You know what, Jeremiah Owyang put together these stats on Social Media and the 2008 Presidential Election in Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008

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Internet Usage in United States
United States Population: 303,824,646
Internet Usage: 220,141,969
Penetration rate: 72.5%
Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

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Facebook
Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

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MySpace
Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

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YouTube
Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

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Twitter
Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

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Community Platforms/Branded Social Networks
MyBarackObama: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)
McCain Space: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)

I mean, overall, Obama had 4 times more presense in Social Media than John McCain. 

And, with Search Engines (ie: Google Insights for Search) it’s about 3:1 in Obama’s favor.

But don’t forget to vote Tuesday; I am certainly looking forward to it.

By the way, there was an article in the New York Times today about Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World

It seems to me Social Media and Web 2.0 are becoming more vital, perhaps even the centerpiece of campaigns, going forward:

“…..drawing on Mr. Obama’s background as a community organizer, his campaign decided early on to build a social network that would flank, and in some cases outflank, traditional news media.“

“.. Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage — from Comedy Central to BBC America.”

Could it be, that besides having more to day than McCain, Obama had a lot more avenues to say it?

Interesting article by Saul Hansell of the New York Times about collecting and harvesting web data to sell to interested third parties - Forget Taxes - This Plumber Wants to Sell Your Data; here’s an excerpt from the article

Last week, Akamai agreed to buy Acerno, a three-year old advertising network that draws data about what people shop for from more than 400 online stores. (I wrote about some of the privacy implications of Acerno’s existing business last week.)

But the bigger question is what does it mean that Akamai, one of the most important Internet companies that most people have never heard of, wants to collect data about people?

As best as I can tell, Akamai’s plan move doesn’t have the profound implications for privacy that the efforts by Internet service providers to monitor their customers’ Web surfing do. Unlike I.S.P.’s, Akamai doesn’t automatically know who Web surfers are and it doesn’t see every click they make. But Akamai does see a lot of clicks, and it works with companies that do know who users are, so there are potentially a lot of implications for both privacy and the advertising business.

Akamai gets paid by companies to make their Web sites appear on the screens of their users faster. It places copies of the largest files, like photos and videos, on thousands of servers spread all over the world to speed delivery. Akamai is the leader in these content delivery networks, but it has a lot of competition putting pressure on prices and creating an incentive to find new sources of revenue.

So, doesn’t everyone want your data?  Who doesn’t want it?

I guess, as long as Akamai doesn’t combine the data, it’s not violating any privacy rules - but if it enables someone else combining the data it wants to collect, it’s their problem, not Akamai’s.

Do you agree with that?   My feeling - if I’m around an alcoholic and I put out some booze, but I say … don’t drink this, it’s not good for you …. and the alcoholic drinks it anyway - is it all their fault?  I don’t think so.

Couldn’t sleep, maybe it was the spiced up Italian food I had for dinner last night, or just maybe it’s the Global Markets of Britian, Germany and France that are down an average of -5% morning, suggesting Monday will be another day of losses in the Dow - all too familiar by now - and nail biting.

Nope, reading my RSS Feeds in Google Reader this morning, as my stomach churns, is a Twitter message (which can be one of my “feeds”) telling me about a depressing New York Times article about Facebook…..

“…Awkward piece in NYTimes Magazine makes me never want to organize / attend Facebook meetup: http://tr.im/l4w [Via @serial_consign's blog.]

Actually, the article is titled Facebook in a Crowd and reminds me of three facts - 1) that few virtual friends are going to show up when you set up an event AND 2)  Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 services, are going to be part of the new “glue”  that holds us together as the World Financial System unravels, perhaps, entirely. 3) Maybe there’s a way to measure the influence of a “virtual friend” or an “event” by holding one of them and seeing “who actually shows up”.

As I get tired, and ready to try to go back to bed again, with that sinking feeling that may be part my own exhaustion and part what is going on in the world, or even with my friends, a few that have just been “let go”, and even the uncertainty of anyone’s financial future right now (including my own), even as my body is telling me it’s time to sleep again … my thoughts go to 2 OP-ED articles appear in Monday’s New York Times.

In Paul Krugman’s Widening Gyre there’s the crisis of the emerging markets to get my stomach to churn again, and get dizzy, along with some poetry to go with it, according to Krugman, the Hedge Funds are now failing and it’s taking down developing markets, that were thinking, even recently, of decoupling and thriving as the West declined  ….. but that is not to be … because….

