nobarking’s posterous

As many of you know, I'm one-third of a team of writers who monitor public metrics produced by and for Google's Knol beta experiment. Our team maintains an award-winning high page view article entitled Knol Site Metrics Reveal Good, Bad & Ugly.

Now, our top analyst, Dr. Krishan Maggon, has detected expropriation of our conclusions into Knols by another "author," without attribution or credit. On Knol Help's guidance page on the subject of plagiarism, Maggon appealed for assistance:

A knol author during the past few months has stolen ideas, data and methods from my/our knols without citation. Within few days of my posting or revisions, he has created new knols using the same data or with slight changes, or the basic idea and claims as the first knol author and used the figures in his comments, revisions or created new knols. The original source or knol has never been mentioned.

What is the way forward to deal with it and send a message to all authors to desist from such practices?

Dr. Maggon's work, abetted as it was by team member Peter Baskerville's insight and my editing, rises to the level of news generation. Not as exciting as the liberation of imprisoned journalists in North Korea, but news nonetheless. As a team, we reported our news in a story entitled Knol Annual Review in the Good, Bad & Ugly Knol linked above. Is it proper for readers of this review to use our conclusions without attribution, perhaps claiming these as original thought? Is it OK to twitter our news, but not OK to republish it in another search engine-discoverable article without attribution?

A new ethical standard is needed, or none at all. What do you think?

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When I received an invitation to try out Google Voice, my burn-out level for VoIP technology had been reached and passed. But... I'm a sap so I accepted and was issued an account. The initial task was to answer a raft of questions (leading to the assignment of a single global phone number that will hunt you down at home, work, cell, wherever your other phone numbers might lead).

After a half hour with Google's telephone number selector (many, many thousands of choices sorted by area code or desired number -- go ahead and try 333-333-3333 in the search window), I picked 415-997-8717. And I set it up to automatically transfer to my land line, VoIP line and cell phone, in that order. It will hunt me down. Phone Routing offers many customizations based on who is calling. Click the link above to see the full feature set that Google has set up. Very impressive. And free for domestic calls.

This all happened weeks ago. I've not had time to try it out... until this morning. I used my VoIP line to call the new number. The land line rang immediately. I let the call go into voice mail (fearing perhaps that answering my own call would be a sign of mental disturbance. I don't need any more signs). My own message greeted me. At the tone, I barked out a new message. A few moments later, my Internet Voice account on Google had the text neatly typed out, converted from the audio stream. It was absolutely correct except for one thing: it said Maria, not Murry, was the caller.

Very cool stuff. I wonder how it will handle accented voices. So, Jorge in Brasilia, give me a holler. I won't answer but hope to see the text of your message. The number again is 415-997-8717.

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I was just notified that my efforts at Zillow (the real estate web site) have earned me "All Star" status. A branded badge has been awarded:

Recognition and atta-boys are always appreciated, so thanks, Zillow. Now, if I could just get my house to earn an all star badge. Better yet, if I could just get the market to turn around so that actual customers showed interest. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a real estate market like this one. Every day, the NY Times-owned local paper carries one or more stories headlining some new aspect of the market (Sales up, Prices down). None of the coverage tells sellers like me how to find buyers.

Being a metrics and analytics freak, I set up a watchlist some weeks ago, populated with directly-competitive real estate. The list has more than 75 properties selected from the MLS for comparability. In the last five weeks, the only change noted for any property is price reductions. Not one of these properties went into escrow.

If you have an idea that might change this absurb situation, please share it. With a bagful, I'll be able to write and publish ideas for others. And of course I'll include the code for my new All Star badge because it would most definitely be deserved.

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I'm in the process of selling my home. Or should I say attempting to sell. My objective: downsize out of the empty nest. We all get there, don't we?

My big life plan called for this three years ago. However, we know what was happening in 2006. Everyone thought we'd be back on the straight and level in a year or so. "Let's wait," I told my wife and she agreed. She's a real estate pro and like all of her colleagues at the time, she thought we'd do better by waiting.

