Ho John Lee's Weblog

I hate being skeptical about charitable solicitors, but I am.

This evening there was a solicitor with a table display of children’s toys on the sidewalk in front of the Long’s Pharmacy on Middlefield Road, next to a barrel marked for donation to Toys for Tots. In general, I like to make planned donations, and usually only make unplanned donations to people and causes that I know or are reasonably likely to be who they say they are. (Girl Scout cookies come to mind…)

For some reason, this evening I actually took the time to stop at this woman’s display and hear her pitch. The basic idea was that you buy one of her “pre-approved” toys and put them in the donation barrel at the end of the booth. The suggested items were around $20, and at the moment I didn’t recall hearing of Toys for Tots before (it turns out they’re legitimate, and well rated at Charity Navigator), so I asked if she had any credentials or anything else to vouch for her. She had a letter in a plastic sheet protector describing Toys for Tots, but said she didn’t have any ID and no one there would know who she was.

I was starting to vaguely recall something about Toys for Tots (it’s the toy drive run by the Marine Corps), and it seemed they would be better organized than that. The woman offered to call her supervisor and proceeded to dial a number on her cell phone, but no one answered on the other end.

At this point in the conversation I’m thinking I’ve already spent too much time on this and want to leave, but I get out a pen to write down the contact info on the letter in the sheet protector anyway. The woman I’ve been talking with doesn’t offer her name, but volunteers that she’s working for a company called Fifth Dimension Promotions, so I write that down as well, and departed without making a toy or cash donation. I told her I wasn’t comfortable making a $20 donation to someone I didn’t know with no plausible credentials, and suggested that she have Toys for Tots or her company provide her with something for future outings.

Later, digging around on Google, no such company turns up as “Fifth Dimension Promotions”, but “5th Dimension Promotionz” is apparently a multi-level marketer based in San Jose. They don’t appear to have their own web site, but show many listings on various job sites. They describe themselves:

5th Dimension Promotionz is the nation’s leading provider of promotional marketing and event marketing solutions. We work in conjunction with industry leaders in the fields of hospitality, sports, and charities. 5th Dimension Promotionz provides unique cross promotional strategies and product launch promotions. We provide staff to represent our clients at trade shows and sporting events for sampling and product demonstrations, as well as providing sales and marketing efforts throughout our communities.

So, in the worst case, we have a freelance charity promoter, selling toys at what appears to be a relatively high markup in the name of charity, and perhaps even reclaiming the items from the donation barrel at the end of the day so little to nothing ends up going to charity.

In the best case, we have a freelance charity promoter, selling somewhat overpriced toys and using most of the profit margin to pay for the booth staffer and downline MLM, with some additional toys going to Toys for Tots. The donors would have achieved more by giving directly to Toys for Tots, although the promoter is arguably providing a marketing and convenience service. I probably would have donated if I were confident that some of the money would end up in right hands.

Having looked up Toys for Tots on Charity Navigator, it looks like it’s well run, with 98% of funds going to programs rather than overhead. I’m not sure that they even have an affiliation with 5th Dimension Productionz, other than having some extra toys turn up at the end of the season.

I have mixed feelings about all this. In principle, I think most people would like to help others who ask. In practice, I’m reflexively distrustful of anyone claiming to work for a charity or political cause. I was puzzled by the woman and her booth this evening, and was curious enough to spend a few minutes checking it out. I started out feeling kind of bad that I didn’t trust her, and ended up feeling kind of bad that I was probably right. I suspect that 5th Dimension Productionz isn’t doing anything wrong, exactly. The woman staffing the booth is just doing her job, trying to work up the MLM ladder. But at best they’re misrepresenting or conflating their objectives and the Toys for Tots. At worst they’re preying on the goodwill and lack of curiosity of passers-by to separate them from their money in the name of a good cause.

This is why I usually stick with planned charitable donations, other than to people and causes I know.

If you would like to make a donation and be sure that it’s going to Toys for Tots, you can use their online form here.

If anyone knows more about 5th Dimension Promotionz and Toys for Tots or their other charity clients, feel free to comment below.

via Seomoz:

This week’s Newsweek (December 12, 2005) features an article on white hat vs black hat search engine optimization. Among other things, it’s interesting that the topic has made it into the mainstream media.

A “black hat” anecdote:

Using an illicit software program he downloaded from the Net, he forcibly injected a link to his own private-detectives referral site onto the site of Long Island’s Stony Brook University. Most search engines give a higher value to a link on a reputable university site.

The site in question appears to be “www.private-detectives.org”, still currently #1 at MSN and #4 at Yahoo for searches on “private detectives”. It appears to have been sandboxed on Google.

Another interesting post at Seomoz features comments from “randfish” and “EarlGrey”, the two SEO consultants interviewed by Newsweek on the merits of “White Hat” vs “Black Hat” search engine optimization, and gives further perspective on the motivation and outlook of the two approaches.

