I came across an infographic entitled, ‘Fear Google’, yesterday. I first spotted it on imjustcreative, who in turn credited the source as onlineschools.org.

Using bold red colours and imagery of a laughing devil, the infographic warns of the power of analytics and user data. Step by step, it takes you on a journey through the process of how Google comes to acquire user data.

The infographic highlights international government requests Google received to disclose user information between July 1st and December 31st 2009, (the UK government requested details of 1,000 users); as well the specific data Google collects from, for example, a Normal Google Search, (query, IP address, country code, domain name, browser) verses a Google Personalised Search (content analysis of visited websites).

What’s the story here? Google knows everything about you, Google has unlimited power and Google is everywhere. IMHO big deal.

Let’s play devil’s advocate. According to ‘Just How MASSIVE is Google, anyway?’ another infograpic on computerschool.org, you would need 1.2 million trees to facilitate the amount of paper needed to print out the 24 petabytes of information Google processes daily. At least human privacy loss is the environment’s gain.

Then there’s the Christchurch Google Person Finder, the free tool helping people caught up in the New Zealand earthquake. In this instance human privacy loss becomes the facilitator to reuniting loved ones.

For better and for worse, Google has become bigger than we can comprehend. Here’s a final thought to make the mind boggle:

If it took you one minute to search each page on Google it’d take 38,026 years to look at them all. It takes Google 0.5 seconds, tops.

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Image via Wikipedia

Sentiment around a brand online is held up as one of the key cornerstones of any social media measurement framework. Just driving up the volume of chatter around your brand is no good – if that chatter is all about what a terrible organisation you are.

But, one of the biggest challenges facing the industry has been how to capture the full range of that positive and negative feeling. The online world is a large and sprawling place. There are 100s of comments posted every day about a company’s products, services and public image.
There are a huge number of tools out there that attempt sentiment analysis in one form or another – Radian 6 being one of the more commonly used ones. Its creators are pretty transparent about its limitations on the sentiment front (allowing you to manually override the ‘score’ given by the tool’s algorithm).

Industry experts estimate that machine analysis is right about 60% of the time (love and hate are easy, but anything in between is not). Most of us end up conducting manual analysis, sampling multiple posts, instead. However, in New Scientist’s latest edition, there’s a shining beacon of hope for all those spending hours pouring over the 500th blog post of the day. A team from Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created a program that achieved an 80% (give or take a few percent) success rate when it came to measuring sarcasm on Amazon and Twitter.

You can read the article in more detail here, and we’ll be following the progress of Ari Rappoport and co. with great interest over the coming months…

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