Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Paul and Storm - News To Us - That's The News of the Week - Live (Squid's Redoubt)

I’m experimenting with glomming the diverse aspects of my digital shadow together into a single cohesive whole. For the moment, you can find that on my new Tumble-blog, http://squidlord.tumblr.com, which puts together photos taken, Twitters, bits shared from Google Reader, and my Jaanix additions.

Ultimately, I’m hoping Jaanix will be able to take live RSS feeds and thus replace Tumblr as the core technology there, because it lets me (and others) find new things more often..

One stop keeping up with Squid shopping!

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: David Bowie / Platinum Collection (Disc 3) / This Is Not America

I feel like I'm vaguely trespassing on the ground of Harry Potter with that title, but oh well.

Google has produced a new search tool called Google Trends that does some crunchy data-mining on queries over the past few years. Its pretty significant work, really, so I just had to put it to a trivial use.

First up, searching for "auto assault, world of warcraft, guild wars, city of heroes, city of villains, dungeon runners, exteel".

auto assault world of warcraft guild wars city of heroes city of villains

Observe the above graph. Note that World of Warcraft is tremendously ahead of the search curve. Hugely, immensely, unquestionably so. But late in 2004, Guild Wars, of all things, not only spiked upwards but held remarkably steady thereafter, considering its much tighter focus and much smaller promotional budget. Between them, they dominate this particular search.

What if we throw Everquest into the mix, you ask? Funny you should ask.

auto assault everquest world of warcraft guild wars city of heroes

It doesn't take a marketing genius to figure out what's going on here. World of Warcraft spikes upward like a kid tweaking on crystal meth, Everquest takes a precipitous dive, like said kid as said meth wears off. What's really interesting here is that, even given searching for Everquest subsumes searching for EQ2, Guild Wars spikes up well over EQ's strong point and then steadily maintains a lead search position. Considering the difference in Sony's budget and NCsoft's, the difference is not just surprising, its shocking.

What if we gank out WoW, EQ, and Guild Wars?

auto assault city of heroes city of villains dungeon runners exteel

City of Heroes is the huge winner here, with its only competition coming from its sibling. The rest I just tossed in due to being the other games I'm interested in, with both Dungeon Runners and Exteel having been announced at E3 today as download-for-free / play-for-free platforms, both from NCsoft. Auto Assault hasn't been out long enough and hasn't been really advertised heavily save a few full-page gaming mag ads, so its position is entirely unsurprising.

I doubt seriously if marketing folks haven't already realized the pure power mining the Google corpus of searches can provide for their feedback on how much penetration they're having. The Trends interface lets you focus on narrower fields of time, specific regions of the world, and even tells you the cities the most searches are coming from. This is heavy-duty stuff, and I, in just a few minutes' tinkering, already turned up information I found personally surprising.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Various Artists - Alice Cooper / No More Mr. Nice Guy (Squid's Redoubt)

I suppose if I were anything more like sane, this would have some vague shape of horror for me. I mean, let's say Joe Naive goes looking for all the LiveJournal entries which mention Hitler, possibly in relation to the next anniversary of WWII. A reasonable thought, really, though a totally naive query, as we all know.

And he gets the frame on the right (amusingly, utterly undoctored; I simply cut-n-pasted a screen capture into PhotoShop to crop out all the other crap I keep running on my box). as a result. The truly funny thing is that there are very few links on that result to LiveJournal articles at all, and mine is the only one at all that points to a whole root site, even though I'm sure that in the past two years there's been enough "OMG, Chimpy Bush-Hitler!" angst and ennui posted to LJ to fill thirty trucks of non-homogeneous otherkin skin with said pages printed upon it.

The irony of this particular gift falling to me is particularly non-trivial, despite or because of the fact that being a short, dark-haired, dark-eyed, physically deformed mutant horror, I'm first on the list of the eradicated should Neo-Nazis ever return to power. My far-greater strategic understanding of warfare and tendency to state so snidely to der Fuhrer's face would simply solidify my deep inhalation of Zyklon at the first opportunity.

I suppose my previous discussion of Google's ranking and news choices were simply not sufficient. Would the invocation of Godwin's Law as a result prove my original contention? Once the folks at Google Labs bring Hitler into the discussion, do they instantly lose? How far reaching was Godwin's prescience?

