A Dozen “Edutainment” Application Bundles

Definition
SEARCH WAS THE GREAT NEW FRONTIER. Sodden with copycats, it has become anhydrous. As Science Fiction writer Harlan Ellison has noted: “We are entertaining ourselves out of existence.”

The Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead would have been a thin book indeed, if it had as its base the language of the Hip Hop culture. It would have to run something like, If I break out your front teethes, I will write my thesis, as an if-then nest. However, the problem is not with Hip Hop—it is just faddish and entertainment. The question is more profound: How far can an illiterate market expand for the new breed of media now emerging?

Below are described a dozen possible education application bundles for a new media model. An “Edutainment” bundle is interactive instructional content, which:

1. Produces measurable and meaningful learning outcomes
2. Engages students at the appropriate level
3. Adheres to standards acceptable to schools, governments, and philanthropies

Search, like Rock and Roll, will never die. But it will not thrive until it diversifies and partners with Media, Not-for-Profit, and aims to build new generations of users via educational application bundles.

THE DIRTY DOZEN
Application Bundles of the Future
(1) Online Writer & Bot Reader for emailing social messages/hearing essay read back by synched avatar.
(2) Automatic Essay Repair
(3) Automatic Essay Scoring with club privileges
(4) Fill-in-Blanks for breaking news stories/ earn points and prizes.
(5) Arrange headlines in ascending order for points.
(6) Reading Machine. Level diagnosis and spelling/pronunciation hierarchy.
(7) Best Sentence evaluator.
(8) Flash Games.
(9) Drag and Drop Parts of Speech, etc.
(10) Write-By-Phone. Assorted Activities. Alliance with long-distance carrier.
(11) Make your own newspaper and distribute by moving blocks of standard online editions.
(12) Interactive TV DVD’s connected live.

SEARCH ENGINES HAVE CHANGED THE WORLD. However, that changed world has also mutated search engines. Looking for the next “big idea,” there are a lot of chefs in the engine, and poaching is not being done to just eggs. The time has come for a new vision, comprehensive, as outlined above, at least in a preliminary sense.

Links

(1) http://faculty.mdc.edu/sdonahue/
(2) http://www.writenowabc.net/ifocos/ifocos.aspx
(3) http://www.writenowabc.net/
(4) http://googlescriber.com/

Steven Donahue is a professor at Miami Dade College in Florida. He is a member of The National Press Club, The Society of Professional Journalists, and The National Writer’s Union. He has published over 100 articles and numerous self-published books, as well as submitted E-Testimony to the Congressional Web-Based Education Commissioner’ report. He has developed sophisticated software programs, some of which provide language training for the U.S. Military in Afghanistan and American K-16 students. He has contributed to the Operation Enduring Freedom Language Task Force (OEFLTF) at the Defense Language Institute and presented before the Director of Central Intelligence’s Foreign Language Committee (DCIFLC). His work has been covered in The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. His hobbies include chess and the violin. For more information, visit http://faculty.mdc.edu/sdonahue/ http://faculty.mdc.edu/sdonahue/dozen.doc

Thanks to the members of the iFOCOS Search Working Group who gathered for a kickoff meeting last week (April 24, 2007) in Santa Clara, California (and thanks to Neil Budde and crew at Yahoo! for hosting the meeting). Thanks, as well, to Dabble founder Mary Hodder, who couldn’t make it to the meeting but will be participating and contributing to its next steps.

What are the next steps? We’ll see. The working group is compiling notes for a situation brief and recommendations. The discussion seemed to be leading toward some research topics and an appetite to build something – a proof-of-concept to demonstrate content management best practices essential for “webby” search-friendly publishing – including native integration of web standards, links, search protocols, social bookmarking and ping services.

That’s the search engine optimization and social marketing optimization goodness built in to sites like Wikipedia and into millions of blogs – and yet is somehow missing or more difficult to implement in many “enterprise” web sites that would benefit most from them. Can anyone say: WordPress? Typepad?

Stay tuned.

Neil Budde is Editor in chief of Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports, and a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group.

