loose wire | blog – Page 83 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

Google and History

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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.

Facebook Wants to Be Twitter, While Twitter May Have to Be More Like Facebook

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

1 Comment

Here’s another appearance on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club which is pretty much every Friday—around 1.15 GMT—and here are some links to the things I talked about this week.

Here’s the audio of the segment (about 10 minutes’ worth).

Facebook’s move to be more like Twitter. As I said on the show, Facebook fears that its network lacks room for growth; when was the last time you added a friend?
Marketers find Twitter. Australian company uSocial will go out and get followers for you, for a price. This isn’t underhand, but already twitter is becoming a place for spammers (from Habitat to the sleazeballs who won’t get out of my twitter stream.) As I mentioned on the show, Facebook is going to try to be more like twitter, while twitter may have to be more like Facebook.
Meanwhile Rupert Murdoch sees Facebook as a directory, MySpace as a place to share common interests. If that’s the case, then twitter actually trumps them both because it’s a real time search engine for both. (I didn’t have time to talk about this, but it’s an interesting point.)
(From last week) Researchers in Italy have been going around nightlcubs in Chieti asking people for cigarettes. Turns out if you ask them in their right ear, you’re more likely to be successful. It’s called the right ear advantage (via the Daily Telegraph.)

The Gap in Michael Jackson’s Online Death

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

6 Comments

This is a piece for my weekly Loose Wire Service column. I’m posting it here because it’s timely. That’s why there are no internal links in it.

Michael Jackson is dead. You’ve probably heard that already. But where did you hear it?

Chances are you read about it on twitter. Or more or less anywhere except for the traditional media channels, unless you’re late riser and live in Asia.

Jackson’s death, more than any other news event since 9/11, has captivated the world. Everyone knows who he is/was, and everyone is affected, to some degree, by his death.

But his passing is as likely to be remembered for the manner of its telling as for anything else. Jackson’s death was an online death—at the heart of the West Coast, at the heart of the Internet.

At 1921 GMT, one of his aides made a 911 call, saying Jackson was unconscious and not breathing. Paramedics arrived a few minutes later; by 2000 GMT he is in the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

2010 GMT: Ten minutes after that an online entertainment site called x17online.com posted photos and a brief story that Jackson had been hospitalized.

Twenty minutes later, at 2030 GMT, TMZ.com, a bigger entertainment website, posted a bulletin: “Michael Jackson—Cardiac Arrest”.

Barely an hour has passed since the medics were called. Twenty minutes later E-Online reports Jackson’s hospitalization.

But still no word from the big media.

Wikipedia—the community-edited encyclopedia—cites the E Online article at 2112 GMT.

Finally, seven minutes after that, the French news agency Agence France Presse quotes TMZ.com and E! Online as saying that Jackson had been rushed to hospital.

A minute later TMZ.com was saying that Jackson was dead; the same time as Thomson Reuters, another news agency quoted the Los Angeles Times website as saying Jackson had been rushed to hospital.

TMZ.com had jumped the gun, but only in medical terms: Jackson was pronounced dead at 2126 GMT.

It’s not easy for traditional media to cover any type of story these days, what with so many amateurs, semi-amateurs, so-called pro-ams (professional amateurs), in the game.

But all that tells me is that the game probably needs to be changed.

Traditional media are used to confirming things before they run them.

But what happens in a world where information travels so quickly, through so many different channels?

It no longer makes sense to say nothing until you can say something.

In this case a news service with extensive contacts was able to trump traditional media for the biggest entertainment story since John Lennon’s murder in 1980.

And not just by a few minutes. By an hour.

The second act is even more revealing.

With mainstream news only still saying Jackson had been hospitalized—while Jackson’s body was being flown by helicopter to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office—the TMZ story was now finding its way onto twitter.

At 2131 the first link to the story appeared on twitter. A minute earlier, the two million odd followers of CNN’s breaking news twitter feed received word that Jackson had gone to hospital.

Now the word is really out. But word of what? Is Jackson dead? Hospitalized? What gives?

From about 2140 Internet users start to hammer Google News for information.

So much so, Google’s engineers think it’s some kind of hacker attack and throw up roadblocks (those messages asking you to enter letters in a text box to prove you’re not a computer.)

From now on, for the next few hours, the average speed for downloading news sites doubles, from about four seconds to nine.

So many people try to update the Wikipedia page on Michael Jackson that the editors decide, at 2145 GMT, to freeze it until the situation is clearer.

History is being written, with or without the mainstream media.

At 2150 Facebook users start to alter their updates more frequently.

At exactly the same time Twitter users are clicking on the TMZ.com link at the rate of 42 per second—its peak.

Plays of Michael Jackson songs on the online music sharing site Last.fm surge; from about 1,000 to 35,000.

Michael Jackson is being mourned online even before he’s been publicly declared dead.

At 2219 GMT the top trend on twitter—the phrase most often and widely used in users’ updates—is RIP Michael Jackson.

Five minutes later Reuters news agency quotes the Los Angeles Times website as saying Jackson is dead. A minute later MSNBC.com confirm his death.

Five minutes later, CNN.com joins in. Two minutes later, so does Wikipedia.

Now he is, officially, dead—an hour after being pronounced dead, and more than an hour after an entertainment website, and millions of people online believed him so.

By 2234 20% of all messages on twitter—and there are many—are about Michael Jackson.

An hour later the LA Coroner confirms Jackson’s death, and, eight minutes later, so does Reuters.

It’s a strange new world where information travels this quickly. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that traditional media tries to confirm stories the old fashioned way.

But the problem is the gap it leaves.

A gap between these new upstart news services, which may or may not be right, but which are able, through the power of the Net, to pass word out to the world, entirely bypassing tradtional media.

Twitter, in that sense, is the last piece of the puzzle.

Google News buckled under the pressure, firstly from all the attention and then latterly because the results from its own little automatic bots which go out and index news pages didn’t show up on Google News until 2246—an hour and a half after TMZ.com’s story saying Jackson was dead.

(This according to the search optimization website SEOmoz, which put together a great chronology on the story, much of which I’ve used here. http://bit.ly/3blDAC)

But maybe Google doesn’t matter anymore, when you’ve got “real time search” like twitter.

Twitter lets you see everything in real time, and, when something big like this happens, everyone wants the information in real-time.

Traditional media now has to figure out a way of giving it to them—without, preferably, ditching their values of getting the facts right first.

Google’s Suicide Watch

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

2 Comments

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.:

Right Ears, Masked Passwords and Nail Printing

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

3 Comments

I have actually been appearing on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club pretty much every Friday—around 1.15 GMT–for the past year or so, but don’t always remember to post the links to the things I talk about (or intend to; there’s not always time).

Here’s to trying to remember to do it (and audio, now it’s available.)

Researchers in Italy have been going around nightlcubs in Chieti asking people for cigarettes. Turns out if you ask them in their right ear, you’re more likely to be successful. It’s called the right ear advantage (via the Daily Telegraph.)
Password masking is stupid, according to user interface expert Jakob Nielsen. Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing, he says, and that makes them more likely to use overly simple ones. (Interestingly, one commenter on FriendFeed said the masking thing has less to do with fear of shoulder-surfing than of old CRT monitors, whose analog connections would give off radio noise which could be reconstituted with special equipment.)
Polaroid spin-off Zink has selected finalists for a competition to find novel ways to use its inkless printing (via Technology Review). My favorite: nail printing, via Singapore’s own Sonny Lim (above)
CEOs are media slackers, according to UberCEO.com. Most don’t have a twitter feed, a Facebook page or even a LinkedIn profile. Only Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters seems to be doing well. (via WIRED)