Archive for March, 2010
Google Introduces Search Funnel, Ad Innovations
Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations . The company’s VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a “set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.” Sponsor The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will be able to sell a grommet to an Albanian from outer space. “The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths.” Ad Innovations is a specialist website Google has set up to “work closely with advertisers on what comes next.” They intend to use the space to debut ad-tech ideas and solicit user feedback. Photo by Danny Sullivan. Discuss
YouTube Migrates Videos to New Design
Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on. In a January post , Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube’s blog that the old design could appear “cluttered and a little overwhelming.” (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.) Sponsor In the intervening months, YouTube has experimented with a cleaner design that made “the video the star.” Other changes besides the focus on the video include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system to replace the 1-5 scale, a finessed up-next video list, an easier-to-find subscription button and integrated video and text comments. Is it a hit so far? Er. Nuh-uh. On today’s YouTube blog post announcing the change, there were… comments – hundreds of them as invested users chimed in. And the chimes sounded pretty discordant. As of this posting, the word “suck” was used 14 times, “terrible” and “shit” tied at nine times each, the word “crap” six times and “bad” five times. Lies, damned lies and statistics? Maybe. Representative comments included the following: “Looks like crap, keep up the horrible work.” Firefox Twitter sentiment analysis gave the changes a 15-12 positive-negative rating. But TwitterFeel disagreed, with real-time analysis overwhelmingly negative. Discuss
New York Times Juices Up Its Document Viewer
The New York Times’ new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it’s an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer. With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader’s fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer’s ability to annotate a story with “raw” information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer’s code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah. Sponsor Want annotated source materials embedded in your kitty blog without having to churn code until the tears flow? You can do it. This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These “annotations” are similar to an old-fashioned “hot link” but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery. Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released “in the very, very near future,” according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times’ Github page. The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what? BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper’s editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as “recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies.” They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members. Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool. “Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online,” he told RWW. “Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published.” However, Chris Heisel , in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, “In a world where I can easily find more information than I can ever possibly use does the public really need more access to raw information.” We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times – this most mainstream of MSM – is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer’s unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter’s approach should prove easier to determine. But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth. The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb. Discuss
User Ignorance Causes Cloud Security Leak; Accounts, Passwords Revealed
At 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning I was doing routine maintenance on my personal Amazon Web Services account and instead found myself looking at something I had no right to be seeing: A database with 800,000 user accounts to the e-card site CardMaster.com . Along with that were the database passwords and back end of a major U.S. Public Broadcasting Service news show website ( Gwen Ifill’s Washington Week ), including daily updates from panelists on the stories they cover. I wish I wasn’t the person to find this. I founded one of Amazon’s earliest dashboards. My consultancy is on Amazon’s European Customer Advisory Board. But this highlights a significant issue in the cloud today: There is a whole new user profile acting as developer and administrator. We are becoming empowered with amazing tools – and being given enough rope to really hang ourselves. Sponsor Guest author Jonathan Siegel is a serial entrepreneur and founder of the cloud applications consultancy ELCTech.com as well as a handful of cloud startups. Jonathan’s book, Electric Connections , is due out in June of this year. I am an early adopter, business builder and owner of a cloud consultancy. On Sunday morning I went to clear out my personal Amazon Web Services account of excess files after seeing huge usage numbers from a report by CloudSplit. For those technically inclined, I was clearing out my S3 buckets and moving the few files that I wanted to save into an EBS disk instead. My EBS disk ran out of space and I went to use a feature called EBS Snapshots. Snapshots are like a tape backup of your EBS disk drive. That’s when I noticed something odd: My EBS Snapshot account was filled with hundreds of snapshots, when I knew I had only made a handful. I wondered, Why do I have access to these backups? Were these backups made by my teammates? Shared snapshots from Amazon? Or something else… What I saw were backups of Enron emails, a genomics database and then two made my stomach turn – a database for 800,000 user accounts to CardMaster.com and the database and site files for the Washington Week website. Yeah, the Enron emails are a non sequitur and the genomics database was likely meant to be public. But the other two, there’s no way they were intended for the public, yet here they were – marked as public and available to me or any other Amazon cloud user. How Did This Happen? Amazon is the largest and longest running public cloud computing platform. It has pushed the boundaries of technology infrastructure for us users. In fact, it has given us tools that are more powerful than anything we previously had available in our own small datacenters. This is great, because before we needed to hire trained Cisco or NetApp administrators in order to do basic tasks as our websites scaled. This was expensive and added another step – a delay – to our deployments. Amazon’s infrastructure commoditizes much of this technology into simple Web calls; paste some XML to Amazon and your website gets a full incremental backup to live-networked NAS. But as Stan Lee has warned us: With great power comes great