This Is Why that Amazing NASA Earth Image Looked So Familiar
After publishing the The Most Accurate, Highest Resolution Earth View to Date, it got extremely popular: The day after, countless newspapers and blogs worldwide reposted the story. NASA wrote to us, surprised. Why? Because everyone already knew about it:
Yes, the Blue Marble is the iPhone’s default screen, which have been seen by millions of iPhone owners and by everyone who has read about the iPhone since 2007. In fact, the image has been public since 2002:
From: *************** <***********@nasa.gov>
Mr. Diaz
Hello. I am the photo editor for the Public Affairs Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
We were happy to see you featured our Blue Marble image on your website last week.
http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the-most-accurate-highest-resolution-earth-view-to-date#comments
We also featured it on our Flickr page but it has really taken off on the web. We had over 500,000 hits in the last two days alone.
Given that this is an image from 2002 I’m just curious what prompted you to post it on your site? Or did you pick it up from someplace other than our site? I see at the bottom it says “NASA via Twitter”
Really, I’m just curious because it’s gotten so much play over that few days.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
Take care,
Rebecca
The reason? Because it’s a beautiful image, that’s all. One that makes you marvel at the beauty of our planet, and how tiny and insignificant we are, but also how unique and rare. [Gizmodo—Thanks to John Hermann for telling me about the obvious]
Don’t forget to check NASA Goddard’s Flickr page. They keep posting really cool stuff.
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]
Cybercrooks Target Social Networks
Source: http://feeds.marketingcharts.com/~r/marketingcharts/~3/16mASWhC9kU/
Cybercriminals are turning their attention to users of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, according to a new report [pdf] from IT security and data protection firm Sophos.
Spam, Malware Attacks on the Rise Sophos’ Security Threat Report: 2010 indicates criminals have increasingly focused attacks on social networking users in the past 12 months, with a [...]<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marketingcharts/~4/16mASWhC9kU" height="1" width="1"/>
iFail
Source: http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/28/a-16-year-olds-view-of-apples-ipad-ifail/
Tonight when I picked up my son in Petaluma we started talking about the Apple iPad and he told me he thought it was a “fail.” This reaction was interesting coming from Patrick (he was first in line in Palo Alto for the iPhone and has been an Apple fan for as long as I remember.)
Anyway, I asked him if I could record our conversation, he said yes, and this is the result. It’s in two parts, because when we uploaded the first part we got a lot of reaction on Twitter so followed it up with a second part. Here’s the two audio recordings, sorry for the poor quality, we recorded that while driving.
His major points are:
1. That it isn’t compelling enough for a high school student who already has a Macintosh notebook and an iPhone.
2. That it is missing features that a high school student would like, like handwriting recognition to take notes, a camera to take pictures of the board in class (and girls), and the ability to print out documents for class.
3. That he hasn’t seen his textbooks on it yet, so the usecase of replacing heavy textbooks hasn’t shown up yet.
4. The gaming features, he says, aren’t compelling enough for him to give up either the Xbox or the iPhone. The iPhone wins, he says, because it fits in his pocket. The Xbox wins because of Xbox live so he can play against his friends (not to mention engaging HD quality and wide variety of titles).
5. He doesn’t like the file limitations. His friends send him videos that he can’t play in iTunes and the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
6. It isn’t game changing like the iPhone was.
Anyway, revealing conversation with a teenager who got extremely excited about the iPhone (and saved up to buy his own) the day he saw that.
What do you think?
If You Could Print Twitter on Paper..
Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/printing-twitter/12538/
“If you could print every Twitter message on paper and then laid these pages end-to-end, they would stretch nearly 60k miles or 2.5 times around our earth.”
Related: Wikipedia as a Printed Book!
If You Could Print Twitter on Paper..
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.
Twitter Stats
source: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/
Summary
Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth, attracting celebrity users such as Oprah, and a growing mountain of media and blog coverage. Sysomos Inc., one of the world’s leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter’s growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that:
- 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009
- 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
- 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity (see the report on analysis of top-5% users)
- New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
- More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
- There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
- Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.
Top Posts – Week Ending August 7, 2009.
#whentwitterwasdown – Twitter crippled by massive #ddos (distributed denial of service) attack
As many of you may have noticed, Twitter was down for many hours starting Thursday morning August 6 and remained intermittent even when it was brought back up. The theory is that this was caused by a massive DDOS attack on their servers including the services that other web applications depended on — that means that outside services (twitter applications) were also taken down.
