#participatorymedia

[dbloom]

TubeFilter co-founder Drew Baldwin talks with live-streaming pioneer Marc Scarpa at #summitlive conference in downtown LA. Kevin Winston did some introductory time-filling. #LiveStreaming #participatorymedia

[angrywhispersbanana-blog]

The Platform Politics of Google

Authors: Orion, Kim, Paige    

History of Google

Google traces its beginnings back to a research project of two Stanford University students in 1995; Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It began as a way to find which websites linked to which places on the web, using Page and Brin’s home website as a base. It was originally called BackRub. “Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine”. Google as a company was formally incorporated in 1998, having been a search engine with a stanford.edu domain previously. By the end of 1998, many were praising Google as being more effective than the portal sites which existed at the time, namely Yahoo! AOL.com and MSN.com. Google prides itself as a company about doing the most good for its users even if having to forgo gains for themselves. Currently it is one of most popular search engines and has expanded itself into other forms of usage; Google now has an email service, as well as its famed Google Drive which serves as a document creator and storage place.

Features of Google

Google is not a website which is based on a profile that its users create; unlike Facebook or Twitter, Google’s purpose is not in solely connecting people with other individuals. Although having a Gmail and Google Drive account does include the creation of profile, the profile includes very limited information at the start. Usually the name of the user, maybe their location, and a username which serves as their email address. Although, through its various algorithms, google begins to form a profile for its users. Noting what they are searching and how often they spend time on different websites allows its database to suggest places a user might like to visit. Also now that Google is the main operating system on many smartphones, taking your phone everywhere allows google to tell you where it thinks you might like to eat for dinner, or when the bus will come to take you to work.

Google is not designed to be a tool for human to human interaction, although it can lead a person to such interaction. Usually a user’s network of connections is limited to those people that the user has the email address of, although it does allow for the search of users through name. Google is more of a tool for connecting people with other websites, as it is primarily a search engine.

Private communication is not overly complicated when it comes to google because of Gmail. Google also has created an app which links to Gmail and is called Google Hangouts. It is a chat service that connects people through email address books or contacts in a person’s phone, depending upon whether the app is used online or through a phone. Making a person’s own content is also extremely achievable since Google Drive allows for the creation of many different types of documents. However, there is not much of a space or opportunity to publish those creative works through Google. A user can easily share a document with people they are connected with through email, however sharing something that a user created with the general public is not as attainable.

Google has attempted a few times throughout its short history to create a stream based social network that would allow users to connect in real time, such as websites like Facebook allow for. Firstly with Google Buzz and secondly with Google+; neither was a great success because people felt limited in what they could post to Buzz and because by the time Google+ came into being, there were already such an array of social networks that most people felt they would rather stick with the websites they were already on.

The Algorithms of Google

Described in Jourdan Rombough’s article from Optimization Theory, PageRank, founded by Larry Page (Google’s co-founder) designed the site’s algorithm in a way that ranked website’s on a numerical scale of 0-10. The design of PageRank was to be able  to measure the website's importance and accuracy. Although Page has now moved on from PageRank to Google, PageRank is what Google uses as the basis of sifting through what is most to least important to share with its users. According to a spokesperson from Google, it is assumed that the more important a website is, the more they will receive links from other websites. Essentially, PageRank is there to make sure that the searches that you see are the most valuable and key to what you are trying to search for.

Some types of algorithms displayed:

Answers, books, safe search, site & page quality, user content, news, many more.

Persistence: Although it’s possible that sites lose their rank of importance from PageRank, they are still in the database somewhere and can still be uncovered, although depending on their ranks to begin with, it might be difficult to find.

Replicability: You may be able to replicate information and post it on your own website, but what Google users see most frequently is what PageRank has considered ‘important’ and ranked it higher up.

Scalability: Google narrows searches based off of your location, how you’re accessing the internet (mobile device, computer), and what you have searched for previously or are interested in. Searchability: Google has 21 components to take into account everything they feel will give their users the best information fit to them as possible. Constantly updating and changing what they use, they work hard to keep their users happy with the site.

Dynamics and Social Practices of Google

Google has a goal in which it advocates that the company seeks to change people’s lives by creating and outreaching technology that reinvents how individuals or a society addresses common challenges (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). With this as a main goal, Google is able to impact the dynamic and social practices of the individuals who use the search engine. Instead of going to a library and using a book, or more recently using a librarian to navigate the vast web, individuals are now able to seek answers on their own. In a sense Google’s search engine gives an individual power; however, the individual's participation with the platform shapes the outcome of the given answers. Algorithms collect data on previous sites visited, and then uses that data to prematch a new site to the individual's search. The “ I’m feeling lucky” is a prime example of how an individual's history affects their search. An individual is also able to control the type of search they do by using special features beyond “ I’m feeling lucky” such as Google Scholar and Google+. So while Google has enabled individuals worldwide to have more power in how they search, in has constrained them by the algorithms used to provide feedback to their searches. Individuals can navigate the pages by their person profile, history, bookmarked pages, scholar, and the simple search engine.

How Does Google Fit Into A Polymedia Environment

Communication in this sense is more based on invisible audiences. An author is able to produce information that may or may not be used at that time. Only when an unknown audience uses the search engine to find the site will it be seen. When broadcasting oneself or in search of information, Google is an ideal site. It stores information and enables invisible interactions and connections. These interactions are very mostly anonymous. These connections are open and usually invisible, unless under email or in chat sites intimate or romantic communication does not occur. Communication under Google is more focused on an exchange of information rather than emotion or intimacy.

http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2013/10/google-search-algorithm-updates-history-log.html

Figure 1: Since its establishment as a search engine in 1997, Google has worked to improve its search capabilities and access to other information. While this infographic does not include everything that Google has added or subtracted from their search engine, it does include most of the major ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

https://www.google.com/about/careers/teams/social-impact/

https://www.google.com/about/company/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

[josemurilo]

Em entrevista, Fabio Malini (UFES) analisa as chamadas “coberturas coletivas” nas redes sociais e o conteúdo produzido pela mídia tradicional: “O que está em jogo é o poder midiático”. Para ele, “trata-se de duas ecologias em disputa”.

[participatoryvideo]

Great stuff from HootSuite's Cameron Uganec on social media and storytelling. Big shift in video from one-to-many to collaborative/participatory storytelling. Links to both his presentation at Marketo Summit 2013 and a series of blog posts on the topic.