“…..as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

“….The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.”

And if that didn’t finish me off, and give me more fatigue to go back to bed - William Cohen writes in  “Shoot the Horses?” that ….

“….a banker friend, and he told me the “unraveling” could go on for ages. I thought he meant the unwinding of all the leverage that had inflated everything from the price of stocks to the price of homes.

But, just to be sure, I asked him: “Unraveling of what?”

He paused, before saying, “Almost our way of life.”

A friend of his, he went on, has a horse farm north of New York City. “I told him, for heaven’s sake, you have to get rid of your horses. Shoot them if necessary.”

That got me thinking.

Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?”

Now, I’m really getting dizzy and need to sleep, again, when I read further down in the article:

“…. It’s really a wonder, when you think about it, that there are still two guys in the race to become U.S. president, pulling out all the stops in these last eight days of campaigning to be chosen as the one to face the nightmare.

Let’s fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels.

The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered.

New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom — that’s to say right now — a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels.

The hedge fund industry is decimated — its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up — and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004.

People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring.

I ask you, Senator McCain, Senator Obama, do you still want the job?”

To finish me off, but give us some hope again, maybe a new WPA program, a New York Times Editorial: As China Goes covers how China is doing what we should be, and spending money to stimulate it’s own economy, and support it’s people, which seems like we need to emulate, and hopefully, will emulate soon, with new leadership:

“….To get China’s consumers to spend, the government will need to spend more at home, investing in public works projects and providing more social benefits — including health insurance and pensions — so its citizens don’t feel they have to save so much for a rainy day.

This is clearly in Beijing’s interest, though China’s leaders are still clinging to the old export strategy.

China is already feeling the impact of a slower world economy. Both economic growth and export growth have braked sharply. The slowdown threatens job creation, direly needed to absorb millions of rural Chinese seeking employment in the cities.”

If anything, all of this stuff I read, which helped my stomach churn, or made it stop, is meant to highlight just how interconnected our world is now - how different it was from 1929 or 1932, in that those systems that were put in place to prevent the Great Unraveling that his happening now, were meant to safeguard on a national level - but no one thought the world would be so interconnected then, as it is now.

And now, time for bed, again - if only for a few hours - till I wake up and read the news, all over again.

I was really exhausted by the 5 days I spent in Alexandria VA, just outside DC, at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, but it was overall a great conference and most of the familar faces were there - and easy to network with.

By the way, I’ve begun to think in terms of including my imagery with my Web Analytics posts - most people know that I’m an artist and it’s part of my own unique branding - and it’s something I do in my own way - where I think it fits - I’ve included my iphone paintings, in this case, to capture the feelings I had, a combination of excitement and exhaustion - in this newer medium, which, lately, I’m finding very satisfying to work in.

Thoughts and Feelings - IPhone Painting - Using Colors Application

Marshall Sponder 2008

For one thing, there was an entire Social Media Track at Emetrics this time, that’s never happened before and I attended about half of the sessions in that tract - which was about the best I could do given the competition with other sessions and speaking with people, that I’ll often opt to do, even ahead of attending a session.   Most of the sessions I covered are at Emetrics Summit.

I also live blogged most of the sessions I covered using my IPhone, but ran into a glitch with pre-created posts (to capture Marketing Notes and hyperlinks); I required network connectivity in order to edit posts I created beforehand, and most of the time, the session rooms did not have connectivity.  I find creative ways around that limitation, and overall, decided the day of carrying a laptop to conference sessions is effectively over - it’s no longer needed as the iPhone has all the neccessary functionality to live blog with.   Applications such as WordPress, will continue to improve and make laptops unnecessary for most conference work within the next year.

Getting back to the Social Media Track at Emetrics, it could have been a conference by itself - there was certainly enough content to qualify and in many cases, first class speakers who were doing leading edge social media analysis with an analytics bent.  There was a keynote on New York Times Web Analytics by James G. Robinson which suggested that, for a Newspaper like the NY Times, weekly reporting has become neccessary as information is coming in so quickly that monthly reporting no longer is sufficient -  there was a number of interesting metrics James came up with, I was familiar with some of it,  other things were actually quite illuminating, and I was very happy I attended his keynote.

