That document above is what appears to be a scanned copy of the print [magazine] version of a Business 2.0 magazine uploaded by a user of a new online library called Scribd. The text from the article can be found online here, but this online version lacks the cool illustrations (created by the innovative folks at XPLANE) found on the print version. Using Scribd’s embeddable code, I can post the full print document — with links for downloading — directly into my blog.

Oh, it gets better. Neither print or online version offer what you see on the bottom bar of the document: a link for downloading an mp3 recording of the article’s text. How cool is that?

Let me get this straight: Now I can create a new document or take an existing document, embed it — and links for downloading it in any one of multiple document formats — on my blog, and add my $0.02 on it in the blog posting. You, the consumer, can download my document to your PC for viewing and an mp3 recording of the document’s text for your iPod.

My my, the possibilities here.

Last year, I made multiple posts of the online-videos-are-going-to-be-big variety…

The rise of YouTube
Video Worth a Thousand Pictures
The Virtual Business Tour
InformationWeek: Firms “must” embrace video

Public speaking guru Bert Decker certainly gets it, as suggested by his recent posts Desktop Video Revolution…

This year 2007 will be the Year of the Video.

…and The Power of Instant Video:

Video compression and the capability of an unknown to make a one minute “film” and have such impact is revolutionary. The revolution has started…Use this tool - influence in new ways.

His latter post cites the so-called “Hillary 1984” video (below) as an example of how a brief video – in this case, just 74 seconds long – can pack a powerful message which spreads virally big-time (more than 2.7 million views at post time).

This is the Year of the Pig on the Chinese calendar. When a YouTube search on “Year of the Pig” produces more than 670 results (as it does at post time), you start thinking that Decker’s “Year of the Video” proclamation might not be so far-fetched.

Finally! In Swivel, I think I’ve found (thanks to this Fast Company article) an easy-to-use way to create simple web-based charts.

The Swivel guys do a bang-up job telling their story in the About Us section of their web site. I think too many technology outfits fall short in this area. From the hows (origination of the concept and their revenue model), the whys (their motivation), and the whats (a tour of their new place), to kudos to key external contributors, to a reference to an advisor’s hobby of trumpet-playing advisor, it’s all there – and founders Dimov and Mulloy paint a great picture with their words. But they fall just short of a 10 — I’ll give them a 9 — in this area due to no use of at least one chart in this section to help tell their story.

I see their pricing model is both simple and fair: The service is free if you make your data public, and fee-based if you seek privacy. I suspect that their best market would be SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses), where slimmer budgets and demand for easy-to-use tools would seem a nice fit for a Swivel-like data sharing and exploration solution.

I found importing data and creating a chart a quick and painless process (see my first Swivel chart here). I certainly haven’t pushed the envelope with an extreme volume of data, but suspect that Swivel isn’t really targeting a power user conducting complex analysis and/or using loads of data. I’d guess that their target user is the average spreadsheet-literate person, and there are plenty of them out there.

I’ve been showing charts of all kinds to folks for a couple of decades now. Here’s a sampling of the things I’ve learned, and continually encourage others who create and present charts to consider:
1. What question(s) is(are) your chart answering? Is that the right question?
2. Is your chart title structured like an eye-grabbing newspaper story headline or a stale “Y vs. X”?
3. Do your graphics utilize color, proportion, and minimization (as espoused by the likes of Edward Tufte and Garr Reynolds) to make the data’s message slap-you-in-the-face clear to everyone in your audience?
4. Does your chart incorporate an image to add context and/or emotion to the graph without interfering with its interpretation?

I believe that the majority of creators of charts still lack both awareness and appreciation of the power of chart design in conveying meaning. And it’s usually not their fault – most have not been exposed to training in basic data visualization design techniques, or are not even aware that better ways to present data exist.

Swivel is definitely a wonderful step in the right direction when it comes to sharing data and getting people talking about how to use data to improve products, services, even the world. I hope that, as Swivel evolves, it will somehow provide ways to educate its users on how to design visually provoking displays of actionable data. One way to do that might be to provide some video tutorials on chart design, delivered by one of the founders themselves or external subject matter experts. Another could involve periodic awards (e.g. usage credits, contest prizes) to talented users for those public charts which convey the best combo of, say, meaningful data and chart design.

I look forward to watching the Swivel story unfold.

Many thanks to new startup Swivel for making this chart possible! I will talk more about them on a separate post.

Another alternative to you-know-who in Web search just went beta yesterday.

What makes ChaCha so interesting is that it offers two options for searching: a do-it-yourself, search engine-driven approach, and a human guide who assists you via IM chat. Company president Brad Bostic explains:

ChaCha’s search-with-a-guide process connects you to a live person who has knowledge about your particular topic and who knows the best resources on the web for that topic, as well as the right search keywords. The ChaCha guide then sends you highly relevant links via an instant online chat session and follows up to make certain the results are just what you wanted.

Why a human guide? This option addresses a chink in the Google armor that too many (myself included) have grown to accept: Google results are virtually instantaneous, but it can take several minutes [or longer] to find exactly what you want, even more when you’re not sure what you’re looking for. If the Web were a library, Google is the librarian who, if you’re asking the right question in the right way, points you to the correct section or shelf. With a bit of MD-like diagnosis of your search quandary, a ChaCha guide will [hopefully] pull the right book from the shelf and point you to the page you want.

