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21 Nov 2011

Siri, Please Teach Google Voice to Listen
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Sometimes using one’s smartphone is like playing a game of, well, “telephone.” Half the time no one can hear you and when they can, the message gets lost in translation – even when it’s not actually being translated. I’m convinced that mine is actually a “smart-ass phone” given how it willfully drops calls, truncates texts and creates general mayhem in my personal and professional lives. “Can you hear me?” becomes “Gland doo deer meat?” I sound like a Martian ordering venison.*

Perhaps I shouldn’t complain. The fact that one can speak into a rectangular hunk of plastic that beams one’s voice to the heavens and back to whomever you’re calling is pretty damn marvelous. Except when it’s not. And what truly doesn’t work is the voicemail transcription on freebie messaging service Google Voice. Again, I shouldn’t complain – the Mountain View search giant takes my voice messages and spits out text to my phone so I can take action without taking the call. For free.

The problem is that their translation mechanism works more like a game of MadLibs with an emphasis on the “mad” part, as in “mad as a hatter” or as Google Voice interprets it, “Man has gone splatter.” This man has nearly gone splatter off a few rooftops after simply hearing my own name gargled by the Google bots. As one might imagine, “Daedalus” is a voice-recognition time bomb.

On a recent occasion, Google Voice assumed my name was “metal brush.” I don’t even mind “Metal Brush,” which sounds like an ’80s hair band gone literal. What I mind is getting gibberish texted to me instead of my messages. So, I’ve turned off the automatic dispatch and instead check my voicemail like someone from the last millennium. Fortunately, iPhones let you scrub through your messages without having to listen to every second. This is godsend since, no matter, how much my outgoing message emphasizes “leave a brief message,” I get a soliloquy. It’s like having Hamlet call with a question and no intermission in sight.

Google’s been trying really hard to work out their voice recognition for some time. I remember when they were still operating Google 411, which purported to be a telephone directory when in fact it was a huge voice data acquisition tool. Since it knew where you were calling from, it could assess and catalog the nuances of your regional accent. And it was probably recording us so that somewhere there’s a record of me stammering my request for an Indian take-out number in my twee-transcontinental accent (this was before there was an app for that – the curry, not the accent).

Meanwhile, Siri, Apple’s answer to the question, “Can voice recognition just work, for crissakes?” was recently born into a few million iPhone 4Ses. Sadly, this came on the eve of the passing of Steve Jobs (whose name is probably the English translation of whatever language “Siri” is).

Consequently, she lost a little of her limelight, though she’s been more than compensated with fawning reviews and loving fan tributes. As can be expected, some wags have made videos of themselves tricking Siri into saying naughty notions chiefly by hacking their own IDs so the phone thinks their names are four-letter words, making it unclear who the joke is really on. I have yet to upgrade so I’m unsure as to how Siri will destroy the pronunciation of my name or transcribe mine or others’ words. I do hope, however, the next time Hamlet calls she’ll cut him off with a brisk, “That’s the question, isn’t?” and hang up. *Some of these examples have been made family-friendly.
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1 Oct 2011

How to Use the Cloud as a Writer
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“Skywriting by Word of Mouth” was a posthumously published book of prose penned by John Lennon that I was gifted a quarter-century ago. It was writing born of an anarchic love of language that sufficed as depth when I was 14 and sometimes still haunts me. Well, at least its title haunts me.

When general awareness of so-called “cloud” computing burst into media consciousness in recent years, I couldn’t help but think of Lennon’s book title and it’s reference to skywriting. Though the term is usually reserved for daredevils with an airplane, it’s become my personal metaphor for writing directly into the “cloud.” Whether that was with Google Docs, or ever increasingly, Evernote, the idea of putting words into some ephemeral-sounding digital mist appeals to me.

Moreover, I can access it anywhere and on any device. Now, moments otherwise lost waiting for the train or between bouts with baristas for refills could be productive. I could “skywrite” my columns, my blogs, bits of books, scenes in screenplays when I would otherwise be twiddling my thumbs, or more likely, using my thumbs to scroll through the Facebook or in engaging some other digital distraction.