For an explanation of denial-of-service attack or distributed-denial-of-service, this is the wikipedia entry. It basically is an attacker using a large number of “zombie” computers to “hit” the victim’s site at the same time, thus overloading it, and causing it to not be able to respond to legitimate traffic.
Full Coverage of the Social Media DDoS (Source: Mashable)
–Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown?
–Denial of Service Attacks Being Investigated by Google, Twitter, Facebook
–Facebook Problems Also the Result of DDoS Attack
–Twitter Outage Explained: What’s a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)?
–Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)
The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2
originally investigated and reported on Friday July 31, 2009 by Augustine Fou, with Tugce Esener @tesener
Several friends and colleagues had the same reaction when they found out about this video — that it was at such a high view count already and we were late to the party of finding out. Then we did some more digging — digital forensics :-) And this is a case where a viral hit was indeed successfully manufactured. There’s something to be learned from all this – how to successfully manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits.
Related: How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2
Chris Brown is successfully tapping into the viral halo of a funny video that coincidentally used his song.
ReadWriteWeb article on how rights owners (Sony, Chris Brown) can make viral profits on other people using their work instead of suing them - http://bit.ly/KA3HI
The video was real. But promotional activities (possibly/likely paid) created the initial viral effect (led to the tipping point of the viral effect) which then got carried a further by people thinking they were simply late to the party, including myself (e.g. 440k bit.ly clicks and 3k detectable retweets out of the 13M views). The numbers don’t jive.
The viral halo has added 1 million more views to the video from August 1 – August 2. (13.1 M to 14.5 M)
Ten ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN proof points to follow, each with screen shot to illustrate.
1a. anyone notice that the “Forever” soundtrack is remarkably consistent throughout the video as if it were dubbed or added in after the original footage was shot. The sound is too consistent in volume and loudness to have come from a built-in, on-camera microphone. At the very end of the video, once it cuts back to the couple at the altar the sound quality goes back to the echo-y, tinny sound of an on-camera mic.
1b. The “TheKHeinz” user on YouTube was registered on July 19, 2009, the day the video was posted. We usually look for clues like this to detect “plants” by PR agencies. This is an issue of trust — a user “CmdrTaco” on Slashdot has been around the forums for years, made hundreds of posts, and was rated by the community very highly. PR agencies trying to seed stories have to create new user accounts during the PR campaign (recent registration date) and have made no other posts or uploads before (no history).
2. The social intensity detected in all of the top social venues like Technorai, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, etc. indicate there was not enough organic sharing to support a view count of 13 million views in 11 days (updated: 14.6 million today August 2, 2009).
a) Bit.ly shows only 447k clicks on the shortened URL
“At Fortune’s Brainstorm:Tech conference Ashton Kutcher effectively took credit for boosting the views from – in his words – 12,500 views before he tweeted the link – to some 1.2 million views 12 hours later…”
Well, unfortunately he used a bit.ly link which provides public analytics on how many people clicked. Most tweets result in immediate traffic, which then tails off immediately after the tweet falls off the first page. In his case, look at the following bit.ly stats URL and click “past month” to see the peak clicks on July 23. All he can actually claim is that his tweet drove a peak of about 100,000 clicks on that day not 1.2 million 
http://bit.ly/info/Z7vMw
too bad Ashton. next time you make a BMOC claim, be sure to use a non trackable method, so analytics won’t “out” you so easily.
after only 3.5 days of retweets the twitter intensity died off to next-to-nothing; if this were a truly viral video, carried forth by real people (and not by paid PR support and paid media) the retweet intensity would remain high. As of August 21, there are over 21M views on the video and the 505k retweets does not show actual organic support for that number.
b) Twitturly shows only 3 thousand retweets on the YouTube URL itself
c) Delicious shows only 447 bookmarks of the video itself
d) Reddit only shows 673 thumbs up for the video itself
e) Technorati shows only 277 blog mentions of the video itself — this could be undercounting if blogs used URL shorteners. But if you look at the blog intensity results (below) sorted by blogs with most authority the blogs have very little authority (i.e. influence or size of audience).
– these are real indications of interest by real people. The social intensity of the passalong for this video does not substantiate the huge number of views in 11 days.
