Archive for the ‘Discussion’ Category
Is Geofencing the Future of Location-Based Apps?
9 Jul. 2010 | Author: 
First of all, what is geofencing? Basically, it’s a series of virtual perimeters for real-world geographic areas. In other words, geofencing is the process of creating virtual borders for the purpose, of say, being alerted of events in your current area, or perhaps of friends who are around the corner. So what does this mean for location-based technologies? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Events, Lokale Suche per Smartphone, Discussion, Local Search per PC, Local Search on the go, Local Search per Mobile phone, Local Search, Localization technology, Search Technologies, News, Local Search Engines, Practical features | 
Tags: Foursquare, Gowalla, iOS 4.0, iPhone, Trapster, yelp | 
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Social Networks: Less Active Users Than Expected
The latest W3B study from the market development and advising company Fittkau & Maß Consulting revealed some surprising information: 62% of the current internet users on social networks visit the sites on a regular basis (at least once a week) but only 35%, and from this group merely 40% are really active users. The majority is rather passive, in other words, watches from the sidelines. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Social Media, Web Communities, Discussion, Studies, Virtual world |
Tags: Communities, facebook, MySpace, Networking, studivz |
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RottenNeighbor.com – the negative side of Web2.0?
Internet-user evaluations of undertakings or service providers, such as those possible on dialo.de, kennstdueinen.de [en=doyouknowone] or Qype.com are one thing, but portals that encourage actual “cybermobbing” are something altogether different.
RottenNeighbor.com is such a site. Launched just over a year ago in the USA by Brant Walker, it sees itself as the world’s first search engine that allows users to judge their neighbors and rate them – positively or negatively. Using this site, visitors could inform themselves about the potential new neighborhood before buying a property, or to warn other users about bad neighbors.
In reality, most users actually use the site to take revenge on hated people – to discriminate, denounce or slander – whether neighbor, colleague, ex-partner or rival. In this way this online-pillory affects both private citizens as well as business people. In so doing, RottenNeighbor.com uses cartographic material provided by Google Maps. After entering an address in the search field, the location is question appears in Map View. Addresses/locations of already-rated people appear as house icons– red for bad neighbor, green for good neighbor. A click on the icon opens a window usually revealing a tasteless entry from an unidentifiable user dishing the inhabitant(s) of the marked house.
Apart from the fact that by identifying the exact location, the name of the occupant can be discovered, few users are deterred from fully naming the ‘guilty’ party, while the user remains anonymous. Photos and videos of the denounced person can also be uploaded. None of this is edited by the site’s administrators, leaving unvetted content on the web.
As of a couple of months, RottenNeighbor.com has been enjoying steadily growing interest also in Germany. The access numbers have grown so much in recent weeks that the server experienced overloads at the beginning of September, and the German portal was inaccessible for several days. As with the growing hits, so did the number of comments delivered by German citizens. Since then, there is hardly a German town on the virtual map, where one can not find some green houses and many red ones with predominantly insulting remarks.
Whomever is defamed on this website – and this can affect anyone – can basically not defend him or herself. Even when one chose to sue for defamation of character or libel, and claim damages or compensation, it is extremely difficult to discover the person who posted the defamation. Firstly, the accusations are delivered anonymously, and secondly, the portal’s administrators are located in the USA, where other data protection guidelines and views on freedom of expression take effect. One can indeed have a rating removed, but this takes time and doesn’t protect against new insults.
While other ratings platforms concentrate on objective criticism on offers, products, services or activities connected to the function of the person being rated, RottenNeighbor.com concentrates above all on private persons. This leads to the public airing of feuds and revenge-lust. The use of such a platform is even more questionable, as the accuracy of the comments is almost impossible to ascertain. The personal damage that can be inflicted by the platform is therefore immeasurably large.
Online-pillory or valuable information platform – what do you think of RottenNeighbor.com?
More knowledge with Cuil?
The Gallic word “cuil,” pronounced as “cool” in English, means knowledge, and is the name of a new English-language search engine, which launched unexpectedly and without a Beta-phase, at the end of July 2008.
Launched in Menlo Park, CA, by former Google and IBM employees, Cuil has generated really high expectations. The operators themselves (in a recent press release) very consciously speak of its “innovative search offering”.
Cuil is intended to deliver better search results than its competitor, by concentrating on the content relevance, rather than their opposition’s analysis and level of awareness of their generated links. Additionally the results are to be displayed in detail, with images, sorted in groups and by category. Cuil’s makers promise the complete protection of the privacy of its users. Their theory is that the collection of user information is unnecessary for a search engine generating via content rather than popularity. With their 120 billion websites, Cuil has trawled three times more sites than its competitors and is therefore the largest search machine on the web. This is important to the Cuil folk, as (in their opinion) the other search providers are not able to keep up with the constant growth of the internet.