However, Bill Glassman from The Gartner Group noted that we’re all looking for the next big thing and it felt as if the conference was looking for it too - perhaps the closest thing to that was Mobile Analytics - it seemed to be the new darling of both Emetrics and perhaps, Web Analytics in general.   It’s almost as if Mobile Analytics has “replaced” the focus on “Social Media” which is now becoming “absorbed” into the general consciousness of Web Analytics practitioners.

Omniture had an excellent presentation, as did Sebastian Wenzel from Lifetopia Corp, who also writes www.webanalyticsbook.com (the mobile metrics guide is somewhere on his site, but I can’t find it right at this moment - otherwise I’d provide the link for download).

There was also a great session on Measuring Virtual Worlds, with Dr. James Bower of Numedeon Incorporated, Jared Freedman of Code4Software and Matt Bostwick of A4R4 Media.  Between Matt, Jared and James, Brand Metrics were explained and detailed in a way I had not seen before, and I think we all “got it” - what branding really has become - which is “product branding” - it’s all about the product, not so much the brand.

I also had a great talk with Jennifer Veesenmeyer, a senior consultant for Stratigent, who I’ve seen and spoken to several times at other Emetrics Summits and some WAA Events.

Finally, I stayed one more day to attend a Board Meeting of the Web Analytics Association, whose Board I am part of. There’s only one place in my life where I can discuss and create strategy that drives business forward, and that’s on the Board of Directors of the Web Analytics Association.

For most of my life, I’ve been affected by the decisions made by others - and being on the Board of Directors has given me an experience of what it’s like to make decisions relevant to the organization and for me, that’s was a very rich and rewarding feeling - especially this last meeting - which was the best one, for me, since I joined the Board.

I would not want to miss the New York Times Presentation (Keynote) by James G. Robinson, who directs Web Analytics at the NYT; in fact, there was an excellent presentation from the NYT at the last Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, one of the best, if not the best session I attended then - I definitely will not miss this one. Here’s the marketing notes on James Robinson’s keynote:

“…Web Analytics as a Value Driver Across Media

James G. Robinson, Director of Web Analytics, The New York Times - Wednesday, 9:00 - 9:50

A massively well-received presentation in both London and San Francisco, you’ll learn how The New York Times uses web analytics to grow both their print and online audiences, improve web engagement, and increase revenue and profit. The presentation will trace the development of the Times’ web analytics strategy which is mapped directly to value drivers for customer and the business. Learn how The New York Times:

• Integrates online and print data to better track and profile users
• Uses web data to make the print newspaper more profitable
• Shapes insights to flow through “the last mile” to senior management

Again, I find myself drawn to attend the Social Media Analytics Session(s) at Emetrics on Wedensday.

I am sitting here listening to Jim Sterne introduce James Robinson. James starts with asking us if we read the paper this morning. He’s been at the Times for a year, and what a year it’s been!

Customer Insights Group - micro of intergration happening at the Times. Print and Digital are very different culturally.

Prolifiration of tools, but what drives the business, what is important?

We look at week over week analysis over month over month, things

Web analytics bulliten published weekly that ties in with current trends. Weekly reports are awsome and stakeholders love them but they aren’t enough.

We came up with 16 user behaviors that result in revenue and qualified it and came up with signing up for a subscription as by far the most profitable.

And we found 2 links on the site generating the most revenue and we ended up seeing the Print and Digital needed to talk to each other, so we got both talking.

James went into a new approach of predicting how many newspapers extra to print after a scandel (covered at the last emetrics in SF).

We came up with a metric based on total pageviews / revenue to drive the print business. Circulation Analysis.

Eggs and Investment - we had to decide weather to invest inall of this - Pageviews per Keywords. We have millions of possible. A page has a value, a keyword has a value. We haven’t figured it all out yet but our approach is determined.

Here’s our approach - if you do a user behavior analysis, it’s a single, tie to revenue, a double, investment a triple, ROI, a home run.

What does each if our tools used for? We have a clear idea now, much more than a year ago.

Newstracker - an interesting story.

Questions:

1. How do combine audience measurement with web analytics? They do, but James didn’t go into detail.

2. How did James get to this Job? He said it was a long, winding path.

Summery; James came up with a few really interesting insights from his first year running New York Times Web Analytics and the key takeaway for me is the weekly reports that are published internally and tie in current events, being a newspaper, they can do draw on it and these reports create company wide awareness of the web analytics group.

