The Media – election-blind!?
Geneva, Switzerland – This past September, the European Center for Nuclear Research steered the first beam of protons through their Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing beams of protons. This extensive experiment will eventually lead to the rewriting of every physics rule we know today. The American media never covered this event in-depth.
The Large Hadron Collider works by colliding two beams of protons that travel towards each other. Each of the beams moves at almost 100 percent of the speed of light. The Hadron’s purpose is to discover an elementary sub-atomic particle – the Higgs boson.
Hellooo??? CERN is on the verge of discovering a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle and no one in the US knows?! How is this acceptable?
Tags: American Media, CERN, Elections, Higgs Boson
Niche vs. Mainstream: The Long Tail
I found myself completely absorbed by yet another ground-breaking book this week: The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.
This term was first coined by Chris Anderson to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities.
The Long Tail phenomenon is all about the small markets, that all added up, result in one universal market capable of supplying high revenues for whoever is targeting it. When we talk about niche markets, direct marketing is the ideal way of catering to them. These niches have particular needs and wants. They have specific purchasing behaviors based on well-defined behavioral and demographic characteristics.
Thanks to modern technology, all this behavioral data is stored in databases we can access. This way, when we have a product that is not a major success in the traditional market (onesies and twosies, as the author of The Long Tail calls them), we may be able to directly target the product to the market that is actually looking for it. We know who this market is and where to find it (lists and databases).
Tags: Chris Anderson, economies of scale, iTunes, niche market, The Long Tail
More Google – A little bit of history
The Search is a truly useful resource – not only for its insightful tips on SEO, but also for the life story behind it. Google’s founders were able to raise capital without a business plan that contained a revenue source for a web service – a service that ran from a dorm room using a college computer. Why did this happen? What was the outcome for those who invested in the early Google versions? I found intriguing answers for all of these questions while reading The Search.
I’m sure we all know by now that Google was started by two students on the Stanford campus.The Stanford community was a very open-minded environment where innovative researchers like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the Google founders) were strongly encouraged to continue their endeavors.
People would support their trials by letting them use university resources, bandwidth, Ethernet boards, CPUs with great capacity, and storage space. It was difficult to keep the system up and running, but people were contributing to Page and Brin’s purpose because they realized there was a strong potential in their quest. Their interest was entirely academic (the soon to be Google eased the academic process and made information more available to the faculty). They did not support it as a business effort, but more as a collegial scientific effort – definitely not true anymore (that’s why we love history).
The first so-called Google investors were other Stanford students, who contributed with physical parts and moral support. The fact that the system was getting more than 10,000 hits a day was a great source of esteem to all those who understood search and the need for search as well as the high quality of the search process.
This brings me to my own quest: I believe any type of innovative endeavor that has the potential to improve any aspect of academic or daily life, or may prove useful and empowering in any way to an industry of field of study should be encouraged and supported by any possible means.
Which is why American University should finance my project to build a Hadron Collider on the AU Campus. Cheers!
Tags: Google, Larry Page, SEO, Sergey Brin, Stanford
Understanding Google – The Search by John Battelle
I recently read one of the steppingstone publications in terms of online marketing from the last couple of years – John Battelle’s The Search.
This book does a great job explaining the (not so) intricacies of search engines. Any web search system has 3 main characteristics: it crawls the sources on the web (by the use of a spider which gathers every possible page on the Internet), builds up an index (which is a massive database created by the crawl), and has a search interface with search software (which makes the index available to the user in a user-friendly manner).
The founders of Google dramatically changed the web crawling and indexing part of these classic elements. They came up with their unique system of crawling the web and indexing pages according to key words in URL (and later on in the full text of the pages) but also the number of links that tracked back into those URLs. The already existing search engines would only crawl the web and index for links and sites that contained the key words, without analyzing the relevance of a page, given by the number of links into a particular site. Because of this factor, the search engines before Google would often times output links irrelevant to the initial search only because they contained the element of search in their URL or page text.
Pretty cool, huh?!
Tags: Google, John Battelle, search engine optimization, The Search