Autonomy and Social Media
May 28, 2009
Exalead, according to my search archive, was the first vendor out of the blocks with a social search function. You can find that system on the Exalead Labs’s Web page here. I recall a demo from IBM several years ago in which social network analysis of content was featured, but I have a tough time keeping track of what trend Big Blue surfs from quarter to quarter.
Now Autonomy is now in the social game as well. You can read Phil Muncaster’s “Autonomy Launches Social Media Analysis Tool” here. The new system is called Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis, which like other Autonomy’s products integrates the IDOL technology.
For me, the most interesting part of the write up was:
The technology uses clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling to understand sentiment, and can present marketers with a richer and more contextual set of data than traditional keyword spotting tools may be able to, according to Autonomy.
You can locate more information at www.autonomy.com.
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
Google Maps and User-Created Content
May 28, 2009
WebProNews here published a story that provides some color to the symbiotic relationship between Google the service provider and users who create content. Doug Caverly’s “Google Maps Embraces More user Generated Content” provides a good example of how Google as a platform pops an umbrella over what were separate publishing functions. Mr. Caverly wrote:
Three months ago, Google took a big step by “graduating” data on 16 countries from Google Map Maker to Google Maps. Now, comparatively speaking, the company’s performed a long jump by following suit with another 64 countries and territories. This move means that the maps are transitioning from a smallish, private sort of program into public view. It acts as a big endorsement of user-generated content, since regular users are indeed the source of all the geographic info. And they’ve contributed a whole lot.
The question in my mind is, “When does the next shoe drop?”
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
Exclusive Interview with Bjorn Laukli, Comperio Search
May 28, 2009
I met Bjorn Laukli about nine years ago. At that time he was the chief technical officer of Fast Search & Transfer. In February 2008 I had Fast Search executives slated to participate in the Search Wizards Speak series here, but the Microsoft deal was underway and the lawyers pulled the plug. I ran into Mr. Laukli at a recent meeting, and I learned that he is now affiliated with Comperio Search, a specialist in the Fast Enterprise Search Platform. I was able to get some of his time on May 26, 2009. The result is a Search Wizards Speak interview. Highlights of the conversation with Mr Laukli included:
An observation that consolidation in the enterprise search sector will continue. Mr. Laukli said:
I think you will continue to see some consolidations, Microsoft acquiring FAST, Omniture buying Mercado etc. This trend will continue as larger companies are trying to strengthen their position within search, bring in new technologies that will bring value to their overall offering, or increasing their customer base.
He also said about the number of new companies entering the search sector:
Certainly, there are many new companies entering the search and content processing space. I still feel there are opportunities for most of them to succeed as long as they are able to differ themselves in some ways. This can be done either by focusing on certain segments of the market, or, deliver new capabilities as an addition to existing platforms.
You can read the full interview on Search Wizards Speak here. More information about Comperio, a Fast Certified Partner, is available from www.comperiosearch.com.
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
Yahoo 1.1 Revealed
May 28, 2009
At the categorical affirmative “All Things Digital” Conference, Yahoo 1.1 was revealed. In an interview with Carol Bartz (Yahoo’s new CEO) conducted by Kara Swisher, information about Yahoo Version 1.1 was reveled. A blizzard of posts appeared on Megite.com but I gravitated to John Paczkowski’s “Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: We’re a Different Company than Google” here. For me, the killer comment in Mr. Paczkowski’s story was this explanation of Yahoo:
We use great technology to deliver search, content, advertising.
Mr. Paczkowski included a remarkable bit of local color, noting that Kara pointed out that former Yahooligan Terry Semel and Yahooliganette Sue Decker were in the audience.
Other points I thought interesting included:
- Ms. Bartz wants improve and integrate Yahoo’s services
- Yahoo email has to be made more simple
- Social network services are of interest
- Buying online ads must be made less complex
- Google “does not have the positioning and reach” of Yahoo.
In my opinion, Yahoo has a technology challenge. No large company will have homogeneous systems. The key is to have more homogeneity than stray cats and dogs. My analysis of Yahoo considers ads, traffic, and brand, but the iceberg that sank the Titantic looked small until it sank the ship. Yahoo’s iceberg is the cost of its technology; that is, there are costs that are tough to control due to the tech cats and dogs. As a result, Yahoo has fewer degrees of tech freedom and runs the risk of a cost spike that can puncture the hull of Yahoo 1.1.
