Twitter: Bombed Out of Existence
March 18, 2009
Interesting write up and comments here. The post that caught my attention was “Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?” by Twine’s founder Nova Spivack. Twitter as an application does not fascinate me. Twitter as an indication of what can be done with pervasive connections and real time messaging does interest me. If you want a good run down of the weaknesses of the present Twitter, check out this write up and be sure to review the comments.
Stephen Arnold, March 18, 2009
Trophy Kids: Search Consultants of Tomorrow
March 18, 2009
As an old addled goose, I find the uptick in newly minted experts amusing. Nothing is easier than getting a LinkedIn account and surfing for consulting gigs. Some of the trophy kids are already in the work force. These folks find joy and compensation in Delphic pronouncements like “Search is easy” or “CMS, business intelligence, and search are converging.” Give me a break. I thought I was alone in the pond when I quack about these intellectual waifs. Nope. None other than the BBC of botnet fame has documented the trophy kids. You can read “Warning over Narcissistic Pupils” here. The core of the story is that every child learns he or she is wonderful, brilliant, and talented. For me the most interesting comment was:
Dr Carol Craig said children were being over-praised and were developing an “all about me” mentality.
These folks will make wonderful search and content processing consultants. Easy subjects, easy money.
Stephen Arnold, March 18, 2009
AWS and the Coming Search Price Wars
March 18, 2009
Amazon Web Services is not about search. AWS is about “sucking the air out of the room”. Translating this phrase used by the world’s smartest man (Jeff Bezos) is beyond the addled goose. I think it means buying the market so competitors will die from lack of revenue. You can read an interesting discussion of price changes at AWS here. The article is “AWS “Sucks the Air Out of the Room.” Cuts EC2 Costs by 50%” by Jonathan Siegal. There are some interesting tables, which suggest that moving certain services to the cloud make sense, save money, and minimize the need for expensive in house systems professionals. Mr. Siegal correctly points out that AWS is not for every organization. I agree.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
Open Source Business Intelligence
March 18, 2009
The interview with Marc Krellenstein, founder of Lucid Imagination, an open source search company, appears in this issue of Beyond Search (March 17, 2009). If you are a fan of open source, you will want to read “Business Intelligence is Broken – and Open Source Can Fix It” in Database Trends and Applications here. The article summarizes a survey’s findings. The author’s argument is similar to the one I made several years ago about enterprise search; that is, complexity, cost, and user dissatisfaction. One interesting comment in the article was:
Close to three out of four survey respondents cite issues that have hampered their BI efforts, led by poor data quality, the complexity of BI tools, lack of BI skill sets within organizations, and lack of management buy-in.
For me the most important comment in the article was:
Already, 28% of respondents that are using open source have implemented open source BI solutions on their premises. (This is equivalent to 10% of the total survey sample.) In 2 years, more than a third of open source users will be deploying BI as part of their portfolios.
Enterprise software vendors will point out that a survey does not a trend make. Denial is okay, but I think the open source options are going to benefit from the present economic downturn and the emergence of companies like Lucid Imagination, Tesuji, and Lemur Consulting who offer open source software and professional services.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
Facebook and a Canadian Court
March 17, 2009
Put this in the “risks of social networking” bucket. TheStar.com reported “Facebook User Poked by the Courts. Judge Rules Man Must Divulge What He’s Posted on Private Social Web site” here. TheStar.com said:
In a precedent-setting decision, a Toronto judge has ordered a man suing over injuries from a car accident to answer questions about content on his Facebook page that is off limits to the public.
For me the most important comment in the write up was:
A court can infer that Leduc’s Facebook site “likely contains some content relevant to the issue of how Mr. Leduc has been able to lead his life since the accident,” Brown [attorney] said. Brown said Leduc [defendant] can’t “hide behind self-set privacy controls” on a Web site that’s all about telling others about one’s life.
Interesting.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
Google Behavioral Opt Out
March 17, 2009
I have avoided the contextual and behavioral ad topic. The systems and methods appear in various Google open source documents, and you should dig them out. If you want to opt out of these programs, click here and download the Google Advertising Opt Out Cookie Plug In. Keep in mind that you will need to run the script if you flush your caches. The plug in works for Firefox 1.5 and higher. You will have to read the instructions and follow them for other browsers. You can learn how to extend the Google opt out here. I have no more to offer on this topic. This is not a search topic.