I first became intrigued by search technology when I joined Dow Jones in 1987. The visionary leader of Dow Jones Information Services, Bill Dunn, had just convinced the company to purchase a pair of Connection Machine computers from Thinking Machines Corp. The promise: that the natural language searching and relevance feedback capabilities of the massively parallel computers could open up the vast databases of Dow Jones News/Retrieval to a huge audience of business information users and move the business outside the library and information specialist marketplace.

Of course, the timing was all wrong: the technology wasn’t capable of searching sizable collections of information fast enough and the dial-up command-line interfaces of the time weren’t suitable for this form of searching. Fast forward to today and you find much larger amounts of information being indexed and searched in milliseconds. Yet we still face many of the same problems: users who enter 1-2 word queries and then dig only so deep into the results as well as interfaces that still don’t make search that simple. What is the answer? I’m looking forward to searching for it.

Oren Michels is CEO of Mashery.

My closest cousin had cancer surgery yesterday. Based on what we (her close family and friends) have learned, this is the sort of cancer you really, really don’t want. Of course, we don’t know that for sure. After all, when we first got the preliminary diagnosis a couple weeks ago, everyone in the family began searching for answers. Searching for clues as to her course of treatment. And her prognosis. We all wanted to find out about that.

And we all found the same sites, the same obscure papers about this obscure cancer, papers that had somehow managed to rise to the top of the SEO heap. Why these ones? Were they “right?” Is the median survival rate 14 months? Says who? When? The prognosis for someone diagnosed ten years ago is likely diffenent than that of someone diagnosed more recently. And on and on.

Search as we know it today fails us at times like this. Despite what Google says, they have not organized the world’s information and made it universally accessible and useful. Far from it. A dozen of us found the same info on Krukenberg tumors, and yet we know little more now than we knew before we’d heard of them. Although this cancer is obscure, much has been written about it, and there are profound debates going on in medical circles about how it happens, where it comes from, and how to treat it. But little of that emerges on the first page of search results, or the second, or the tenth. But because Valerie is family, we persevere to the fifteenth, the twenty-fifth. Highly unusual search engine user behavior, I know. But totally reasonable in light of this situation. Yet we still see the same content dressed in slightly different skin.

How could search be better? Make it temporal – don’t just tell me what people are linking to; tell me when they linked to it, and how new and fresh the content is – blog search does this on some level, but non-blog content has as much need to be “fresh” as blog content. Allow us to search for a topic over time – searching for “Enron” today brings up a lot of information on the collapse and bankruptcy, but little on how it was perceived and written about at its peak. Hindsight is interesting, but we learn even more by looking at contemporary accounts of its success and gleaning understanding that will allow us to pattern match to current events.

Differentiate between original content and meta sites. Speaking of meta, focus on metadata. I’m much more interested in a site or blog dealing directly with Krukenberg than with a popular cancer site that happens to mention it; accurate metadata can help here. So can some sort of measure of authority…though that is a hard one to nail down. But we should still try. Get better at deduping, and weeding out similar or even identical content from multiple providers. Make it so the first page of ten results provides a broad look at the subject from a variety of categories of sources, and then drill down on “more like this”

Better results. More relevance. More timeliness. More focus on the desired subject.

Then what? Get people to use it. That is all about one thing – web service APIs. It is highly unlikely that anyone will dethrone the current search market leaders on virality alone, and few startups have the resources to compete using traditional marketing and promotional techniques. New search, and the new content that it finds, will gain traction if existing and newly emerging high-traffic sites incorporate that search in a seamless user experience. That takes APIs that are open, with easy and flexible integration into existing sites and applications.

I look forward to our sessions. I have no doubt that we will all learn a lot. Thanks for including me!

Jeff Given is the IT Operations Manager for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This post is a pre-cursor to the iFOCOS Search Working Group meeting on April 24th, 2007.

About OSTI – OSTI’s mission is to collect and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Several key technologies support our efforts to disseminate DOE STI, including search and retrieval for our internal collection and federated search for collections of interest to the DOE, but not physically housed at OSTI. OSTI’s main public STI collection consists of approximately 2.3 million bibliographic citations and 150,000 electronically available full text reports. OSTI’s key search and retrieval products include Information Bridge (electronic full text), Energy Citations Database (bibliographic citations), ePrint Network (draft journal articles and scholarly papers), and Science.gov (federated search of authoritative science information provided by the US government).

