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Monday, August 28, 2006
Google Video Delivers Lecture -- BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System
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In this lecture at the University of Washington, Google's Jeff Dean discusses the Bigtable content storage system used in Google's backend data capacities.
This content was recorded nearly a year ago, but would have been helpful answering the questions posed by Senators in last week's hearings on search and privacy, which included questions like, "Why can't we just immediately take sites down if they contain illegal, illicit or immorakl cointent? (I'm paraphrasing, but not far off the direct quote.)
This content is also a virtually perfect addition to the discussion of the massive data that is the spent uranium of search, including Katie Lefren's August 23 story about the realities of data availablity in research and the dilemmas posed by the nature of the mountains of data for research and personal privacy concerns.
The story in last week's New York Times, Researchers Yearn to Use AOL Logs, but They Hesitate, .mentioned Google's extensive data analysis projects (which may not have been a suprise to Google Dance watchers.)
This lecture is an hour long (and quite possibly too technical to be useful to many if not most casual viewers) . I share it for two reasons. First, because the content is important, highly topical and fascinating. The presenter, Jeff Dean uses an appropriate level of jargon for the audience, and presents these complicated concepts in a way that makes sense.
The other reason was my amazement at the customer experience I had with my first use of Google Video. Once I decided to checkj it out, it seemed as though I were watching it nearly instantly, amazed at the seamless way it appeared virtually instantly. The slides and a PDF of the paper about this topic were also quite easy to access.
I arrived at the video through pages with numerous available subscriptions I was adding to my personalized news page. I noticed this content in one of the Google technical groups I lurk around.
The point is, the content that I found after following an intuitive path was highly relevant to my research at the moment, engaged my attention with Video and with my discovery of several new beta products that Google has in the works and motivated me to use the blogging function to write this post.
If you hate dealing with the plug-ins to watch video Online, Google will delight you with the video delivery options. Right now, I am watching the lecture in the pop-up Blogger interface that I accessed with just one click. Imagine the possibilities....Don't worry if this lecture is not your cup of tea. It's not the only one they have (but it tells you how they keep track of them.)
As I listen to this lecture, it strikes me that the same curiosity that makes academic researchers salivate at the notion of accessing the data that is arguably one of the best uneditied views into Web users' behavior that exists, is driving the average user to experiment with Web 2.0 technologies.
Using and sharing the data found on one's own personal searches and sharing those finds with others is the essence of the experience provided by sites like MySpace, Digg and Squidoo.
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