(Of course, the more I go on at length about this, the more Hitler and I become coterminous, even though I'm a better painter and tactician, and a worse demagogue. Does PageRank's conflation suggest there's someone out there that links to my blog every time they use the word Hitler? I mean, the functioning of the algorithm is relatively sensible -- as published. What can we say as a result of seeing the result?)

In a sense, this puts full validation behind the contention I've always had that Google (and all 2nd generation search engines, from AltaVista on) loses out by not telling a user why a certain page came up in response to a query. Sites like Collaborative Rank are starting to make themselves present in the systemic landscape and impact the things users have come to expect from search engines.

Just another day in the bizarre expanse that is my life.

Current Mood: highly amused

So, who knew I was talking smack about Google.

Google, apparently.

I feel strangely ... honoured ... to have the top result for the search "hitler livejournal" point directly to me.

I'll treasure this moment ... always.

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Warren Zevon - Mohammed's Radio (Squid's Redoubt)

I've just had a bit of an odyssey. While hacking on putting together some research for a reply on John Roberts' judicial positions, I was, of course, using Google. After all, I'm a Googlelectual, someone who considers the Net his external brain and leverages all the tools at his disposal to reference and categorize that vast well of knowledge. Logically, I started that off by googling for "john roberts flag burning", thinking, reasonably enough, that I'd hit a fairly clear pointer to his original rulings and notes somewhere near the top of the pile, right? That's what Google does, after all, give you the facts first, right?

Wrong, apparently. In fact, in the first ten pages, there wasn't one pointer to a collection of John Roberts' judicial reviews or analysis. Moreover, there wasn't one reference to a John Roberts confirmation discussion from a right-leaning blog in the first five pages.

That's kind of a scary image, when you think about it. I mean, there's a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about John Roberts, on all three sides of the aisle (if you imagine Libertarians have a chair kind of suspended over the back end of the room). I mean, a lot of discussion, with all the relevant cross-linking and article-citing you expect from the Pajamas Media. But for a system supposedly keying on who links to what most frequently and deeply, Google is coming up with some deeply suspicious content. Technorati comes up with a pretty balanced selection of blogs when you search it, but Google, which has access to more than simply blog feeds, does a worse, less balanced job?

Can we assume from that data that the overall mediasphere is less balanced than the blogosphere, or is it reasonable to suspect the folks at Google are pushing an agenda?

The idea's been floated before. GOPinion has one of the more recent examples of it. The choices of news sources to aggregate into Google News are occasionally very troubling (and including IndyMedia as one of them almost invalidates the very idea that they're filtering for quality and not ideology; Little Green Footballs can't get aggregated there, but IndyMedia can?).

On the off chance I was just hitting the wall on picking a subject too recent, I decided to go hunting something a bit more old school: Che Guevara.

Lots of good looking photography. Looks vaguely t-shirtish. On the first page, there's ten major links, one of which goes to Wikipedia and contains a rather dry set of facts which side-steps neatly most of the questions of whether Che is, in fact, a laudatory revolutionary figure, and a critique from Slate down near the bottom which takes the unambiguous stance that Che was a failure and a violent murderer, inspired by the Motorcycle Diaries. The rest are pretty straight-up fawning revolutionary Che cult sites. Page two is little better, with two critical sites of ten listed.

In fact, one juxtaposition is almost amusing:

Che Guevara's Dubious Legacy
Anti-Communist essay by John Suarez on the legacy of Che Guevara.
www.fiu.edu/~fcf/che.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

Che Guevara hero file
A short biography and background notes on Che Guevara.
www.moreorless.au.com/heroes/guevara.html - 39k - Cached - Similar pages

Che Guevara: The Killing Machine | www.vcrisis.com
e-zine offering news, analysis and information from venezuela regarding hugo chavez, political crisis, human rights violations, terrorism, ...
www.vcrisis.com/index.php?content=letters/200507081316 - 55k - Cached - Similar pages

Is there something here? I'm not sure. My gut says there's definitely enough evidence to suggest the Google News sources are hand-picked to conform to a certain ideological framework. There's some mild suggestion that, at least as applies to blogs, some form of behind the scenes selection may be occurring.

If either of these contentions could be proven outright, it'd be bad news for a company that prides itself on being "not evil." One of the aphorisms that best quantify the Net applies here, in closing, however:

The Net percieves censorship as damage, and routes around it accordingly.