Category Archives: Google

YouTube’s New 10K Views Minimum: Triumph of Quantity Over Quality, Bonanza for Crowdsourcing Companies

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YouTube makes money by putting advertisements on video channels, but advertisers are increasingly restive because some of those channels show terrorists attacks or racist rants. Ironically, the terrorists and racists could have earned money via YouTube’s AdSense program. Additionally, some YouTube channels have been stealing others’ content (and associated AdSense payments). Unfortunately, this new rule disenfranchises the millions of YouTube video creators who have not yet reached 10,000 views of their channels. According to Internet data firm Pex, 88 percent of all YouTube channels have fewer than 10,000 views.

YouTube’s new policy should create a bonanza for the numerous organizations who provide low-cost labor for doing a wide range of tasks on the Web that are more suited for humans than software, because many of sub-10K view channel owners can flock to them to boost their view counts. The most famous of these is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. When we first heard of what appeared to be slave labor, we were affronted, but when we found that people as ethical as Stanford University researchers used Mechanical Turk we were somewhat mollified. And we quickly learned that it would only cost about one cent to have one of these low-paid “slaves” watch a video for the 30 seconds that is needed to create a “view”, so it would only cost about $100.00 to rack up 10K views. This means that essentially ANY channel owner—including terrorists, racists, and plagiarists–could exceed YouTube’s 10K requirement.

Social Media, Especially Facebook, Unfortunately Hijacks Users of the Web … But “Better Web” May Reverse That

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Facebook and a handful of other social media are so entrenched that few people think about life before them. But the Web was conceived 15 years before Facebooks’s founding in 2004. Facebook put a pretty face on the Web, and billions of people have flocked to it. And Google Search, YouTube, and a handful of other giants –fueled by tons of advertising revenues—exercise a lot of control over what people can see and do, so much so that there is growing sentiment about breaking up these monopolistic organizations. And delivering fake news or vicious propaganda from the likes of ISIS (ironically ISIS can even get PAID by YouTube while it disseminates its messages of hatred) adds further pressure for this breakup.

It will take more time, but help may be on the way from the original creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He is working towards a “Better Web” where users’ control their own (private) data. One group that should benefit from greater control of their data is musicians. The title of Jonathan Taplin’s new book, “Move Fast and Break Things”, may even have caused Facebook to foresightedly replace their eponymous former motto with “Move Fast With Stable Infra(structure)”.

The Argy-Bargy About H-1B Visas is All About Dollars … At Tech Companies AND Universities

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We at Technology Bloopers are not big fans of President Trump, but his administration’s putting pressure on tech companies’ hiring software engineers from India and China to replace Americans does seem to be consonant with his pre-election promises.

But apparently it is even worse than that. We heard a couple of days ago about one local company that not only hired a bunch of Indian H1B visa-holders, fired their American staff, and replaced them with these imported folks … after they were trained by the Americans. And this noxious practice has apparently been going on for some time, according to the Stateline folks at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Three months of coder school is not much training compared with that of the better-trained—often in American universities—and more-experienced visa-holders. But why are these American universities welcoming these foreign students? It’s because those students come bearing big funds for their education. (At state universities, it is simply that the international students must pay the same (higher) prices as out-of-state American students.) We have heard that among some of these students it is said that PhD stands for “Parents have Dough”. Interestingly, those international students are more prone to cheat on their exams. Hmmm … does that mean that their future code will be less trustworthy than that of Americans?

We wonder why the big Silicon Valley tech companies have not done a better job on their own of training software engineers. Couldn’t they be hiring “junior” software engineers from the coder schools and boosting their capabilities with on-the-job training. We suspect one reason is that it is more expensive to do that than to hire foreign help. And more time-consuming. And another reason may be that they didn’t do a good job of forecasting their growth and concomitant demand for those software engineers. Maybe the current visa flap will motivate them.

But it may not be the fault of these companies. Americans may too lazy, or too afraid to be “uncool”, to study STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) courses so there is not enough local talent to fill the needs of Silicon Valley. Graduates with strong STEM knowledge are polar opposites to “art history majors” , a term used derogatorily to connote enjoyable-but-low-paying jobs.

