Tag Archives: Google

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Google AdWords as a writing tool

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Ever have trouble thinking up character names for your fiction?

Gareth L Powell takes the quick route of simply opening his spam email folder and looking at the pre-randomised names in the “From” field, but Robin Sloan (who we mentioned in passing when talking about new publishing business models) went into a little more in depth: he ran a bunch of Google AdWords campaigns to find the name people were most interested in reading about.

Here’s what I did:

  • Created a campaign attached to a bundle of search terms: mystery, detective story, sherlock holmes, noir, and more like those.
  • Came up with a whole set of names, basically wide variations on a theme. One was my original pick, but I liked all of them. Then, I created an ad for each one, all with the same body text but each with a different name swapped in for the headline.
  • Allocated a small budget ($40, to be exact) and kicked off the campaign. And wow there are a lot of people searching for stuff on Google. Over the span of 24 hours, my ads made about 100,000 impressions.

Sounds a bit like a very convoluted form of displacement activity, no? Well, Sloan’s aware of that, but it’s part of his overall writing philosophy:

… okay, I’ll be honest. This was mostly just an excuse to try a new tool. Any nerd will tell you that tools can provide their own intrinsic rewards. There’s an aspect of exploration to it, too: you’re pressing out into new tool-territory, learning about what you can and can’t do.

This little AdWords test is a first step. Mechanical Turk might be next. I mean, imagine — this is the sci-fi extrapolation — imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it. Five minutes later, ding — the timer goes off and you have the results right there, floating over the text. Aggregated feedback from an anonymous swarm of readers: “I stumbled here,” “this variation works better,” “this line rings false.”

That might sound naive — it’s definitely oversimplified — but I think there might be something useful lurking in this particular tool-territory.

Crowd-sourced micro-fragment beta-reading… for some reason, my brain wants to rebel against the idea (because it doesn’t fit into the pre-established set of writer behaviours, I guess), but that’s probably as good a sign as any that it might actually work. [via GalleyCat]

One could be cynical and assume that Sloan performed the AdWords experiment as much for the potential publicity as for practical purposes, but if that’s the case, hey – it’s worked, hasn’t it? Writers have never really had the same opportunity as visual artists or musicians to experiment publically with methodologies up until now… maybe this sort of “performance writing” will fill that PR void we were talking about before? Nothing gets a link passed around as effectively as novelty.

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Google grenades the ebook punchbowl

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I dare say that if you’ve an interest in publishing as an industry, you’ve already heard that Google has announced its own ebook store will open late this year. A summary from Tomorrow’s Trends:

Google stated that it will allow publishers to set eBook prices.  The cost of the eBook will probably be higher than Amazon’s current eBook prices.

This will certainly start a format war.  Google does not have a dedicated eBook reader and I do not see them getting into the eBook hardware game.  This will push companies to create eBook readers that will connect to Google’s new store. Certainly Amazon is ahead of everyone in regards to ease of use and the ability to download eBooks via a wireless connection.  Hopefully this will give all of us multiple choices on purchasing eBooks.

Credit where it’s due, the Big G knows the value of biding its time for the right moment. This is the game-changing announcement that I’ve been expecting for the last nine months, the potential trigger for an explosive growth phase in ebook hardware and distribution. An analogy to digital music seems appropriate: the Kindle and the Sony Reader are your iPod equivalents, tied to specific content-buying channels and/or file formats to keep the profits as close to their makers (and their partners) as possible. Now the ubiquitous Google is getting in on the game of selling the content, savvy tech firms will be watching closely to see which file format wins the popularity war, before starting to churn out affordable generic readers that can display them without restriction.

Now, as discussed before, ebooks are probably never going to be as big a deal as downloadable music has become (though one can dream, right?), but I’m confident that this will be the tipping point at which another content market suddenly leaps into the digital domain. Hopefully by Christmas time this year I’ll be able to get a decent eInk device that doesn’t lock me in to one content provider, just like my charmingly generic media player…

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Sueing Google – how far does the law extend into the internet?

judge's gavelOK, you’ve probably seen this story already, primarily re-reported with a certain muted gloating that someone got one over on the Big G; a guy called Aaron Greenspan has successfully retrieved $721 of AdSense earnings from Google by filing a small claims lawsuit against them after his account was closed without explanation.