NOT. Now we are experimenting with selling. In the heavy duty process of getting ready (my honey-do list just dropped below 200 but light is still not visible at the end of that tunnel), I've come to realize that much has changed in real estate marketing:

• The newspaper is no longer the prime mover of real estate. It's hard to say by what percentage. The daily paper does not carry many listings compared with just five years ago. It's not hard to speculate that the number is large, maybe as much as a 90% decline.
• That leaves the venerable Sunday Real Estate section. Well, venerable no longer. This section used to be printed in two folios totalling perhaps 24 - 30 pages. Now it's a single section of maybe six pages. The chief reason for its existence these days seems to be the open house listings and scarce display ads for new homes. Both are needed by serious shoppers and sellers and none of the on-line publishers like Zillow has found a way to implement successor service because it's such a local kind of thing. In the heyday (pre-2005), new home builders filled those folios with attractive full page color ads. The open house guide spanned three full pages. Now the business is all fractional ads, and not many of them, while the guide resides on a half page.
  
• Before my wife took a sabbatical from the biz several years ago, agents would readily hire graphic and wordsmith freelancers to produce flyers and brochures. Not anymore. With a huge drop in sales -- and with the lion's share of listings concentrated at the low end -- there's no money for marketing communications. If you are a real estate agent today, you have to be a desktop publisher. One of your largest expenses is color ink for the desktop printer.

And you have to know how to use the 'net. You are spending more time at your keyboard putting data into Zillow, for example. And you are looking for ways around the costly custom website that used to pop up for every new listing.

I may have found a useful way to get a website free. I discovered this place more than a year ago and have pressed Scribd.com into service as my home's website... for free. I even named the site with the address, e.g. About 123 Elm Street. I just published the site yesterday and it already hunts in the top 10 for a Google address search (e.g., you put the address 123 Elm Street into a Google search window and the Scribd site shows up (not really, since 123 Elm is not my address, but you get the point). No zip code, either. Append About to the address, put it all in quotes, and it may hunt as #1.

Scribd.com accepts PDF's, so if you have the desktop creation skills, your presentation can earn "Wow." Mine is a color photo essay in five pages plus a two page feature sheet (I built this place and poured tons of effort into improvements, many of which I did myself). Anytime I wish to change the content, I just fire up the source doc, make revisions, save as PDF and tell Scribd I've updated the document via the upload feature. Viola!

To my pleasure, a whole bunch of folks have now seen my document and several have downloaded it. That's another bene of Scribd: they keep track of your metrics. Maybe I'll write a blog entry about the numbers after a month or two.

Of course, I've also produced the obligatory Craigslist ad. This time I tried something new using my own advice about big photos (see earlier blog postings about my Knol and HowToDoThings articles on big photos for Craigslist). I created an attractive one-page ad for the house, filled a 19" portrait LCD display with it and captured a screen shot. After a few minutes in Picasa to optimize the 960 pixel wide portrait format "photo", I was ready to play. And I daresay that few others have a better looking Craigslist ad. It's completely readable at 800 pixels wide. You can CTRL+ it to magnify in Firefox. It scales nicely and remains readable.

So, if I can do it, you can do it. It does not have to be a house for sale. Everyone is a publisher, or should be. Use software you already own, including Word and Publisher and many other free programs. Practice may not make perfect, but you'll get darn close. Between those photos you shoot and the copy you prepare, you are well on your way to Internet publishing success at low (or no) cost.

Copywriting is still a skill best left to pros. However, real estate advertising should be short on copy, long on pictures. So, some of the pain can be made to go away via your digital camera. Still, if you need some assistance, nobarking is the writer to call. Google Knol still has me in top position after eight months.

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My cheerleading for Google took a turn this week when the new Chrome operating system plan was announced in a blog. Google is press release adverse, preferring to harvest its persona via blogs and sometimes just rumors. However, the blog was pretty rich with data (more than one pundit claims it was also bereft of hard news).

Those who know me also know that I have a storied history with operating system clients. Not long ago I helped found and then run the Embedded Linux Consortium, a trade association developed for the promotion and implementation of Linux for embedded applications. You may not know that for every microprocessor chip sold for desktop, laptop and netbook PCs, 10 more are sold for embedded devices like cell phones, medical instruments, test equipment, fare collection, military and literally thousands of other uses. If a product does not look like a computer but has a computer chip inside, it's an embedded device. My washing machine is an embedded computer.