In some ways one can think of the difference between search engine optimization approaches as a “trading” approach vs a “building” approach to investment. The “Black Hat” approach articulated in the Seomoz article tends to focus purely on a tactical present cash return to the operator, while the “White Hat” approach presumes that the operator will realize ongoing future value by developing a useful information asset and making it visible to the search engines. This makes an implicit assumption that the site itself offers some unique and valuable information content, which can’t usually be the case in the long run.

From an information retrieval point of view, I’m obviously in the latter camp of thinking that identifying the most relevant results for the search user is a good thing. However, the black hat approach makes perfect sense if you consider it in terms of optimizing the short term value return to the publisher (cash as information), while possibly still presenting a useable information return to the search user. This is especially the case for commodity information or products, in which the actual information or goods are identical, such as affiliate sales.

I’m a little curious about the link from Stony Brook University. I took a quick look but wasn’t able to turn up a backlink. One of the problems with simply relying on trusted link sources is that they can be gamed, corrupted, or hacked.

See also: A reading list on PageRank and search algorithms

Update 12-12-2005 00:30 PST: Lots of comments on Matt Cutt’s post, plus Slashdot

Brad Feld summarizes much of the ongoing discussion about user-generated content into three points, in a recent post. Here’s a recap, with some additions:

1. Trust
2. Attention
3. Relevance
4. Authority (added in a reader comment)
5. Intent (added by me)

These are recurring themes for the current generation of collaborative, intent-capturing, tagged, social-network-based, “web 2.0″ applications.

It’s interesting to look at the difference between Trust and Authority. As an example, Wikipedia is clearly not “Authoritative” on any subject, yet people ascribe “Trust” to the content there. Topics that are strongly subjective or open to interpretation can sometimes be organized based on Trust more easily than through Authority. The “disputed content” mechanism on Wikipedia allows for a little of this, but part of the confusion comes from the underlying model of an encyclopedia, which is generally intended to be authoritative.

Attention is a big deal because communications and information technology is providing easier access to more and more information content, but there are still only 24 hours in a day, and human cognition isn’t increasing exponentially. This creates a scarcity of attention, and makes the ability for a 3rd party to steer a viewer’s attention more valuable over time. New tools and interaction models can help allocate attention (cell phone conversations while driving, mobile messaging while in meetings, multiple windows and displays on the desktop), but these don’t scale very far.

One of the reader comments also suggests Priorities as a fifth concept, although I think this might really be captured by Relevance. Time and Place are also important, but I would put them with Relevance as well.

I’m adding “Intent” to my augmented list. One of the challenges with keyword-driven search is trying to guess what the user is trying to ask. Social software applications tend to increase relevance and trust of information shared among users, and implicitly create alignment of intent among the participants. If you have better information about what the user is trying to accomplish, search queries and other interactions become much more effective, which is one of the reasons AdSense works so well.

At the end of his post, Brad was fishing around for acronyms using three letters – “TAR”. With my list of five items, it’s no longer a TLA, but “TIARA” or “TARIA” might work.

Spent a few hours this afternoon at Chris Heuer’s BrainJam event. Wasn’t able to make it to the morning sessions, but arrived in time for the end of lunch and the “youth user panel”, consisting of four college students. They all love Facebook. Not sure how representative they are of the general student demographic, since two of them are trying to put together a web startup. They all use free online music and movie access, mostly through sharing within the dorm networks.

During the Q&A I asked for the panel members’ thoughts on privacy and about having their college lives online in perpituity. They’re vaguely concerned, but I don’t think the topic is really raising red flags for them. I think the high school and college users have more confidence in Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and others keeping their data private and/or it not making any difference to them in the future as social norms change. Part of it is that people are simply making things up on their pages, for the sake of attracting attention, and part of it is them not caring or not understanding that their web pages, chat transcripts, and even VOIP are mostly staying online forever. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting conflicts in the future as people start running into their past personae 5, 10, 15 years later in a societal context that hasn’t adjusted yet to perpetual transparency.

Afterwards the group broke out into smaller topical discussions. The first session I went to was on the 2-way RSS proposal from Microsoft (Simple Sharing Extensions, SSE). I’m starting to think of SSE as a way for MSFT to use an RSS container for solving the sync problem for applications like Windows Mobile syncing a device and a desktop, or Active Directory performing distributed synchronization of directory data. I’m not really seeing a federated publishing model based on this, an idea that was floated in the conversation. It really feels like it solves an application sync problem for structured data.

