Elliott Ng

The continued polarization between Western popular opinion and Chinese popular opinion continues. I read Chinese Internet Users Say Enough to International Bullying which talked about the (L) China viral movement. The TechCrunch commmenters, especially the anti-(L) China commenters, were so offensive that I got baited into writing a 450+ word comment on TC. What a waste of my time — I’m not going to change any minds over there. Anyway, I’ll just post it at the bottom here for recordkeeping.

Christine Lu launched her Harmonious Fries award to celebrate people trying to bring people together rather than split them apart. Here’s mine!

Thanks Christine! Follow @christinelu at Twitter!

Here’s my TechCrunch comment:

It amazes me to see TechCrunch haters on virtually every topic here on TechCrunch. I feel blessed to live in the USA where freedom of speech and freedom of the press allows us to express virtually any point of view without serious concern about my personal liberties being curtailed by the state. I (L) USA!

At the same time, it disturbs me that the anti (L) China commenters are so much more judgmental and one-sided than the pro (L) China commenters. Look, I am not fluent in Chinese and can’t read Chinese media or BBS. BUT there seems to be ABSOLUTELY NO EFFORT MADE by most Western audiences to even UNDERSTAND the point of view of the Chinese people who feel Westerners are getting only 1 side of the story.

The amount of global awareness by educated Chinese people is on par with that of other educated people in most countries. It is the developed 1st world, and America in particular, where people have completely taken their freedoms for granted and not sought to engage in dialogue with others, and just take their own preconceived notions and allow events and news to just reinforce whatever they were already thinking.

On balance the pro (L) China commenters seems A LOT more reasonable and cosmopolitan than the anti (L) China commenters, at least on this thread. Doesn’t that surprise you? Aren’t “we” the ones who are free and “they” the ones who are brainwashed and held down by a repressive government?

Look — if “they” can climb over the Great Firewall via proxy servers (which btw is a total pain in the *ss) to see the outside world, maybe “we” can read Global Voices Online or Rolang Soong’s fabulous translations on EastSouthWestNorth blog (www.zonaeuropa.com) to climb in. Visit. Listen. Keep an open mind. Try to understand. Have a dialogue. Then try to convince. That is far superior than staying in our own little world with our own preconceived notions.

America may only have another 20+ years as de-facto world leader to steer the rules in place before we turn over leadership to a more complex multipolar group which will undoubtedly include China, India, EU, and Japan. Let’s regain our moral authority by reengaging the world with more humility and open-mindedness and only then will we get to create the world we want before we have to turn it over. The close-minded comments of the TC haters on this board convince me that we are still “same bed, different dreams” with the Chinese, and most other peoples in this world for that matter.

Saw @Kirsteno tweet about TweetCloud so I thought I’d try it. Here’s my TweetCloud as of 4/11! Warning: it takes about 0.04 secs per tweet to process, and mine took 135 seconds. So a massive tweeter like @davidfeng or @christinelu will have to wait a much longer time.

Here’s the first version with all the @ replies included:

Not surprisingly, the top words (including below the fold) are:

1. Twitter
2. @davidfeng
3. @chrsitinelu
4. post
5. nice

Here the version without the @ replies:

The top 5 words are, uninterestingly:

1. Twitter
2. Great
3. Nice
4. Post
5. China

There you have it. My Twitter zeitgeist.

Is Scobleizer a Cylon?

I’ve always wished I had the same massive information processing gene as Robert Scoble and wondered if there was some upper limit. In fact, I even considered the possibility of the Scobleizer being a Cylon, because of his incredible ability to consume, synthesize, and publish information.

Probably not. Even Scoble has limits…20,000 Followed in Twitter.

Well it sounds like today is the day that the upper limit has been reached. @Scobleizer just Tweeted:

So the upper limit with his information processsing abilities is 20,000 followed. I am at about 200 followed and it is already generated “continuous partial attention.” So far I have loved Twitter and it has expanded my peripheral vision tremendously.

So its nice to know that Scobleizer is not a Cylon and has some upper limit on information processing.

UPDATE: Robert Seidman (@seidman) had almost the exact same idea only a day or two later. Read his take here. This seems weird. Maybe it is not @scobleizer who is the Cylon but…wait, what’s that song that I keep hearing?

