Googlicious

Google Google Google

Investors want them, other companies want to be them.

And MBA students want to work for them (free snacks and casual dress, duh)

One of the great things about El Goog is that they keep coming out with new stuff. I’ve been messing around with a couple of their new things recently. One is really really cool. The other’s just a little bit scary.

Scary stuff first.

I’ve been using Google Maps on my blackberry since I got it in August. It’s been pretty fantastic, even if it seemed buggy in a couple respects. But last weekend, I went to use it and was asked if I wanted to upgrade to the new version.

Sure I said, bring it on.

I downloaded the new version of the application, and booted it up to start messing with it. There was a new option on the menu.

“My Location”

I clicked on it, and immediately I got a dot on what was nearly my exact position at the center of a large circle.

It said that was my approximate location within a couple hundred meters.

That’s great if I get kidnapped and wonder where I am…but what if I plan on kidnapping someone else? Maybe the Google software can help find me (which would be a bad thing, because I’m sure if I kidnap someone, there will be a really good reason and I shouldn’t get caught by the police).

I'm sure this type of thing may be mentioned in their user terms of agreement. Of course, I did what everyone else does, completely ignore them because they’re a complete waste of time.

So the fact that they might be able to find me is a little scary. Fortunately, I’ve found their other new development cool enough to outweigh that scariness.

It’s a little addition to YouTube called ‘Insight.’

Let’s say you uploaded a video of you moonsaulting your cousin Ed onto a breakaway table as part of some amateur backyard wrestling.

In the past, you had no real information about how your video was playing, you only had a view count, which is a little simple for a data driven analysis of your backyard wrestling ways.

But now with Insight, you can get tons of INSIGHT (get it, the name is what it does) on your viewing audience.

Since I uploaded footage of my TV appearances to YouTube months ago, and since those have been viewed over 75,000 times, I had plenty of data to warm my little GSB heart. (note: this doesn’t count the ~500k viewers watching Kebert Xela clips, as they were uploaded by someone else)

And what a treasure trove of information!

I can look at all my YouTube views and see how viewers are finding my videos, I can see when my views spike across different places in the country, I can even see how many times I’ve been viewed in different countries across the globe (I’m unusually big in Poland)

But a more interesting analysis comes when I look at the demographics of my viewing public.

Below, a graph of my viewing audience by gender.

Females outweigh Males by 26 percentage points! Very interesting…especially for a medium (Internet Video) that we can assume is used more by men than women.

The lesson here, is that chicks dig me.

Of course I couldn’t stop there. Below, is a demographic chart of the age ranges of my viewers. The green and gray together represent totals, the gray represents male viewers, and the green, are my large female fan base.

Upon closer inspection, I appear to have strength in two large blocks.

Boys ages 0 – 18

And Women ages 35 – 55

The final lesson, it seems, is that it’s not chicks that dig me, it’s soccer moms.

I guess I’ll take that.

Learning

I’ve had a couple crazy moments recently, things that were so weird and out of place that I wondered exactly what’s been going on.

I think I’ve been like, actually learning stuff at business school.

It’s been weird, when I’m just minding my own business, thinking to myself, and something from one of my classes pops in my head when I’m thinking about some kind of problem.

As an example, I was walking across campus the other day, thinking about my group project final for my technology strategy class. We’re picked a company to analyze and as a part of that, we’re spending time figuring out the technological forces and changes going on in media content distribution (I know, me working on a media-technology convergence project, such a surprise)

Anyway, I was thinking about the interfaces on most streaming web TV sites and thinking about whether it would be advantageous for any of them to adopt some kind of software algorithms to recommend other programs viewers might be interested in. Because as of right now, I don’t think they have that capability, and it would be really beneficial for some of them that have a couple really popular shows and many more smaller ones to prod viewers to their other content (and ads)

Obviously not a new idea, TiVo does it I think, and I believe Netflix at one point issued a challenge to the internet community for someone to develop just such an algorithm.

And so I started to think about how I would think about doing it, when out of the blue, a perceptual map jumped right into my brain from marketing.

Then I saw something shiny and got distracted, but then I starting thinking about what dimensions would be appropriate on such a map for television/movie programming.

I’m not sure how to deal with this, it’s like I’m building some kind of tool box.

Scary.

Also, today I totally got the chance to do a very UChicago thing and sit and hear a Nobel economist speak. That was definitely pretty cool.

The topic was essentially covering the increasing returns on education across the world as well as male/female splits of people pursuing education.

Most of it I was already pretty familiar with, but I thought the suggestion that the increase in female’s going to college is because the supply of women is more homogenous and therefore, more elastic (and if you ever want to get slapped in a bar…try going up to a woman and saying, ‘baby, you’re so homogenous’)

Anyway, the idea that women are more homogenous was supported by the fact that women in college have far smaller standard deviations in their average GPAs. I’m not sure that’s conclusive, but I thought it was a really interesting argument.

It was also good to hear that I share many of my personal beliefs on the education system with a Nobel economist. Crush teachers’ unions and pay based on merit.

My words, not his.

His probably have a lot more nuance and many more graphs.