The Googlization of Everything

Seth Finkelstein in The Guardian:

There's a cliche that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The latest iteration of the "Wikia Search" project might be summed up as "when you have a Wikipedia, everything looks like an edit". Wikia Search is an effort to apply many of the ideas that underpin Wikipedia to the task of building a search engine; irreverently, ideas such as relying on large amounts of unpaid labour to attempt quality assurance and fight spam.

It's important to keep in mind the distinction between the startup company Wikia Inc, with $14m (｣7m) of venture capital, and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia. Wikia was created by several high-level people involved in Wikipedia to commercialise similar concepts. But there is no significant financial connection between the for-profit Wikia and the charity that is the Wikimedia Foundation. However, Wikia benefits enormously from a "halo effect" due to Wikipedia's prominence and name recognition.

The launch of Wikia Search in January was poorly received. In a recent update, many features have been added to allow users to alter the results returned by a search. Items can be rated, added, removed, edited and so on. As systems which aggregate user actions are the grand fetish of a certain kind of data-mining business, this release of Wikia Search was more warmly received. But the ability to manipulate results is not much in the way of innovation for searching.

By now it's a standard caution on Wikia Search that it's competing against an incumbent (Google) which is an overwhelming world leader, and very powerful second-tier rivals (Yahoo, Microsoft). With this in mind, it's worth remembering that many other initiatives hyped by Wikia have ended in failure. "OpenServing", a hosting service where site creators kept advertising revenues, has been abandoned. A political website, "Campaigns Wikia", now demonstrates apathy. An effort to develop a "Blogger's Code Of Conduct" died as soon as the corresponding story faded away (Accusations of sex and violence were bound to grab the headlines, Guardian April 2007).

The most successful Wikia sites, their digital sharecropping electronic plantations, tend to be like what can be found on Wikipedia, but with a higher emphasis on material from popular culture (eg, TV shows, movies, videogames).

The point here is to note how little success Wikia has had outside of its own niche and area of expertise, which is the near-cloning of Wikipedia for hits and (potential) profit. The operating model is extremely fragile and not readily applicable apart from very narrow confines. But search engines require very specialised skill, which commands a high price. So not only is Wikia competing with entrenched companies for users, it's also competing for talent.

One of the drivers of Wikipedia is that skill at writing passable encyclopedia articles is common, and not restricted to a tiny academic elite. And people can be induced to work for free with the thought that they are then like those academics. But that trick doesn't work for search engines, as expertise at writing a decent search engine is rare. The problems Wikipedia has, with incentives for people to slant its articles, pale in comparison to the financial rewards that can accrue to a site which has the top spot in a search on a lucrative term. Compare the amount of money devoted to search engine optimisation with the much smaller field of public relations with Wikipedia.

In general, we are poorly served by slogans such as the "wisdom of crowds", which often stand for nothing beyond finding a few popular selections by various types of polling. It may work well for entertainment sites, and business owners are enthused at how consumers can be led to volunteer to undertake part of the process of determining what to sell to a target market. But the idea that these simple systems can be applied to deep value-laden social problems, of politics, or even relevant search results, is like trying to use a hammer to turn screws on the basis that it works so well to hit nails.

This is a strong point. I remain agnostic about such efforts. But I am convinced that if Wikia were to build a decent search engine, it would have to close shop quite a lot before doing so. Seth does us all a great service by reminding us of the political economy of Wikia and its reliance on confusion and conflation to free-ride on the brilliant benevolence of Wikipedia.

Submit Your Picks for Tech Policy Leaders: Nominations Open for the 2008 IP3 Awards! | Public Knowledge:

We’re now accepting nominations for our annual IP3 Awards. Each year, Public Knowledge singles out three people who have advanced the public interest in one or more of the “three IPs”: Intellectual Property, Internet Protocol, and Information Policy.

As technology advances, the roles of users, content creators, and service providers expand and blur. This year, more than ever, the areas have overlapped in debates around patents, copyright, net neutrality on the Internet and on other networks, the use of spectrum, and many others. As new questions arise at the intersection of law and technology, certain individuals come forward to advance to public interest in each of the three types of “IP”.

