Blog: May 2007

This is really cool. It's a tabletop computer where you can manipulate objects with your fingers, like drawing or resizing photos and maps. Best of all, if you place a device on it, like a camera with wireless capability, it can automatically get the pictures out, or let you drag them into a phone.

Manipulating digital images is a complex task, and difficult for many people. Maybe this kind of interface can finally make it intuitive and accessible.

Long-time Googler Aubrey Sabala recently also made the decision to depart the big G, and has written a very thoughtful piece about how her relationship with Google has evolved as the company itself has evolved from start-up to big corporation. My experience shares some similarities and many differences, but it's a good look into how the Best Company To Work For isn't always the best company for everyone.

The result of today's meandering exploration of Wikipedia and the Web: Some esoteric programming languages such as Piet (programs look like modern art such as that created by Piet Mondrian) and Chef (programs are also recipes).

Piet "hello world", which prints "Hello, world!":

And in Chef, here's Fibonacci Numbers with Caramel Sauce, a program that generates the first 100 Fibonacci numbers and also makes a lot of caramel sauce.

Today Google Maps launched a really amazing feature, Google Street View, where you can see street-level images taken from a vehicle that drove all around various cities. Here's where I live. And here's one of San Francisco's most famous screetscapes.

On May 16th, Google hosted a consumer press event called "Searchology" where they announced a slew of search enhancements. Among these was a piece of my project, Timeline and Map Views. You can now also see the locations mentioned in your search results displayed on a map, or the dates from your search results organized into a timeline.

Here are some queries to get you started:

• gandhi timeline
  
• earthquakes timeline
  
• route 66 map (with &num=100 to show more results)
  
• new england bed and breakfasts map

Here is some blog coverage of this feature:

• A user tries many queries including attempting to find future dates
  
• A user discovers he can get library conferences in one place
  
• "Google's timeline and map views are nifty"
  
• A lawyer analyzes tort reform

This is one piece of a larger effort around "structured data" - identifying and understanding dates, locations, facts, numbers, and other information in Web pages. Some other pieces have already launched, like question answering on Google.com or dates from books (scroll down to the big map on the bottom). Other pieces will launch in weeks or months ahead.

But for me, this is the last launch I will personally participate in as a Google Product Manager. After five and a half years, I have decided to leave Google to pursue other projects. My first priority is reviving IPac, the political action committee I founded in 2004 to get Congressional and Presidential candidates on record on issues that are important to protecting innovation. You can read my message about that here. And I'll post more about my other projects - but that's a topic for a later post.

Seth Godin is an amazing speaker who spreads simple, revolutionary ideas about marketing in the modern age. He speaks in a staccato with informative and often funny slides going while he speaks. In that spirit, here are some of his statements, occasionally paraphrased.

Ideas that spread, win.

The old world of TV marketing: I have money, I can interrupt whoever I want, whenever I want, with whatever message I want, even if it's not true.

The TV industrial complex: buy ads, use those ads to get more donations, get elected, raise money, use that money to buy more ads.

Now the world is filled with noise, and it's easy to ignore anything you don't want to hear. People have become very good at ignoring you. The TV model is broken.

Tiffany is giving the jewelry away; it's the box you pay for. Everyone is in the fashion business now.

10,000 years ago everyone was a hunter. Then the only animals were dead or really good at hiding. Farming came along and humanity was saved, except the politicians and the marketers. At election time, they go out and try to hit voters. Except the voters have become very good at hiding.

People like to do what other people are doing. Why did everyone do the Macarena? It's not because it's a good song! It's because when you would go to a wedding, everyone would make you do it. So why do politicians focus on private events with donors? Create movements and organizations where people can connect.

Targeting is a hunting term. Don't target, work the grapevine.

Don't look at the world as a funnel where you put ads in the top and hope a few votes come out of the bottom. Turn it into a megaphone and give it to the people. You're giving up some control but getting conversation, a current of support.

The new fashion permission complex: Be remarkable. Tell a story to your sneezers. They spread the word. You get people's permission to reach them.

Larry Lessig is speaking at the PDF conference this morning, talking about his campaign to open up the content from the upcoming political debates. He showed a variety of innovative remixes of political content - Jon Stewart conducting a debate between President George W. Bush and 2000 Presidential candidate, Texas Governor Gerge W. Bush, a Paul Wolfowitz parody of "The Office", a love song between Bush and Blair, and the Obama 1984 video.

These remixes of political culture are a tremedous step forward in the ability of citizens to participate in political speech, but they require the ability for creators to use clips of public figures from the commercial media. And while Comedy Central has plenty of lawyers to defend Jon Stewart's right to do this, others don't. NBC attempted to block Robert Greenwald from using a clip of Bush, and the reason they gave? "It's not very flattering to the President." While they backed off this particular terrible excuse, media organizations continue to assert an absolute right to control all content.

Barack Obama and John Edwards have answered the call to open up debate content. Obama wrote, "The Internet has enabled an extraordinary range of citizens to participate in the political dialogue around this election. . . . We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation. . . . Rhere is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection [of copyright]. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates."

Obama's words are terrific not only for their sentiment but also for their choice of themes - he mentions incentives, the fundamental goal of copyright. Where copyright creates incentives to create, it is performing a public good. Where, as in the case of debates, it instead blocks creativity and innovation, it is a harm and has no place in that particular context.

Senator Chris Dodd has also called for opening up the debate content to citizens, as has retired Republican Congressman Robert Livingston. Hillary Clinton has not spoken up on this issue, nor have the major Republican candidates.

I'm starting a candidate scorecard on issues of innovation. Here's the scorecard so far (For space, I'm only mentioning candidates where we know their positions, or who are in the top tier of national polls):

Candidate	Free Debates
Democrats
Obama	A+
Edwards	A
Dodd	A
Clinton	???
Republicans
Giuliani	???
McCain	???
Romney	???