CYLON WATCH ON TWITTER:

• @elliottng - Elliott Ng - CN Reviews and UpTake Blog
• @seidman - Robert Seidman - TV by the Numbers
• @scobleizer - Either NOT a Cylon or this 20,000 limit is a headfake

Maobacks vs. Greenbacks

I have been investigating the obvious trend of RMB appreciation (or some would accurately point out, relative RMB appreciation to the declining dollar) and what to do about it.  I wrote about using CNY ETNs to hedge RMB appreciation and later shared more links on this subject.

I’m currently in process on setting up an Everbank account that is based on non-deliverable forward contracts.  Its a complicated and obscure thing to do for a retail investor so even though large, sophisticated players may have ways to hedge RMB-USD exchange rate, the little guy like me has only a few options.  More on this at my China group blog, CN Reviews.

Inspired by my co-blogger Grigo’s post on who’s who in the Chinese blogosphere I decided to try out the TouchGraph Facebook browser myself. Here is the public link to the Facebook TouchGraph photo album.

300 friends graphed

It seems to do a pretty good job of grouping clusters of related people to each other.

50 friends graphed

I’m not sure how to control which of the top 50 are shown in the default settings.

By the way, if you are looking for Elliott Ng’s blog on China, go to CNReviews.com. My friend James said he could not find it when he Googled “Elliott Ng blog”

A zen slap is “a moment of unexpected enlightenment when something becomes blindingly and undeniably obvious to you. It often brings a feeling of elation, relief, and discovery, even as you laugh at yourself for missing the obviousness all along.”

Well, I just had a social media zen slap. Earlier this morning, I tweeted a question:

I didn’t get any response via my followers. But then later in the day I checked Facebook and saw that there was an answer in my Friendfeed widget:

Then I went back to FriendFeed to comment back on Brandon Titus’s comment. I subscribed to his feed while I was on.

Google please free my data!

Now I’m writing this post. And then I’ll tweet it back out after I’m done. So the cycle is:

Twitter to Facebook to FriendFeed to My Elliott Ng blog, and then back to Twitter.

Corvida earlier exclaimed, @Social Aggregators GIVE ME MY COMMENTS! and I concur. I would add another demand:

@Social Aggregators GIVE ME MY CONVERSATIONS!

But not sure how these conversations can be portable and deduplicated. I don’t want all my Tweets to be fed into Twitter by a FriendFeed bot. And I certainly don’t want to consume all my FriendFeed activity via an RSS feed in my Google Reader! Argggh!

Hope this helps you with a Zen Slap realization of where we are going, the problems and the opportunities!

Image courtesy of japanart.wordpress.com

Went to the Adaptive Path party last night. Here is the full Flickr set. Here are some pictures of the event!

Allison’s friend Sue having a great time as always! She is a person that is fun to hang out with. We went out to AsiaSF afterwards, my first time.

Great shirt, apparently from Geekshirts. Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, All my Base Are Belong to You. I am just a marketing guy, but even marketing guys can wanna be 7331.

Gallery shot of 111 Minna Gallery. Cool bar/gallery near New Montgomery and 2nd St.

DJ and graffiti in the background. Or is it art?

The TACO TRUCK at the Adaptive Path party. This sounds like a great tradition. I had an excellent Spicy Pork Burrito. thanks Path!

Adaptive Path Pinball Trailer

talked with Karriem Khan about his project SVWebBuilder. Check out his blog too.

The Omnipresent Shannon Clark of Meshwalks / Meshforum fame.

The fetching Allison Gregory (a coworker at Kango Inc.) and the dashing Thomas Brown (also of Kango Inc.) fame. Caught them in a philosophical debate about whether Santa Barbara Family Hotels were better than South Lake Tahoe Family Hotels.

Last but not least my connection to the Path. The Mother of Mental Models Indy Young and her padowan apprentice Mary Piontkowski, the second illustrious alumni of the Kango Inc. era.

 Dear Nova,

I saw your offer of March 8 to jump the beta invite queue by writing a blog post talking about why I want a Twine beta invite. I read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s review, Paul Miller’s thoughtful roundup, Laptop magazine’s pan, your thoughtful and humble response, Profy’s meta-response about alpha vs. beta, Frederick Giasson’s comment that the network is not there yet, and Richard MacManus’s defense. I felt empathy for you because at Kango we are also working on an application that utilizes semantic analysis and it is also somewhere between alpha and beta. I guess the fact that we have less celebrity status that you is both good and bad!

