loose wire blog

Google and History

I had gotten excited about Google’s timeline search before, but hadn’t seen this: Google is mining not just text for the dates of more recent stuff, but everything, stretching back into the mists of time, culled from Google Books:

The result is an odd but interesting automatically generated history of whatever you’re looking for.

In this case, I was looking for “cleft stick”. This is what appeared:

And the first few were all about how women found to be disrespectful, swearing, reveling or other forms of subversion had their tongues inserted into a cleft stick—a stick with the end split, and the tongue inserted:

The sources are varied, revealing a fascinating brutality and harrassment of women which went on for years:

In 1636, Elisabeth Aplegate was proclaimed guilty of the crime of swearing and reveling, and was required to stand in public with her tongue in a cleft stick.

1638 - The calmness with which even cultivated men then viewed the public whipping of women appears from the record by Governor Winthrop of the punishment of Mrs. Oliver in 1638. She was a woman of good character, but differed violently with the magistrates as to religious ...The calmness with which even cultivated men then viewed the public whipping of women appears from the record by Governor Winthrop of the punishment of Mrs. Oliver in 1638. She was a woman of good character, but differed violently with the magistrates as to religious matters, for which she was reproved, and finally sentenced to have her tongue put in a cleft stick, and then to be whipped.

This is clearly where the term “caught in a cleft stick” comes from. But not, probably, exactly what we mean when we say it.

Google’s Suicide Watch

I don’t really know what to make of this, but I occasionally trawl Google Search Trends/Insights to see what people are looking for, and whether they’re changing much over the past few years.

This seems to me to be as good an indicator of things as anything else.

I did it back in 2005 with Web 2.0, the tsunami,the economic crisis and seinfeld and tina fey.

But how about this one: the rise and fall of the search for “commit suicide painlessly”: things had been pretty flat since 2004 and then suddenly, over a period of three or four months from October 2008 to March 2009, the index goes from about 18 to 100:

It’s not good to read too much into Google Insights for Search, but I reckon there’s some interesting stuff in here. For one thing, the spike is a real one. That’s no blip.

(I should point out that these figures are relative. What Google does is to take the highest point—the largest volume of searches for that term since they started saving data in 2004, and then work out the volume in relation to that.)

Secondly, by mid April things on a global scale return, more or less, to where they had been in August 2008, before the crisis hit:

But if you look at individual countries, the picture is more complex:

In the U.S., where the search term rose from a relatively low base (actually it shows up as zero, meaning not enough data) it rises to 100, and then falls back by April to around 20. Only in the past few weeks does it seem to have returned to where it was to start with:

Look at the UK, by comparison, and we’re not there yet: From zero it rose—a week or so earlier, apparently to 100 by January, and then dropped, but only to around 40. It’s now around 35:

In other words, if one could take this data literally, the British are still very depressed and are still likely to be exploring ways of committing suicide. That’s pretty scary.

By the way, if you take these figures and compare them with the official UK statistics [PDF], they don’t tell you a lot. Brits have been killing themselves less since the late 1990s (though without figures from 2008 until now):

This pretty much dovetails with the Google results, 2004-9

PS I should point out that I used the term above because, having searched for “how to commit suicide” on the Google Trends page, I noticed that “commit suicide painlessly” was a popular search, rising 190%. Confusingly, “how to commit suicide” has, as a search been trending downward since 2004:

PPS Google’s nonprofit arm does use its data for this kind of thing, at least in the area of flu. It now carries data on Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the U.S.:

The Financial Crisis in Charts

Thought I’d offer a brief history of the financial crisis as seen through Google Insights, which measures the popularity of a search term over time.

Interest in the word subprime spiked a couple of times in 2007 (above) before we figured out it was all about toxic debts (below):

and credit crunches:

Then we realised suddenly we had to learn a bit more about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

and even basic terms like liquidity:

Useful information. And it wasn’t just an economics lesson. We had to gen up on countries that we had recently given little attention to, like Iceland:

Although it’s worth keeping it all in perspective. Search for the word meltdown, a commonly used term to capture the excitement of the past few weeks, and you get this. Clearly rising interest, but that spike in 2005? It’s linked to Ice Age: The Meltdown, which grossed $70 million at the box office in its debut week:

Hollywood still trumps global financial disaster, I guess.

