Yet another cool google tool fir information analysis.
This Books Ngram Viewer will now give more detailed information about what has been a topic of interest to various populations over time.
Books Ngram Viewer:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com
This is not really a surprise to see that cybernetics is not really the most fashionable topic at the moment. But it is nevertheless interesting to see that it is loosing in popularity.
But what could be the topics of interest:
The first which come into mind or drugs, sex and rock’n roll. But maybe over time, this could be more love, religion, war.
Interesting to see that war clearly has 2 peaks during the second world wars. Religion has been decreasing steadily. Man and love have been increasing. Clearly more information here, which could be used for studies in human behavious and interaction.
Basically the somme of all the money generated in one year in the country.
I love the way Google’s new publicdata interface makes all this so clear:
So if you want to become rich maybe it would be a good idea to go and live in luxemburg.
So the sum of all the wealth of china is just slightly higher than that of France, and Russia just slightly higher than Spain. While the US seem to
Ok, so these countries are just slightly in debt.
So Italy is in a much worst condition than most of the others, nearly as bad as Greece, and Spain isn’t that bad after all.
I often talk about facebook and google, but what about baidu? This search engine is the 6th most visited website in the world although it is only available in a few languages, Chinese and now Japanese, in other words about one in 5 people. What can it be which makes Baidu such a huge success? What is Baidu?
“The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival. Together, the Chinese characters băi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.”
1. Content:
First thing to do is use chrome with the translation plugin, in order to visit the site correctly, if you do not talk chinese. You can immediatly see that it is really similar to google, a mix between, yahoo, wikipedia. With prime features are: News/Search/mp3s/videos/images/Knowledge/maps/forums, and many more in the more section or in english. Baidu is very user centered and a large amount of the traffic comes from the forums or messages with friends. It has a google analytics, trends, messanger, and google anaytics.
Most of the site is pretty well done and optimised. With good scores in Yslow or Google Page speed 96%.
The maps were a bit disappointing since they only seem to have China. If you search for Barcelona for exemple, you will only get Barcelona Bar in Shangai. Although they had a pretty call 3 dimensional vue of the town in Sim City mode.
The video and image search lacked a few recent features from the google version, but maybe I just didn’t find the .
The mp3s search is interresting, since this clearly the killer feature which made Baidu popular to the younger generation, And which Google was unable to offer to to lobeing in the West. Once again the Music industry has shown is lack of knwoledge and conservative approach which has not benefited growth.
Baidu’s social network is based around sharing content such as videos, tests votes or playing games similar to facebook’s farmville. It appears to be oriented to a younger age group than Google would and more comic focused.
Most of the other features seemed pretty good. Unfortunatly I havn’t connected to many friends since they do not have the check address book feature yet, which doesn’t make the contact propogation viral yet.
2 History:
Baidu was originaly founded by Robin Li it is interresting to see that google invested 10Million $ in Baidu in 2004, and selling this 2.5% share of the company in 2006.
CrunchBase made the following report in 2006 along with this regularly updated page.
You can get a better view of it’s stock value here:
Alexa, compete.com or quantcast give us these interresting statistics:
The alexa stats show indicate that it would be the 6th most visited site in the world although it still stays pretty far from google and facebook. Wikipedia also indicate that it would now represent 63% and Google 24% of the chinese market share for search
It has a higher page views per user though, which means that it is an essential tool for its users.
3. Future of Baidu
One surprising fact is that baidu looks very country centered, since it does have other translations such as baidu.jp and baidu.cn, and there doesn’t seem to be many ways of going from one site to another or no easy feature to translate pages,
But with such a marlet share in China, we can really expect it to become a huge global player the minute it will go global. Up to now, it has been looking like a cheaper copy of Google, with 6000 engineers this could change on some killer features.
This article on Robin li’s fanclub shows that it is what Baidu will probably be looking at doing in the near future, in the same way as google is focusing on China.
There are no real rules set on the web. Everything is just there to make things easier for the users. And it seems normal to copy the neighbour and include every feature you can make. I will definitly be keeping a close eye out on this search engine though.
We simply cannot go passed the worlds number 6th website, even if it is in a language which I don’t know yet, if there is something good there, we will need to brag it.
Baidu grew with the mp3 feature which was not allowed in the West but it will most likely gain the west on another feature. There is still a lot of work and therefore potential for Baidu. We will see what the future holds for Baidu.
A few day, after having watched “the social network” the film which tell the story of how facebook would have been funded in it’s early day, I stumbled across this interresting public talk of Mark Zuckerberg: http://justin.tv/startupschool
I was suprised to learn that Marc had, like me taken psychology classes during his first year at university.
I have been very interrested in facebook ever since I first got invited in 2006. I was already a member of most social networks which were around at the time.
But it was obvious to me at the time that facebook was going to go much further than any other. Mainly because by the time I got invited, a very large number of people I used to go to uni where already members. But I think the way the site was done, and the potential it had striked me.
Since I have been far more interrested in the potential of the large amount of data included in the site. This interview reminded me of my psychology, cybernetics, AI, datamining and bioinformatics courses.
I believe the most interresting thing about this video was that by telling us about his current interrests, Mark is giving us critical information about what is missing in the current facebook strategy.
