@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Today this is happening with Yahoo! Just over 100 days after Carol Bartz’s appointment as CEO of Yahoo! from Autodesk, the redesign of the homepage is launched as an opt-in test for millions of US users with the rollout to major European countries over the coming months.

Let’s track how this affects Yahoo’s share of the search market and content syndication models……..There’s a feature which allows users to update their FB status from the Yahoo! homepage.

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a closer look at Google’s Q2 2009 earnings summary and happened across this very interesting page:

Significance? Well, let’s wait and see what happens in Q3 2009 with Google’s TAC (the word auction model took a little time to gain traction, but the strategy seems to be picking up). For this Q, the most interesting growth was in China where GOOG Q2 made a revenue increase of 25 percent over the previous quarter. It’s currently responsible for 30 percent of the market whilst the incumbent, baidu, leads with 64 percent.

Now, coincidentally, Morgan Stanley — yes the bank that offered us the wisdoms of Matthew Robson (aged 15 and 7 months who says teenagers aren’t into Twitter) — has just published a note on advertising revenue prospects ahead. It’s revised what it calls a previously “pessimistic” outlook by the sector.

Connect the dots from Google + MS documents and we can extrapolate……………..the exact month / quarter when the media sector will make a recovery from this recession. Now, THAT’S useful information to present to investors.

XLNT.

[Yes, I've calculated it for my own models.]

I’m bearing in mind that Sequoia Capital released this presentation 9 months ago as advice to tech start-ups. There are some real gems to follow here and the smarter techcos would have followed the advice. The less than intelligent ones would have wasted resources on stupid marketing and alienating their user base. The unfortunate ones would have featured in TechCrunch’s layoff tracker:

* http://www.techcrunch.com/layoffs/

Ok, I just heard that my cousins from Germany are flying in later this week. What am I supposed to do with teenage girls?

Hmmn……..Well, all teenage girls love TopShop where Kate Moss has her own design line……..and Portobello Road for kooky treasures…….and eating foods that are banned by parents or unavailable at home (like chocolate, cream scones and fish+chips — separately and not together, of course)………

Hey and their surprise visit is cool. It means I’ll be able to speak Spanish, Italian, French and German all within the next month along with English and Chinese! There was I thinking I may have to watch another movie by Tom Twyker or Der Untergang (Downfall in English, btw) again to remind me of what German sounds like. Incidentally, it’s an Oscar-nominated film, a must-watch and is gripping with exceptional performances:

German and I have a strange relationship; it’s my least favorite of the European languages — lacks poetic lyricism — and yet it’s the language of some of the world’s best philosophers.

My German languages teacher was pretty upset I chose chemistry instead of German as an elective. Mostly because in the last German exams I ever took I got 99%, the first time anyone she’d taught had passed the 85% mark. Oh well, at least I opted to stay in her French class and she got to write in my report, “Twain has a natural flair for languages!” Ha ha. If she’d had her way instead of my mother, I’d have studied all the major languages, marched off to the LSE / Sorbonne, studied European Studies and become a UN interpreter or something.

LOL. Of course, if I hadn’t studied chemistry SmithKlineBeecham wouldn’t have let me play with their Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine when I was 17, compound my own paracetamol, glass blow my own test tubes and round-bottom flasks, and then two years later I wouldn’t have been in the development team (at what is now IFF) that created the world’s first alcopops, right? I wouldn’t have spent one summer synthesizing one cola as close to Coke as I could, right? And promptly lost all interest in soft drinks because if you spend 10 hours a day in a lab concocting and testing it, the last thing you want to do at the w/e is drink it!

Most importantly, I wouldn’t know an iota about chemical mechanisms to propose that THIS is a much smarter and more natural way to envisage and realize the Global Brain, when crossing it with linking open data:

See? There’s cause+effect and a natural connective order to each of our lives. I gained insights on this and it created neural paths to enable me to make successive leaps of know-how and cross pollinate it into another sector.

Hmmn, maybe it wouldn’t take much to translate that entire Google knol into Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and to ensure that colloquial Anglo-Saxon phrasing is suitably cross-checked to reduce “lost in translation” issues. Maybe then researchers from all over the world will have one source on the Global Brain which is written in all the major languages. At the moment, no single source exists.

[Note to self: must learn more Russian beyond "perestroika" --- LOL.]

See? All these to-do’s, to move Semantic Web concepts more spot-on along with Project ART commitments to disrupt online business models. Ergo, I’m a wee bit busy to join Facebook’s translation project group, particularly since (even in English) they can’t communicate it in a clear way that makes us understand what their request is!

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/07/15/facebook-im-rotflol/

Also, I know from translating M+A deal documents (French => English, Italian => English, Spanish-Italian => English) that translators cost GBP15-20 an hour. Obviously, I decided to translate those documents myself instead.

Hmmmn……Now, please can anyone explain, “WHY SHOULD ANYONE TRANSLATE FACEBOOK WHICH HAS A VALUATION OF US$10+ BILLION, ACCORDING TO THE LATEST INVESTMENT OFFER BY DIGITAL SKY TECHNOLOGIES, AND CASH IN THE BANK TO PAY FOR TRANSLATION SERVICES AS PART OF GLOBAL ROLLOUT STRATEGY? FOR FREE?”

There too the question about the paid content model, users’ contributions and who owns what copyright arises.

Suppose we help Facebook translate itself. Suppose that some of us even create an algorithm that flags similes and non-translate-ables. Or even a methodology for someone in China to grasp the concept that that there are quantifier conjunctions in English which don’t exist in Chinese. Then suppose one day Facebook decides to charge us to upload our content in the same way that hosting providers charge us for storage space and our ISPs for connection. That means that instead of earning per hour for our translation abilities, we’re giving away our time and efforts for free. It also means that FB owns the algorithm and the methodology. It means the users will have added to the valuation of FB, yet they own no shares in the company, they’re not management or employed staff on a salary — not even temp / agency / consultancy staff — and they haven’t been paid for their contributions.

See? The Internet model which is appearing (and which Chris Anderson argues for) is NOT democratizing at all if the traditional barters of trade (aka MONEY) is not appropriately distributed and has differing equivalence. It is actually……..Communist if the online user bee is expected to build the hive, pollinate it and their reward is only that their content is allowed to exist in the hive — rather than for their content to LIVE, propagate collective sense-making and be nourished by honey (money).

This is why paying users for their content contributions and any special skills they bring to bear on a site should be a consideration that ALL sites which genuinely believe in online democracy need to commit to and implement.

THIS IS WHY MALCOLM GLADWELL WILL PROBABLY PROVE TO BE RIGHT AND CHRIS ANDERSON TO BE WRONG.

Returning specifically to my thoughts on German, what’s the other great reason to be able to speak and read the language apart from improving our technical competence and understanding “Vorsprung durch Technik” (advancement through technology)?

Answer:

* Wittgenstein

* Nietzsche

* Hegel

* Schopenhauer

* Kant

* von Clauswitz

What do these great minds teach us? I think, therefore I am. The World as Will and Idea. The power and utility of logic. We fight wars to win and there is no such concept as moderation in a war (to me, this is a sad but true insight). And, We are Human, All Too Human.

Sprechen Sie Deutsche? Ja, natürlich.

Why do we learn other languages if not to become informed with the wisdoms of and appreciation in as many cultures as possible?

Das ist Die Wahrheit. No, that doesn’t mean “the height of war”. It means………the truth.