As always, we need your help in choosing this year’s winners. So please send your nominations to IP3nominees@publicknowledge.org, or post your picks in the comments below.

With your nomination, please send us your reason, however brief, for suggesting the individual and a means of contacting them. We will accept anonymous nominations, but we’d like to be able to contact the nominating parties in case we need further information. We need your nominations by June 1st, 2008. IP3 Award winners will be invited to attend the October 16, 2008 awards ceremony in Washington, DC.

Previous winners can be found here.

We have a distinguished panel of judges who will be selecting our winners from the list of nominees:

* Jim Burger: Member, Dow Lohnes PLLC
* Bruce Gottlieb: FCC Official
* Kathleen Wallman: President, Wallman Consulting LLC
* Jennifer Urban: Clinical Associate Professor, University of Southern California Law School; Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School
* Richard Whitt: Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, Google
* Tim Wu: Professor, Columbia Law School

The blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities has an interesting essay on this subject:

But how reliable are these electronic texts? Can researchers feel comfortable citing them and using them for text analysis? In my view, the quality of an electronic text and its appropriateness for use in scholarship depend on 6 factors:

* Quality of the scanning: Is the complete page captured? Is the image skewed or distorted? Is the image of sufficient resolution?
* Quality of the OCR/text conversion: Is full text provided? What method was used to produce the text–double-keying or OCR? How accurate is the text? Are the texts marked up in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)? Are words joined across line breaks? Are running heads preserved?
* Quality of the metadata: Is the bibliographic information accurate? Is it clear what edition you are looking at? If there are multiple volumes, do you know which volume you are getting and how to locate the other volume(s)?
* Terms of use: What are you legally able to do with the digitized work? Can you download the full-text and use tools to analyze it? Is the content freely and openly available, or do you have to pay for use?
* Convenience: Can you easily download the text and store it in your own collection? How much work do you have to do to convert the text into a format appropriate for use with text analysis tools? How hard is it to find the electronic text in the first place? Is there a Zotero translator for the collection?
* Reputation: Is the digital archive well-regarded in the scholarly community? If you cited the archive in your bibliography, would fellow researchers question your decision? Does the archive provide clear information about its process for selecting, digitizing, and preserving texts?

I focused my evaluation on the main collections that I plumbed for the primary source works in my dissertation bibliography: Google Books (GB), Open Content Alliance (OCA), Early American Fiction (EAF), Project Gutenberg (PG), and Making of America (MOA). I found the OCA works in the Internet Archive (they are marked as belonging to the “American Libraries” or “Canadian Libraries” collections.) I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I want to dig into the details. ...

Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds

By Steve Lohr

The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co.

Over that time, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates. The greenhouse gas impact of data centers is “not yet counted and likely to be very significant,” said William Forrest, the lead McKinsey consultant on the report.

The study, released on Wednesday at the Green Enterprise Computing Symposium in Orlando, Fla., mainly focuses on the cost- and energy-saving opportunities being squandered today in corporate and government data centers.

For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance. In other words, if data centers were hotels, they would be bankrupt and shut down instead of growing like kudzu. ...

John Wilkin writes:

Metasearch vs. Google Scholar

What the world needs now is not another metasearch engine. Mind you, having more and better and even free metasearch engines is a good thing, but there are already many metasearch engines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and even some that are free and open source (e.g., see Oregon State's LibraryFind). Metasearch isn't an effective solution for the problem at hand.

...

Google Scholar (GS) is absolutely not a replacement for the vast array of resources we license for our users. Criticisms of Google Scholar abound. Perhaps most troubling to an academic audience, GS is secretive about its coverage: no information exists either inside GS or by any watchdog group analyzing the extent of its coverage in any area or for any publisher. Moreover, it will probably always be the case that some enterprises in our sphere fund the work of finding and indexing the literature of a discipline, online and offline, by charging for subscriptions, thus putting them in direct opposition to GS and keeping their indexes out of GS. (Consider, for example, the Association of Asian Studies with its Bibliography of Asian Studies or the Modern Language Association and the MLA Bibliography, each funding its bibliographic sleuthing by selling access to the resulting indexes. To give their information to GS is to destroy the same funding that makes it possible for them to collect the information.) And yet, as we learned in the recent article “Metalib and Google Scholar: a User Study,” undergraduates are more effective in finding needed information through Google Scholar than through our metasearch tools.[2]
6

If metasearch is an ineffective tool for comprehensive “discovery” and Google Scholar has its own shortcomings, the need and the opportunity in this space is not creating a more effective metasearch tool; rather, the challenge is to bring these two strategies together in a way that best serves the interests of an insatiable academic audience, whether undergraduate, graduate or faculty. ...