The question about intergrating Nielsen NetRatings with Omniture/WebTrends mirrors issues I’m dealing with currently, but I don’t think James really answered the question exceptvto say that it has been accomplished by his team.

Also, James said audience measurement sits on a different part of the New York Times Tools map than Web Analytics, and pointed out that you dont’t use a hammer when a screwdriver is required, and it’s important to have a map of tools your organization uses and the purposethey are used for.

But having said that, James said audience data is used to figure out “who” is reading the paper and web analytics shows “how” they are reading the paper.

Interesting point.

At the end of the session Omniture had a presentation mobile phones.

What does the market look like for mobile? Quite a lot of growth in numbers and capabilites.

Interesting presentation about celiberities and mobile phones. Analytics show mobile “referrers” by make.

Many challenges for web analytics and Matt from Overture went over the main ones.

Image tags used for identification. Omniture has intergrated Site Catalyst with mobile analytics. Partly we need to identify the handset so site owners can determine if the site experience works for the site. Capturing data and geolocation.

I had not planned on writing this post had it not been conceived while taking a walk in Prospect Park this morning with my friend and business partner in Blogspeedway.com, Sebastian, who writes www.Webanalyticsbook.com (He will be speaking at Emetrics DC next week in a panel titled Mobile Analytics is Calling You - Sebastian Wenzel).

Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis wrote a post on Google’s Third Quarter Results that were, again, as always, beyond Wall Street’s Expectations - defying all odds, and confirming that Google is a company that appears to defy normal physics (see my Google Recession post- when everyone else is suffering - they glide into a 3rd Quater Profit - but how? According to SeekingAlpha:

Market reaction: Wall Street was pleasantly surprised by the earnings release, rewarding the shares with almost a 12% markup in after hours trading. The shares saw nearly a $100 swing from their lows to their highs providing a nice selling opportunity for prudent traders. I think if you dig deeper into the report, you may detect some fool’s gold from within.

And now, according to Jeff Jarvis in a post on The Google economy, indeed

Google does indeed have its own economy. It’s latest results:

The Web search leader reported third-quarter earnings that far exceeded the expectations of analysts, especially those who thought the company might finally fall victim to the slumping economy. Thanks largely to having contained costs better than in previous quarters, Google reported on Oct. 16 that profit rose 26%, to $1.35 billion, significantly higher than analysts had predicted. Sales jumped 31%, to $5.54 billion.

The analysts are stumped because they are not judging Google as a new kind of company in a new kind of economy. It’s different.

Indeed - strange - until Sebastian woke me up to something about Google that no one talks about.

Ha, ha, ha, Google has “rigged” their system so it always pays out profitable …

Google is the will, the way and the word, Google controls almost 75% of Search in the United States according to a post in Web Analytics World Google Up 12 Percent Year Over Year and 80% of all the Paid Search Advertising Share according to the Rimm-Kaufman Group - look at this chart from Alan Rimm Kaufman’s blog:

Well, want to know the secret of why Google is profitable and always will be, even when the rest of the economy crashes?

Simple, with AdSence and AdWords - Publishers don’t know the actual money that Google is making on each ad .. no one does - except Google.

If Google were a European company, it would have been much more regulated, Europeans would not have allowed Google to create such a financial system.

And as we sit here and think about the implications - look what happened on Wall Street - all the “sub-prime” mortgages, and “credit swaps”. from Lehman Brothers amounted to almost $607 Billion dollars - I think that’s why the FED didn’t bail them out - they had simply too much unregulated Debt (I’m trying to find the article in the New York Times where I read about the over 600 Billion that Lehman lost .. and could not find it, but I’m sure I read it today)

All Google needs to do at any point, is manipulate the dials to pay out to publishers more or less, as they need to, to make whatever Quarterly Goal they want.

In other words, Google has total control over it’s own Economy - Google is it’s own Economy - and it can alter the payout on advertising to publishers in any way it feels like - without anyone ever knowing how much they actually made, and it can alter its PPC Ads to be easier or harder to click on, as it wants - all which end up controlling how much money it makes and how much money it reports.

Google is the ultimate “rigged” system - as much as I love wearing Google T-Shirts and Swag - as great as their products are - their 3Q08 results each quarter are as “unnatural” as George W. Bush’s winning the Presidential Elections of 2000 and 2004 - especially 2004 (Neocons are trying to do it again in 2008, but having a much harder time of it).

