Remember when IBM pitted its Deep Blue computer in a chess match against human opponents? Well now, HotHardware reports that IBM has developed a “Question Answering” supercomputer that not only answers questions put to it in plain English, but is good enough to play Jeopardy.

The machine is named “Watson” after IBM’s founder but perhaps a play on Dr. Watson, whose questions to his companion Sherlock Holmes invariably elicited the reply, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” And don’t forget Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Watson, who was summoned by Bell on the freshly invented telephone to see if it worked. It worked.

Though it sounds like a multimillion dollar parlor trick, in fact IBM has set its sights on no less a rival than Google. Its ability to answer questions in conversational English give it the advantage over the Google keyboard.

Yo Watson, pick up! (What Alexander Graham Bell actually said was, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.")

And responding to Jeopardy questions is particularly challenging.  Watson needed to be “trained” to recognize those questions, which are really answers.  And, as the video shows, Jeopardy’s format is filled with puns and other wordplay, requiring a nimble intellect.

HotHardware points out that Watson passed some tests with flying colors, but it still has a way to go before it puts Google out of business.  “Watson has a tendency to crash [and] sometimes goes on streaks of getting everything wrong.”

Well, yes, that can be a problem!

Richard Curtis

Think you’re addicted to YouTube now?  Your fifteen minutes a day – maybe five or six videos of two or three minutes each – are a fraction of the five hours you spend daily watching television. Google, YouTube’s owner, is not happy about that and has plans to raise your dose substantially.

Dude, when YouTube is through with you you’re gonna be freebasing videos.

You probably haven’t been aware of it, but right now you have too much choice.  When you go on the YouTube website you make choices about what you want to watch.  When you finish watching a video you have the choice to select another or to exit the website.  YouTube doesn’t care for choice one little bit. “Every decision point is an opportunity to leave,” says a company executive, and opportunities to leave are not good for business. Not good at all.

Randall Stross, writing in the “Digital Domain” feature of the Sunday New York Times, says that YouTube has devised a strategy to capture your attention to keep your eye on the screen and your hand off the exit key. “This fall,” writes Stross, “YouTube says it will introduce a radically different, uncluttered look, with YouTube Leanback. It will have a separate Web address and will start playing a video the moment a user clicks on the site. When one video ends, another will start automatically, eliminating those dreaded ‘decision points’ that invite abandonment.”

But there’s more – hours and hours more.  Stross reports that the chief of YouTube’s user experience team – yes that’s actually a title -  says the site is stepping up its long-form content – “television shows, professionally produced Webisodes and movies, as well as live sporting and music events.”

Prepare to trade in your couch for…another couch, compliments of YouTube.

Read details in YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile.

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Last year we posed this question to bloggers: Would you be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website – if you were losing $40 million a month to service them? That’s the question that Google has been asking itself; the hemorrhaging website in question is Google’s corporate subsidiary, YouTube. The very amateurism that had made YouTube the Fabulous Behemoth was draining its resources.

Google realized it was time to stop giving content away and to recognize that it is an entertainment medium that has every right to monetize that content. In short, Google had to go Hollywood, with professionally made videos generating advertising revenue.

The New York Times’s Brad Stone has looked in on YouTube and found its strategy beginning to take grip. That seems like a good idea given the fact that it attracts more than 2 billion views daily.

Stone writes that “Google executives said in January that the site, which has perennially lost money, had increased its revenue, and that ad space on YouTube’s home pages for 20 countries was sold out every day toward the end of 2009. Many analysts say YouTube could break even this year for the first time, after five years of large losses generated by its high bandwidth and storage costs.”

To learn how you can monetize your website when it attracts 60 billion views every month – or even a mere 6 billion – read At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5.