This is a rich and complicated essay. Please check it out. I can't do it justice here.

Google is at the forefront of encouraging women to enter technical careers and rise in management. Kudos on this program:

Google Announces Winners of Scholarships for Female Technology Students

Google recently announced the winners of the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships, awarded to women who are studying computer science and related fields.

In the U.S., 23 women were given $10,000 academic scholarships, and 32 finalists received scholarships worth $1,000. In Canada, four women are receiving $5,000 scholarships, and 13 finalists will be given $1,000 awards. Students in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe are also eligible for the Anita Borg scholarships, which were established in 2003. For more information on Google's scholarship programs, -- Catherine Rampell

John Wilkin€™ of the University of Michigan libraries was badly misquoted in an AP story on the digitization projects at the University of Michigan.

On his blog, he uses that glitch (calling the Brewster Kahle's issues with Google "polemical," but the AP substituted "theoretical.") to generate a great discussion about what he describes as degrees of openness.

I think all of this debate begs us to ask the question "what is open"? For the longest time (since the mid-1990's), Michigan digitized public domain content and made it freely viewable, searchable and printable. Anyone, anywhere could come to a collection like Making of America and read, search and print to his heart's delight. If the same user wanted to download the OCR, that too was made possible and, in fact, the Distributed Proofreader's project has made good use of this and other MOA functionality. We didn't make it possible for anyone to get a collection of our source files because we were actively involved in setting up Print-on-Demand (POD), POD typically has up-front, per-title costs, and making the source files available would have cost us some sales that might otherwise pay for that initial investment. As we moved into the agreement with Google, we made clear our intention to do the same "open" thing with the Google-digitized content, and to throw in our lot with a (then) yet-to-be-defined multi-institutional "Shared Digital Repository." In fact, now we have hundreds of thousands of public domain works online, all of which are readable, searchable and printable by anyone in the world in much the same way.

...

Could the Google books be more open? Absolutely. Along with Carl Malamud, for example, I would love to see all of the government documents that have been digitized by Google available for transfer to other entities so that the content could be improved and integrated into a wide variety of systems, thus opening up our government as well as our libraries. I believe that will happen, in fact, and that Google will one day (after they've had a chance to gain some competitive advantage) open up far more. In the meantime, however, when we talk about "open," let's mean it the way that the OCA FAQ means it. Let's mean it in the same way that the bulk of our audience means it. Let's talk about the ability to read, cite and search the contents of these books, and let's call the Google Books project and particularly Michigan's copies Open. Let's stop being theoretical, er, I mean polemical.

Here is part of the comments on Wilkin's blog:

Brewster Kahle on paragraph 2:

John– while it may not be appropriate to start this in a comment, but I am quite taken aback by your seeming implication that “open” includes what google is doing and what UMich is doing.

“Open” started to be widely used in the Internet community in association with certain software. Richard Stallman calls it “free”, but “open” has also come to be used as well. Lets start with that.

“Open Source” in that community means the source code can be downloaded in bulk, read, analyzed, modified, and reused.

“Open Content” has followed much the same trajectory. Creative Commons evolved a set of licenses to help the widespread downloading of creative works, or “content”. Downloading, and downloading in bulk, is part of this overall approach as we see it at the Internet Archive.

Researchers (and more general users, but we can stick with researchers because they are a community that research libraries are supposed to serve) require downloadability to materials so they can be read, compared, analyzed, and recontextualized.

Page at a time interfaces, therefore, would not be “open” in this sense. Downloadable crippled versions would not be open in the Open Source or Open Content sense either.

As a library community, we can build on the traditions from the analog world of sharing widely even as we move into the digital world. We see this as why we get public support.

