The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Category: Gilbane Advisor (Page 20 of 28)

The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish weekly via email and on our blog except for August and December.

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Gilbane Advisor 9-18-19 — Good/bad Google, multi-purpose content, face recognition & DBs

September 18, 2019 /

Less than half of Google searches now result in a click

Some mixed news about Google for publishers and advertisers in the past few weeks. We’ll start with the not-so-good news about clicks, especially as it turns out, for mobile, detailed by Rand Fishkin…

We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google resulted in zero-clicks. Read More

Google organic click stats

Google moves to prioritize original reporting in search

Nieman Labs’ Laura Hazard Owen provides some context on the most welcome change Google’s Richard Gingras announced last week. Of course there are questions around what ‘original reporting’ means, for Google and all of us, and we’ll have to see how well Google navigates this fuzziness. Read More

Designing multi-purpose content

The efficiency and effectiveness of multi-purpose content strategies are well known, as are many techniques for successful implementation. What is not so easy is justifying, assembling, and educating a multi-discipline content team. Content strategist Michael Andrews provides a clear explanation and example of the benefits of multi-purpose content designed by a cross-functional team that is accessible for non-specialists. Read More

Face recognition, bad people and bad data

Benedict Evans…

We worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases – we worry what happens if they contain bad data and we worry what bad people might do with them … we worry what happens if it [facial recognition] doesn’t work and we worry what happens if it does work.

This comparison turns out to be a familiar and fertile foundation for exploring what can go wrong and what we should do about it.

The article also serves as a subtle and still necessary reminder that face recognition and other machine learning applications are vastly more limited than what ‘AI’ conjures up for many. Read More

Also…

A few more links in this issue as we catch up from our August vacation.

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content management, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

Gilbane Advisor 7-29-19 — Enterprise ML risk, web contract, web 3.0, news & scale

July 29, 2019 /

Managing ML in the enterprise

Regulated industries are often among the first to figure out how to implement new technologies in complex, high risk environments. This O’Reilly article looks at how finance (mostly) and health care model risk in the context of machine learning. There are useful and important lessons for enterprises in general. Read More

 

Model risk management

A contract for the Web

We all know the web has a boatload of challenges coming from a collection of commercial and national sources intent on subverting or replacing it. But organizations and consumers of the web have also been too complacent as these threats have grown. The World Wide Web Foundation’s mission is to “advance the open web as a public good and a basic right.” by changing government and business policies. The foundation has just published a draft “Contract for the Web” and is asking for input from governments, businesses, and citizens. That’s right, they want your opinion. Read More

Is Web3.0 the next lifestyle brand?

Web 3.0 does not, and will likely never have, a canonical definition. Web 3.0 refers to a collection of aspirations, similar to those of the Web Foundations’, and new technologies to support those aspirations and a decentralized web, such as blockchain and crypto. Since these technologies are not widely understood, marketing Web 3.0 etc. is a problem. Jeremy Epstein has some “half-baked” (his words) ideas on relating it to modern intentional lifestyle choices as away to build support. Read More

By running unwitting PR for Jeffrey Epstein, Forbes shows the risks of a news outlet thinking like a tech platform

If journalists want to criticize the anything-goes ethos of Facebook, it’s only fair to note when news organizations’ hunger for scale leads them down the same problematic path. Read More

Also…

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

Gilbane Advisor 6-26-19 — Deepnews.ai, iPadOS, open AI, agile vs waterfall

June 26, 2019 /

Introducing Deepnews Digest

Frederic Filloux and team have been working for 18 months on the Deepnews.ai project that uses a deep learning model to find the most relevant and non-duplicative articles on a particular news topic. They recently released a beta version of a newsletter that uses their model. The project, and his progress reports, are worth a look. Read More

Deepnews Digest 600

Agile versus waterfall

Apparently, there is some controversy over which approach is best. While this might make sense for a particular project, choosing one as an overall technology strategy is just silly. Scott Brinker explains (though he doesn’t say ‘silly’). Read More

The iPad operating system

Horace Dediu has one of the best takes on Apple’s WWDC announcements. I would agree that the new iPadOS is the most interesting/surprising of the announcements (Dediu says “most significant”). But I think the most interesting, if more predictable, announcement is the separation of the Apple watch App Store access from the phone. This is an important step in making the watch a stand-alone computing device with market reach well beyond Apple. Read More

AI can thrive in open societies

According to foreign-policy experts and the defense establishment, the United States is caught in an artificial intelligence arms race with China—one with serious implications for national security. The conventional version of this story suggests that the United States is at a disadvantage because of self-imposed restraints on the collection of data and the privacy of its citizens, while China, an unrestrained surveillance state, is at an advantage … This idea makes for a compelling narrative, especially for those trying to justify surveillance—whether government- or corporate-run. But it ignores some fundamental realities about how AI works and how AI research is conducted. Read More

Also…


The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content management, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

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Gilbane Advisor

The Gilbane Advisor newsletter, published by Bluebill Advisors Inc., curates content for our audience of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year, and includes Gilbane Conference news. We focus on strategic technologies and strategies.

We’ve been a trusted advisor to all stakeholders on content and information technologies and applications for decades. We only publish what we’ve written or what we’ve read and believe will be valuable to our subscribers.

