2008: Anyone can make predictions!

I made a prediction earlier, saying that the city of Košice will blossom in 2008. The prediction brought me search engine traffic because people are starting to look for predictions for next year. Even Adwords advertisers have woken up with their predictions for 2008 (led by horoscopes and such).

Google Trends shows that the demand for new-year 2008 predictions online has grown over the last few years. Every year it starts earlier and peaks a little higher. The order of searches by countries is stable over time - Indians search for predictions the most.

A classmate of mine in primary school, Alexander, told me in 1988 that in 1999 we would be able to travel to neighbouring Austria on bicycle. To me that was unimaginable at the time: we were living in the depth of a Soviet-satellite Communist regime. In November 1989 suddenly we were walking across the border. His prediction simply turned out to be correct.

Now I feel like it may be fun to make a few predictions for 2008 - if I make 10 or 20 oredictions on random events there is a good chance a half of them may turn out right and having 5 or 10 correct prediction can be packaged as pretty good predictive success.

Anyway the purpose of this article is to motivate myself to make up a few predictions, write them up and drum them up.

Filling out the facebook profile for a UWC classmate

I've been adding a lot of my fellow UWCers to my facebook, it's been somewhat of a fad. The circle enlarges and more people who touched my life but fell of my radar screen appear. Today Agnieszka, the first UWCer I met became a Facebook friend.

Facebook offered for me to fill in how I knew Agnieszka and honesty about my AHUWC experience made me check that we:
lived together (we did, in Lanham house),
were in a group together (an outdoor orientation group, I think), took a course together (the IB although that may be a slight stretch as Agnieszka was my second-year), attended a program (numerous, for sure), traveled together (she and Demet from Turkey were the first UWCers I actually met, while changing planes at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport), went to high school with Agnieszka, met randomly (in an airport), are Facebook friends (as of today) and finally, I know Agnieszka through a friend (or several friends).

Neat.

My Prediction: 2008 will be the year of Kosice

I am extremely bullish on Kosice - have been for years. The Google Trends screenshot shows clearly what's going on - more and more people are looking for info on Kosice on Google.

If I had the cash to spare or goodwill to borrow I would buy a nice place in the centre of Kosice, banking on its finiteness and the Skyeurope flight from London. My guess would be about 50% appreciation over the next two years.

There are real estate investment opportunities galore right now. The market is somewhat illiquid, I believe, but that may open opportunities for a buyer ready to pay in cash.

It wasn't easy to find English-language blogs in Kosice but in the end I came across a fellow internet entrepreneur, a Peter Soltes.

Are you clever enough to pull a 419?

I don't know if Nigerian scammers read blogs but if they do I have an idea for a scenario for them:
1. send one of the usual spam letters (late widow of Sani Abacha, wife of Rwandan farmer),
2. send another letter signed by a Nigerian official (or even a UN official of another nationality) requesting cooperation with the authorities in uncovering the scammer from no. 1 above, earning a hefty reward in the process,
3. if anyone catches on, make them actually send money to no. 1 while delaying payment from no. 2.

Or maybe I can send the idea to this guy although he obviously does not need it.

My feeling is that if the other things reaching my mailbox work this one would, too.

$10 Threadless sale rocks!

I love Threadless. Threadless has rocking great t-shirts and they ship to Slovakia.

One of the most frustrating things about many US-based e-commerce websites is that they do not ship to Europe. There is no directory of US internet stores that ship internationally, that I would be aware of. Even at this day and age in a lot of websites you have to dig deep for info whether they will ship to you or not.

I am surprised the math doesn't work out favourably at least for the big stores that do not bother to ship throughout the EU (J. Crew, BlueFly.com to name a few). They must have sufficient ability to learn on the internet that Poland, Slovakia or Estonia let alone Austria or Sweden are not Nigeria (not to mention the fact that there must be lots of nice, regular people in Nigeria who cannot order anything at all from anyone because noone will ship to them).

The flipside is that any parcel worth more than EUR 22 must clear customs and in my case is subject to 19% VAT and 10 or so % customs duty. But that's a whole another story (and a sad one of utter ignorance of essential civic dignity).

Anyway, what spurred this post was the current $10 Threadless sale. Needless to say that because they are among the few who will ship to me (and without extorting me with incredible postage just for not being from the US of A) I am a loyal repeat customer.

Acupressure point for nausea, anyone?

Not as easy to find as I would have expected. I was confident there was one and I did find a nice diagram in the end on a site on a New Zealand site on nausea during labour. It is a point a bit (2-3 inches) above the wrists, between the two veins on both arms.

You can massage it gently or even apply a wristband with a plastic button available through New Zealand chemists.

Who ranks who with Personalized Pagerank?

San Jose is pretty far from Bratislava so there is no way for me to make it to search engine strategies this year. Instead, I have been reading the amazingly useful live coverage at the Search Engine Roundtable.

In the coverage of Personalised Search this assertion attributed to Dave Davies of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning genuinely surprised me:

Google will be assigning a value to you as a search user. This value will be used to grade your activities on web sites. This will affect the rankings of sites based on an individuals activities on that site. Users who are trusted by Google will affect the results to a greater degree than those who are not trusted.

I had thought of personal pagerank as individualised pagerank assigned to a website just for you (and people like you). E.g. Google knows I get annoyed with Web 2.0 social sites and love all things Russian. Therefore if I searched for dating sites something like Consumating would have a low personal pagerank for me. RussianBrides.com would on the other hand appear pretty high up.

The Davies interpretation would mean something quite different: his peronalised pagerank would rank my personal worth as a searcher whose search behaviour is, I guess, generic enough to be useful to influence the general pagerank for other. Goofy people, who surf all over the web, would be discounted, while systematic, savvy searchers would carry more influence.

I think if you juxtapose the two ideas, it is clear which one makes more sense: since everyone's results will behighly personalised there is not so much point in finding trusted users to watch their behaviour. Rather, in a fashion similar to how Amazon works in recommending CDs you may like, search engines can group users according to a variety of characteristics: "If you liked Consumating and Digg, you will love Sphinn."

Goofy users won't have low personal pagerank. Rather, if Google knows you are goofy, it will modify your personalised pagerank algorithm to rank highly sites other goofy people like.