crap
This Is Why Vine Is Stupid
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5979691/this-is-why-vine-is-stupid
I don’t get Vine. I don’t give a looping turd about it. Every video I’ve seen so far is six seconds of jerky concentrated idiocy. I may be too old for this crap but I’m not alone—thanks, [Willa via Laughing Squid via Petapixel]
Most Product Reviews On Amazon Are Crap
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/you-probably-shouldnt-take-amazons-reviews-at-face-value-2012-6
Those glowing reviews you see on Amazon.com aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, according to a study performed last year.
Tech entrepreneur Filip Kesler and Cornell professor Trevor Pinch, found that more than 80 percent of the reviews on the site were positive all because 85 percent of prolific reviewers receive free stuff to review. (Hey, everyone loves a freebie.)
“Amazon’s top reviewers do receive some sort of direct material reward, however small, for their endeavors,” wrote the authors.
This was particularly true in the book realm. Reviewers in the top 1,000 rank told the authors they received a large number of Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) of books from small agencies and self-published authors. Those in the top 500 rank said they received even more, and so it went up the totem pole.
One member of Amazon Vine, the site’s members-only review program, described how his rank attracted more freebies in the study:
“I started getting offers at about rank 800 (Classic Rank). When I got to 500, the offers increased, but I did not get many until I got to about 250. Under 150, it increased some more. At that point is was an average of one offer per week (not including Vine). When my New Rank appeared, placing me in the 50s, I started getting several offers per week, mostly for books.”
For consumers looking for a deal and great products, it might be better to go the old-fashioned route, i.e., asking family and friends for suggestions.
SEE ALSO: Surreal photos of America’s housing crisis >
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A Best Buy Manager Thinks That The 3,000 Employees Running Its Customer Service Twitter Account Can’t Be Trusted
Best Buy hasn’t been doing so hot lately, and here’s another example that shows why.
The retailer has a Twitter account @Twelpforce that uses 3,000+ employees to help run it. So far it has worked without a major disaster, despite the exposure it has with so many employees working on it.
But at least one Best Buy manager disagrees, and thinks it’s basically a load of crap, reports Chris Morran at the Consumerist.
Morran received a note from a reader, Jonathan, explaining his experience. Jonathan was trying to exchange a box set of CDs, which was missing one CD when he got it, but didn’t have the receipt. The Best Buy site pointed him toward @Twelpforce, who told him to “Talk to a manager at your local Best Buy, they should be able to assist with exchange.”
He did. When he showed the Best Buy manager the tweet from customer service, he dismissed it as an unreliable source (even though the Best Buy website tells you that the only places to ask questions are a phone number and the Twitter account). The manager also said that it’s “just social media” and “that could be anybody.”
Which begs the question: what’s the point of having a customer service Twitter account if Best Buy managers don’t even acknowledge it as a legitimate source of information? Somebody got company policy wrong here, but whether it’s the manager or the person who answered that tweet doesn’t matter. The manager shouldn’t have dismissed the Twitter help line as useless.
It shows a fundamental disconnect between the brick-and-mortar and the online world. The corporate side has accepted that social media is a viable tool, yet that feeling hasn’t been passed down to its employees — even at the manager level. Oops.
NOW SEE: 14 Surprising Ways Employees Cost Their Companies Billions In The Workplace >
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See Also:
- 11 Craft Beer Companies That Went From Little To Big Time
- Proof That Giving Your Employees More Freedom Makes Them More Productive
- Starbucks Is Hiking Prices On A Bunch Of Its Drinks To Deal With Rising Costs
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Inside Google’s Secret Search Algorithm
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/zzkIcilnJp4/inside-googles-secret-search-algorithm
Wired’s Steven Levy takes us inside the “algorithm that rules the web“—Google’s search algorithm, of course—and if you use Google, it’s kind of a must-read. PageRank? That’s so 1997.
It’s known that Google constantly updates the algorithm, with 550 improvements this year—to deliver smarter results and weed out the crap—but there are a few major updates in its history that have significantly altered Google’s search, distilled in a helpful chart in the Wired piece. For instance, in 2001, they completely rewrote the algorithm; in 2003, they added local connectivity analysis; in 2005, results got personal; and most recently, they’ve added in real-time search for Twitter and blog posts.
The sum of everything Google’s worked on—the quest to understand what you mean, not what you say—can be boiled down to this:
This is the hard-won realization from inside the Google search engine, culled from the data generated by billions of searches: a rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around. “The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”
Oh, and by the way, you’re a guinea pig every time you search for something, if you hadn’t guessed as much already. Google engineer Patrick Riley tells Levy, “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously.” It lets them constantly experiment on a smaller scale—even if they’re only conducting a particular experiment on .001 percent of queries, that’s a lot of data.
Be sure to check out the whole piece, it’s ridiculously fascinating, and borders on self-knowledge, given how much we all use Google (sorry, Bing). [Wired, Sweet graphic by Wired’s Mauricio Alejo]
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