Of course, not all of us are happy to see YouTube go Hollywood.  Last year we wrote:

How do we feel about the westcoastification of YouTube? Here’s one opinion – mine:

Well, Hollywood, there are millions of us who don’t want YouTube to mature. We like it just the way it is — embarrassingly sophomoric, amateurish, LOL hilarious, pathetic, dopey, dirty, funky, and utterly counterculture. It belongs to We the People. Can’t you go co-opt some other industry? We can think of a lot of them that could use your genius, your money and your values.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

There's an app for that

“America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centers of companies like Google and Microsoft.” writes Ashlee Vance in the New York Times.

“The rise of higher-speed data transfer networks, however, has given technology companies a chance to move farther from large populations and still be able to get information to them as quickly as they need it. So companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com and Microsoft have been engaged in a mad dash to find spots in the United States that have plenty of electricity and land. As a result, more data centers have been built in states like Washington, Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma. If those locations are near dairy farms, so much the better.”

Are we missing a bet by not setting one up in Washington DC?

Details in One Moos and One Hums, but They Could Help Power Google

RC

About a year ago we asked if you would be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website – if it also meant that you were losing $40 million a month to service all that traffic.

The website in question was YouTube.  Its owner, Google, was struggling to find a way to make money on all those eyeballs, and happily it has begun to find a path to profitability. (See YouTube Goes Hollywood.)

Now it’s time for another conundrum. How would you like to own a service hosting 50 million messages a day – that isn’t minting money?

That’s Twitter, a fabulous giant that proves once again that no matter how mountainous the wave of hits to your website may be, you are not a successful business until and unless you monetize all that traffic.  This is a fundamental law of business, yet more than one startup has been so dazzled by the hits lighting up its site that its creators were blinded into believing they had struck it rich.  In time they discovered that unless they converted those eyeballs into cash it was all in vain. Some learned the hard way: they went out of business.

In the case of Twitter, many clever developers have found a way to convert the eyeballs to cash – only they don’t work for Twitter. They are independent appsters who slipstreamed in the host company’s wake, battening on opportunities that Twitter’s management failed to see or capitalize on.

“Twitter has been unusually free about letting developers tap into its data and technology, through what is known as an application programming interface,” writes Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times.

That’s an elegant way of saying Twitter gave it away. But the company is beginning to figure it out and stop shy of giving away the store.  “If developers build something Twitter wants, the company has three options — let it exist separately, create its own version, or buy the start-up,” Miller explains.  It would appear Twitter is abandoning the suicidal option #1 and focusing on creating its own proprietary apps or  buying firms that advance its business agenda.

It would seem to be a sensible strategy but it may come at a price.  It’s easy to attract a stampede of customers when your service is free. But once it starts costing…?

And what happens when the apps that Twitter generates in-house compete directly with former partners? “When you go to write a Twitter application,” Miller quotes a developer, “you almost wonder, is Twitter going to come out with the same feature in a month and blow me away?”

These questions will hang in the atmosphere over Chirp, the first conference for Twitter developers commencing this week in San Francisco.  To see which way the wind is blowing – well, read your tweets.

You can read Miller’s coverage in full here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Now that our speculations about Apple’s tablet (including a name) have been put to rest, it’s time to play Speculation 2.0.  What are we speculating about?  How about a Google tablet.

Electronista says “Google is in the midst of crafting its own tablet to take on the iPad, a leak late Sunday may have revealed. CEO Eric Schmidt at a recent Los Angeles party purportedly told those gathered that the company is working on an Android tablet. Most of its details weren’t mentioned, but it would be both an e-reader and a general computing device.”

The Electronista staff adds: “Any tablet launch would be controversial for Google, as it would not only stoke the heated battle with Apple even further but risk alienating the company’s hardware partners.”

Can’t pass up a good rumor?  Then Google prepping its own Android tablet? is perfect for you.

RC

Back in February we learned that Google planned to terminate support for those who use Google’s FTP site to post their blogs. (See Panic in Blogger Park! Google Pulls Plug on FTP Feed).  The FTP was a huge drain on the company’s resources. Though the original March 26 2010 deadline has been extended to May 1, that date is definitely lights-out for bloggers relying on Google Blogger.

Google offers support for bloggers migrating to other platforms, but we strongly urge those living in denial to move now or face not just a blackout but the possible loss of archived blogs.