Now, my thumbs are producers, world class hacks, hunting and pecking these very words you’re reading. What’s interesting to me is that writing to the cloud makes the creative act both incidental and opportunistic — with the right device in hand (an iPhone in this case), writing is like spackle filling the fissures in one’s schedule. Many a colleague might bristle that I’ve not ennobled the act of writing with it’s own appointment in my Google Calendar. Mind you, I do occasionally make a date with the muse but as a man with a toddler and a full-time career writing hokum on the clock, I have to let any “extracurricular” writing spring like weeds from the cracks in the concrete.

Writing into the cloud allows me to do this into a single document, always waiting for me in the sky when inspiration strikes. Of course, the “cloud” is just a server farm in an air-conditioned warehouse but by the same token, one’s muse is more neurochemistry than a visitation from the divine but we can romance it all the same.

Of course, I haven’t yet bothered to extend the cloud metaphor to its logical conclusions, namely the various forms of digital precipitation that might occur if Google flipped the wrong switch. Would words rain from the heavens? Not likely, but the waterworks would be real for me and thousands of other bawling scribes who entrusted their work to a couple of Stanford dropouts in Mountain View.

This is where a healthy denial mechanism is useful. Having lost an opus or two to various snafus (I once watched the lone copy of a terrible play I’d written wash out to sea), one might think I’d reconsider my precious “skywriting” notion and commit everything to good old pen and ink. Try emailing a page from a notebook sometime. I try to keep about a hundred miles between me an my editors for safety’s sake, so emailing is the only option for deadline writers like myself. And if by some miracle particle physics I was able to email my handwritten scrawl it would be unintelligible anyway. My carefully-keyed missives are borderline as is, so I don’t want to push it. For now, I’ll keep putting my words in the sky and hope they don’t get lost amongst the Lucy’s and the diamonds.
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9 Jun 2011

iCloudius: Apple's Man in the Sky
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When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the weather whimsy, simply refers to information stored in remote servers and accessible via your device of choice anywhere there is a decent Internet connection. Though the concept isn’t new (telephone companies once used the metaphor to describe their early forays into “virtual private networks”) its implementation in tech quarters gained real momentum in 2006 when Amazon introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that obviated the need for expensive server systems and paved the way for a bevy of start-ups. It was Google, however, that brought the cloud to civilians with its suite of document creation tools (aimed squarely at Microsoft’s bread and butter). Now, with iCloud, Apple has also entered the consumer cloud market, touting synchonization of one’s digital data – docs, email, calendars, iTunes library, videos and plans for world domination, between one’s MacBook, iPad, iPhone and beyond. And it’s free. Heretofore, one’s computer was like the sun in a private digital solar system around which all other devices orbited and depended for data (through increasingly arcane syncronization rituals). Conceptually, iCloud collapses this solar system into a single celestial body accessible, anywhere, anytime by whatever piece of gear happens to be in your hand. It’s as if you’re opening a wormhole into the fabric of your virtual universe andt hough other companies offer aspects this “unified field theory of your stuff online,” including Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” and Google’s Gmail inbox (sort of), none offers total integration of everything in a single service that’s hardware-agnostic. This is the crux of Jobs’ plan, “demoting” the “PC” and even his own company’s iconic Mac line to mere, as he explained, “devices.” Of course, to those who’ve eluded induction into the cult of Apple, the company’s products have always been mere devices. For true believers, however, they’re tantamount to religious talismans that signify belief in a higher being – namely Jobs. His conceptual downgrading of his stock and trade might prove as revelatory a moment in the history of personal computing as Macintosh did for user-experience in the early 80s. It takes the way we deal with data, the ones and zeroes that comprise much of our quotidian experience not to mention whole flanks of our self-concept and moves them from the concrete to the abstract, from “there” to “everywhere,” in a manner analogous to going from the corporeal to the spiritual (which, by some accounts, Jobs might be soon doing). The device, like the body, is but a vessel. “We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Jobs beamed. It’s not hard to imagine him hovering there too – lightning bolt in hand.
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4 Jun 2011