Technorati Tags: financial crisis,credit crunch,economics,charts,google,zeitgeist,iceland

Fail, Seinfeld and Tina Fey: A Zeitgeist

I use Google Insights quite a bit—I find it a very useful way to measure interest in topics. Here’s one I keyed in just for the hell of it. Red is the word success and blue is the word fail. The chart covers from 2004 to today:

What seems to have happened is a surge of interest in the word fail relative to the word success.

To the point where, in the past week or two, it’s become a more popular word to include in search terms than the word success, for the first time in four years.

Just to magnify that last bit:

What does this mean? Probably not very much. But I found it intriguing. Are we now more interested in failure than success, or is it just this ridiculous new fascination with the word FAIL?

I think these Google searches reveal a lot more than we’re really giving them credit for. If nothing else, I believe they offer a pretty good idea of a celebrity’s career trajectory.

Take these clowns, for example. Here’s the gradually declining interest in Bill Gates (red) and Seinfeld (blue), revived, briefly, by the Microsoft ads:

(The blips in 2006 and 2007 for Seinfeld, by the way, are ‘Kramer’s’ racial slurs and Seinfeld’s aptly titled The Bee Movie, by the way.)

Here are the two comediennes, Sarah Palin and Tina Fey, their careers apparently forever intertwined. Palin is of course red:

A close-up reveals that Palin might be on the decline, whereas Tina is on the up:

Because all these things are relative, put Seinfeld and Tina Fey (red) in the same room and you get an idea of how big a shot she has become this year:

Just to stress that last spike:

Seinfeld was right when he said he was a has-been. Still a funny guy though.

And I can’t resist taking a look at how Techcrunch and Scoble (blue) face up:

Ouch. Seems Scoble started losing ground in in 2006. But hey, who knows? With this new dotcom crunch, maybe he’ll have the last laugh. Gotta admire someone who’s kept his own for 4+ years.

Talking of not leaving the party after it’s over, how does Vista shape up against XP? The chart is surprisingly revealing. Vista (red) enjoys a spike in early 2007 on its launch, but never seems to be able to shake off the XP shadow:

That’s one FAIL, I reckon.

Who says graphs are boring?

Technorati Tags: windows,xp,vista,seinfeld,palin,tina fey,success,charts,google,zeitgeist,techcrunch,scoble,microsoft

The Freshness. and T-Shirt Worthiness, of News

(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net)

CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the 'freshness' of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a 'developing story' label.)

This kind of thing is helpful in that the site can still order stories by their importance, but also flag those that are being updated:

(It also adds a rather cute touch to its whacky stories, allowing readers to order a T-shirt with the headline on it:)

Click on the T-shirt logo and you're taken to a page where you can order the shirt:

Technorati Tags: cnn,news,presentation,visualization,monetisation

Breaking Out of Those Silos

If you're looking for the future of news, a pretty good example of it is at UK startup silobreaker, which isn't a farm demolition service but a pretty cool news aggregation and visualization site. In other words, it lets you look at news in different ways. And it's caught the attention of Microsoft, who today announced it had select the company for its Startup Accelerator program.

The website itself looks pretty normal on first glance--news on the left, three columns of stuff. But look closer. Four boxes on the right offer different sorts of information: a trends chart showing "media attention" (presumably the number of mentions in the news) of different Windows products:

Another shows the relationships between Rio Tinto, other companies, topics and cities:

And my favorite, a map showing all the places where things are happening in the news. Move your mouse over them and details will pop up in a small box:

Drop down lists of topics along the top of the website allow you to select your area, and it's a satisfying range to choose from. Open the terroism page, for example, and you get a bunch of stories on terrorism, as well a map of hotspots (already zoomed in on the Middle East and Central/South Asia), and a trend map showing how media interest in terrorism in Afghanistan has risen markedly in recent weeks against that of Iraq and the U.S. Who knows how accurate this stuff is, and where it comes from, but it's still an interesting way to slice and dice the data:

Not everything works quite as it's supposed to but there's still lots of quality in here, and it puts pretty much every other news site to shame. And it's not even as if these elements are particularly new; I've long sung the praises of newsmaps and mindmaps as a way for online newspapers to get with the program, and it's frankly been disappointing that so few have tried these things out.

