YouTube and theyTube

Recently I had a number of academic publications accepted on my work with youtube in the financial markets. The results were highly encouraging and extremely interesting.

My paper prooves this wrong convincingly, however the question still often comes up, "...so can you take something like youtube really serriously?" Isn't it just a bunch of home PC camera amateurs trying to get attention on a silly website!!?

...the answer is no! I've come accross the Google History page today (i recommend a read of the timeline, certainly fascinating) and it might struck you that in December 2007 the Queen of England launched the Royal Channel on YouTube, to be the first monarch to establish a video presence this way. In January 2009 the Vatican launched a YouTube Channel to provide updates from the Pope and Catholic Church.

These are marked as milestones among top achievements of Google - certainly significance is carried here...

The Flu effect this Winter

Information is power, and power is information! We can extract patterns and insightfull features and make extrapolations about the future. We may not realise this but without breaking any terms of acceptable data use or data protection, Google inc. has access to aggregated dataset on search querries. Surprisingly this offers a lot more than one would imagine. Each querry can be associated with a geographical location, precise time, simillar querries made, previous pages the user was on before visiting google, the browser or even operating system used... and even much deeper demographicall knowledge based on user profiles (in case the user is logged into google-mail or for that matter any of the many google services).

Google inc. naturally realised this and started to make serrious use of aggregated search querries data. See this page for google's stand on this. They recently partnered up with U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to research influenza trend forecasting using their querry datasets. The website is available here, check it out.

On google.org an analysis for the future flu season is provided. What is interesting however is that the influenza season in Australia and New Zealand is not really that bad and when past flu seasons are incorporated into the overall picture one can gain the strong impression that this comming flu season will not be all that bad!!

and in the US:

See and judge for yourself

Web 2.0 Business Model

During my 'traditionally irregular' web surfing this morning, I came across a blog article that focussed on CRM (Customer Relationship Model) and how it will look under the use of web 2.0 concept.

The diagram above is self explanatory - hint, read from the top (customers form partnerships & and provide self-service) to the bottom right (community generated collective intelligence), and go back up on the left side of the diagram.

I like this diagram because it is simple illustration of not just customer intelligence but the general web 2.0 model (with a little imagination of-course). Youtube or flickr are basically based on this model. I am convinced that many more companies with these simple models will follow the example of illustratory stock start ups. Something to keep in mind in many ways when valuing businessess.

News Tweeting

I never really followed the Twitter.com phenomenon. I did join up thought and have had an account for some time now. I remember when twitter was still in its obscurity, not many people knew about it and I thought what a funny concept to share one line thoughts with random web surfers. 

Recently a study by Pear Analytics classified twitter talk and discovered, based on their statisticall classification that around 40% of all twitter posts is pointless blabber, they also found that the count of poststwhich could possibly be classed as news related was minimal (below 10%). 

Chris Matyszcyk submitted an interesting opinion. He suggests that the blabber itself is off value to many people and is actually quite usefull way of accumulating new knowledge. See for yourself, on his blog.

Interesting I thought... any opinions welcome, just drop me an email or comment!!