Social Networks Need a Hippocratic Oath … And Users Need to Heed the Warning of Caveat Lector

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Why are we at Technology Bloopers going back centuries to use Greek and Latin to admonish Millennials to be careful how they use social networks? Just as physicians swear that they will “First do no harm”, the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Reddit are so powerful that they should also have such an oath … or risk legislation to prevent their doing harm. There are numerous examples of the harm they have already done. Most recently, the fake news posted by malevolent individuals and organizations had some impact on the U.S. presidential race, possibly to the extent that Hillary Clinton was unfairly defeated by Donald Trump. The importance of some of the harm being done is likely to result in legislation to limit their behavior, so these giant companies should police themselves before the government does so.

People are social animals, so the social networks can provide a ton of experiences that they crave. People like fatty foods and sugary drinks, but over-indulging can make them obese due to their lack of nourishing foods and drink. The same goes for social networks, which can distract them with amusing but mindless fare but deprive them of the solid information and communication they need to be productive. The web already provides effective ways to communicate with your friends, business associates, and other people organizations. Information is used to inform, educate, and entertain, but it appears that social networks overdo the entertain role and short the inform and educate roles.

All of the above goes double (or more) for teenagers, who usually have a lot of time and highly value being popular. Additionally, they haven’t yet developed a full set of values that allows them to distinguish good from bad, and avoid the bad. They might profit from a couple of pieces of homespun advice. Remember that much “Web Wisdom” is worth only what you pay for it. And “Believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see”.

YouTube Takes Bigger Slice of Overall Television Pie

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Google is certainly getting a lot out of the $1.76 billion they spent buying YouTube almost exactly 10 years ago today. As of early 2013 YouTube was experiencing one billion unique viiewes/visitors every month, nearly one out of every two people on the Internet, use it for myriad purposes. Anyone at all can upload or watch videos of cats or dancing babies, and Google benefits because it can charge advertisers to put ads adjacent to those videos.

But either Google had great vision a decade ago or they have more recently realized that they have a great medium, arguably better than conventional television. However, a recent study by Nielsen and Google shows that YouTube and conventional (“linear”) TV may be more complementary than competitive. People are watching TV on YouTube and they are watching YouTube on their TVs, so the gap between the two media is shrinking. In fact, it is shrinking so much that Google has just signed up CBS for its imminent web TV service. And, notwithstanding some folks’ criticisms of CBS, its leader seems to be pretty savvy.

Facebook and Google Create New Homeless People in Silicon Valley in 2016

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They may not be sleeping on park benches, but they’ll never be able to afford a house in Silicon Valley. That’s because the household-word high-tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Google, et al) in the San Francisco Bay Area are adding jobs but no one is adding commensurate numbers of housing units, and the prices of homes is skyrocketing.

The iconic independent bookstore in Menlo Park, Kepler’s Books, and Peninsula Arts & Letters, sponsored a well-attended public forum, “Housing Crisis Stories”, on August 18, 2016. The motivation for the meeting was the disconnect between the huge number of new jobs being created by the giant high-tech companies like Facebook and Google and the tiny number of new housing units being created. According to the local paper, The Almanac (which covers the tony cities of Atherton, Menlo Park, Portola Valley, and Woodside), San Mateo County added 55,000 jobs but only 2,000 housing units (homes plus apartments) between 2010 and 2014. The main source of new jobs is these high-tech companies, but other real estate development is also favoring offices at the expense of housing units.

Except for me (in my TechnologyBloopers persona), who dealt with the new jobs, everyone dealt with the housing shortage. There appeared to be NO representatives from the nearby, Menlo Park-based, Facebook. Many of the attendees were either personally the victims of the rapidly-rising home prices or apartment rents, or were recounting stories of other victims. The poster child for these victims is a Palo Alto planning commissioner—a tech lawyer with a software engineer husband—who is resigning and moving to Santa Cruz because they can’t afford to live in Palo Alto and raise a family there.

Unfortunately, individually they have no power to escape their victimhoods. They will have to band together to elect officials who DO have some power. City Councils in those cities affected will need to be very proactive in forcing the tech companies and real estate developers to deal with the housing shortage. And neighboring cities need to cooperate with each other so that jobs created in one city (which result in revenue both to that city government and to retailers in that city) do not force other cities to deal with housing those new employees.

The problem seems to be a failure to optimize the OVERALL combination of jobs and housing. The technology companies are a big part of the problem and they need to be a big part of the solution. And one way those companies, at least the ones like Facebook and Google whose principal activity is software development (which can be done most anyplace), can be a part of the solution is for them to locate large portions of their staff in regional offices in cities far away from Silicon Valley.