Lets build that open world.

We would be happy to work with UMich to support its open activities.

-brewster

April 25, 2008 4:59 pm
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jpwilkin on paragraph 2:

I think this is precisely the sort of rhetoric that’s muddying the waters right now, Brewster. There is no uniformly defined constituency called “researchers” who “require downloadability.” I know ‘em, I work with ‘em, and I know that’s not true. Access (and openness) is defined on a continuum. What we do is extraordinarily open and has made a tremendous difference for research and the in the lives of ordinary users. This sort of differentiation in the full accessibility of source materials is one of the key incentives that has brought organizations like Google and Microsoft to the table, and if it didn’t make sense, the OCA wouldn’t go to pains to stipulate that “all contributors of collections can specify use restrictions on material that they contribute.” Is more open better? Damned right. That’s one reason why for two years we’ve been offering OCA the texts Michigan digitizes as part of its own in-house work. But is what we’re doing with Google texts open? Absolutely.
go to text » Reply »
April 26, 2008 8:43 am
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Carl Malamud :

I’m not sure I get all these degrees of open … let me add a hypothetical if that helps clear this up.

What if a bunch of students in Ann Arbor organized themselves into a Democracy Club and started grabbing all the public domain documents they can find on MBooks and uploading them to some site such as scribd.com or pacer.resource.org for recycling? If the docs are open (and we’re just talking “works of the government” which are clearly in the public domain), would you consider that a mis-use of your system and try and stop it or would that fall inside of the open side of the open continuum we’re all trying to mutually understand in this dialogue?

Hypothetically speaking, of course. I’m not advocating that students form a Democracy Club and crawl your site to recycle public domain materials, I’m just trying to understand if the restrictions on reuse are passive ones like obscuring how to download files or if these are active restraints where the library is involved in enforcing restrictions on access to public domain materials.

Again, I’m not at all suggesting that students interested in furthering the public domain form Democracy Clubs and start harvesting documents from the public taxpayer-financed web sites at UMich and re-injecting them into the public domain.
go to text » Reply »
April 26, 2008 7:13 pm
0
John Wilkin and others on Openness and its opposites | Au Courant on whole page :

[…] Kahle’s as “theoretical,” when John meant polemical.” John has a nice blog post on the on the subject, with responses and rejoinders from both Brewster and from Carl Malamud. The […]
go to text » Reply »
April 26, 2008 4:01 pm
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jpwilkin on paragraph 2:

What if? If there really were that sort of interest, I’d hope that we’d have a chance to talk to the students and make sure they were aware of powerful options to make “in situ” use of the openly accessible government documents that they find in MBooks. I’d want to make sure they knew that in late June we’re releasing a “collection builder” application that will allow them to leverage our investment in permanent (did I say permanent?) curation of these materials so that the materials could be found and used after the current crop of students comes and goes, that the students could add to the body of works as more get digitized from our collection and the collections of other partner libraries (e.g., Wisconsin’s are coming in soon) and that we would want to hear what sorts of services (an RSS feed of newly added gov docs?) might aid them in their work. I’d want to talk to them about the issue of authority and quality, and would see if there were ways that their efforts could help improve the works in MBooks rather than dispersing the effort to copies in multiple places. And if they needed computational resources to do things like data mining, I’d let them know that we’re glad to help. But if none of this satisfied them, would we try to stop them? Assuming Google digitized the works, according to our agreement (4.4.1) we would make “reasonable efforts … to prevent [them] from … automated and systematic downloading” of the content, something we currently do and which does not undermine the ability of those same students to read, search and print the documents. Lots of openness there.
...

What Wilkin dismisses as "rhetoric" and "polemical" is a real-world difference: usability that enables imaginative and powerful uses of materials that we (in our modest 2008 mindsets) can't yet imagine. Free Software, like liberal democracy, is constitutionally structured to limit binding future initiatives. Let's face it. We don't know what people of 2058 will want to do with digitized material. So let's avoid proprietary formats (because they die), corporate control (because corporations fail and morph), and closed standards and code (because they limit improvisation and correction).

