Google's Periodic Table of APIs & Developer Tools
Cool list of the various APIs and Developer tools provided by Google.
I also like the fact that this is presented as an interactive table (rather than an image), so each element is clickable and takes you to the information page about that particular API.
I’ve been using Gmail’s Priority Inbox for a while now and, while I don’t get an overwhelming amount of email, have found it very useful (and increasingly so as it learns even more about what is, and isn’t, important to me).
Recently, when I was describing what Newstogram does for news and current information sites, someone said “so you’re basically like Priority Inbox for news”.
I hadn’t thought about it like that but, at his suggestion, I watched the video for Priority Inbox (embedded above) and can clearly see the parallels. In fact we could basically reuse several quotes from the video just by replacing “messages” with “news articles” and “Google” with “Newstogram”:
Wouldn’t it be nice to know which news articles to focus on first
Newstogram finds the important news articles and sorts them for you
What is really neat… Newstogram is great at predicting what is important
So… we need to get publishers using Newstogram to its full potential so their news and current information sites are as useful as Priority Inbox.
I’m sure there are worse cases (perhaps involving airlines and plane crashes), but advertising cruises on this YouTube clip is pretty bad example of contextual ad targeting. I doubt this drove many sales despite the “60% off / $100 cash back” deal.
Related: my old employer (Channel 4) made the FAIL Blog last week due to some unfortunate ad targeting.
The promise of the ‘new and improved’ Google News (see the video here)
It still seems like a lot of set-up work to me but I love that Google is making personalization such a prominent part of the Google News experience.
Good analysis by Chris Dixon of difference between intent harvesting ads (think Google text ads) and intent generating ads (think majority of display ads), and how Facebook’s Like button (and the associated interest data that can be inferred from people ‘liking’ things) position Facebook to dominate the display advertising space.
I gained some insight today into why (at least for me) Google Reader’s “selected just for you” recommendations suck (see previous rant here).
In a paper presented at the IUI ‘10 Conference a group of Google researchers discuss different recommendation algorithms they have tested on Google News. They outline some of the problems with their default ‘personalization’ method (which relies on collaborative filtering), including the inability to recommend new stories and the inability to account for variability between users leading to “recommendation convergence” (this is my term, not the researchers’, but I think its appropriate). For instance, they observed:
… that entertainment news stories are constantly recommended to most of the users, even for those users who never clicked on entertainment stories. The reason is the entertainment news stories are generally very popular, thus there are always enough clicks on entertainment stories from a user’s “neighbors” to make the recommendation.
I assume that Google Reader is also using a collaborative filtering method to recommend articles “just for me” since the recommendation convergence issue would definitely explain why all I seem to get recommended are humorous (and presumably popular) videos.
I can only hope that the hybrid approach that was tested on Google News (and which performed 30%+ better than collaborative filtering) will be rolled out to Google Reader as well. Until then I’ll have to put up with clips “selected just for me” (and thousands / millions of other people ‘just like me’) like a lightning blot striking a plane, a baseball player jumping over the catcher and a young girl doing a trick on a bicycle (actually that last one is pretty cool!).
I’m a business / finance and technology junkie…. at least according to Google’s Ad Preferences Manager. To be fair, its a pretty accurate assessment and should, although I can’t say I’ve noticed, mean that AdWords advertisers are able to target campaigns to my interests when I visits sites in the Google Content Network.
In contrast, Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager (which I mentioned in a previous post) has me pegged only as a generic ‘sports fan’. While that is also accurate, its not very specific (since I only really follow the Miami Heat basketball team).
Why the difference? I guess the sites I use for my business / finance and technology news are more likely using Google AdWords, whereas the sites I use for my basketball news are using Yahoo Advertising.
My Newstogram profile which reflects my reading habits on DailyMe.com (and other sites in the Newstogram Network) shows a much more accurate and rounded view of my interests and preferences (but of course of would say that).
You don’t need a business plan. You don’t need to have an MBA. All you need is a great idea. Anything is possible and you can accomplish it.
- Ron Conway
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1 year ago