In fact, Google can almost, almost make as much money as it wants to make…. as long as people use Google to publish PPC Ads of any variety, and people click on them ….. Google will be profitable. How profitable?

As profitable as their CFO decides they need to be in any quarter. That’s Google’s Secret - they are their own Internet Economy. Microsoft and Yahoo simply can’t compete, they don’t have enough of a market share in Search to drive any real policies.

So the question may come up ….. should Google be regulated? And the answer is ….. Yes. Their quarterly results are …. well … whatever they want them to be …, and that’s unnatural.

But think of it this way - while Google is not a monopoly in name, it might as well be …. because they can set prices with no regulation - no one sees what Google really makes vs what they pay out.

But … I bet, with some sluthwork, large publishers could determine sublte changes in payouts earch month - I’m sure Google doesn’t make it easy but it seems like there’s enough data in publisher’s hands where they could notice the average payout per click in a specific position might vary slighly - and all Google needs is to make very subtle alterations to what they pay publishers OR how they position their ads, and presto … all the money the need.

The CFO of Google might as well have a dart board in his office and just sit there with and throw darts on the numbers they want to make and then just manipulate the dials of Google to pay out whatever they want.

Yep, Google must regulated at some point soon - they’re too powerful, too dangerous to be allowed to continue to operate this way, much longer - because they’re acting much as Government would, as a Federal Reserve would - except, they’re not accountable to anyone but their stakeholders - and that’s not right, especially as they’re a de-facto monopoly in search, both Paid and Organic, and that’s not right.

However, to be fair, SeekingAlpha has a more probing look at Google’s 3Q Results and sees signs of weakness - results that Google is probably trying to spin it’s own way - Google: 3Q Results Reveal Chinks in the Armor

“….On the surface, Google (GOOG) appeared to soundly beat analyst expectations of $4.76, by reporting diluted earnings per share of $4.92, on a top line of $ 4.04 billion (see conference call transcript). GOOG’s revenues were $20 million short of analyst expectations of $4.06 billion. This was the first time in GOOG’s trading history that they actually missed revenue estimates, and their sales gain amounted to a mere 4% sequential rise against second quarter results. The company’s growth rate is indeed in a declining phase, as the law of larger numbers, a dismal economy and a stronger US dollar are factors beginning to take their toll.

But not that much of a toll - in fact, I bet Google could have easily “erased” that $20 million decline by just “turning the dial” up a little.

Yes, it’s a rigged system - the problem is there’s no real competition to Google - nothing to keep them in line - they can, essentially, do whatever they want, and their profit will be, well … whatever they want or need it to be.

The other day I wrote a post titled-

End of an Era and … The Man Who Won as Others Lost - Plus Social Media doing Good in the Recession?

In my post I mentioned that …..

“…..What if Google started laying off people? Then you’d really know it’s bad.   Well, I predict, that’s going to happen - maybe not next week - but I bet, it’s going to happen within the next year.   It makes sense, the only thing they make real money on in AdWords and AdSense -everything is advertising based.  Can you imagine if Google fired a bunch of marketing people - it’s not so far fetched.  But what does that say about the rest of the economy.   I shudder to think - I don’t think we want to know - but, unfortunately, we probably will start finding out soon.

Guess what?   We don’t have to wait that long - Google is already contemplating laying off some of it’s employees - according to Silicon Alley Insider Henry Blodget -  probably the Ad People I mentioned…… Google: Yes, If Revenue Craters, We’ll Fire People

read this analysis from Blodget::

“…. Last week, we posited that Google might eventually have to start firing people to offset slowing revenue growth, shrinking profit margins, and a weak economy. Sales chief Tim Armstrong recently suggested that the company is, in fact, prepared to do that:

[L]ast week Tim Armstrong, president-sales and commerce, Americas, told a group of travel advertisers that the company is “watching the economy closely and making sure our expenses and revenue are very much aligned.”

Tim didn’t specify firings, and, in truth, we imagine that Google’s people would be the last costs to go. Google has grown so quickly and is reportedly so undisciplined on internal cost controls that we imagine the company could find hundreds of millions to cut before it let a single Googler go.

That said, we don’t think a small headcount reduction would be such a bad move.

I know that anything can be spun an number of ways - and honestly, Henry Blodget is right - Google has so much extra money that it could get rid of a lot of the “fringe” expenses before having to lay off anyone …..