My 3 reasons for wanting a beta invite:

1. I’m a semantic web fanboy.

I can see the promise of Semantic Web for the future although I think much of the early visionaries (Tim Berners-Lee and yourself included) may not have it right about how we will get to the end-state. But I want to try Twine so I can see more of the future through what you have tried to do with Twine. I can’t promise to be an uncritical reviewer of Twine. But I think Semantic Web is in the down part of the Gartner Hype curve:

I believe that the Semantic Web will eventually come into being and Twine will be one key milestone.

2. I’m a sympathetic fellow entrepreneur launching an alpha-ish beta product.

My product is in private beta and we are trying to decide when it is ready for public beta. I want to learn from your experience and the coverage you received. How can we convince bloggers to go easy on us once we come out in public beta? We just want people to use our product so we can improve it faster. But I don’t want to create inflated expectations that results in people panning our service.

3. I want to engage in a dialogue with you about the Semantic Web.

We’ve been pretty heads down trying to solve the problem of user review aggregation to aid in travel planning. We have been using some semantic analysis to parse the reviews. I think dialog with you would help sharpen our approach. And who knows how we can be helpful to Radar Networks and Twine. If nothing else, we can be enthusiastic fellow travelers who can being a sounding board to each other.

Nova, look forward to hearing back from you. And help yourself to a beta invite to Kango if you want. Just give me a chance to talk with you about it before you pan us on your blog, and I’ll do the same!

Via Kara Swisher and TechCrunch I learned about the SearchMe private beta announce. I just signed up for it and look forward to seeing it. Kara broke the story but 5 days ago RichardbaxterSEO at YouMOZ noticed SearchMe crawler traffic and connected the dots that SearchMe earlier created the Wikiseek engine. Louis Grey also noted the crawler more than 30 days ago!

Caveat: I have not tried the product. But here’s my initial take:

1. SearchMe looks great for browsing and general navigational searches when you are just starting a search or research process.
2. For more targeted searches, I am not sure how SearchMe’s Visual Search–the iPod Touch like “cover flow”–can help me efficiently find what I’m looking for.
3. SearchMe should focus on discovery and browsing…sort of like StumbleUpon 2.0 powered by search.

1. SearchMe looks great for browsing and general navigational searches when you are just starting a search or research process.

One way they claim to help people is through CategorySuggest, the disambiguation of search results using categories. For example, if you type Labrador then they will show you visual icons for “pets” and “Canada” so you can better clarify your intent. This is great when you are typing in general terms and need the engine to help you express your intent more clearly.

But this is not unique. For example, Clusty.com (by Vivisimo ) has been doing automated clustering forever:

Ask (and Teoma before that) also does the same thing.

Yahoo! Search Assistant combines disambiguation with helping you refine your query:

Google does not separately do disambiguation but simply interweaves the results in their SERP page. But Google understands that Google doesn’t yet understand your intent. For example, they provide both the “Canada province” meaning and the “Dog” meaning in their first Wikipedia result:

2. For more targeted searches, I am not sure how SearchMe’s Visual Search–the iPod Touch like “cover flow”–can help me efficiently find what I’m looking for.

Caveat. I have not yet seen the product . But I simply do not believe that for more targeted searches, showing a thumbnail of the page is the best way for people to find what they are looking for.

The job of search engines is to understand intent, and to show the most relevant fragments of information from destination pages that help users select the best result for them. For example:

Live decided that for the query “digital cameras” the most important dimensions were photos, star rating, names of top products, and quick links to other guides and reviews.

I’m working at Kango.com, a new semantic search application focused on travel planning. We also have to decide what infomation to show to help people determine which website and product to research further:

Here we’ve decided that relevance to their search criteria (in this case “family friendly”), reviews and ratings, photo, price, and location (there is a map over to the right) are the factors that people want to know to decide if they want to do further research on a hotel. (Sorry about the debug “confidence interval” stuff on the right. That will be removed in the final product)

In these two examples, what if Live and Kango were constrained to only show the Visual Search “cover flow” experience that SearchMe is providing? To be fair, SearchMe provides a ListView feature that allows you to go back into a traditional search results page experience.

3. SearchMe should focus on discovery and browsing…sort of like StumbleUpon 2.0 powered by search.

In summary, SearchMe needs to decide what kinds of searches to focus on–general vs. specific, discovery/inspiration vs. specialized, and target verticals–where the Visual Search feature allows the user to get a rich, browse experience. In my opinion, SearchMe should become StumbleUpon 2.0, focused on discovery and browse. It should not compete with the host of vertical search engines (like ours at Kango) and even Google, Yahoo!, Live, and Ask, who are effectively blending the right page elements at the right time, to help people get more specific information.