Wilkin is just as polemical as Kahle (not that there is anything wrong with that). His rhetoric just rests on the default polemic of our age: proprietary neoliberalism.

Now here is where it gets all slippery. Let's face it, Google's ambitions and Michigan's hyperbole about their partnership is just as polemical (if not more) than Brewster's OCA principles. The difference is that we are so used to proprietary and neoliberal models being the default mechanisms for getting anything done in the university and library worlds that we discount a bold a profound distinction that Brewster is trying to import: Freedom.

When librarians are bound by nondisclosure agreements from discussing a major project involving state resources, we cannot pretend that there is meaningful freedom. When libraries are restricted in what they can do with copies of their own materials (in other library-Google contracts; not Michigan's), we can't pretend that there is meaningful freedom. When one secretive company claims as its mission ("organize the world's information") and public university libraries defer to its hegemony rather than building alternatives and challenging its troubling policies, we can't pretend that availability equals meaningful openness, let alone freedom.

So while "openness" lies on a continuum (see John Willinsky's essential book, The Access Principle, for a brilliant discussion of all these issues), "freedom" is not so smooth a concept. There are degrees of freedom. But they are more staggered and clearly defined than those of openness.

This is the main reason that Richard Stallman resists the clever branding of "open source." It invites all sorts of slipperiness at the expense of the public good. I think Stallman sacrifices many useful partners and allies for idealogical purity. But that is not Kahle's problem. His problem is that his project is dwarfed by one of the richest institutions in the history of the world and he can't get a fair hearing without being dismissed as "polemical." Yeesh. If only.

Paul Courant calls Kahle's issues "the perfect being the enemy of the good." If only it were that simple. It's actually the case of the not-as-good-as-advertised crowding out the could-be-great-if-everyone-would-start-asking-tough-questions
-and-work-toward-a-common-and-open-solution.

WWW 2008: Refereed Papers:

Paper Title: PageRank for Product Image Search

Authors:

* Yushi Jing(Georgia Institute of Technology and Google, Inc.)
* Shumeet Baluja(Google Inc.)

Abstract:
In this paper, we cast the image-ranking problem into the task of identifying "authority" nodes on an inferred visual similarity graph and propose an algorithm to analyze the visual link structure that can be created among a group of images. Through an iterative procedure based on the PageRank computation, a numerical weight is assigned to each image; this measures its relative importance to the other images being considered. The incorporation of visual signals in this process differs from the majority of large-scale commercial-search engines in use today. Commercial search-engines often solely rely on the text clues of the pages in which images are embedded to rank images, and often entirely ignore the content of the images themselves as a ranking signal. To quantify the performance of our approach in a real-world system, we conducted a series of experiments based on the task of retrieving images for 2000 of the most popular products queries. Our experimental results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results.

Get the paper here.

Doug K explains:

... The real question is how to arrive at a health-care system that doesn't punish the sick. The answer is technically simple but politically difficult. It starts with acknowledging that health care isn't a market. More accurately, it is a market, but the good being traded is healthy individuals, not health care itself. Senator Edward's health-care proposal (or Sen. Clinton's, as it's much the same thing) is a good first step. Once we have a system where we need not fear the database, we can proceed to establish evidence-based medicine.

Until that time, I will fervently oppose all attempts to establish a database of medical records. The incentives in our current system are so perverse, that the database will be very dangerous to our health.

A secondary issue is one of simple data gathering. According to the optimistic hurrahs of Microsoft,
"People want to be able to collect, and securely store, and share their private health care information which is today scattered all over the place, with doctor A and doctor B and hospital C, and wherever they were born."
Lovely. How do they propose to extract that information from doctors and hospitals ? For them, that data is part of their competitive advantage. Whenever I get tests or procedures done (and I've had a lot recently) the results are kept secret from me: sent only to my doctor and doubtless a variety of financially interested parties, insurance companies, and so on. On a few occasions kindly nurses or technicians have actually shared the information with me, but that's the exception. For the most part an inquiry as to obtaining the technical details is treated with a kind of amazed wondering contempt by the administrative staff....

I could not agree more. But we are still stuck with a political dilemma. We are not getting single-payer health care in the United States (which means, of course, that about a fifth of all Americans are not getting health care any time soon and the rest of us get crappy health care at the highest possible prices). That's the sad truth.