The above was the modus operandus with which Cuil debuted, which sounds convincing. However reality is something else– as yet the new search engine has not been able to fulfill these high expectations. On the contrary– already in the first days after launch, there was a media hailstorm of criticism, and not unfounded. Excluding that the layout of the results (in a choice two or three columns) was an acquired taste and that the search engine is English-based, but the generated results left much to be desired. And the successful recognition of content relevance is also not fully realized. Christian Stöcker of Spiegel Online points out that Cuil is also a ‘victim’ of the old “miserable failure” search… which like Google before it, links to the homepage of President George W. Bush as one of the first results, indicating that Cuil’s reliance on link frequency is indeed higher than envisaged. Further, parallel to the web search, no further functions are in evidence, such as specialized image results or local search results. The latter results are in today’s climate, of critical importance for a search engine, that wants to hold its own against the big players.
Can Cuil in reality present itself as a serious competitor to Google and Co?
Posted in World Wide Web, Discussion, New Search Machine Interest |
Tags: cuil, Suchdienst, Suche, Suchmaschine |
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Point of View – “Street View” in Germany
A report by news magazine ‘Focus’ reports that Google intends to introduce its panorama photo innovation for German towns and cities. Deutsche Post AG plans a similar venture. The call to action for data privacy activists has been sounded…
To realize the Google Maps Feature “Street View” for Germany, the foreseeable future will show cars sporting specialized cameras, cruising the streets of local towns and shooting innumerable 360º photos. “We are at the moment already on the go in Europe and will also come to Germany”, confirmed Google’s data security executive Peter Fleischer to ‘Focus’ magazine.
In the USA, this service has been on display since May 2007 and is constantly being expanded. From the launch, Google’s display of highly detailed photos – some of which clearly show faces of pedestrians or license plates (and occasionally still do) – has been cause for discussion and uproar. For example: a couple whose house was visible in “Street View”, felt their privacy had been invaded and took Google to court. In Europe the situation will not be any easier for the search-engine market leader. On the contrary – according to a report posted in the online magazine PCWorld, the EU’s data protection supervisor, Peter Hustinx has expressed his reservations concerning “Street View” and warns against its introduction, as its present format is not compatible with European legislation.
Google has actually already started to blur the faces of people caught in “Street View”, using a technique aptly named “Face Blurring”, which automatically recognizes faces and blurs them. This technology was first tested in documenting Manhattan, according to Google’s Lat Long Blog. It is planned to be universally implemented in Europe, and will obliterate not only faces but also vehicle license plates as well. “In all European locations, no faces or vehicle license plates will be recognizable [in Street View]”, promised Fleischer to ‘Focus’.
However this doesn’t satisfy many privacy watchdogs. As outlined in the ‘Focus’ report, the Deutsche Post AG is working on a very similar project. For this project, watchdogs are calling for not only the blotting out of faces and license plates, but also house numbers. According to ‘Focus’, concerns are mounting regarding public display of private buildings. These could then be linked to specific people [and invade their privacy].
Whether these fears are unwarranted, is questionable. Actually, “Street View” is a nice and useful feature. Shouldn’t it, assuming that faces and license plates are unrecognizable, also be granted the blessing of the data protection legislators?
Enticing customers with online coupons?
For many years in the USA, vouchers/coupons have been a much loved advertising form, which has recently spread wide across the Internet. In fact, there is a real boom at the moment in the States, promoting online-coupons for bargain hunting.
This is discussed by news agency Pressetext (pte) in a recent report. Revealed by the USA internet market-research firm ComScore, hits for the special Coupon-Portals such as Coupons.com or RetailMeNot.com, rose a healthy 38% in March 2008, compared to figures for 2007, to a total of 281 Million. The reason for this growing consumer interest in the discount sites, is seen to be the worsening economic climate and increasing consumer prices.
Rebate-items are not only found and printed from coupon sites in the US– local search services like Google Maps or Mojopages.com have recognized the viability of Vouchers, especially for smaller and medium-sized undertakings. Coupons are now accessible through these local search services both for location-search specific clientele, and also can attract clients to visit firms directly and thereby soften them up for purchasing.
In Germany, this form of advertising has not yet been launched by local search engine services. Only the online-directory glenglobe.de has offered featured firms the possibility of presenting special-offers, or rebates and vouchers to online customers.
Wouldn’t it make sense, if other local search engines and directories [in the German-speaking region] were to expand their offerings through the option of online rebate-coupons or vouchers? In so doing, the users benefit and the participating firms themselves gain from offering value-for-money, also benefitting from growing site visits.
Posted in General, Discussion, Local Search, Practical features |
Tags: Coupons, Coupons.com, glenglobe, google maps, Mojopages.com, Rabattmarke, Rabattscheine, RetailMeNot |
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Freedom of opinion on the way out for ratings sites?
Local information services are ever increasingly enabling the participation of their users in the form of rating and notating the found search results. The resulting content is only useful and credible for other users, when negative rating are also allowed – of course, only when relevant or justified.
However, if the website provider allows such (negative) comment from its users, they may face legal consequences. This is indeed what happened with the local information and ratings portal dialo.de, as its management, dialo GmbH explained in a recent Press Release.