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
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When those of a certain generation first hear of the "Filter Bubble," they might reflect on that brief two weeks in the mid-'90s when the band Filter was kind of popular. These days, the Filter Bubble, according to former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, is the means by which the Information Superhighway functions more like a private driveway upon which only targeted and personalized information travels at the expense of the broader range of knowledge. This shift to personalization raises as many questions about one's online privacy as it does about censorship, whether it's intentional or the result of an algorithm trying to give you what it thinks you might like - or buy. As Pariser explains in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, a personalized world is one that only serves to confirm our existing beliefs as determined by the digital breadcrumbs we've left along the way. When we only receive information aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, "It's difficult to maintain perspective," suggests Pariser. Or, as he whimsically put it during a recent chat at Seattle's Town Hall Center for Civic Life, "When you step to the side for a new perspective, it's as if the world moves to meet your gaze." In an Amazon Q & A, in which Pariser credited the bookseller for its relative transparency as regards its product suggestions with the apropos example, "We're showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984," the Internet activist explained, "Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop." "The technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in," Pariser said to The Atlantic. "It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience." Of course, the Filter Bubble is more the unintended consequence of a business strategy than an insidious plot on the part of a gaggle of geeks in Silicon Valley to control your Internet experience and by extension your thinking. The fact is, in some cases, we're censoring it ourselves. As Pariser recently explained on KQED's Forum, "Because Facebook mainly uses how many people 'like' something as a means of figuring out what they should show other people, what that means is that you see well-liked news on Facebook." Google, however, has 57 different ingredients in its secret sauce. Even when logged out of your account, Google gleans signals from your online behavior and applies them to a profile that it uses to tailor results more to your liking. Consequently, like a fingerprint, no two search results are the same for different users. Try it - it's spooky. It should be noted that the sources for this piece came entirely from links presented through the various mechanisms Pariser describes, so it's likely only part of the story - the part the robots intended to be seen by someone in the media to be shared with those it knows are reading that media. When I asked him personally what content producers could do to override the algorithm, Pariser essentially said we're SOL: "Content creators are at its mercy." Time to crank the Filter.
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15 Apr 2011

QR is PR: How QR Codes are changing the media landscape
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They look like the bastard offspring of a crossword puzzle and a crop circle. QR codes, also known as "quick response" or "quick read" codes, are often seen lingering on the corner of magazine ads, clothing tags or band fliers as a bridge for our digital and terrestrial worlds through the aid of one's smartphone. Though nearly 20 years old, the technology, which was originally devised to track auto-parts for Japanese auto manufacturers, has only recently penetrated American consciousness since being appropriated as an advertising gimmick. However, it seems the codes will eventually transcend marketing as artists and others embrace the technology—in fact, the Bohemian itself themed its recent Best Of issue around QR codes that linked to editorial videos. The process is simple: download any of a dozen free QR code reader apps to your camera-equipped smartphone, and tap into a world of info that would otherwise be inscrutable. QR codes take the "Easter egg" concept of sequestering content in obscure places within a game environment or DVD and apply it to reality. Google has been issuing such codes with its "Google Places" initiative as a means of muscling into Yelp territory. Stroll by hip ROE Nightclub in San Francisco and stuck to the corner of a window is a QR code that, when read, links to a half-off lunch coupon to present to your server. Conference badges now boast QR codes for the facile swapping of contact information. Indie-music service CD Baby's Kevin Breuner recently posted a blog and video about using QR codes to promote one's band. The little iconic square is becoming ubiquitous. "Pick up any magazine, go walk around the city, go up to a hotel—it's all over the place, and, in general, in Asia and Europe, it's much more accepted. We are very far behind with the QR code here in the U.S.," observes Peter Philip Wingsoe, CEO of Entertainment Fusion Group, which has produced QR marketing campaigns for Guess and Neuro Beverages, among others. Though his company has used QR codes for five years, he's only seen an up-tick in requests for QR-related campaigns this year. Wingsoe suggests the relatively slow acceptance of QR codes in America is because the software to read them is not preloaded on our smartphones, as it is in Asia and Europe. "We're seeing a huge pick up, and I think that in the near future we're going to see a lot more, and you can start doing more with the QR codes," says Wingsoe. "We're actually making the codes look like logos." Of course, it's only a matter of time before logos themselves become encoded with secret information—as if they aren't already.
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29 Dec 2010

