We’ve seen in previous posts (1,2) that interest is increasingly growing in the blogosphere and its potential as a Weapon of Mass Distraction. As marketers and advertisers push into this relatively pristine environment, we can expect a new wave of interest in benchmarking to emerge.

Seth Godin offers some interesting points on the perils of benchmarks:

The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much. Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time? What entrepreneur wants to embrace the fact that the wait time at her new restaurant franchise is 20% behind the leader—and there’s no obvious way to improve it?

Our interconnected, 500-channel world lets us be picky. We can want a husband who is as tall as that guy, as rich as this guy and as loyal as my brother-in-law. We can ask for an apartment that is in just the right location, with just the right view and just the right rent—and then reject it because the carpeting in the hallway isn’t as nice as the one in the building next door. Monster lets us see 5,000 resumes for every job opening… and imagine that we can find someone with this guy’s education and that woman’s professional experience—who works as cheap as this person and is as local as that one.

Source: Seth Godin, “The Curse of Great Expectations”

Seth touches off on an interesting dilemma we face as we try to establish the blogosphere as a marketplace. Today we are seeing tremendous growth in the industry as a whole. All segments are reporting back surges of exponential proportions. Unfortunately, that growth is not even and, as a result, cannot be used as a baseline.

Our challenge, then, is to devise the benchmarks that not only display the potential of our new resource, but also work to preserve the essence of the thing. E-mail was pure when it started. Today 80% of it is useless. How do we avoid that trap?

Smart marketers are turning to the blogosphere now with hopes of being the first pioneers to inhabit this new consumer frontier; we need to make sure they are compelled to stay.

The use of VOIP is growing more and more in various different contexts. Consumers received a new form of relief today as Vonage, one of the dominant players in the consumer VOIP marketplace announced a $50 rebate on their installation/setup package.

News.com reports:

The kit, which includes a Motorola phone adapter, is now $30 at Circuit City, Fry’s and RadioShack after a $50 mail-in rebate, Vonage said Wednesday. The starter kit, which consists of an adapter and two months of free Vonage service, used to cost $100 at the same stores.

As Vonage’s subscriber numbers grow, it has a greater ability to pass on savings to its customers, according to company Vice President Matthew Deatrick. Vonage made a similar argument in mid-May, when it signed up its 150,000th subscriber, saying it had reached an “inflection point” that allowed it to lower the cost of monthly unlimited North American dialing from $35 to $30 a month.

Source: News.com, “Vonage slashes price of Net telephony kit”

This is in addition to Vonage’s recently inked distribution deal with Radio Shack, not to mention an alliance with another landline provider. Price drops aside, I am most enthused to see that a VOIP has such widespread distribution channels already in place. 150K subscribers is still just a blip on the radar, however, its still encouraging.

The only thing to look out for now, unfortunately, is the governments attempts to normalize this new technology into archaic paradigms they can relate to. Vonage is already partially getting served some cold tea in New York but they aren’t standing still.

A valuable characteristic of a network is the inherent ability for nodes to discover their parents, siblings, and children. For years, more and more network technologies have been spawned that ease this process for not only the humans at the helm but also for the system agents that drudge through the data on our behalf.

Apple computer released a very unique network recognition system, aptly named Rendezvous as part of its OSX operating system. The basic role of Rendezvous is to allow machines, and inadvertently their operators, to locate available networks and initiate conversations, in one form or another. For the most part, these conversations are either social a la user-user chat or functional a la synchronization, streaming, and sharing of files/resources.

In the next few weeks, the Rendezvous methodology of auto-discovery will be unlatched from Apple, and more importantly. from the desktop and destined for your pocket. A bright developer, Razvan Dragomirescu of Simedia, is poised to release his newest application: Pocket Rendezvous. As described:

It’s a web server for the Pocket PC that advertises itself to other Pocket PCs in the neighbourhood wirelessly using ad-hoc WiFi networks and Rendezvous. Windows users can look here for a Windows Rendezvous browser/publisher. Pocket Rendezvous also allows you to browse for nearby devices running Pocket Rendezvous and view the content published by the Pocket Rendezvous server on those devices. You can also browse for regular Rendezvous services published on your network.

Source: Smart Mobs, “Pocket Rendezvous”

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Simple passwords no longer suffice
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/06/01/beyond.passwords.ap/index.html

“A password is a construct of the past that has run out of steam,” said Joseph Atick, chief executive of Identix Inc., a Minnesota designer of fingerprint-based authentication. “The human mind-set is not used to dealing with so many different passwords and so many different PINs.”

…

But it’s difficult to remember dozens of strong passwords — so many sites now require them. Alternatives include writing them down on a sticky note attached to a monitor or in an electronic spreadsheet — practices security experts also deem unsafe.

…

People will pay more attention to security as they keep more of their lives online, said Robert Chesnut, eBay’s vice president for rules, trust and safety. He offered this analogy: “The more stuff you have in your house, the better the deadbolt lock you have.”