It striked me that Mark was also very interrested at the moment of the potential his large dataset could have on subconscious choices. By telling us about this. And the natural way in which he talks about it. It is obvious that he has really hardly started exploring the potential of the information which is included in his own database.
Probably because so many people are getting so paranoïd what facebook knows about them. But by watching this, we realise that facebook doesn’t actually know anything about the information they have.
Looking at this article from the boston post the only datamining search which has been made on the facebook data would be from a study from an MIT research team.
Obviously, for a website like facebook, in order to get more interresting and localised information, all you need to do is make your user base grow. By looking at the facebaker statistics it is immediatly clear that with only 13 percent of the population having a facebook account in asia, while 56 percent have an account in north america. We can immediatly calculate the potential growth on the amount of accounts, if they had the asian market.
What striked me, was that Mark did not seem to know how to get the chinese market. But he did seem to be relatively rational about it. Although not really taking the matter too seriously. But he is obviously on the right path.
It seems obvious to me, like I have been thinking about it a lot since I have been in catalunya. And the difficulty which can be to be included in a group. This must be even more difficult for people who come from a country called “us” by opposition to “them” (the rest of the world). But Mark’s point on the “nazi” issue in Germany does show that he may be understanding this a bit more than most people. But it must be very difficult for him to really mesure how much this must be true.
Although, I am aware of there being a large number of chinese people interrested in the facebook application, although it is banned in China like this thread from the hiphop mailing list conversation suggests, probably more by the posibility of hacking the content. Even though, it is banned in China.
It seemed obvious to me that if the chinese governement had the impression that this could actually help them understand they people better, then they would probably have no objection on allowing a light version (with all they usual sensorship included). Also if the Chinese governement does not allow some form of facebook, then they risk to simply be faced by the fact that somekind of technology based on openVpns will suddenly spread faster then they will know in they country. And before they know it, they sensorship will become obsolete.
A recent article mentions various studies which use public data to try and predict, the stock market or the house values tendency. This studies use data available to the public via, google trends or twitter to correlate the public mood which is extracted from twitter logs to housing value. This study seemed to demenstrate that stock values were more dependent to calm and to some extent happyness could have an impact on the stock tendancy to increase or decrease.
The second study uses google trends queries logs on housing to predict if houses are going to be sold or not. This follows another project Google setup last year where it used it’s search queries to predict the flu-trends after the H1N1 outburst.
Recently google also added a number of new datasets available to the public via it’s public data tool recently, which gives us a really interr
If correlation on these datasets was made succefully enough to predict house market value and probably stock exchange. Since, if anonymous mood information can give us tendancies of the market. This is nothing compared to the actual information which can be extracted from social networks such as facebook or google history, since by including the relation between people, geolocation and the knowledge or the information people actually know. We will not only be able to predict but actually know what people are planning to do, learn or discover.
Historically we have always seen information going in one direction. Going from Event to press to public. But if we actually know who has read what article, then we know exactly what they know and therefore, based on that information what choices they are capable of making. The control of the information in this case is complete.
Today was also the day wikileaks published a large amount of information on the Iraq war. Including this very interresting casualties map. Many people had predicted that this would happen in Iraq, but maybe that if we had had the tools to prove it. We could have avoided a huge amount of casualties.
I had the occasion yesterday to help out someone with their website.
Which they created with google sites: http://sites.google.com
I was at first very impressed, although I have know about this website for a long time, I hadn’t had the occasion to actually test it, with a live site.
Google websites are as always very well done, and documented, and easy to use. But at the heart of the website, there really wasn’t much to the site. It was in fact just an advanced online editor. And by using online editor, it would probably be pretty quick to reproduce an alternative to this site.
It was also very limited in what it was allowing users to do, there seemed to be no way of adding javascript, a different web statistics tool, or any type of dyna;ics.
But the simplisity of it was impressive, but this showed that there was most probably place for an alternative and a more advanced tool once again.
I the same way as I could see the charts.google.com tool, really interesting and a fun basis for a more advanced statitics tool for developers.
The 3rd website, which could also have made progress is definitly googlemaps, since the API, requires so much tweeking to get anything to work, but once again, I am sure that this team is actually already working on making progress on this.
Maybe it is because I am approching 30 and need to start thinking of acheiving great things in my life that I am currently drawn to great acheivements that some people have done.
And I never really seemed to remember what were the real 7 wonders, so thanks I thought I would have a quick check at my facts, and I was very surprised to discover on my first search that the eurostars was concidered one of them.
That is of course since many different lists exist.
And this was the list of the American society of civil engineering. The original being refered to nowdays as the 7 wonders of antic world. Other interestings lists include the 7 wonders of midle ages of of the modern world.
One interesting one is definitly the Colossus of Rhodes, since I have also been very interested in the sea recently. And I would be very interested I like the idea of boats having to go under a statue to go in a Port.
Here is a list of 7 wonders of the American society of Civil Engineers:
Interesting to see read about the CN Tower and the Panama chanel, although this list will most likely be the first to be outdated, since most of these buildings have since already been shadowed by others such as the incredible Burj Khalifa.
But the following list would seem to be the list which most people would remember, since it includes the great wall of china, Machu Pichu, the Pyramids and the Colosseum.
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