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I’m not convinced that digital ignorance should be accepted as an excuse. This all should come under the ethical and responsible behaviour we expect from our suppliers whether they are delivering, products services or customers.

While it is unclear if Habitat’s error was by one of their employees or a third party, more often, unethical marketing tactics are deployed by third party lead generators. Commonly referred to as affiliates, they are paid commission for generating customers. Not all affiliates practice unethical tactics, but a significant proportion of all online spam from emails to, now Twitter are usually conducted by third party affiliates. Where the vendor can deny knowledge of any malpractice.

In the offline world, many companies have been accused over the years of dodging responsibility through the use of offshore subcontractors with dubious labour practices. In 2007 the ethical credentials of the fashion giant Gap was brought into question, when an investigation by The Observer uncovered the use of child labour in an Indian sweatshop. Gap claimed that the Indian subcontractor had managed to escape their rigorous factory monitoring program designed to keep tabs on their supply chain.

Shouldn’t the same sense of responsibility apply to a company’s online supply chain?

Add to this the diminishing numbers of eyeballs for television compared to that of online, and you may be thinking I’m about to point out the bleeding obvious.

But, I’m not really interested in the move from TV to online. Well I am, but, this conversation is already maturing and the data is all there for everyone to see.

I’m more interested in how TV could be used to seed an online experience- a push pull approach that’s more effective and makes much more economic sense.

Returning back to my short pseudo scientific study of the Kevin Bacon YouTube phenomenon [YouTube has since removed that video], where Graham Norton’s TV program increased the number of views for that particular Kevin Bacon video by 600+ overnight – and then WOM increased it by another 30,00 views over the following week – it was clear that the diffusion of the information through online and offline WOM plaid the bigger role in spreading the video. But, TV definitely plaid its part in getting the ball rolling.

More importantly this was not an expensive TV ad, but a mention on a TV program which was targeted at an audience that was more likely to find it funny and have friends who also shared their sense of humour.

If we translate this to TV advertising – let’s not spend all the marketing budget on the TV ad experience, which most people are not going to see it and out of those that do, few will act on it. Instead use TV as a cheap trigger to a more satisfying online experience. Kind of make TV not the main course which is a very expensive main course, but a targeted entrée – that’s cheaper to produce and aired on a cheaper slot which is more focussed to an audience that’s more likely to watch it and spread the message.

Spend the lion’s share of the budget on hte product and creating a useful engaging online experience which is more likely to spread and gain attention for a longer period.

I’ve been convinced for some time that all financial services will be transformed to some degree by the network.

I’m not convinced by Jeff’s argument that insurance is somehow immune to the network because of the inherent fraud and mistrust in this industry. Yes it exists when both sides stand to gain so much, but in a co-operative system only one side can gain. And that person is up against a network of highly connected individuals who collectively has something to lose. Getting caught cheating the community is a much worse than losing to a corporation.

Regulations governing financial products are considered another nail in the coffin to a co-operative utopia. But, much of the regulations governing Financial Services have evolved to protect both customer and profits. How will things change in a non profit scenario where regulation are there to protect the one entity?

Even if the insurance industry will not benefit from the network inputs driving MyStarbucks, I can see Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) principals embedding into the insurance industry very easily. OK it’s not going to be ani-insurance or necessarily replace insurance companies as we know em. But enabling the customer to control their data and allowing multiple quotes from a single data feed has obvious advantages. Insurance aggregators currently fill this space, but they take their cut which doesn’t particularly help providers compete on price – one of the biggest drivers in motor insurance.

On Friday, Google announced the launch of their Social graph API , which promises to take us another step closer to portability. They plan to crawl our connections across social networks where profiles are public. This data can then be ported by social application developers to provide users with the choice of picking their friends from a list presented to them, instead of having to build their network from scratch every time.

But the closer we step towards fully automated approaches to portability the more the ownership of this data becomes an issue. But that’s a discussion for another time. When I get my head around Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) and finally write about it.

But for now, I like where Google’s heading with this API

Last week a friend asked me about lijit – a kind of social search engine based on Google custom. So, I started reading about it and the next thing I know I’d installed it on my sidebar. Wow! It was like a spiritual experience in user experience. I was reading one minute bought into the whole idea the next and a couple of clicks later I was there.

So how does it work – lijit enables you to search this blog and if what you seek is not here it’ll pull in content from other places I’ve contributed – Digg, delicious etc… If it’s not there, it’ll then look at the blogs I link to and the places they’ve contributed. You can even upload an RSS reading list. Fantastic!

