. 

Again, as we begin to recognize the shifting of power to the consumer, the full impact has not shaken out yet.  When we can buy anything online, quickly, easily and confidently, will what will that mean for the entire bricks and mortar retail world out there?  Will there be shopping malls in 20 years?  Will there be stores at all?  Will we buy directly from the manufacturers, cutting out distributors, wholesalers and retailers?  Or will distribution of products to the world of consumers lie in the hands of a few mega, long tail retailers such as Amazon?  I certainly don’t know, the future is far too murky to be able to peer down this path.  And I don’t think it’s important to be able to predict the future, but I do think it’s vitally important to consider the quantum change that is likely in the future.

Searchability

As the amount of information available to us continues to multiply exponentially, the ability to connect with the right information at the right time becomes more and more important.  I’ve always maintained that search is the fundamental foundation of everything that will transpire online.  It is the essential connector between our intent, and the content we’re looking for.  But more than just the connector, the sheer functionality of search, both as it is today and as it will be in the future, creates another catalyst for change in our society. 

We are becoming used to having the answers just a few mouse clicks away.  We are becoming a society of instant gratification.  In the past, we accepted that we couldn’t know everything.  In divvying up the world’s knowledge, some of us were experts in one area and some of us were experts in another.  Some of us were experts in nothing.  But we held no pretensions that we would become experts in areas where we had no previous experience.  There was no path to follow so there was no reason to start the journey. 

But today, you can become an instant expert in anything, depending on how you define the scope of that expertise.  Within 30 seconds I can tell you every movie that Uma Thurman ever appeared in.  I can look up a medical condition and have access to the same information, likely more information, that a doctor 20 years ago would have access to, based on his own experience, education and reference materials.  But again, what is the impact of this?  Does having access to the information about a medical condition makes me an expert in treating that condition?  I have the information but I have no context in which to apply it.  As we gain access to information, will we use that information wisely without the experience and domain expertise that used to accompany that information?

And how will instant access to information alter education in the future?  I remember hearing an observation that if we had a modern day Rip van Winkle, who had gone to sleep 20 years ago and suddenly woke up today, the one place he would feel most comfortable would be in the elementary classroom.  While the outside world is changed dramatically in the past 20 years, the classroom in which your child spends the majority of their day has changed very little.  When I help my children do their homework, there isn’t much difference between the textbooks and the worksheets I see today and the ones I saw 30 years ago.  I recently had to explain to my daughter’s principal the difference between a Web browser and a search engine.  The classroom is like a backwater eddy in the rushing torrent of technological change that typifies the rest of the world.  And it’s not just elementary school where this is an issue.  We often speak to students who are currently going through marketing programs at the university level and are always aghast at how little they’re learning about this new world of marketing and the reality of consumer empowerment.  They’re learning the rules of a game that changed at least a decade ago.

So to bring the point home once more, what will the organization of the world’s information mean for our society?  As search gets better at connecting us to the content that we are looking for, what are the ripple effects for us?  Will our children’s and grandchildren’s brains be wired in a different way than ours are?  Will they assimilate information differently? Will they research differently? Will they structure their logic in a different way?

Creation of Ideological Communities

The Web has redefined our idea of community.  It used to be the communities were defined along geographic lines.  You need a physical proximity to people in order to create a community because physical proximity was a prerequisite for communication.  Communities could exist if there was two way communication.  That’s the reason why community and communication are extensions of the same root word and concept. 

Perhaps the most powerful change introduced by the Internet has been the enabling of real, two way communication between people where physical proximity was not required.  Consider the chain of events that typifies online interaction.  You become aware of someone who shares an ideological interest, usually through stumbling upon them somewhere online.  You initiate communication.  Depending on the scope of your shared interest, you may create the core of the community by inviting others into it.  The Internet gives us the platform that allows for the creation of ideological communities.  We see this happen all the time on properties such as YouTube or MySpace.  Ideological communities are created on the fly, flourish for awhile, and then fade away as interest in the idea that engendered them also fades away.  The Internet, at any given point in time, is a snapshot of thousands, or perhaps millions, of these ad hoc ideological communities.  They form, they flourish and then they disappear.

But in our real world there was physicality to the concept of community.  The way our world is built, our political boundaries, come from physical considerations.  There are distinct geographic boundaries like mountain ranges, oceans and rivers that, in the past, prevented the flow of people across them.  Because of the restricted ability to move, people spent long enough together to share ideals and create communities.  As time moved on these communities became larger and larger.  Transportation allowed us to share common ideals over a greater expanse and nations became possible.  The more efficient the transportation, the larger the nation became.  But throughout this entire process, the concept of geography defined communities and defined nations.  Our entire existing political structure was built around this geographic foundation.

With the Internet, geography ceases to have meaning.  It’s now a virtual world, and I can feel closer to someone in China with whom I share one particularly strong mutually held belief then I might with my next-door neighbor.  More fundamentally, I can belong to several different communities at the same time.  Again, the restraint of the physical world usually restricted the number of interests we had that we could share with those immediately around us.  Our sphere of interest as an individual was somewhat dictated by the critical mass each of those interest areas had within the community in which we lived.  If we thought particularly strongly about one interest we could physically move to a community where there were more people who shared that interest.  So we tended to move to communities that felt “right” ideologically as well as physically.  But with the Internet, does that need for ideological “sameness” where we live eventually disappear?  Does our physical need for community decrease as our ideological need for community is fulfilled through the Internet?

And, if this physical definition of community begins to erode, what does that do for the concept of nationhood and all the things that come along with it? Increasingly, communication and commerce travel along lines not defined by geography.  The idea of a nation, as we currently understand it, is inextricably bound to the realities of geography.  Politics, trade, laws and defense are all concepts that are rooted in thinking developed over the past several centuries.  In the past 30 years we’ve seen the erosion of the concept of nationhood through the creation of common markets and free trade areas.  The very breakdown of the Soviet Union comes from the inability to isolate the population from the concepts which flourished in the free world.  And that was before the Internet ever became a factor.  What happens when we take this movement, already afoot, and add the tremendous catalyst that is the Internet?

It’s in these macro trends that the true power of the Internet can be seen.  It’s not about an individual technology or even the cumulative power of all the technology.  It’s about how the sum of all that affects us as individuals, how we interact with the world around us and how we connect with other individuals.  The seeds have been planted, we can’t turn back, and we can’t foresee what will be.  The world is evolving and truly becoming a global community.  We are entering a time when change will accelerate faster than our society may be able to keep up.  There will be costs, certainly, but my hope and belief is that the rewards will far outweigh the costs.