Last night, I attended a Supernova2008 mixer at Wharton West. The topic was around Social Networks, in a discussion led by Jeremiah Owyang. The discussion was fast-paced and the participants were articulate. I also got a flashback to HBS, and after 30 minutes went by and I hadn’t said anything, I got the familiar HBS 1st year feeling that I wasn’t going to get a comment in before the end of the period! So then I forced myself to chime in! My photos are on a Flickr set.

Reception

Pre-reception discussion with Jeremiah Owyang. (HBS Flashback for Elliott…got..to..get…a comment in before I hit the screen…<raise hand>)

Here the insights I garnered from the session:

1. Social Networks in the future will be like air

This idea of the ubiquitous social network was bandied about even before Charlene Li of Forrester walked into the room. She had presented this meme at Graphing Social Patterns earlier in the week.

See Charlene Li’s post and her Graphing Social Patterns Slideshare. She believes that social network providers need to increasingly open up, and provide compelling social experiences by consuming feeds (on a permission basis) from other social networks. “Social graph lock-in” is not the answer.

2. If social networks are air, then monetizing them may be challenging

Joi Ito made the point that no one is making a lot of money on email, because its an open system.

Initially, players like AOL provided profitable walled garden solutions, only to have open systems ultimately win in the future. What about Facebook?

Jeremiah led the group to identify 8 potential revenue streams for social networks:

1. Advertising
2. Downloadable media
3. Subscription
4. Premium Services
5. Market Research
6. Specialized Content
7. Infrastructure
8. Executive Search (not sure this was the last point)

There was some discussion about the recent Nine Inch Nails album launch that provided people with ways to consume at different levels: Free, $5 album, $10+ double album, $70 collection, and $300 signed collectors edition albums. Coverage here, here, and here. They sold 2500 of these and made $750k while giving away other music for free. Huge insight here about monetizing rabid fans while giving away a free taste to create more rabid fans.

There was also some talk about Blyk, a mobile provider in the UK that enrolls only 16-24 year olds into the service. You get a free SIM with 217 free texts and 43 free minutes per month. In return you get 6 rich ads a day from brands that you whitelist. According to one person, they are receiving a 29% response rate! Often time the ad is bundled with a promotional offer.

People seemed to be talking about advertising in terms of display advertising like Facebook ads and Adsense. I personally think the future of advertising through social networks is more about influencing the influencers, and things like Techdirt, Meetup, Blogher, and other blog networks and communities are more the way brands are going to generate interest and following through social networks, not just impression (or even clickthrough) based advertising.

3. Mobile devices will play a big role in making social networks air.

There was some discussion about Mobile Devices, I guess because of the recent announcements about the iPhone SDK. Since I already use Twitter and Facebook on my iPhone, this seems like an obvious conclusion to me.

4. Social networks will be amorphous, layered, interconnected, and fragmented.

My insight from playing around with FriendFeed is that each social application will be centered around serving some specific need of a segment of the audience, whether it be wine, photos, sharing feeds, blog promotion, etc. Then these applications will consume feeds from across the web to serve as a context-specific digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA). Other applications will compete for attention by also combining things in a different way to serve a different context. This results in the following characteristics:

1. amorphous - (Jeremiah’s term) - social graph will be freely flowing from one network to another, and from one application to another.
2. layered - applications will add value to other applications data and mash up and remix it into more useful ways. Community will build at different layers of the stack, depending on what those communities are trying to accomplish. Friendfeed is a great example, where I’ve seen people commenting and voting on a person’s lifestreaming activity across network.
3. interconnected - as discussed in Charlene’s presentation
4. fragmented - there is not going to be a “centralized commons”. Successful social networks are really “social network platforms.” Twitter and Facebook are successful because they don’t open everyone up to everyone else, and create some barriers to entry for any one person’s social network. They are platforms for expressing one’s existing social graph with the right permissions so you don’t get spammed by people you don’t know or don’t care about. This means that technology will not necessary unify or change social behavior, but support existing real life social behavior.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the Supernova2008 conference already. Thanks Kevin for putting together such a dynamic group of people.

UPDATE:  Jeremiah Owyang covered the event here.  Kevin Werbach’s Conversation Hub will contain the ongoing Supernova conversation here.  Subscribed!  Renee Blodgett over here. Ted Shelton here. Brian Solis here.  Funny I have seen Brian’s name all over the Web but didn’t know who he was.  Now I do: the man with the really expensive zoom lens in the skydeck!