Time may be running out, and it is not clear if a sugar daddy can rescue Yahoo. Yahoo is hanging tough. Yahoo may be following the same path that AOL took in its quest to become the Internet portal of choice. Didn’t work at AOL. Will it work at Yahoo? Ms. Bartz has confidence and a great track record. That technology iceberg is a threat that may be tough for a management strategist to deal with. I am not so sure about the “great technology” assertion. It’s Yahoo 1.1., not Yahoo 2.0 in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
The Google Anthill
May 27, 2009
I find the metaphor – ah, well – inspiring. Ants evoke an image of a mass of workers carrying out the dictates of either genes or a very influential boss ant. If you want to know more about the anthill analogy, you will want to read “Watch the Google Anthill Move toward Social and Real Time” by Robert Scoble here. My recollection is that ant colonies move. The ant hills – particularly the big, hard ones in Brazil – don’t move. Enough nit picking. The key point in Mr. Scoble’s essay, in my opinion, was this passage:
Google is more like an ant hill. One powered by 20% time which is how the ants find out where the food is. Heck, enough of Google’s ants have left to join Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, that it should be clear by now there’s some new tasty food bits that they aren’t yet munching on. Heck, Friendfeed should be a major embarrassment to Google since that 14-person team has at least five Google superstars on it (the guy who came up with the idea for Google not to be evil started the company. That’s Paul Buchheit and he also ran the Gmail team. Also on the Friendfeed team is the guy who ran the Google Talk team, the guy who ran Google Maps team, the designer for a whole bunch of Googley products, and the guy who ran the backend team on Gmail). Over at Facebook and Twitter I keep running into people who used to work at Google too.
Two thoughts:
First, maybe the ants are moving to a new colony, intermarrying, and creating a new species, a super social nerd ant and colony?
Second, ants move on when the food supply is exhausted.
Is this happening at Google?
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
Social Search: Nay Sayers Eat Twitter Pie
May 27, 2009
My comments will be carried along on the flow of Twitter commentary today. This post is to remind me that at the end of May 2009, the Google era (lots of older Web content) has ended and the Twitter or real time search era has arrived. Granted, the monetization, stability, maturity, and consumerization has not yet climbed on the real time search bandwagon. But I think these fellow travelers are stumbling toward the rocket pad.
Two articles mark this search shift. Sure, I know I need more data, but I want to outline some ideas here. I am not (in case you haven’t noticed) a real journalist. Save the carping for the folks who used to have jobs and are now trying to make a living with Web logs.
The first article is Michael Arrington’s “Topy Search Launches: Retweets Are the New Currency of the Web” here. The key point for me was not the particular service. What hooked me were these two comments in the article:
- “Topsy is just a search engine. That has a fundamentally new way of finding good results: Twitter users.” This is a very prescient statement.
- “Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes, retweets are the new currency on the Web.”
My thoughts on these two statements are:
- Topsy may not be the winner in this sector. The idea, however, is very good.
- The time interval between major shifts in determining relevance are now likely to decrease. Since Google’s entrance, there hasn’t been much competition for the Mountain View crowd. The GOOG will have to adapt of face the prospect of becoming another Microsoft or Yahoo.
- Now that Topsy is available, others will grab this notion and apply it to various content domains. Think federated retweeting across a range of services. The federated search systems have to raise the level of their game.
The second article was Steve Rubel’s “Visits to Twitter Search Soar, Indicating Social Search Has Arrived” here. I don’t have much to add to Mr. Rubel’s write up. The key point for me was:
I think there’s something fundamentally new that’s going on here: more technically savvy users (and one would assume this includes journalists) are searching Twitter for information. Presumably this is in a tiny way eroding searches from Google. Mark Cuban, for example, is one who is getting more traffic to his blog from Twitter and Facebook than Google.
For the purposes of this addled goose, the era of Googzilla seems to be in danger of drawing to a close. The Googlers will be out in force at their developers’ conference this week. I will be interested to see if the company will have an answer to the social search and real time search activity. With Google’s billions, it might be easier for the company to just buy tomorrow’s winners in real time search. Honk.
Stephen Arnold, May 27, 2009
Direct Mail Nuked by Search, Social Networks
May 27, 2009
Digital information, search, and social networks are disruptive. Publishers understand the disruption, and most publishers are working hard to find a way to manage the opportunities disruption creates. Gavin O’Malley’s “Direct Mail Doomed, Long Live Email” here gave me a fresh perspective on disruption in a sector tangential to publishing. Mr. O’Malley wrote:
After making quick work of print newspapers, and the Yellow Pages industry, “The kudzu-like creep of the Internet is about to claim its third analog victim,” warns a new report from research firm Borrell Associates. The victim? “The largest and least-read of all print media: Direct mail.”
Referencing a research report, Mr. O’Malley provides a number of useful data points; for example:
- “A 39% decline for direct mail over the next five years, from $49.7 billion in annual ad spending in 2008 to $29.8 billion by the end of 2013.”