E-Reads migrated its blog to WordPress in the recent redesign of its website and we’re very happy with it.

Richard Curtis

Is Google a service provider or a content provider? Before you answer I have to read you your Miranda rights, because you can go to prison if you answer the wrong way, at least in Italy.

The Italian government says Google is a content provider, and an Italian court supporting that position found three Google executives “criminally responsible for content posted on its system,” reports Rachel Donadio in the New York Times. Under Italian law, executives can be held responsible for actions taken by the companies they work for. The decision “suggests that Google is not simply a tool for its users, as it contends,” writes Donadio, “but is effectively no different from any other media company, like newspapers or television, that provides content and could be regulated.”

The case revolves around a video posted in 2006 that showed a group of teenage boys bullying an autistic boy. Prosecutors for the Italian government asserted that Google should have removed the video from its site faster than it did. It took two months after the incident before the Italian police formally complained to Google, but within two hours of receiving that complaint Google says it took the video down. Donadio writes that the response among Internet activists could be “likened to punishing the mailman for delivering a nasty letter.”

Google has posted a blog arguing that the Italian decision contradicts a European Union directive protecting Internet service providers from liability for content hosted on their site. You can read it in full here.

Though it’s hard to believe that the Italian ruling will not be thrown out on appeal, this incident is a wakeup call for Google and for anyone who believes he or she can simply throw a video up on a website without any consequences whatever. If the court decision is upheld it could have a catastrophically depressing effect on the Internet as we know it. As Google’s blog said, “If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

This is not a war being fought on a foreign shore. It’s one that is playing out beneath your nose. So, I respectfully suggest you take more than an intellectual interest in the income. Read the Times article in full here.

Richard Curtis

A Credit Suisse analyst has downgraded Amazon’s market share of e-book sales over the next five years, reports Matt Phillips in the Wall Street Journal blog. Downgraded it big time, from 90% to 35%.

“Near term, we suspect that the iPad and the new eBook agency pricing model, which requires that Amazon increase retail prices to be more consistent with Apple’s pricing, will provide Kindle with the most market share headwind. Going forward, we can envision a scenario where Apple, Amazon, and Google eventually split the market. Therefore, we expect Amazon’s share of eBooks business to fall from 90% currently to about 35% over the next five years.”

Driving Credit Suisse’s projection is the shift by many publishers away from retail model that propelled Amazon to a huge lead in the e-book space. And lurking in the shadows is a Google tablet rumored to be in development.

RC

Last week many bloggers received an email notice from Google that triggered an OMG moment, except that the “G” stood for Google. The firm announced the imminent shut-down of support for those who use Google’s FTP site to post their blogs.

Though less than 1% of active blogs are published on FTP, the medium “remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger,” writes Rick Klau, the company’s Blogger Product Manager. Thus Google will turn the lights out on FTP on March 26 2010. You can read the full text of his announcement here.

“FTP”, which stands for “File Transfer Protocol,” is a common and convenient method for transferring or exchanging files between computers over the Internet. Most blogger platforms like Blogspot, WordPress and Drupal do not rely on FTP. Those that use Google’s FTP may not realize the huge impact on Google’s server. Every time you upload a new post via FTP, Google’s server republishes and re-synchs every previous single file, image, archive page, and link. If you’ve been blogging for years, the hit on the FTP is mammoth. Savvy bloggers have been wondering when Google would finally pull the plug. “It was too good to be true,” one told me.

Those bloggers that do depend on Google FTP are going to have to scramble to migrate their blogs to another host. Google has offered all sorts of support to make the transition as easy as possible. First, they’ll issue more email information in coming weeks, and have created a dedicated blog which you may visit here. In addition, they tell us that…

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released

Klau expressed his regrets, acknowledging that his company’s decision “will frustrate some users.”

Frustrate? How about opening their veins in a tub of warm water! If you’re working your blog through Google’s FTP feed we strongly suggest you put your backside in overdrive and find an alternative.

Richard Curtis