responsibility. By giving programmers control of the network and storage, we’ve empowered developers to take on system administration chores. This power has come too quickly or is being digested too lightly – as my discovery has shown. In the case of PBS’s Washington Week there was quick acceptance of the issue. “It was human error and nothing personal was exposed,” said Kevin Dando, PBS’s Director of Digital Communications. “Although we weren’t aware of the issue initially, it was easily corrected. Because of Amazon’s strong audit capabilities we could pinpoint the error and fix it quickly.” Despite numerous attempts we were unable to reach CardMaster.com. This highlights a deeper issue in the cloud today: Despite what you may think, cloud security is not sexy. We are seeing products that address the baseline needs of cloud functionality, like Amazon’s dashboard and the support sites for the cloud. They focus on the sexy: deploying mobile apps, auto-scaling, grid processing and other buzz-word-friendly features. But the dirty truth is that the cloud has a whole new user profile acting as administrator and needs a new set of tools and expectation management to ensure that little mistakes make little problems and not big ones. Remember: This is not something that Amazon did wrong. This is an intentional switch thrown by Amazon’s users that allowed their data to be public to any other Amazon user. The users did not mean to hit that switch and it’s unclear whether those users would have found this issue without my notification. This is the switch in Amazon’s Web Console. It can be more subtle when packaged deep within cloud-assisting tools: And Why Me? A spokesperson for Amazon pointed out that snapshots were private by default and users must choose to share them. According to Amazon, “in general users understand this feature very well as this is no different than users explicitly choosing to share their data by any means.” However, as we’ve seen, users are obviously making their data inadvertently public. Amazon said they were updating their documentation “to provide more explicit guidance on this feature,” and that they would be “reaching out to the few who may be unknowingly sharing their snapshots.” The question, though, is: Is it too easy to accidentally make your data public – and whose role is it to play data cop? This leads to me, at 1 a.m., and finding security leakage with Amazon’s cloud customers while doing unrelated housekeeping. Look, I’m anything but an IT Security guy; I’ve got enough on my plate to worry about. For god’s sakes, I have 6 kids! Moreover, I’m an outspoken supporter for moving companies to the cloud – and I exclusively recommend Amazon’s cloud because of its reliability and features. Why is it me that finds this security issue – one that has been open since January of this year if the Snapshot dates are accurate. This tells me that there is a pattern about to be replayed: That the users on the cloud today are a motley crew. That we need more supervision and hand-holding – whether we like it or not. That powerful services like CloudKick and CloudSplit need to be encouraged to add security as a top-priority feature. And we need to budget for their services and embrace their boring, yet hyper-important role as perimeter guard and security inspector. If I were to try to keep this security problem in the bag – and avoid alerting the community – I would be fostering a sense of complacency that is antithetical to the marketplace needs. The cloud is so young that when we find a problem we need to admit it and find real, workable solutions. Since the cloud represents new ways of doing things, it gives us new ways of getting in trouble, and we need a lively forum for nipping these issues in the bud and laying a framework for ongoing success. What Now? If you are on Amazon’s cloud, I can’t stress enough that you need to immediately go to your AWS Management Console. Check at a minimum that your Snapshots, for every Region, are marked PUBLIC only if you mean them to be available to ALL other Amazon Web Services users. I’ve already checked mine. If you find data that you did not intend to make public, you need to engage your security team to remove the snapshots from the public and mitigate any data exposure. Hopefully this gets chalked on the wall as a lesson learned – and we continue our march to the cloud with a deeper appreciation of our security support needs. This isn’t about calling people out. I work in the cloud and am passionate about its development. These mistakes could very well have been ones I made – or any other cloud user. To move the cloud forward we need to encourage a dialog about our new found power, new paradigms and new needs in the cloud. Discuss
DayOne Ventures Brings Small Town Flavor to Startup Incubation
When you think of startup incubators, you think of the more well known organizations helping companies in cities like Boulder, San Francisco, New York or Austin, but one incubator is looking to change that assumption. Based at the VT KnowledgeWorks Business Acceleration Center in Blacksburg, VA, DayOne Ventures is a program aimed at tapping the talent coming from Virginia Tech to help local startups get off the ground. Sponsor With fewer than 40,000 residents, Blacksburg is less than half the size of startup hub Boulder, CO, but the city’s ties to Virginia Tech make it a fertile spot for its budding startup community. DayOne Ventures is taking advantage of the growing buzz in the area with its highly concentrated experience which will accept just 3 companies to participate this summer. Those selected will benefit from up to $16,000 in seed funding, free office space, Internet access and hosting, legal assistance with incorporating their company and setting up stock plans, and mentorship from an panel of experienced entrepreneurs. DayOne co-founder and mentor Bill Boebel has prior experience himself with starting a company in Blacksburg; in 1999 he and a pair of co-founders created Webmail.us , an enterprise email solution. “It was really awesome doing our startup down in Blacksburg because of the low cost of doing it. We were able to fail three times before we figured out the right idea,” Boebel told ReadWriteWeb. “The cost of failing in Blacksburg is a lot lower than the cost of failing in Silicon Valley.” Eventually, Boebel and his co-founders molded Webmail.us into a profitable company which was later acquired by Rackspace in 2007. The Rackspace presence in Blacksburg remains to this day and is a reminder of the city’s most successful Internet startup. Now as an experienced entrepreneur, Boebel and others are teaming together to provide local startups (or those that choose to relocate for the program) with the mentorship and resources to get started. TechStars and Y Combinator aren’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea; DayOne, one the other hand, brings a bit of small town flavor to the already close-knit startup culture – a flavor that could produce some interesting results with their exclusive incubator. Applications for the 10-week program are open now , so if you’re in the Blacksburg area or wouldn’t mind relocating for the summer, be sure to look into the DayOne Ventures program. Discuss