MetaMuse

Fly Fishing Rattlesnake Lake

Since June 1st when it opened, I've been favoring the Cedar River in Renton, particularly given the recent addition to my arsenal -- a new 3wt TFO fly rod! (My 5wt is just too much rod for when I hit the small creeks/rivers.)

But Friday night I lugged my trusty Trout Unlimited one-man 9' pontoon boat out to Rattlesnake Lake near North Bend, WA. I was on the water for over 3 hours and it was just lovely. Here's why:

• Very few people on the water.
• No houses on the lake nor road noise nearby, so very quiet.
• Lots of nature going on -- frogs, fish, bug hatches, herons, eagles, and all kinds of other birds.
• Started off breezy but then calmed down completely.
• The fish weren't feeding on the surface nearly as much as every other time I'd been there, but I still caught quite a few in the 11-13" range.

There's nothing like sitting at the far end of the lake among the stumps, casting and retrieving. There was no surface activity when I got there, so I decided to cast a sinking line and leech pattern, retreiving quickly. I landed a few nice ones that way, but also lost 3 flies on snags. Then when I started seeing some scant rises, I switched to a floating line and a dry fly. The beetle pattern didn't do squat, but the midge pattern earned a few bites.

I started back a bit late, around 9:10pm, and didn't hit the boat ramp until 9:35pm. The ranger was nice though, even though I made him wait 20 minutes past closing of the gate. While I packed my stuff, he educated me on how Rattlesnake Lake was formed, the feeder creeks, etc.

Virtuous Profiling -- Leveraging Implicit Behavior of Others Online

There's a lot of crap on the Web, but every now and then you read something that is just eery -- almost like you wrote it yourself.  Well, since I have been doing a lot of thinking about virtuous profiling, implicit distributed social networks, and behavioral-driven social search, I had that experience when I read Alex Iskold's post The Implicit Web. Props to Mike Dierken for pointing it out to me. Some excerpts:

The basic concept of the Implicit Web is simple. As we touch information, we vote. When we come across an article we like, we spend time reading. When we like a movie, we recommend it to our friends and family. And if a piece of music resonates with us, we listen to it over and over again. We do this automatically, subconsciously or implicitly. But the consequences of our behavior are important. The things that we are paying attention to have great value to us, because we like them.

The Implicit Web is powered by clicks. Our gestures and actions reveal our intent and reactions.

The Implicit Web is already here and is being actively used by many companies. Yet, consumers are not aware of it - at lest not explicitly. And that is not a good thing. The Implicit Web and its close cousin Attention Economy are big and important concepts; and they are still in their infancies.

He goes on to give some examples, such as the Last.FM music service, Amazon's book recommendations, etc. I agree that we will see more of the Implicit Web, and in my opinion the following is essential to the success of Implicit Web initiatives:

Profiling -- it's all about *appropriate* and accurate profiling of behavior and intent, which can be scary to people.

User Value -- you have to directly and transparently couple a user value proposition to the act of profiling, such that the deeper and richer your profile the more value you receive as a user. This value prop can't be fear-based, it has to be interesting, motivating and rewarding.

Privacy Controls -- users have to be in control. If your profiling quality and the coupled user value propositions are outstanding, then why not let users edit their own profile, or even allow others to use it (with permission)?

No work -- this is why social search (in its current form) won't work. It requires explicit user action (bookmark or a manual vote of some sort). I believe the Implicit Web has to leverage the activities of the user already, their publishing and browsing. No incremental work is required to achieve incremental benefit.

He mentions the AttentionTrust organization in his post too. The success of AttentionTrust seems to be dependent on a user revolution against all the Web sites out there, because there's nothing in it for the Web sites. That ain't gonna happen, as evidenced by some of the comments in Alex' post. Nonetheless, I believe there IS an opportunity for a business to be a central repository and broker of people's behaviors/intentions/context (the others online) provided the above requirements are met.

Tracking Widget Metrics and Usage

ComScore recently unveiled a new service called Widget Metrix in order to track the usage of widgets across the Web -- data files that can be embedded into a site’s HTML code and are typically displayed in a small viewing pane on the site. Some key takeaways:

• Nearly 178M unique Web users viewed a widget in April 2007.
• Widget penetration was highest in North America where 40.3 percent of Internet users visited a Web site with an embedded widget, followed by Western Europe (24.3 percent) and Latin America (17.5 percent).
• Their definition of widgets is actually overly narrow, focusing only on embedded flash objects, so the numbers are conservative.

So far, widget producers have earned money mostly by selling ads on their own sites, but have found it difficult to generate revenue from the content created using their services and displayed on other sites. The data from comScore could begin to change that by showing advertisers how widely distributed the content is.

Of course, that shift involves a couple important assumptions:

• Widget producers figure out where to carve out some ad space within a widget that doesn't have much space to begin with.
• There is some basis for targeting and therefore relevant advertising. Bouncing smiley face ads won't work.
• Widget producers work out the economics with their users (the actual publishers). Is this going to be a rev share deal?

The Beginning of the End?

Some organization called Privacy International accused Google of having the worst privacy ranking of any internet company today, in their Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies.

The view that Google "opens up" information through a range of attractive and advanced tools does not exempt the company from demonstrating responsible leadership in privacy. Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook. Neither of these elements has been demonstrated.

Clearly, with Google's vast reach into our online behaviors through their ads, search service, toobar, maps, etc., they have more information about us than any other company on the Web, and the demonstrated prowess to harness it. SearchEngineLand has the most comprehensive write-up, while Scoble appears to be keeping track of the PR score.  (I'm sure there are far more important things being said in the long tail, but it's late Sunday and I'm feeling lazy.)

I'm starting to wonder whether this is the point where Google starts to be looked at very differently -- where the average Web user starts to fear them. They could of course expose their profiling information and allow user control, which would be SO powerful for them to do -- when you can control 100% of your profile information, is there ANY privacy concern? But can/will they ever do that? My guess is that it's too late for them to do that -- people will get too freaked out with what they know about us already.