Groupon Public Voice Guide Fail
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Deal-of-the-day website Groupon might have passed on Google’s multi-billion dollar acquisition offer but it hasn’t forgone using the online search engine and advertising empire’s document hosting services for a memorandum entitled the “Public Groupon Voice Guide,” which details, with embarrassing clarity, “principles” apparently “intended to help new and applying writers learn Groupon’s signature writing style.” No doubt, all commerce sites need web-copy but Groupon needs its copy to adhere to a house-style so purple it suggests a necrotizing soft tissue infection. Consider this write-up for a discounted stay at Sonoma’s tony bed and breakfast MacArthur Place: “Statistically, the home is the place you're most likely to fall asleep under a running lawn mower, get sexually harassed by a pet, or suffer a heart attack while trying to fit into a heated oven. Escape that horrible deathtrap with today’s Groupon for a stay for two at MacArthur Place in Sonoma.” Groupon, a portmanteau that grafts “group” and “coupon,” operates as its name suggests – it partners with local retailers to offer the subscribers discounted fees when a predetermined number of people sign-up for the deal. It’s a form of assurance contract whereby all participants benefit, which, theoretically, mitigates the risk for the retailer who can leverage the coupon as a quantity discount. And, of course, Groupon takes a cut of resulting sales. What differentiates Groupon from the horde of copycats in this sector is its deft branding and user-friendly interface, which has attracted over 40 million users and as well as a salivating Google, who 30-year-old Groupon CEO Andrew Mason (a recent Forbes Magazine poster-child) famously rebuffed this month. So how is it that Mason felt confident in turning down $6 billion dollars after a mere two years in business? Perhaps the answer lays in the glib lingo his company prefers over the more sober corporate-speak that defines the parlance of Silicon Valley. According to the document, Groupon has a sense of humor, or, at least, something it believes is humor. Under the title “Humor Devices that work well in Groupon Voice” are such axioms as “absurd images,” “sweeping, dramatic nonsense,” and “the absurd narrator.” These are buttressed by examples like “Humankind has been playing with fire for years; now we can harness the bronzing essence of the fiery sun in a gentle mist, proving once and for all our dominance over the weak, inanimate solar system.” Why? Because one person’s absurdity is another’s marketing copy and Groupon has diligently codified their secret sauce of lest applying writers misinterpret the meaning of “absurd.” Others include “hypothetical worlds/outcomes” such as this chestnut, “Without goals, no one would unicycle the Appalachian Trail or train a flock of carrier pidgins to deliver meat pies to unsuspecting haberdashers.” Though Groupon’s “signature writing style” might challenge one’s definition of both “writing” and “style” its fake proverbs, mixed metaphors and intentionally errant take on history (“When strongmen of the past wanted to show their superhuman brawn, they coddled kettlebells or other, potentially stronger strongmen”) are arguably “signature” if not downright annoying to other online scribes. On her blog The Conical Glass, Bay Area indie record label owner Sue Trowbridge has rued the “Grouponese” as nausea-inducing and “yucky.” In a post entitled “The Worst Writing Job in the World,” Trowbridge recounts researching the genesis of Groupon’s tortured prose only to discover a help-wanted ad on its site that invites applicants to submit a sample write-up for a shot at a $40,000 salary and possible relocation to its Chicago headquarters. Ever game, Trowbridge even attempted her own Groupon-styled translation of a favorite restaurant newsletter but gave up after some twisted verbiage to sign-off “Ugh, I feel dirty now. I think I’d rather make my living writing those fake letters to Penthouse.” For some, including Trowbridge, penning garrulous crap for a web discounter might epitomize the death of modern prose. For others, it might be a dream job with full-benefits. Though Andrew Mason’s business might be changing the face of local commerce its colorful product plugs likely won’t affect the world of letters anymore than jingles have affected music. That said, if Mason added stock options to his benefit package and courted another multibillion dollar acquisition deal, be assured more than a few professional writers might consider tossing his salad with the croutons of capital whilst forging phonemes on the velveteen anvil of loathsome lingo.
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1 Aug 2010

Wolfram Alpha vs. Google vs. Your Brain (on drugs)
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[caption id="attachment_2977" align="alignleft" width="208" caption="This is your brain. This is your brain on Wolfram Alpha."]