This is great news for all the people who fear Google’s monopoly on search, but what bothers me here is the question of whether the spirit of the law that governs an internet user need necessarily prevail in any section of cyberspace said user chooses to use.

I spoke with Adam C. of AdWords once more on the phone. After pointing out that in the United States of America, the accused are generally given the right to know both the crimes they are being accused of, and the identities of their accusers, Mr. C. responded by saying that such thinking did not apply to Google’s terms of service. Effectively, Google’s position was that it was above the law, and if not any law in particular, then at least the spirit of the law.

In this case, the judge disagreed with that stance (though it should be noted that, as it appears above, it has been paraphrased by Greenspan rather than quoted directly). With the inevitable caveat that I am not a lawyer or legal professional, it strikes me that this sort of question will become increasingly important as virtual worlds proliferate.

Let’s say you get burnt in a gold-trading deal in your favourite MMO; who has legal jurisdiction over an exchange that happens entirely electronically? Just how binding is that click-through EULA for the game, or for the trading site? If you’re based in the US but the huckster is based in China, how would you go about prosecuting (if you could at all)? [via The Guardian; image by steakpinball]

Questions like this are a reminder that the internet is still a wild frontier with a whole lot of loopholes. If nation-states are weakening in influence, how will they project the legal protections of their citizens into a space that has no geography?

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Wolfram Alpha: Answering the questions that matter…

whyPolymath Stephen Wolfram (famed for AOT Mathematica and his book entitled A New Kind of Science) has been developing a knowledge engine that uses a natural language interface. It’s a bit like Google except:

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for COMPUTING answers to questions about what we as a civilization collectively know.

It’s the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world — a new leap in the intelligence of our collective “Global Brain.” And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way — it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

So basically you type in a question in normal language and it should provide an answer, rather than links to webpages that might contain the answer.

Anyway Wolfram Alpha will be launching in May.

[via Charles Stross, ComputerWorld, Physorg etc][image from e-magic on flickr]

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Google Ocean marks (unsurprisingly) aren’t Atlantis

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Leading on from one discussion of reporting style to another, did you hear the one about how the new Google Ocean maps of the sea floor revealed a rectangle the size of Wales comprised of straight lines intersecting at right angles? In exactly the place that some ancient writers suggested as the location of Atlantis?*

seabed markings on Google Ocean - not actually Atlantis, OK?

Well, sorry to disappoint, but it turns out that the markings aren’t the work of an ancient civilisation or marauding aquatic aliens after all:

The scientific explanation is a bit less exotic, but we think it’s still pretty interesting: these marks are what we call “ship tracks.” You see, it’s actually quite hard to measure the depth of the ocean. Sunlight, lasers, and other electromagnetic radiation can travel less than 100 feet below the surface, yet the typical depth in the ocean is more than two and a half miles. Sound waves are more effective. By measuring the time it takes for sound to travel from a ship to the sea floor and back, you can get an idea of how far away the sea floor is. Since this process — known as echosounding — only maps a strip of the sea floor under the ship, the maps it produces often show the path the ship took, hence the “ship tracks.” In this case, the soundings produced by a ship are also about 1% deeper than the data we have in surrounding areas — likely an error — making the tracks stand out more.

Of course, Google are probably just feeding us the line their reptilian overlords want us to hear in order to keep the Secret Mysteries out of the hands of the slave races; the truth is down there, kids. Never stop believing.

[ * – Yes, the Telegraph again. Once the fuss has died down over the initial story, we’ll start getting the human interest pieces about how drug-addicted immigrant Polish ship captains – having successfully abducted Princess Diana and Madeline McCann – are now giving hardworking British taxpayers some form of gay Atlantean cancer.]