- “In fact, last year, email advertising quietly moved to the No. 1 online ad category spot, surpassing all other forms of interactive advertising.”
- “We’re expecting local e-mail advertising to grow from $848 million in 2008, to $2 billion in 2013, as more small businesses abandon direct mail couponing and promotional orders and turn to a more measurable and less costly medium, e-mail.”
Useful write up.
Stephen Arnold, May 27, 2009
LBS II: Query Processing Performance Degrading
May 27, 2009
Question: When we brought our search system online a month ago, query processing was snappy. Now it is noticeably slower. What’s going on? How do we speed up performance?
Answer to this Little Baffler: The addled goose needs much more information about your specific implementation of search. You will want to take a close look at some hot spots that crop up, regardless of the system. Here are some places to start your investigation:
- Check the log files for spikes. Increased usage and / or users sending more complex queries can choke a system. If you have experienced spikes, you may have to throw hardware at the problem, add bandwidth, or take more drastic steps such as refusing queries under certain conditions.
- Look at the hardware, RAM, and storage for the query processing server or cluster. Ask your service provider or your colleagues what’s under the hood. Search vendor specifications are often understated. One immediate fix is to add RAM. Other hardware architectural changes may be necessary if the initial set up in not up to snuff.
- Verify that indexing and crawling are taking place on dedicated machines. If you are sharing servers or running a sub optimized virtual environment, you may see the symptom as slow query processing and not realize that the cause is the implementation of the indexing and crawling subsystems.
How common are performance problems in enterprise search? Very common.
Stephen Arnold, May 27, 2009
Social Search and Security
May 27, 2009
Might these terms comprise an oxymoron? Some organizations are plunging forward with social networking, social search, and open collaboration. You may find Vanessa Ho’s “Risks Associated with Web 2.0” here a useful article. She summarizes the results of a study by an outfit called Dynamic Markets conducted for WebSense. With a sample of 1,300 business professionals, the report contained some interesting information. This statement from the article struck a chord in me:
“The thing about the web is once it is out there, it is out there [forever],” Meizlik [a WebSense executive’] noted. Other findings of the survey include 80 per cent of respondents reported feeling confident in their organizations web security, despite the fact that the numbers show that they are ill-equipped to protect against Web 2.0 security threats. For example, 68 per cent do not have real-time analysis of web content; 59 per cent cannot prevent URL re-directs; 53 per cent do not have security solutions that stop spyware from sending information to bots; 52 per cent do not have solutions to detect embedded malicious code on trusted websites; and 45 per cent do not have data loss prevention technology to stop company-confidential information from being uploaded to sites like blogs and wikis, hosted on unauthorized cloud computing sites or leaked as a result of spyware and phishing attacks.
I learned from a chirpy 30 year old conference manager last week that security is not an issue of interest to that conference attendee audience. Yep, those 30 somethings set me straight again.
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
Open Access Pricing
May 27, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a copy of a presentation given by Andrew Wray, Group Publisher, Institute of Physics. He gave a talk called “How the Web Has Transformed Scientific Journals” in June 2007. I flipped through the PDF and noted one slide that struck me as important in my online research. You can find the talk online here. The information I noted appeared on slide foils 35 and 36.
Mr. Wray pointed out that new pricing models for online journals could have these characteristics:
- Discounts to subscribers who take only the electronic edition of the publication
- Tiered pricing by size of university subscribing to a journal
- Discounts for consortia
- Discounts or free access for small institutions or institutions in developing countries.
I also noted four interesting points on slide 36. He noted that the Web facilitates “open access models”. The brief description of this notion provides a check list of ways to generate revenue from digital publications; specifically:
- The author pays
- Institution pays a “membership fee” to join the publisher’s community
- Sponsorship which I think means an organization pays the publisher
- Advertising; that is, something like the Google model.
As I thought about these points, several ideas occurred to me:
First, Google at any point in time could morph from a “finding” service to a full-scale publishing service. Google has the intake, monetization, and distribution mechanisms in place, just not knit into a digital publishing enterprise.
Second, traditional scholarly publishing companies may find themselves in a tough spot if a sponsorship for a particular line of research runs afoul of a social or regulatory guideline. I don’t want to get into specifics of journals publishing material that may not hold up to additional scholarly scrutiny, but sponsorships have upsides and downsides.
Finally, the shift to real time research may disrupt some of the expectations about advertising. Are scholarly publishers ready for the dynamic free-for-all that may be emerging for new social information services. A scholarly article, like a video or MP3, can be Tweeted. Ads may not work in that medium as they do in Web search.
Stephen Arnold, May 27, 2009
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