[/caption] Last month, the big brains of the "computational knowledge" world gathered in central London to explore how "advances in computational technology are unlocking knowledge assets and shaping the future." The event, dryly named the London Computational Knowledge Summit, was underwritten by Wolfram Alpha, which bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a tagline so catchy, they trademarked it lest it be stolen. The brainchild of scientist, inventor, author and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram, the Alpha engine was heralded as a Google-killer upon its debut last year. That was before everyone realized that it was more of a calculator than a search engine. (Those seeking confirmation of this will note the website's favicon features an equal sign.) A year later, Google is expanding at a rate exceeding that of the universe itself, while Wolfram Alpha remains something of an online curiosity to anyone whose CV includes the phrase "liberal arts." Wolfram's own résumé, predictably, reads like that of a boy genius just one romantic spurn away from becoming a supervillain. "Beginning in his teenage years," an online bio exhorts, "Wolfram made a number of discoveries in physics and cosmology. In the early 1980s, his now-classic work on cellular automata helped launch the field of 'complexity theory.'" But wait, there's more. After Wolfram grew up, he took the 300-year-old notion that laws based on mathematical equations could be used as a means of describing the natural world and turned it into software for modeling everything under the sun, over the sun and even in the sun. The killer app, known as Mathematica, is used for modeling phenomena in fields as diverse as engineering, biotechnology and finance. So when Wolfram Alpha was launched in the spring of last year, lazy journalists and high school term-paper scribes rejoiced. Finally, the man who gave the world a plug-'n'-play way to simulate chemical processes or test financial risk models had made a tool for the rest of us! Wolfram Alpha inhaled the web's collective information into its own massive database and processes answers with an ever-evolving complement of proprietary algorithms borne of Mathematica software. What does this mean? The truth is out there, and now it's in your iPhone, thanks to the Wolfram Alpha app. Phrases like "knowledge extraction" might roll off the tongue of a character in Christopher Nolan's Inception, but they're not part of the general parlance. That's, in part, what Wolfram seeks to fix, if not in name, then in deed. He's empowering his engine's users through "natural language processing" or, specifically, by letting them speak in intuitive human terms rather than some sort of computer-speak. Remember the dark ages of the web when Boolean searches were all the rage? Such qualifiers aren't necessary here; however, a fair amount of specificity is, especially when the data entered is partial or idiosyncratic. While most human brains in the Bay Area "know" that Sonoma, Napa and Marin are counties, Wolfram Alpha only understands them as searchable terms and presents results based on a library of internal algorithms. Upon entering the query "Sonoma, Napa and Marin" for a comparative analysis of the counties, the engine assumed Marin was in Spain. Refining the query by adding "counties in California" yielded a comprehensive breakdown of the counties, and their statistical relationships to one another were presented side-by-side. The amount and range of information is beguiling, in fact overwhelming, which makes the aforementioned "knowledge extraction" a bit of a bear. After a moment's reflection on the data set, interesting observations begin to effervesce. There are nearly three times as many deaths in Sonoma County as in Napa County, though the population of Sonoma County is only double that of Napa County. Why? And where's the data on Marin County? Perhaps we can infer that no one actually dies in Marin County, which accounts for its comparatively high real estate prices. You see, inasmuch as the engine can slice a near infinite amount of information like a Ginsu blade, it can't tell you what it means. The ability to infer, to extrapolate and perceive meaningful relationships between the data remains a strictly human occupation—at least for now. Or, as one might say, you can lead a geek to Wolfram but you can't make him think.
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26 Jul 2010

SEO as a Networking Tool
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In no way do I purport to understand the alchemy of search engine optimization – that arcane conflux of meta tags, algorithmic jockeying and ritual sacrifice to Google that produces page rankings and spankings in equal measure. Well, who knows if it's equal – that sort of proprietary information lives in some server barn in Mountain View, CA. This much I do know: I invested a modicum of effort in upping SEO on DHowell.com (the original incarnation of FMRL.com) with eye to ranking favorably with such terms as “branded entertainment,” “transmedia” and my own keyword cocktail “branded transmedia” and have enjoyed positive results both online and off. By flicking a few switches on the SEO-friendly Thesis Theme for Wordpress and going over the site with the fine grit web tools Google offers, I was pleased to receive an email from San Francisco expat entrepreneur Dave Watson, who works in similar spheres as I in the Czech Republic. Apparently, Watson Googled something akin to “transmedia blogs” and found DHowell Media Group (now FMRL), which led to an invitation to coffee at Napa’s Oxbow Market while he visited the states. There, we swapped notes on our shared niche, talked shop and hatched fiendish schemes. SEO as a networking tool – what's next? CRM for dating?
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