What we are seeing now is the additional viral halo, as the momentum is sustained by large media outlets reporting on the story — even Google Blog blogged about it (boasting about the success of YouTube advertising in driving revenues). Of course TechCrunch is right that viral videos can be monetized: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/youtube-viral-wedding-videos-are-great-for-advertising/ )
3. Twitter shows nothing in the top “trending topics” related to this video – indicating few people are actually tweeting about it — if this video is SO viral (13M views in 11 days) then it has GOT to show up on a scan of social intensity. (see screen capture below)
July 31 (Friday) August 2 (Sunday)
4. The original video was posted July 19, 2009. The people from the video appeared on NBC’s Today Show and danced around Rockerfeller Center on July 25th (6 calendar days after posting). Today Show staff may be great at spotting news, but to get all the wedding party from the wedding to re-enact the dance on the Today Show in 6 calendar days — too good to be true? Hmm…
5. Out of all the wedding videos on YouTube, how did Chris Brown detect this particular one that used his song. @glenngabe noted that there are song detection mechanisms - ContentID - which detect the pattern of the copyrighted song and report that to the rights owners. We know there are hundreds, if not thousaands, or really funny wedding home videos — America’s Funniest Videos has been running for years and years on TV showing funny wedding blooper videos that people submitted to them.
6. ALL TEN of the top viral videos on AdAge’s Viral Video Chart took around 3 – 6 months to achieve full viral effect — not 6 days. See all 10 videos’ stats, as reported by YouTube at the following link. This video has not shown up at all on the list of Adage viral videos.
AdAge Top Viral Videos all take 3 – 6 months to reach full viral effect
7. From @RedW0rm – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success – http://bit.ly/9ZUtu
8. also check the velocity of this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkwedding or this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkweddingdance notice the tweets are not seconds apart but hours apart. Something that achieved 13M views in the 11 days since posting would show far higher velocity or twitter intensity.
9. For a top-trending topic on twitter, there is usually correspondingly high search volume that is detectable. At first glance, terms related to this viral video like “jkwedding” or “jk wedding dance” all seem to spike. But if you put it against even “Corazon Aquino” (one of the top trending topics NOW on Twitter) those JK wedding search volumes are dwarfed. (see chart below).
10. Google only reports 366 links to the video and most of them are not even important websites (see Alexa blue bar)
11. The video itself has no honors and no stats (yet); YouTube stats are conveniently turned off. Other videos have their stats graphs publicly available.
12. see the fine print in the YouTube description — For more information or to make a donation towards violence prevention please visit our website: http://www.jkweddingdance.com/ – why would a normal wedding video ask people to make a donation towards violence prevention? (see screen capture below), the WHOIS record shows the domain jkweddingdance.com was created 29-Jul-09 — today is 31-Jul-09
Updated: This was circumstantial evidence. A source confirmed that Jill is studying patterns of violence propagation for her PhD. Their choice of charity was their own choice. And the site was set up to help that cause.
Conclusion? The video itself is real, made by those nice people in the wedding. They may not even realize why or how their wedding video went viral (and the tens of thousands of other wedding videos on YouTube did not). On the Today Show, “The couple told Lauer they were surprised at the video’s popularity” (also see NY Daily News article – http://bit.ly/OA3iG )
Related articles:
ReadWriteWeb – Build Profit Not DMCA Suits
WSJ – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success
PSFK – Co-opting Viral Hits to Sell More Music
TechCrunch – YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Are Great For Advertising
Huffington Post – Viral Wedding on YouTube Drives Buyers to Chris Brown Music
Social “media” is created – the total quantity, reach, frequency, and intensity are not pre-known
Social “media” is created – the total quantity, reach, frequency, and intensity are not pre-known. The “media” that is generated can be positive or negative or both. Extremity or “extreme-ness” is usually a necessary ingredient. Extremely positive, extremely entertaining, extremely negative, etc.
Oprah Winfrey KFC Grilled Chicken disaster, coupon debacle. Her reputation may have been permanently tarnished because she was found out to have been paid by KFC to promote the coupon tied to the launch of KFC grilled chicken.
Dominos was on the hot seat when 2 employees shot a video of them sticking mozzarella cheese up their nose and then putting it into the pizza.
Motrin offended the sensibilities of moms when they implied that a baby was a cool “accessory.” The blogosphere and twitter lit up with people taking exception to that.
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- The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED - Post 1 of 2
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