Stephen Arnold, March 14, 2009
Twitter Search Fail
March 17, 2009
For Twitter bashers, here’s a post for your collection. Navigate to BusinessInsider here and read “Twitter Search Not All That Useful at #SXSW”. For me the most interesting comment was:
But the #sxsw problem raises an interesting issue for real time search: If the firehose of information is already unmanageable, how will anyone make sense of anything if Twitter becomes as big as Facebook? Interestingly, both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have recently dismissed the idea of incorporating real time search into their offerings.
Yep, sounds a bit like the dead tree publishing crowd explaining that online was a trivial technology. Might be an opportunity for those less eager to dismiss real time text flows in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
Marc Krellenstein Interview: Inside Lucid Imagination
March 17, 2009
Open source search is gaining more and more attention. Marc Krellenstein, one of the founders of Lucid Imagination, a search and services firm, talked about the company’s technology with Stephen E. Arnold, ArnoldIT.com. Mr. Krellenstein was the innovator behind Northern Light’s search technology, and he served as the chief technical officer for Reed Elsevier, where he was responsible for search.
In an exclusive interview, Mr. Krellenstein said:
I started Lucid in August, 2007 together with three key Lucene/Solr core developers – Erik Hatcher, Grant Ingersoll and Yonik Seeley – and with the advice and support of Doug Cutting, the creator of Lucene, because I thought Lucene/Solr was the best search technology I’d seen. However, it lacked a real company that could provide the commercial-grade support and other services needed to realize its potential to be the most used search software (which is what you’d expect of software that is both the best core technology and free). I also wanted to continue to innovate in search, and believed it is easier and more productive to do so if you start with a high quality, open source engine and a large, active community of developers.
Mr. Krellenstein’s technical team gives the company solid open source DNA. With financial pressures increasing and many organizations expressing dissatisfaction with mainstream search solutions, Lucid Imagination may be poised to enjoy rapid growth.
Mr. Krelllenstein added:
I think most search companies that fail do so because they don’t offer decisively better and affordable software than the competition and/or can’t provide high quality support and other services. We aim to provide both and believe we are already working with the best and most affordable software. Our revenue comes not only from services such as training but also from support contracts and from value-add software that makes deploying Lucene/Solr applications easier and makes the applications better.
You can read the full text of the interview on the ArnoldIT.com Web site here. Search Wizards Speak is a collection of 36 candid interviews with movers and shakers in search, content processing, and business intelligence. Instead of reading what consultants say about a company’s technology, read what the people who developed the search and content processing systems say about their systems. Interviews may be reprinted and distributed without charge. Attribution and a back link to ArnoldIT.com and the company whose executive is featured in the interview are required. Stephen E. Arnold provides these interviews as a service to those interested in information retrieval.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
Subsidies: One Way to Save Dead Tree Outfits
March 17, 2009
Patricians deserve subsidies. After centuries as patrons and arbiter of taste, now publishers have hit upon a sure fire way to generate revenues–subsidies. The TechDirt article “Content Companies Demand Subsidies from ISPs… While ISPs Demand Subsidies from Content Companies” caught my attention. You must read the story here. The point is that content companies want those in the digital food chain to pay them. Those in the digital food chain want the content companies to pay them. Is this a stalemate. I found this comment interesting:
The ISPs think that it’s the network that is the most important thing, and the content providers should be paying their way to use it. Meanwhile, the content companies think that it’s their content that makes the networks valuable, so the ISPs should be paying extra to offer their content. In reality, they’re both wrong.
I am not sure Internet service providers are off base. If I put my content on a third party system, I expect to pay for that service. I am a publishers of the lowest order, but I pay a couple of ISPs. I don’t have a problem with that. The notion that an ISP should pay a content provider to provide a service for the content provider rubs me the wrong way. When I pay, I have control. Subsidies for content providers are little more than vanity plays in my opinion. If I pay someone who writes for me, I own the content. I don’t expect anyone to subsidize me. Third parties can buy my time or pay me for a report, but I am not comfortable with a subsidy and those who want subsidies strike me as an order of entitlement diptera.
Stephen Arnold,
Voice Web Sites: New Frontier for Search
March 16, 2009
The Economic Times (India) reported that IBM has developed a technology for voice only Web sites. The story “IBM Develops a Technology That Will Allow Users to Talk to Web” here reported:
“People will talk to the web and the web will respond. The research technology is analogous to the Internet. Unlike personal computers it will work on mobile phones where people can simply create their voice sites,” IBM India Research Laboratory Associate Director Manish Gupta said.
The notion of a spoken Web in interesting. The question I have is, “What technology will one use to search these sites?” I find that as I age, certain frequencies become difficult for me to hear and certain speech patterns become unparseable for me. Has IBM a breakthrough technology to address the challenges of searching voice only Web sites?
Stephen Arnold, March 15, 2009
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