Additionally, we are unlikely to get a Clinton/Edwards version of expensive universality any time soon.

And, we are unlikely to stifle Microsoft's, Google's, and the Cleveland Clinic's efforts to create digital health databases.

So what are our political option? Do we refuse to intervene to push for necessary regulations on what Google and Microsoft are doing in hopes that further disasters generate the widespread political will for single-payer health care? Do we sacrifice the health and security of millions for the possibility of a better system someday?

This is one of the classic conundrums of incremental liberalism. There is no easy answer.

I am visiting YouTube and Google this week. Yesterday I hung out at YouTube. It turns out there are NOT little people dancing behind the screen! It's some sort of digital magic, instead!

Oddly, on "take your daughter/son/other to work day" at YouTube, the kids get PONY RIDES!

PONY RIDES!

That's very nice. But if kids think that mom or dad get pony rides every day, that sort of defeats the purpose of "take your daughter/son/other to work day."

NEJM:

Tectonic Shifts in the Health Information Economy

Kenneth D. Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., and Isaac S. Kohane, M.D., Ph.D.

In a recent shift in the health information landscape, large corporations are seeking an integral and transformative role in the management of health care information. The mechanism by which this transformation is likely to take place is through the creation of computer platforms that will enable patients to manage health data in personally controlled health records (PCHRs). Two types of large corporations are involved. Technology companies such as Google and Microsoft see business opportunities,1 whereas Fortune 100 companies in their role as employers2,3 see efficiencies and cost savings when patients can securely store, access, augment, and share their own copy . . .

From the New York Times story about the NEJM article:

... Today, most patient records remain within the health system — in doctors’ offices, hospitals, clinics, health maintenance organizations and pharmacy networks. Federal regulations govern how personal information can be shared among health institutions and insurers, and the rules restrict how such information can be mined for medical research. One requirement is that researchers have no access to individual patients’ identities, although there can sometimes be exceptions to those restrictions, if they are approved by an independent ethical review panel.

Under the current system, individuals can request their own health records, but it is often a cumbersome process because information is scattered across several institutions.

As part of a push toward greater individual control of health information, Microsoft and Google have recently begun offering Web-based personal health records. The journal article’s authors describe a new “personalized, health information economy” in which consumers tell physicians, hospitals and other providers what information to send into their personal records, stored by Microsoft or Google. It is the individual who decides with whom to share that information and under what terms.

But Microsoft and Google, the authors note, are not bound by the privacy restrictions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or Hipaa, the main law that regulates personal data handling and patient privacy. Hipaa, enacted in 1996, did not anticipate Web-based health records systems like the ones Microsoft and Google now offer.

The authors say that consumer control of personal data under the new, unregulated Web systems could open the door to all kinds of marketing and false advertising from parties eager for valuable patient information. ...

Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

April 18, 2008, 4:42 pm How Big Is Google? Here’s Another Measure

By Saul Hansell
Google

Rory Cellan-Jones, a blogger for the BBC, calculates an interesting statistic from Google’s earnings release Thursday.

Google earned $803 million, about £407 million, in Britain in the first quarter. If you assume that rate won’t grow, that makes £1.6 billion for the year. And since Google’s British earnings are up 40 percent from a year ago, it is a safe bet it will grow.

That means Google will overtake the ITV television network as the biggest seller of advertising in Britain this year, Mr. Cellan-Jones figures. ITV sold about £1.5 billion of advertising last year.

Britain’s biggest commercial television business — the original “license to print money” — is about to be overtaken by an American upstart which only arrived in the UK in 2001.

That should be no surprise. As best as I can tell, Google sells more advertising than any company in the world. This year Morgan Stanley estimates Google’s total advertising revenue will be $21.9 billion. Excluding the payments it makes to companies that display its ads, Google’s total ad revenue will be $15.7 billion.

Time Warner, the largest media company in the world, earned $8.8 billion in advertising revenue last year. Viacom had $4.7 billion in ad revenue last year. I’m still working through the numbers at the other big conglomerates, but it seems clear that none of them sold more than $16 billion in advertising. ...