The principle is based on ask a friend or friend of a friend – and relies on mutual trust within these mini circles. The depth of search is limited to your immediate friends, but things could get more interesting if this caught on with more people installing it creating deeper searching.

And unlike the doomed Wikia search launched last month, this doesn’t require me to do anything different, other than install it and carry on with business as usual.

Might not be a Google killer, but a simple idea well executed and I’m finding it more useful than a regular blog search box.

Nice one!

But during this year, one thing that seemed to have stayed stagnant is search. At a time when people power dominated and shaped everything from how we communicate to make purchase decisions, to most people search engines seem to be lagging behind – leading some ‘experts’ to declare the death of Google.

So did Google stand still? Well I’m confident they didn’t. But before we can look at where Google is at and where they’ll likely end up – it’s worth looking at some Google history and some of the barriers to social search.

Most people think that Google’s primary contribution to search was the use of linkage data to judge reputation. But a bigger contribution, the one I believe is the reason that I’ll still be Googling to my grave is the technology and methods they developed to scale and efficiently deliver information to where ever you are. Add to this a ranking method which can be swapped in and out like a removable hard disk – and you have the infrastructure for longevity. Oh and let’s not forget Spam – not something to be taken lightly.

What’s up with the algorithm
Link reputation has served us well, but letting the published community define reputation and relevance over the people that consume that content has limited appeal. More about that here – From link spam o user data

As reputation dominates other factors in the ranking game – Is Google constantly pointing us into the ‘head’ of content on a given topic. As Chris Anderson pointed out in his groundbreaking book The Long Tail, what’s the point in having a tail if you can’t get to it?

User driven recommendation engines like Amazon and Last FM do this very well but can Google really reach those parts – or maybe that’s not what we want out of our reputation system? A navigation aid and nothing more.

Developments this year
People write search algorithms not computers. So you could argue that Google like all search engines were already influenced by people. It’s just that those people worked with the data available to them.

Personalisation ramped up
Using search history and other signals from user data such as bookmarks and content saved in your Google home page is a move towards employing more user data to judge relevance and more importantly query context or intention. But the use of data is confined to the individual.

Blended results – Google universal
On the face of it blended results seem more an aid to navigation than anything else. I.e. save people having to explore vertical indices to find what they’re looking for by attempting to understand and deliver vertical results into regular Google. Danny Sullivan introduced this concept more than five years ago and called it invisible tabs.
But the really interesting development her e was the ability to use popularity data in verticals in order to be able to identify when a vertical result is relevant for the masses. Google can identify if a news story is relevant for regular result in less than an hour of publication.

So we’re starting to see the use of user data in quite a big way already within Google.
Search 3.0 – blended and vertical http://searchengineland.com/071127-091128.php

Google Knol

http://searchengineland.com/071213-213400.php

Of course, Manber did say that Google could better tell which of the Knol pages were of high quality by looking at signals such as ratings.

Going all the way
So what stops Google from using user data to refine search results in a more direct way – Spam (remember the Direct Hit Algorithm) trust in everyone’s opinion is just one of the issues.
However Google is already using popularity data to determine search quality. All clicks on a results page are tracked and high recall rate can be used for further tweaking.

Toolbar data and even ISP data could be used to determine the relevance of a site to a given query. But if Open standards like OpenSocial and OpenID are adopted on mass then many of the Spam and trust issues could be overcome through the use of personal reputation scores like personal Pagerank. APML will no doubt play role in enabling people, content and behaviour to be connected in one seamless network or as Tim Burners Lee refers to as The Graph.

One thing is for certain, we are unlikely to see a set of open standards designed by committee and adopted by everyone to take us to the next generation of the web (Semantic web). We are more likely to see adoption based on the need for attention and economic growth. Until one day we’ll find that we’ve arrived. Just like when O’Rilley coined the phrase web 2.0 – no one planned it or named it – things just emerged that way.

2008 will be one of the most interesting years, not just for search but for the internet. Technology was never the limitation – people will ultimately decide how, why and who they wish to connect and engage with – marketing can only follow.

guns don’t kill people, rappers do

Think a coffee and the free Wifi code for me please!

Good news for the mobile internet and some of FON’s other investors including Google and ebay who owns now Skype. Not so good for mobile carriers who will need to rethink their business model when it comes to 3G and ultimately phone calls. Not sure how they’ll compete with a fixed price service that is simply a lot faster.

The programme was making just $10M a year, compared what they could make, if they were to allow search engines to crawl this content, acquire links and generate a lot more traffic, which they could monetise through advertising.

For medial owners the future seems clear – let Google in and sell ad-space.