Technorati Tags: visualization, news, media, microsoft, startups, UK, newsmaps, mindmaps

Getting My Brain Around PersonalBrain

 This week's column for The Wall Street Journal (subscription only) is about PersonalBrain, a topic I find hard to write about:

Here's a heads-up on some organizing software that may take some getting used to. Frankly, it's taken me nearly 10 years to appreciate its power. But now that I do, it has become something of an obsession. I even have dreams about it.

It's a defiantly different kind of thought-mapping program called PersonalBrain, and a new version (including versions for Mac and Linux users) will be launched next month by U.S.-based TheBrain Technologies LP. Users include scientists, soldiers, inventors and others who have used it to marshal their collections of thoughts, projects and even databases on criminal syndicates. I find it so useful and absorbing, there's nothing -- be it a Web site link, a random idea, a contact, a document, a scrap of information -- that I don't add to its spider-web-like screen, knowing it will throw up links my brain had never considered or had failed to remember.

 I love the program with the passion of the newly converted but often feel I'm not getting the most out of it. I also feel a failure in my efforts to convert friends to its power. It's almost painful to see them writhing with information that would reveal so much to them if they spent a bit of time getting their brains around PersonalBrain.

What tipped it for me? I think it was when I stopped trying to use it like a mind map and just trusted it enough to throw things in there and not bother too much. With PersonalBrain there's no right or wrong way to use the thing, and its tendency is to startle with surprising connections, rather than build a perfectly formed tree of connections. It thrives on connections, so the other lesson is that adding links is good. It's not, as like mind mapping, a sign of a confused mind, but a recognition that creativity and association is born out of the seeming chaos of our brains. Or something.

Technorati Tags: mindmaps, personalbrain, thinking

At Last, a Zoomable World

It’s sometimes hard to get my friends excited about the technology I’m interested in, and that’s often down to the fact that a) the exciting stuff is often a big shift in what that technology can do and b) I’m not good at explaining these things to people, especially in wine bars, for some reason.

Last night, for example, I was trying to get someone excited about the Nokia N95. It’s a good phone, but the thing that most gets me excited is the ability to take good photos (5 megapixel camera) and then immediately upload them to Flickr (or anywhere else) via ShoZu, with a GPS tag attached. I just love that idea because it pulls all these technologies together (camera, phone, GPS, 3.5G connection) and makes something of them:

• it’s seamless. I don’t need to do anything except say yes when a message pops up answering if the photo I just took should be uploaded
• it’s instantaneous. As soon as the photo is uploaded it’s visible on Flickr. Anyone who wants to can see what I just saw.
• it’s physical. Now my photo can be seen in geographical context, or seen on Google Earth, or whatever.

But this is just the start. We're getting closer to a zoomable world, as imagined by the likes of the late Jef Raskin. Images will become the way we transfer, navigate and access all sorts of data: it's often easier to navigate through thumbnails than it is through filenames. Think Google Earth using 3Dconnexion's SpaceNavigator but applied to information. The closest I think we have at the moment is TopicScape. For a sign of what this might look like, check out Microsoft's photo-based acquisition, SeaDragon, which will make viewing everything, from maps to newspapers, something that we can do on more or less any device. (See Long Zheng's blog post for a demo at TED, and tools like Widsets for pushing the boundaries of what can be viewed on a small screen.)

The other big change coming that appears in the demo above is that this data will become more meaningful as it's incorporated into bigger arrangements of data. Instead of us just uploading and tagging/geotagging photos, those photos will help make up 3D maps of the world-- check out the BBC/Photosynth gallery in Long's excellent post on this. Imagine that tied to Google Earth-type environments, and then imagine it time-tagged as well as geo-tagged, and you can see the possibilities. Suddenly every photo we take will fit somewhere into a greater mosaic:

This is why I think people should buy phones like the N95, because I think these tools -- camera, phone, fast connection, GPS, editing features -- are going to make ordinary folk much more excited about the content-creating revolution that started with blogs.  

Technorati Tags: gps, nokia, n95, microsoft, seadragon, photosynth, zoomable interface, zui, photos, flickr, google, google earth, geotagging, tagging

Escape to Streetlevel

Next up: cities you can drive through, and not from above, or fake worlds where everyone has big chests. Real cities, from all angles. It’s called EveryScape.

The company calls it “the world’s first interactive eye-level search that offers Web users a totally immersive world on the Internet.” A “virtual experience of all metropolitan, suburban and rural areas in which visitors can share their stories and opinions about real-life daily experiences against a photo-realistic backdrop ranging from streets and cities, communities, restaurants, schools, real estate and the like.” Yes, I’m not crazy about the lingo, but the idea is a cool one: Just try the preview of San Francisco’s Union Square.