If you’re a guide, you can work as much or as little as you wish, and you’re paid based on how you’re rated by users. In fact, they’re providing an instant-payment system for guides, which could potentially revolutionize how workers are paid in other occupations and companies. One guide recently shared with Wired magazine how this model might work for her:

Say I need to send my daughter to the store to buy $10 worth of groceries, but I have no cash. I sit down and work on ChaCha for a little while, watch the money add up and click ‘Pay Me Now.’ I give her the debit card and a grocery list. Brilliant.

Better web search, and a new way for people from virtually all walks of life to earn extra income. ChaCha may be onto something.

George Gilder on Google and the dawning of the petabyte age (bold text is mine):

Google appears to have attained one of the holy grails of computer science: a scalable massively parallel architecture that can readily accommodate diverse software.
Google’s core activity remains Web search. Having built a petascale search machine, though, the question naturally arose: What else could it do? Google’s answer: just about anything.

Google’s success stems from more than foresight, ingenuity, and chutzpah. In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant – as signaled by precipitously declining prices – in order to save what is scarce. Google has been profligate with the surfeits of data storage and backbone bandwidth. Conversely, it has been parsimonious with that most precious of resources, users’ patience.

Of course, wasting what’s abundant comes with a price, as Gilder notes:

If it’s necessary to waste memory and bandwidth to dominate the petascale era, gorging on energy is an inescapable cost of doing business.

According to Ask.com operations VP Dayne Sampson, the five leading search companies are currently running a cumulative total of about 2 million servers. These servers, and the hard drives to which they’re connected, collectively burn about 5 gigawatts of electricity this year — nearly enough to power greater Las Vegas on the hottest day of the year.

According to Google’s corporate information page, the beta label came off the company’s website on this day eight years ago.

Some of you may not be aware that Google did not come to be the search power it is today via some grand strategic plan.

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not the first to enter web search, and their site has never been the best in terms of quality of results. It soared in popularity during its early years because it was easy to use. Ironically, its simple interface is rumored to be more the product of the founders’ lack of programming ability than intelligent design.

While Google has certainly made it easier for non-techies to sort through billions of web pages, their biggest impact has arguably been in revolutionizing advertising. Their premise: Ads are most effective when viewed only by people who are interested in what’s for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Internet.

Initially, Google’s ads were sold at fixed prices. Larry and Sergey were hesitant to adopt an auction-based model out of concern for users. In early 2002, an employee named Salar Kamangar convinced CEO Eric Schmidt and the founders to switch to an auction-based system like the one used at Goto.com, where advertisers paid only if their ad is clicked on, and the highest bidding advertiser was listed first. The New York times wrote about this last October in Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too:

Mr. Kamangar, though, had an important improvement on the model. Rather than giving priority to the advertisers that bid the most per click, as Goto did, he realized that it was better to save the front of the line for ads that brought in the most money - a combination of the bid and the number of clicks on the ad. This was not only more profitable, but it also linked readers to ads that were more relevant to them. He also figured out that the system should use what is called a Vickrey auction - that is, to charge the winner only one cent more than the second-highest bidder. That gives advertisers an incentive to bid high, knowing that they will not be penalized if they are far higher than the rest of the market.

The rest, as they say, is history. And history might be what this company will change — in a big way — over the coming years.

Update: Google’s Dennis Hwang blogs about the birthday here.

In Why India’s Wage Inflation Won’t Bring Outsourced Tech Jobs Back to The U.S., Cognizant CEO Lakshmi Narayanan provides a profile of his firm’s labor cost structure:

75% of Cognizant’s workers are based in India, but those workers account for only 20% of its labor costs. Conversely, Cognizant workers based in the West, mostly in the U.S., account for 80% of the company’s wage expenses even though they’re just one-quarter of its total staff.

Because wages paid to workers in India represent such a small percentage of total costs for companies that operate there, a 15% increase in salaries results in no more than a 2% rise in prices charged for IT services…

This is an example of the Pareto principle — and good reason for the U.S. IT talent pool to focus on building new skills. For starters, I recommend Dan Pink’s latest book A Whole New Mind to all the techies I meet.

A couple of New Yorkers weighed in yesterday on Net Neutrality, each with a different delivery.

Amanda Congdon hosts a daily videoblog on Rocketboom, and made NN yesterday’s topic du jour. In typical Rocketboom style, Amanda conveys her message in a manner both entertaining and informative.

VC Fred Wilson used his blog to post his views. His money quote:

[O]ur current network architecture is “dumb”. It doesn’t care what application runs on top of it. And if we change that simple fact, the Internet in our country will cease to be a viable platform for innovation. The action will move to Estonia, India, China, Israel, Korea, or wherever else they understand the power of a dumb network.

I vote for dumb.

Update:
Doc Searls offers some recent scoop on S.2686, including this Jamie Lewis quote:

We need to incent the world we want rather than regulate the world we fear.

Seems like good advice for legislators and business leaders alike.

Sig has posted a beauty: YKSIW. I think he’s invented a new acronym as well.

As his post suggests, Sig’s mission goes beyond merely selling software which automates the way we do certain tasks. He wants to change the way business is done, for the betterment of all.

As Hugh has said, “Business is change; there is nothing else.” Given a flat world, Friedman’s miscalculation, and rampant job dissatisfaction (among other things too numerous to mention here), a continuous pursuit of change in business has never been more important.