Gilbane Advisor 6-4-19 — Martech metrics, B2C AR, B2B AR, machine talking

June 5, 2019 /

Martech stack metrics

Scott Brinker: “Martech stack utilization is a misguided metric… (when it’s disconnected from value)”. This is certainly true. Products/tools in your stack usually have many features, only a subset of which actually provide value for your needs. Identifying and

Martech stack value

focusing on those features can save resources and provide more accurate ROI calculations. Read More

4 questions retailers need to ask about augmented reality

It seemed like AR was poised for rapid adoption (beyond Pokémon Go) a couple of years ago when apps started appearing from Ikea and others. Indeed I thought so. There has certainly been a lot of activity and some very useful applications, but as usual the use-case specifications, cost justifications, integrations, and learning curve take a time-toll. Bain & Company has some good advice for execs creating or reviewing a plan. Read More

Google announces a new Glass augmented reality headset for B2B

Much of the advice in the Bain article we reference above is also relevant to non-consumer AR applications. Whether B2B AR deployments are ahead of B2C or not, project planning should be informed by research into both. ROI calculations will be very different, but technologies and user experience design considerations largely overlap. Google Glass was a consumer flop but their Enterprise Edition is making some progress and what they are learning is valuable. After all, employees and professionals are consumers too. Read More

Can we trust machines that sound too much like us?

David Weinberger raises a good point. He is not asking whether we can trust machines. He is asking whether we want to loose the trust signals we get from talking with humans when we can’t tell the difference between machine and humans voices. He also wonders about the efficiency and how our preferences will evolve. Human sounding machines will not always be the right choice. Read More

Also…

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content management, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

Gilbane Advisor 4-16-19 — Rules & data, ad blocking, use metadata, journey mapping

April 16, 2019 /

The Guardian’s old-article trick

“… this is a great idea, one worth replicating elsewhere. But it’s also a reminder of the power publishers have to use their article metadata to improve public understanding — and how little they use it. When one of your old stories is floating around social media in a way that causes confusion, you can do something about it.” Read More 

The Guardian metadata trick example

Is ad blocking past 2 billion worldwide?

Doc Searls: “The answer is, we don’t know. Also, we may never know, because”… Read More

Journey mapping: 9 frequently asked questions

Journey maps are useful for building common ground in an organization, but practitioners often have questions and misunderstandings about their scope and how to create them. Read More

Bitter lesson + better lesson = lesson

Many of you will remember the rules vs data debates from the early days of machine translation and image recognition. There is a similar debate currently going on in AI research. The main differences are the dramatic improvements in deep learning, facilitated by the availability of massive computing power. The current discussion seems more secular, and concerned with relative costs and efficiencies. This post, “Better lesson” is by Rodney Brooks, but also checkout Rich Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson”, which Brooks links to. Both posts are short and very accessible. Read More

Just 2 weeks until…

Gilbane’s Digital Experience Conference

Reserve your seat today – use code FG19 for best price

Also…

 

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content management, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

Gilbane Advisor 3-19-19 — Federated ML, ephemeral messaging, search for humans

March 19, 2019 /

Google releases federated machine learningTensorFlow summit 2019

Federated learning is going to be a thing. Health care is just one example… “TensorFlow Federated will provide distributed machine learning for developers to train models across many mobile devices without data ever leaving those devices. Encryption provides an additional layer of privacy, and weights from models trained on mobile devices are shared with a central model for continuous learning.” Read More

A warning on the dangers of ephemeral messaging

The Information’s Sam Lessin is bullish about Facebook’s moving to full encryption, but thinks a reliance on ephemeral messaging is a big mistake. He makes a good case and the issues he raises need broader consideration. (Firewall – but you can get access by providing an email.) Read More

Search engines: a human perspective

Wise words on search applications from Daniel Tunkelang.

The foundation of human-computer information retrieval (HCIR) is that search engines help searchers who help themselves. The best search engines reward searchers’ incremental effort with a higher return on investment. … But searchers have been trained by simple search interfaces, and their laziness is compounded by a skepticism of anything that violates their expectations. In order to earn searcher effort, search engines have to provide simple, incremental, and effective steps that guide searchers — and that teach them through experience that the return justifies the additional effort. Read More

Facebook’s News Feed era is now officially over

It’s anyone’s guess where Facebook will end up after the strategic shift announced last week. The new direction impacts all parts of the company and raises questions about their business model, growth, and of course, organization. Read More

Join us at Gilbane’s Digital Experience Conference

Digital experience strategies, technologies, and practices, for marketing and the workplace

Also…

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

Gilbane Advisor 2-27-19 — Language models, dev workflow, integration and DX

February 27, 2019 /

Better language models and their implications

OpenAI reports results using an unsupervised language model that generates coherent paragraphs of text. The examples are impressive. An additional reason to check this post and their site is the decision not to share the full models because of concerns they will be used for malicious purposes. This seems well-intended but is controversial. Read More

Google Translate & Wittgenstein

While we’re on the topic of language models. I love it when philosophers get credit, and this example is a favorite. In this quick read, Olivia Goldhill does a great job explaining how Google Translate, and other neural networking based natural language applications, are a manifestation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language. Read More

How fast can you go from structured content to working front-end?

Experienced content strategists and web developers know that collaborating as early as possible is the safest and fastest route to success. Chris Atherton shares a short engaging case study that is useful for educating nontechnical colleagues on why early iterative collaboration is important even for “simple projects”. Read More

Google, Dropbox, and the “one-window test”

Scott Brinker on platforms, integration, and DX. The same test, and advice, is useful when building your own non-SaaS, or mixed, systems.

“Does X integrate with Y?” is a deceptively oversimplified yes/no question. In the cloud, the answer is almost always “yes.” It’s kind of like calling a restaurant and asking if they combine ingredients together. Sure they do. But how tasty is the meal? How attentive is the service? How reasonable is the price? Read More


April 29 – May 1, 2019, Washington DC
Digital experience strategies, technologies, and practices, for marketing and the workplace.

Learn more & use code FG19 for best available price

Also…

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December.

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