Relevance, for OSTI and most likely many other similar agencies, provides a constant challenge. In order to get government-funded science information into the hands of researchers and interested public, we have placed major significance on including the major enterprise search engines as part of our dissemination strategy. The inefficient crawls of the past have been replaced by new methodologies, supported largely by the recently adopted Site Map Protocol.

It is significant to note that approximately half of our web traffic to publicly available STI is derived from referrals from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. We expect to see this increase significantly in the next 12 months, and is a good indicator that the enterprise search engines such as Google are the standard onramp to the information superhighway (See: Search, while dominant, is not very good).

Even though we have implemented several technologies to assist the user in finding material of high relevance quickly, we still feel there is a significant amount of work to be done in this area.

OSTI’s mission to collect and disseminate DOE STI underlies our fundamental vision to advance science. Accomplishing this involves many facets, however ultimately it boils down to gathering the right resources and putting the most relevant results in front of the right people, and to do so in a constantly changing landscape. The real limiting factor for knowledge diffusion is people’s time. The focus of all efforts to improve web search should be to get the most relevant content to the user in the shortest possible time with the least amount of user effort.

So, what constitutes a better search?

The discussion at We Media Miami on next-generation search concepts, chaired by Jim Kennedy of The Associated Press, was both vibrant and inconclusive. So we’re going further. We’ve launched the iFOCOS Search Working Group. The group will hold its kickoff meeting April 24, 2007, in Santa Clara, California – using meeting space generously provided by Yahoo!

Members include:
Neil Budde, GM, Yahoo! News; Suranga Chandratillake, founder/CTO, Blinkx; Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner, SoftechVC; Steven Donahue, Professor, Miami Dade College; Jeffrey S. Given, science.gov/Computer Operations Manager, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy; Jim Kennedy, VP Strategy, Associated Press; Michael Mannes, VP Strategy, Gannett; Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery; Andrew Nachison, President, iFOCOS; Julie Rutherford, Marketing Director, WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive; Rich Skrenta, CEO, Topix.

This is the first of what we hope will become many action-oriented teams initiated and driven by members. Working Groups are an antidote to the tedium of best practices meetings – our working groups will focus on better practices and results. If you and your company haven’t become members of iFOCOS yet – please do. Our impact and ability to convene projects like the search working group depends on the support and participation of members. Please review the membership details and benefits, join now, and then help us push the agenda and outcomes further.

To join now, click here.

About Search
Could internet search work better? What would a next-generation, “better” search experience look like, especially for discovering news and current events information? What is “better” – and what would it take to get there?

This working group of experts representing key constituents from search and content companies will share ideas and assess opportunities, if any, to collaborate on initiatives, standards or recommendations that could enable independent innovation and improved means to access more relevant and more informative search results across digital platforms.

The goal of this working group is to seek a next-generation vision for making sense of the world’s information. The result could be no more than a set of recommendations, or creative ideas applied in unexpected ways; or perhaps action among members to develop a new data standard or some other collaborative project.

We want to keep our working groups as small as possible – 10 – 20 people – but have enough brainpower, key constituents and influence represented to consider actions if any emerge.

Our goal is to convene and facilitate the smallest group possible to be effective and well-rounded, with a potential to collaborate and have influence on next steps (which might include other participants). We’ll post notes, position statements and conclusions on the iFOCOS blog to seek additional input, expand the conversation and discover other collaborators.

Roles
Working groups are driven by the members. iFOCOS will facilitate a working group’s creation, initial information sharing and kickoff meeting to push the discussion further, and ask participants to self-organize on subsequent actions and recommendations. Follow-up actions might require some financial commitment to cover support or development costs, if any emerge. That will be discussed at the kickoff meeting or in follow-up conversations.

This is meant to be collaborative and driven by the working group members – not merely advisory to or driven by iFOCOS. You can help shape and move the agenda forward, debate and push back on assumptions or recommend alternative approaches. As a learning experience the dialog might inspire new R&D and innovation within individual member companies irrespective of shared actions or outcomes.