There were some creative solutions mentioned, which would help add housing units, IF the groups concerned would cooperate to change the rules for zoning and construction. One was to build several floors of housing above parking garages. Another was to replace single-story strip malls with multi-level buildings having the retailers at ground levels and housing at the higher levels.

There was one additional issue that seems unique to Palo Alto and Menlo Park (among the cities on the San Francisco Peninsula), namely the gentrification of (formerly) low-priced residential housing in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, and the related issues of racism because of the relatively high percentage of people of color living in those cities. Fortunately, those cities were well-represented in the meeting, and hopefully their inputs will continue to be carefully considered as solutions to the jobs/housing are implemented.

Those Who Live by Google Analytics Shall Die by Google Analytics

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We at Wild Bill Web Enterpises have been tracking the visitors (and other metrics) for our three websites–including TechnologyBloopers, WhyMenDieYoung, and Wilddancer—on a weekly basis using Google Analytics and on a monthly basis using our ISP for nearly two years, and are baffled by the helter-skelter, all-over-the-map, random-looking numbers Google Analytics is providing us. Apparently this is a common problem, with a lot of possible causes, including some possibilities that could be our fault (well, the lack of useful guidance from Google and other sources isn’t really OUR fault). And it isn’t that our visitor volume is so high that we are the victim of Google’s sampling process. But we, and probably millions of other website developers, find it highly difficult, even impossible, to make any decisions based on this data. Why don’t the Internet and the Web take advantage of the huge computing power of the hardware and software to provide reasonably accurate statistics so that we can make things easier and more productive for both us and our visitors?

The Witches’ Brew that is YouTube

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Google presciently bought YouTube from its founders in October 2006, “betting that the popular video-sharing site will provide it an increasingly lucrative marketing hub as more viewers and advertisers migrate from television to the Internet.” Silly us. We thought that YouTube was something that individuals could use to entertain ourselves, and that popular ones would bring their originators (and Google) some (or a lot) of money from ads.

Well, Google sure isn’t making it easy for individuals, thanks to the messy combinations of accounts, email addresses, channels, and browsers that makes it a nightmare to find videos once you have more than one of each of these four entities. And to make matters worse, Google threw its failing Google+ social network into the brew. Using Chrome we find three channels (or are these accounts?)—Wilddancer, Beekeeping (thus far empty as we try to sort out the whole mess), and Bill Coggshall—associated with one email address, and two channels—Car Tunes by Coggshall (which started out as “Car Tunes” that YouTube allowed me to reserve then reneged and forced me to add “by Coggshall”) and bill@technologybloopers.com (strange-looking channel, no?)– associated with a different email address (bill@technologybloopers.com). Using Firefox we find two channels (or accounts?)—Car Tunes by Coggshall and bill@technologybloopers.com—associated with email address bill@technologybloopers.com.

Usability Testing: More Honored in the Breach than the Observance

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The Internet and the Worldwide Web have arguably changed the path of history. And they have made companies like Google into mega successes. But those companies have also caused much consternation among their millions of users. Why? Apparently they don’t bother to check with many (or any!) of those users to see how logical and self-evident their websites and associated tools are for their target audiences. Examples abound, and we will be posting some of the more egregious. But the Internet giants could have been even more successful, and keep website visitors on their sites longer (where they would be exposed to more advertisements) if their user interfaces were less opaque. The goal is usability, which is not rocket science. Two of most used tools are the Chrome browser and YouTube, which we will discuss in separate posts.

Ads Based on Recent Shopping Miss Their Target

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I was shopping for MEN’s pickpocket-proof travel pants, and I must have visited travelsmith.com in my search. That was on Monday, May 2. Now, on Wednesday, May 4, EVERY site I visit—on searches totally unrelated to clothing—I am dealt a Travelsmith WOMAN’S Walkabout Knit Short-Sleeved Drape-Neck Top. I hope that Travelsmith is not paying Google (I am using Chrome) or another ad-dealing company very much for these ads. What is their logic? Do they think that I want to buy my wife this top (admittedly, at $27 it IS a lot cheaper than the pants)? Fortunately, after repeating this advertisement ad nauseum, Google graciously offered to let me fine-tune my ad preferences. Hmmm.

But there must be millions of other victims of these faulty algorithms. And some folks, such as the Wall Street Journal’s satirist Joe Queenan, are even more outspoken (e.g., in his ridicule of Amazon, Expedia, and Netflix).