AJ Kim points to a very interesting intersection between old school technology and new school thinking. The new company/service, called Talking Street, provides history and content rich tours of different locales. The kicker is that these services are obtained by dialing into a central service and punching in the appropriate location id to retrieve the audio snippet. As the original article notes:

What’s particularly remarkable about the effort is the company’s unique funding strategy: get funded by the people hoping to share their content, rather than by a technology developer. In this case, founder Miles Kronby offered his fledgling application to a Jewish philanthropy: as a model for a walking tour of the Jewish history of the Lower East Side. He signed on American Jewish comedian Jerry Stiller, and got a grant to develop the technology.

And it works. Hundreds of tourists and residents of New York have already spent many hours on the same streets trod by early immigrants to New York City and learning about the weddings, labor protests and commerce that took place there a hundred years ago. With the Lower East Side tour serving as ample proof of concept, Talking Street is about to release new walking tours — one of the Ground Zero area in New York, one of the Mall in Washington, DC, and another of Boston, “City of Rebels and Dreamers.”

Source: TheFeature, “These Streets Were Made For Walking”

The CEO notes that though the technology is not new, the most difficult aspect of the deployment was the selection of content. Most areas have any number of stories to tell which makes selecting the most representative 2 minute segment is truly a balancing act.

Looking forward, the company has some ambitious plans, but a sound strategy. New versions may include other media formats like photos or even videos.

The role and interest in audio, video and other forms of interactive media is growing at a steady pace. Speech-To-Text applications have existed for years now, catering to both the inquisitive and the disabled. Apple computer has embedded Text-to-Speech tools directly into its OS X environment.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the inclusion of these features at the API level for the forthcoming Microsoft OS, Longhorn. Since the API is embedded into the OS itself, this will provide many different possibilities for application developers looking to improve, enhance, or revolutionize current user interface systems.

http://www.developer.com/voice/article.php/3345251

A more ambitious proposal for managing the car’s ever-growing information stream is the notion of an artificial passenger, an intelligent, interactive system capable of carrying on a conversation with the driver. The centerpiece of the company’s effort in telematics, the artificial passenger is actually a set of systems. The voice recognition portion is based on IBM ViaVoice software.

Combining information from the Global Positioning System with onboard data, today’s leading-edge navigation systems are already smart enough to fulfill such requests as “find nearest ATM” or “find Italian restaurant.” They can also talk back, to provide driving directions with an electronically generated voice. Future systems, as IBM researchers imagine them, will consult databases not in the car but in networks reached through wireless exchanges.

http://news.com.com/Are+you+ready+to+have+a+chat+with+your+car%3F/2100-1041_3-5223935.html

The larger search engines are also now starting to look more deeply into differentiating their algorithms - this time the focus is on the emerging content types of the web (images, audio, and video). News.com reports on the rising challenges for multimedia content producers as they seek representation in search engine listings. This snippet sums up the dilemma:

“Our site is primarily full of rich audio, and we want people to find it when it’s relevant,” Thomas said. “The big search engines’ technologies don’t have the ability to get inside the audio or video. With the little bit of text we have on NPR, it’s not always good enough to find our content, and reference the page.”

Consumers armed with broadband connections at home are driving new demand for multimedia content and setting off a new wave of technology development among search engine companies eager to extend their empires from the static world of text to the dynamic realm of video and audio.

Source: News.com, Search engines try to find their sound

The result of this demand has been a growth in specialty search systems, much like SpeechBot, that fill the gap. These upstart projects/companies may serve as serious competition for the leading search engines in the years to come. However, the majors are not standing still. Lycos and Altavista have already had systems in place and Google is already working with NPR and others on their multimedia indexing.

One interesting find was StreamSage, an audio and video technology provider. They have released a site, CampaignSearch.com, that allows users to search the political speeches of the upcoming US Presidential candidates. It’s a great preview of how valuable this form of search will be.

John Dowdell points to an interesting research project being conducted at HP Labs, the SpeechBot. As the site describes, “SpeechBot is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites”.

Digging a little deeper into the technical documentation for SpeechBot, I came across this summary:

SpeechBot (http://www.compaq.com/speechbot) is the first Internet search site for indexing streaming spoken audio on the web. Unlike previous attempts to index spoken audio on the Web, which have relied on either adjacent text, metadata, or hand supplied transcripts and close captions, SpeechBot uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information. The use of speech recognition permits the efficient and cost-effective indexing of thousands of hours of audio content, which were previously inaccessible. Because of this indexing, SpeechBot allows users to quickly search for relevant content in long audio documents and yields a high precision on first page-retrieved items.

SpeechBot indexes streaming media files based on their content, much as conventional search sites index ordinary Web pages by their text content. Like conventional search sites, SpeechBot does not store or serve the multimedia files themselves, but rather provides users with links. SpeechBot’s current index has over 3200 shows, 3500 hours of audio and 20 million words. The index is continually updated using SpeechBot’s highly scalable architecture.

Source: SpeechBot White Paper

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http://voisen.org/archives/central/000402.php

http://news.com.com/1606-2-5208490.html?tag=ne.guts.vid