Members: If you’d like to join the search working group – or start a new working group on a different subject – contact Andrew Nachison at iFOCOS.

Jim Kennedy is VP of Strategy for The Associated Press. He is also a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group, which is holding its first meeting April 24, 2007, and of the iFOCOS Advisory Board.

Over the past six years, the online function of search has become the dominant content entry point for digital information consumers. More than 7 billion searches were launched in March, up 14 percent from a year ago, and the titans of online search – Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL – touch nearly all of the active Internet users in the United States in the course of an average month.

Desktop search, by anyone’s measure, is the most popular on-ramp to the information superhighway. Social online networking may have gained some ground as an Internet entry point in the past couple of years – thanks to the MySpace-Facebook-YouTube phenomenon — but search has even greater days ahead with the mobile environment and the living room still up for grabs.

Think about it this way: While digital citizens may always need their “friends,” they’ll need a “remote” even more in order to navigate the many screens in their digital lives. Search is that remote.

If that’s the future we expect, then those of us in the information business – content providers and technologists alike – have a lot of work to do. Search, while dominant, is not very good. It seemed to plateau once it reached “good enough” for general use, and many stakeholders turned their attention to monetizing the traffic flow through advertising technology. That was sorely needed, of course, for revenue generation, but it didn’t do much to improve the relevance or timeliness of underlying search results.

The research firm, Outsell Inc., reports that the search “failure rate” for desktop information seekers keeps rising, and at last report was 30 percent, based on the firm’s annual survey. That suggests that search only satisfies the user seven out of 10 times, which really isn’t good enough for a dominant online entry point.

Before the world turned its attention to search and contextual advertising, search was improving rapidly. Indeed, Alta Vista and, later, Google rose to prominence on the strength of their information search capabilities in those early days. That led others to go to work on improving search, and enterprise engines, such as Autonomy and FAST, and many vertical search engines emerged and advanced search technology considerably.

Nonetheless, general online search still flunks 30 percent of the time. In the case of news, the failure rate could be even higher. Try putting anything close to a real-time keyword into the plain-vanilla search of the giant engines and see what you get. If it’s a running story, maybe you’ll get a development from a day or two ago, from a site that’s optimized for search but not necessarily an authority on the subject or close geographically to the action. At times, the results can be laughable.

That’s probably OK for the desktop, and we put up with it, because the next search is just a keyword away. But try that on a mobile connection, or imagine fumbling with a TV-remote search, only to get nonsense results. No one will be able to monetize that experience, and users likely won’t put up with it.

In fact, search might begin to fade as the great engine of digital revenue growth and give way to recommendation engines, or we might even fall back to a destination-based experience of some sort to minimize the pain of lousy search.

Perhaps these outcomes are overstated, but there’s no hype in the nagging failure rate of general search. What’s more, this failure rate is working to the distinct disadvantage of the very content providers who could provide the information consumers are looking for. Online newspapers, for instance, are struggling to surface in general search results, largely because their content is not optimized for real-time discovery.

How can this picture be changed in a competitive online world where content providers and distributors are focused on their own proprietary agendas? It would seem an impossible task. But what if the various “stakeholders” in search – content creators, technology companies, search engines and other online distributors – came together to identify key initiatives, which when combined might raise the tide for all ships?

That is the hope that inspires the working group discussion of search being sponsored by iFocos.org. As the organization has done for the citizens’ media space, with its We Media research and conferences, the objective of the working group discussion is to raise questions and awareness that might enhance the evolution of the search ecosystem.

That’s buzz-speak for a simple goal: Let’s open the floor for ideas that could improve general search. Are there initiatives various constituents could undertake – individually or collectively — that would significantly improve the search user experience? What are the costs and benefits of those initiatives? What is the potential return on investment?

For The Associated Press, I can speak directly to a major metadata initiative that we hope will establish some standards for the categorization and tagging of content across the daily news industry. We expect this effort to result in an AP “stylebook” for indexing news that would be roughly comparable to the writing and editing stylebook followed by news organizations around the world.

Standardization – in this case, for tagging – is one example of an initiative undertaken by one stakeholder that may be very useful to others. Are there more? Let’s talk about it on April 24.