…but ….. much of what makes Google the kind of company it is …. are those fringe benefits - and the culture around them - mark my words  - it’s all about the culture …. about Google and Manifest Destiny (the same force that drove immigrants across America to travel west, dislocate the Indians, and settle the country during much of the 1800’s.

Part of the reason Google is an attractive place to work is that it seems to defy the laws of physics and make money when everyone else is losing it - that it seems to defy the odds and expand when everyone else is contracting ….. all of that because the minds of it’s engineers are superior, that it’s search engine is superior, that it has covered all the bases, even at NASA and the US Goverment.

However, what if ….. in an Obama Administration, which is looking more and more likely, Google and other search engines, but mainly Google is “Regulated”?

Well, at tonight’s BrandHacker Meetup in Manhattan (http://marketing.meetup.com/277/calendar/8539631/) Kevin M. Ryan said that

“…… it’s a certainty (inevitable) that within the next two years Google will be subject to some kind of regulation that will disrupt part of it’s business model.”

That’s right - even if the economy doesn’t take down Google a few notches - the Government, Democrat or Republican, will - people will - there’s more and more, a perception that Google needs to be regulated (much as the Wall Street needs to be regulated, much as Banks need to be regulated).

Google’s “Search Equity” is more “real”, if you think about it, than the Sub-Prime Mortgages that aren’t good enough to wrap fish in (to mark an old expression) which in turn was regulated by a “Shadow Economy” that took up credit swaps.

In a lot of ways, Google operates above the law - it makes it’s own rules and defies gravity - but not for that much longer - it’s inevitable the age of Google’s infallibility will end, probably sooner than later.

I can almost … almost see it now … the very same minds that built the Financial Algorithms (Computer Models) that ran Wall Street - many of them, are of the same elk that program Google’s Search Engine (another set of Computer Models).   Take this post by Saul Hansell in the New York Times Bits blog - How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers:

“….. The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough.

Top bankers couldn’t simply ignore the computer models, because after the last round of big financial losses, regulators now require them to monitor their risk positions. Indeed, if the models say a firm’s risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its bets or set aside more capital as a cushion in case things go wrong.

In other words, the computer is supposed to monitor the temperature of the party and drain the punch bowl as things get hot. And just as drunken revelers may want to put the thermostat in the freezer, Wall Street executives had lots of incentives to make sure their risk systems didn’t see much risk.

“There was a willful designing of the systems to measure the risks in a certain way that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks,” said Gregg Berman, the co-head of the risk-management group at RiskMetrics, a software company spun out of JP Morgan. “They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and portfolio managers would be stable.”

When the story of the Financial Meltdown becomes more and more solidified - much of the blame will fall on the “assumptions” that were overly optimistic, programmed in a way to mimic human financial behavior - but were unable to predict what happened last month - or correct for it - with an estimated 60 Trillion dollars of Reverse Credit Swaps out in the World Economy, not to mention all the Sub Prime debt that’s also bad (which it turns out is the least of the problems we have).

Now…. let’s spin this forward a little - we know a lot of people are afraid of Google, the resent Google for taking unfair advantage, for being, in a way, monopolistic, but most of all, people of jellous of Google’s success.

As the Financial Downturn continues - and people become more aware of the Financial Computer Modeling that enabled the Banks to fail - together with resentment that is already solidifying against Google …. where do you think the anger will point to …. in the future …….. who of all corporations is most like Wall Street?

Google.

In a way, if Google were even smarter than smart, they’d anticipate the upcoming changes and take themselves down a few notches - in other words, humble themselves more - open up in other ways than those they’re accustomed to.

Sure, Google has done a lot to make certain things they do more transparent - such as Google Webmaster Tools - but that’s only on Google’s own terms - they don’t actually ever want to have a conversation with anyone where they may end up being on the wrong side of it - and I suggest, they should allow themselves to be wrong more often.

And hire customer service people for Search - people you can talk to, for anything.    Look - we’re getting sick of dealing with Computer Algorithms - look what happened on Wall Street.

You know, people, as dependent as they are on Google, can easily morph a hate of willful manipulation that wiped out their savings and retirement funds - largely caused by a series of computer programs that were programmed, or over programmed - to Google, which runs on much the same kind of algorhytms for Search - both paid and organic.

