Remember the newspaper guy so many were calling clueless for saying that Google was getting all his content for free without paying for it? I defended him, saying that from where he stood the name Google was synonymous with everything we think of as the web or the Internet.

Now there's a study that ranks Google as the most valuable brand, not just in tech -- bigger than Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Wal-Mart, GE, and of course Microsoft and Apple. It's the #1 most valuable brand in the world.

If you stopped the man or woman in the street and asked what Google means, what would they say?

I don't know but I suspect they would say "The Internet."

2:50:14 PM    

Here's Discovery's map of the blogosphere. Actually, it's one small Matthew Hurst of Nielsen Buzzmetrics. Here's his Data Mining blog, where most recently he pointed to a seminar titled How to Read 100 Million Blogs (and How to Classify Deaths without Physicians), where a series of links leads to a serious paper that says stuff like

...adapt a technique called simulation-extrapolation (SIMEX) to the problem of imperfectly coded content analyses, which has not been done before. SIMEX is due to Cook and Stefanski (1994), turns out to be closely related to the jackknife (Stefanski and Cook, 1995), and has subsequently been applied in other areas (Carroll, Maca and Ruppert, 1999; Küchenohoff, Mwalili and Lassaffre, 2006).

We trust Matthew to understand this stuff. Or at least I do.

Here are some way cool maps of the old 'sphere, including the one above. About that he says,

By showing only the links in the graph, we can get a far better look at the structure than if we include all the nodes. In this image, we are looking at the core of the blogosphere. The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of the graph is that part of the blogosphere generally characterised by socio-political discussion (the periphery contains some topical groupings). Above and to the left is that area of the blogosphere concerned with technical discussion and gadgetry.

AH! There it is! Notice that there is still some air, some space, some gray, in the "technical discussions and gadgetry" zone, while the "socio-political discussion" has gone black in the middle? Huh? Okay.

Now go back and read what I said here and here about "black hole" discussions. One sample:

Back when it was still true, Don Norman said "Microsoft is a conversational black hole. Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape."

I used to think the blogosphere was large enough to provide enough distance from black hole subjects that at least some illumination was possible. Now I'm not so sure. Some black hole subjects have event horizons that out-distance anyone's ability to bring constuctive thought to bear on a subject [~] much less to support the telling of helpful stories in mainstream media, which too often subordinate fact-providing to story-telling in any case.

Then also go back and read what I said here on the blog the "snowball effect":

But if you start with an idea, whether partly formed or whole, whether yours or somebody else's, and push it in the downhill direction that all blogging (thanks to links and RSS) essentially goes, it's bound to have some impact once it grows large enough. And as long as it keeps going.

... and look at what I said in a talk at OSCON last summer, starting here. (Keep clicking that almost-invisible link in the upper right. It says "next".)

Note that the difference between a snowball and a black hole is not only that between light and dark, but that between progress and its opposite [~] or perhaps (to borrow from Virginia Postrel) dynamism and stasis. Both grow, but one goes somewhere and the other doesn't.

I realize now that much of what I have come to know, understand and believe about blogging was gained by techblogging, and hanging with techies. Or at least people in tech fields. The practice of vetting half-backed and provisional ideas [~] scaffolding understanding, when that's the best we can do, so far [~] is ideally suited to tech projects and subjects, and getting progress going.

Progress also happens in the socio-political zone of the 'sphere. I am constantly amazed at what is being done with politics. Amazing, constructive and good work. (The Personal Democracy Forum is a wonderful window into that work, as well as an instrument of it.) On some transient, highly charged topics, however... whoa. Politics and politicized topics often produce severe clustering. Sometimes those turn into black holes, meaning that trying to change minds from the outside is a losing proposition.

Anyway, this is one of those provisional posts. My mind isn't made up here. I'm just looking at stuff I've been thinking out loud about the new light of Matthew Hurst's insights and visualizations.

Now I need to pack for Brussels and London. See ya there.

2:28:26 PM