The trigger was a critical comment posted by a member, concerning a coin-collector transaction. In the user’s assessment, a complaint was noted stating that in his opinion, an unfair sales tactic was used. The negatively rated organization involved then called in their lawyers. Since the management of dialo.de declined to respond to a court order from the Düsseldorf Judicial System to remove the content, they now face prosecution, as explained in the press release. The reasoning for not giving in to this demand, clearly seems that in so capitulating, the entire credibility of the ratings and recommendation website would be at risk. “We stand firm for our members and fight for the right to deliver both positive, and justifiable ‘negative’ ratings” said Director of dialo.de, Peter Chlosta. In addition, according to Chlosta, dialo.de gives all firms who perceive themselves as unfairly rated, the chance to respond with a statement detailing their position on the issue at hand. As a result, it is even less understandable why the firm with the bad rating immediately chose to take legal steps.
dialo GmbH probably can afford to be optimistic, as their position has been reinforced by previous court decisions, which upheld the right to freedom of speech. An example quoted by dialo.de in the press release is that of case concerning the school pupil-portal “spickmich.de” [‘cribme’ UK]. The Cologne regional court of appeal decided in November 2007, rejecting the interim order of a teacher versus the website, challenging her rating there. The decision means that even teachers must tolerate/accept their bad ratings on the school-pupil site, as long as no defamatory comment is cited.
However, if the court now sees the case differently, the result will be precedent setting, and could mean the end of justified criticism on ratings portals. In this event, the question remains – what use would these portals retain for their users?
Web2.0 portals that depend on user-generated content, haven’t had it particularly easy in Germany. The courts here tend to an enterprise-unfriendly stance as regards the expression of the opinions of users, in blogs and forums. This is indicated in rulings by the Hamburg courts (among others) against the Heise Zeitschriften Verlag [‘Heise Newspaper Publishers’] and the media journalist Stefan Niggemeier. In these cases, the respective management immediately deleted controversial postings by users; however the courts ruled that this action was not enough, and that the comments should have been screened in advance by the portal administration.
Cause of these problems is seen to be a ‘telemedia’ law, based on the EU-Guidelines, which allows the courts a wide playing field – contrary to other EU countries and the USA, where the liability of forums is clearly regulated. The Hamburg court regularly uses this broad spectrum, mostly ruling against the website administrators. This forces the companies to take precautions which are no longer practicable, and which ultimately jeopardize the future of the “collaboweb”. So, for example, the requirement that all comments are now legally required to be approved before publishing – this is not only far too much trouble for the website controllers, but it will also discourage or prevent any free discussion in forums or blogs.
Question 1: Does such a trend mean the end for forums as well as communication possibilities within blogs (at least in Germany)?
Question 2: And what point is there for Web2.0 undertaking such as dialo.de, when only positive ratings are allowed?
Better results through User Generated Content?
Increasing numbers of portal undertakings are offering their users the possibility of becoming actively involved in widely differing forms. User Generated Content (UGC) is the word of the moment.
This trend towards interactivity is also visible in the fields of local search engines and online directories (for instance, qype or Google Maps) by which they offer their users additional value. For example – when their users of the localized search results are able to augment them with individualized descriptions and ratings. Even old-guard frontrunners like Gelbe Seiten (‘Yellow Pages’ in German) allow the user to add their own companies into the online directory.
User Generated Content, used in this context, focuses itself predominantly on new entries, updates/corrections or rating of existing entries. In Unlike all other providers, DasTelefonbuch.de (direct translation “ThePhoneBook”) offers also the access to private data, using KontaktKarte.de (ContactCard), where one can personally decide what data should be published in whichever directory. Google Maps and suchen.de (“search”) however restrict use to commercial entries.
Yet other ‘participation-services’ are being increasingly integrated with the offerings of local search engines. At present social networking is much in demand. The latest examples are the city-portal meinestadt.de (“myCity”), together with meineleute.de (“myPeople”) who offer their users their own platform, and the online directory 11880.com, with the recent start-up advice community “11880iQ”.
Such communities are really interesting to the user of localized search services, when they represent authentic local character. Such as where one can ask a ‘local’ about his own area, as to where one can find a nearby good, reasonable hairdresser or who makes the best Curry ‘Wurst’ in the town. Ideally, such communities would be directly linked with the local search sites. One could then, for example, while searching for local bars, not only find addresses, but also simultaneously discover who in the community frequents which pub, and even perhaps make an arrangement to meet up. Townster is well on the way at the moment to providing such a service, however at present one still finds too few search results using this service.
It makes less sense when online directories integrate with communities, which have absolutely nothing to do with local themes and issues, such as the ‘question and answer community’ of 11880.com. In this case, one somehow cannot get rid of the feeling that the provider really just wanted to hang out the “Web 2.0” banner. And conversely, general advice websites can actually appear counter-productive.
The user loves good advice, tips and ratings, which help with problem solving or decision-making – these can have negative impact on commercial providers. Advice gained online may solve user issues but cause loss of earnings and project participation for commercial undertakings. Negative user ratings can also cause companies to reconsider their continued participation on such portals, and resisting investing even pennies in advertising there. Through such consequences, portals can erode their financial bases in the middle term.
User Generated Content– the user loves it, whereas business only loves it when it is positive. Can this be good for business?
Benjamin Broshi