Using a Flash-enabled browser you move through the terrain and ground level (in the middle of the street), and then can tilt your view through all angles. You can click on certain markers for more information, or enter certain buildings. You “window shop storefronts as well as tour the inside of those stores, see their offerings, and access published reviews and other information.” You can add content such as “relevant links, personal reviews, rankings” and things like “a “For Rent” sign and an apartment tour.”

Putting the stuff together doesn’t sound as hard as you would expect. EveryScape’s HyperMedia Technology Platform means anyone with an SLR camera can take pictures and upload them; EveryScape hopes to tap “into local communities and users to assist in building out a visual library of content that will cover the entire world.” A sort of Google Earth at ground level.

Great idea, though of course you can imagine there’ll be a lot of commercial elements to all this. It’s hard to imagine ordinary Joes allowed to plaster streets with their virtual graffiti or anything else that gets in the way of advertising opportunities. The only other concern I have off the top of my head is that Google Earth made some of us wonder whether, after seeing every corner of the globe from a bird’s wing, we’d feel the same urge to travel. Now, after wandering the virtual streets of San Francisco, would we lose our wanderlust?

EveryScape plans to launch 10 U.S. metropolitan areas this year.

Tags: everyscape, google+earth, googleearth, maps, visualisation, virtual+worlds

What Your Product Does You Might Not Know About

Empty vodka bottles used for selling petrol, Bali

Tools often serve purposes the designers didn’t necessarily intend — increasing their stickiness for users but in a way not clearly understood by the creator.

Take the System Tray in Windows for example (and in the bar, whatever it’s called, in Macs.) And this array currently sitting in my overburdened laptop:

These icons usually either notify the user if something happens, by changing color, animating itself or popping up some balloon message, or they will be quick launch icons: double click or right click to launch the program, or some function within it. Or they can be both. Or, sometimes neither, sitting there like lame ducks taking up screen real estate. (These ones should, like all lame ducks, be shot.)

But the thing is that for users these icons actually sometimes do something else, acting as useful sources of more important information. I’ve noticed, for example, a lot of people — including myself — use the Skype icon (left) as the best, most visible way of telling whether their computer is connected.

First off, Skype is better and quicker at establishing a connection than most other connection-based programs with icons in the system tray. Secondly, the icon is a uncomplicated but appealing green, with tick in it — an obvious and intuitive signal to even the most untutored user. (It helps that the Skype icon is a dull gray when there’s no connection — once again, intuitive to most users.) When the Skype button turns green, users know they’re good to go.

Another good example of this is the Zone Alarm icon which alternates between the Zone Alarm logo and a gauge, red on the left and green on the right, to indicate traffic going in and out (see left). Another useful tool to see whether your computer is actually connected, and like the Skype icon, much more visible and obvious than the regular Windows connectivity icon — with the two computer screens flashing blue. I’ve gotten so used to having the Zone Alarm icon tell me what’s going on I have not been able to switch to other firewall programs, or Windows own, because they don’t have the same abundance of visual information to offer.

I’m not convinced that Zone Alarm’s new owners CheckPoint get this: They have dropped the disctinctive yellow and red ZA logo in the system tray for a bland and easily missable Z (left). The ZA icon  was an easy and prominent way to know your firewall was working and they’d be smart to resurrect it.

What does all this mean? Well, Skype have been smart to create a simple icon that not only does things like tell you your online status (available, away) but has also become a tool to help folk know whether they’re online or not — not always clear in this world of WiFi and 3G connectivity. In fact, for many users I’m guessing the green tick is more recognisable a Skype logo than the blue S Skype logo itself.

I don’t know whether Skype knows this, or whether the Zone Alarm guys realise their icon and gauge are much more useful to users as a data transfer measure than Windows’ own. But it’s a lesson to other software developers that the system tray icon could do a whole lot more than it presently does, with a bit of forethought. And if it can’t justify its existence, just sitting there saying, then maybe it shouldn’t be there?

Beyond that, we’d be smart to keep an eye out for how folk use our products, and to build on the opportunities that offers.

Tags: firewalls, zone+alarm, systray, system+tray, software, skype, icons, usability