Don’t think it can’t happen - people are going to be getting very emotional - in the not too distant future - there will be alot of angst to go around - some of it may end up on Google’s doorstep - and I suspect, some of it, belongs there, too (at least, that will be the perception).

About the New York Times article on Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

I have to say, this is great news and suggests. that on the international finance and economics, Paul Krugman, has been recognized as an thought leader - which is kinda timely, given that he’s been pretty much right on most of the major issues in the several years I’ve been reading his OPED Column in the New York Times.

I also think the Nobel Prize was given to Paul Krugman, to bolster his position, just now, with the Financial Meltdown that has occured over the last few months - and especially in the last month.

Congratulations, Paul, there’s no one that deserves this award more than you.

Around the time of the Renaissance in Italy and Germany artists like Albert Durer would spend a considerable amount of time coming up with the ideal proportions of the human figure, including the human face  (see below); it was all based on the Golden Mean.  Durer’s manuals on The Four Books on Human Proportion are particularly relevant here, and come to my mind.

Construction of a golden rectangle: 1. Construct a unit square (red). 2. Draw a line from the midpoint of one side to an opposite corner. 3. Use that line as the radius to draw an arc that defines the long dimension of the rectangle.

Today, an article in the New York Times comes us with the Modern Equivalent of Durer’s books on Human Measurement - The Sum of Your Facial Parts

where the human face, in a photograph, is subtly altered to fall within a standard set up beforehand.  The results are very hard to notice 80% of the time, but somewhat noticeable the other 20% of the time.

“…. The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.

Scientists took the data and applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.

Essentially, they trained a computer to determine, for each individual face, the most attractive set of distances and then choose the ideal closest to the original face. Unlike other research with formulas for facial attractiveness, this program does not produce one ideal for a feature, say a certain eye width or chin length.

The question I have - does it really matter?   As an analyst, I do care about subtle things - in fact, it’s those connections that make delving into data to find what was at once, hidden, and revealing it, that makes the job of Web Analytics interesting.

But in the case of using a process to improve “imperfection” one whas to wonder.  For example, there are cultural differences and a small number of individuals that came up with the formulas”

“….68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.”

I don’t think that’s enough people - 2000, maybe - 6000 - 10000 would be better - but the next question comes up - if you had the extra 9,932 “panalists” data to draw on, would the formulas be any different?   To be honest, probably not that much - with a big if …. depending on how well the initial group of 68 people where choosen.

Recently I’ve been working on a Paid Search Project - and noticed just how much of the online spend and converstions are focused on terms my client has in the first position, and usually, on Branded terms - the “Long Tail” might alter the results somewhat - but one wonders if it is worth the effort.

Same here - I believe the 68 panelists whose ideas of beauty were assembled to create the program, is too little - but then, Albert Durer, back some 500 years ago, had only one person to decide what his alogrythm was - and it worked … at least, for him.

Final session at WordCamp NYC tonight, and I’m totally saturated, especially with the subject of the last post on security, plus, I did not cover Jen Simmonds who spoke about Video on Wordpress.

Jeremy started at NYT in 2006, in April 2006, started launching blogs at NYT, 152 at present. Active blogs are being written to once a month (65 blogs).

The idea is blogs that are presently not written to (sessions, like Tennis) are still valuable is something the speaker had to win support for.

When a stakeholder came to ask for a blog to develop content and concept, you end up being their therapist, it takes a lot of effort to explain blogs. There are about 500 bloggers at the New York Times, many can’t even operate the default dashboard.

There is a smarter way to deal with this; people need attention to grow, and giving them the right attention to grow.

The Dry Method - documentation on how to use the product could be put in a single place, so when dealing with stakeholders, you can interact at the most important level if their need.

90% of our time is based on administration with people and it seems to make sense to streamline it.

Communities that read a NYT blogs, a particular blogger, building tools for more meaningful discussions.

The Annotated ….. Post a entire speech, then have readers comment on what they read, then take a reference to the comment as a link back to the comment from that section.

Most blogs at the NYT today are at 2.5.

Paul Krugman’s blog is posting several times a week and his column is published twice a week, so a distinction between opinion vs commentary vs blogging.

We started an internal blog at the NYT called “On The Blogs” to distill information about blogging so it doesn’t need to be repeated over and over again, with every new stakeholder.

Well, I feel I have covered as much as I could today and iwabt to catch a SMX East party tonight, briefly, before heading home.