And every one of those devices needs some kind of operating system. Enter Chrome, which claims the Linux OS as the key "simple" underpinning. Simple? Hardly. Google, you have some struggles ahead. I say that in the nicest possible way based on extensive background with no less than 10 operating systems (one of my early articles compared something approaching 100 embedded OS's in a Control Engineering article).

Linux hasn't earned much traction in the PC business in spite of several good attempts. Oddly, the Chrome browser on which the new OS will be partly based is already built on Linux and open source code yet won't run on Linux. Chrome runs on Windows software - XP and Vista. Wassssup with dat? No homage to the homies?

Of course, Google has the best view of itself from 50,000 feet. It knows how its other offerings like Google Docs delivered through the browser will round out the total OS offering. I won't begin to second guess the high altitude view. But I can wonder just what Google is thinking when the only real competitor here, Microsoft, is gaining ground with the impending distribution of Windows 7 to essentially good reviews in Beta. Even with the disaster that is Vista, Microsoft is not about to fall off the planet. This means that W7 will offer a broad embrace to all those apps you hold near and dear on your hard drive. Apps that you are not ready to give up for browser delivered replacements.

Is there a visible tipping point that we can't see but Google can? Time will tell. In the meantime, I'll hold off on a Netbook purchase to see just what kind of muscle Chrome OS is able to muster. Then the cheerleading might start again (just kidding: I'm pulling for you Googe. I want ala carte cable service and ala carte software.)

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As part of a team of writers, my Knol on Content Violations has achieved 100% success in the removal or remediation of content that appears to violate Google's policies. In our latest case, we uncovered a writer who had posted almost 40 slick advertisements for resort properties, masquerading them as Knols. Upon learning that the writer is removing these from the system, here's what I wrote in a comment:

On one level, I think this is unfortunate because this author is clearly skilled in the use of the Knol platform. Instead of removing of Knols, we recommended to her that they be turned into tourist guides for the regions of interest, in the model exemplified by Russ Cary's Yosemite Guide. Perhaps she'll do this going forward. I hope so.

Having established trust with readers, such guides can be potent salespersons for recommended accommodations, restaurants and points of interests that are included. If I had to summarize the approach, I'd call it Journalism rather than PR.

On yet another level, I think this event can be viewed as a case study for Web 2.0. A lot of PR people are crowing about the end of journalism, saying that PR is the new journalism. I practice both PR and journalism in my freelance work, and I am shouting back: no way. Why? Readers are really smart. The best commercial Knol writers should pay attention.

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I'm pleased to see that my ghostwritten Knol for Bernie Borges, Twitter and Tweet from the Trenches, has earned a coveted quality badge as Top Pick Knol. All day yesterday, the Knol was featured on Google's Knol landing page. After I ghost wrote the first draft, Bernie made me an honest writer by editing and adding his own content. I very much enjoyed the collaboration and hope to do more work like it.

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My colleague Gary Katz has issued a call for marketing pros to act with courage in the current dismal market.

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My new Knol on Content Violations has scored victory #1. Heather Matthews has reorganized her Knol on Romance Novels and removed her first novel from the list of greats.

I think Heather gets it. Knol is not the place to promote directly for profit. It is the place to inform, to educate or, as Google says, to deliver a "unit of knowledge." Google does not tell authors WHAT to write, but they do legislate WHY to write. If your motivation is to inform, you are going to like Knol because jerks like me won't harass you for violating content policy.

And, you might profit by building trust with readers who will seek you out.

As a knowledge seeker, I want search results from a counterpoint to Wikipedia. Not a competitor, but another source of information, perhaps one that is more grounded, less academic (and we all know that Wikipedia's academic credentials are not always... sterling.

That's why it's important to me for Knol to succeed. My motivation for the content violations Knol is to see if, on a broad front, we can get traction that will raise the bar on Knol's trust. If Knol succeeds, it's going to be because we trust what we are reading.

Take a look at the Knol and see our new selection of a Case in Point:
http://knol.google.com/k/murry-shohat/content-violations-on-knol-report-them/2srzofgvr8kjr/23#

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Will public access trash Google's Knol experiment? You get to vote at my new Knol (article) built by an international team. Check it out: http://knol.google.com/k/murry-shohat/content-violations-on-knol-report-them/2srzofgvr8kjr/23#

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