The session on “what to do with all the data?” quickly turned into a discussion on privacy, transparency, and DRM. I’m personally disinclined to depend on trusting anyone’s DRM system to manage my criticall personal data, or for allowing anyone to indexing my private data in a way that eventually gets exposed to the world. One point of view expressed in this discussion was that the world would be better off if everyone just got used to the idea that everything they did was recorded and visible to the world (the Global Panopticon), although I think the majority disargreed that this would actually make people behave better. Personally, I think that documenting everything would break a lot of the ambiguity in relationships and conversations that allow the formation of reasonable opinions, by forcing people into adhering to “statements” and “positions” that were nothing more than passing conversation or exploration of a topic. This was part of my thinking behind asking the college kids about privacy. In real life, there are normally various social transitions that call for stepping away or de-emphasizing some aspects of one’s life, in favor of new ones. It doesn’t make the past behaviors and activities go away, but the combination of search engines and infinite, cheap storage is likely to keep some aspects of these folks’ “past” life in their face for a long time, which may make it harder to move forward.

Someone mentioned the idea of “privacy parity”, i.e. you can ask for my data, but I can see that you’re asking for it, sort of like being able to find out when someone has requested your credit report. This is interesting, but there are substantial asymmetries in the value of that information to each party. A bit of parity that would be very interesting would be a feed of who’s seen my site URLs and excerpts in a search results page — not the clickthrough, which I can already see, but when it’s turned up on the page at all.

A few of us continued a sidebar discussion on search, social networks, trust, and attention networks, and eventually got kicked out into the lobby where we were free to speculate on Google’s plan for world domination next to a huge globe in the SRI lobby. I haven’t bumped into anyone yet doing work on integrating the attention, social, and trust data into search. Doing this on a Google/Yahoo/Microsoft scale looks hard, because of the sheer scale, but I’m getting the sense that doing a custom search engine biased by the social / attention data inputs for a limited subject domain (100-1000’sGB) and a relatively small social / atttention network (1000’s – people you know or have heard of) is becoming more reasonable because of cheaper / faster / better IT hardware and because more of the data is actually becoming available now. Still chewing on this. I just came across Danah Boyd’s post on attention networks vs social networks yesterday, which concisely explains the directed vs undirected graph property which underlies part of the ranking algorithms that would be needed.
Perhaps someone’s already done this for a research project.

If Google Desktop were open source, it might be a logical place to insert a modified ranking algorithm based on attention, tags and social networks and also to insert an SSE-style interface to allow peer-to-peer federation of local search queries and results. This would keep the search index data local to “me” and “my documents”, but allow sharing with other clients that I trust. Perhaps it’s just an age thing. The college kids didn’t seem to mind having all of their documents on public servers, are counting on robots.txt to keep them out the global search engines, and apparently think that access controls on sites like Facebook will keep their personal postings out the of the public realm. For me, I still think twice sometimes about posting to my del.icio.us bookmarks list and keep anything really critical on physical media in a safe deposit box in a vault. So while I’ve gone from being Ungoogleable to Google search stardom, there’s a good portion of my digital life which is “dark matter” to the search engines. I’d like to find a way to fix it for myself, and share information with people I trust, and refine my searches over the public internet, but without having to give Google or anyone else all of my personal data.

Took a few photos, photos from others will probably turn up tagged with “brainjams“

Update 12-04-2005 21:15 PST: Audio from the Youth Panel discussion on Chris’s blog
KRON-4 television piece on BrainJams. Looks like I missed the hula hoop part in the morning. I also seem to have mostly missed the non-profit community-oriented discussion, as you can see from my notes. Perhaps that’s what was going on when we got kicked out into the lobby for being too loud…

If you’re subscribed to the full feed, you’ll notice I collected some background reading on PageRank, search crawlers, search personalization, and spam detection in the daily links section yesterday. Here are some references that are worth highlighting for those who have an interest in the innards of search in general and Google in particular.

• Deeper Inside PageRank (PDF) – Internet Mathematics Vol. 1, No. 3: 335-380 Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer. Detailed 46-page overview of PageRank and search analysis. This is the best technical introduction I’ve come across so far, and it has a long list of references which are also worth checking out.
• Online Reputation Systems: The Cost of Attack of PageRank (PDF) –
  Andrew Clausen. A detailed look by at the value and costs of reputation and some speculation on how much it costs to purchase higher ranking through spam, link brokering, etc. Somewhere in this paper or a related note he argues that raising search ranking is theoretically too expensive to be effective, which turned out not to be the case, but the basic ideas around reputation are interesting
• SpamRank – Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection – Work in progress (PDF) –
  András A. Benczúr, Károly Csalogány, Tamás Sarlós, Máté Uher. Proposes a SpamRank metric based on personalized pagerank and local pagerank distribution of linking sites.
• Detecting Duplicate and near duplicate files – William Pugh presentation slides on US patent 6,658,423 (assigned to Google) for an approach using shingles (sliding windowed text fragments) to compare content similarity. This work was done during an internship at Google and he doesn’t know if this particular method is being used in production (vs some other method).

I’m looking at a fairly narrow search application at the moment, but the general idea of using subjective reputation to personalize search results and to filter out spammy content seems fundamentally sound, especially if a network of trust (social or professionally edited) isn’t too big.