Wave: Functionality Questioned
June 6, 2009
The Chicago Sun Times’s Andy Ihnatko asked a killer question: “Google’s Wave of the Future Is Genius, but Will It Work?”. You can read the article here. You will experience the Sun Times’s latency, but don’t despair. The page should render eventually.
Mr. Ihnatko wrote:
Google seems to be doing everything right. They’re defining Wave, but then they’re more or less letting go of it. The sole benefit that they seem to be retaining is their 18-month head start on the rest of the developer community.
Quite an endorsement for a demo. I was hoping that some doubt might surface. No pun intended. At least Bing.com is a service anyone can use. I remember the old jokes about demos. Might apply here.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009
Nstein Explains Its To-Be System
June 6, 2009
I have difficulty categorizing the Canadian company Nstein. Several years ago, I understood the company was in the content processing business. Then the company moved into digital asset management. DAM is a method of handling images and videos. I spoke with an Nstein manager or consultant at the Boston Search Engine Meeting in April 2009, and I learned that indeed Nstein offered each of these services. Okay, I thought. The company is doing what it has to do to meet the needs of customers.
Today I received two news releases, so I assume I am on the media list twice. The only problem is that I am not media. I am an addled goose, and I read these unsolicited messages with a critical eye. Here’s what jumped out at me:
- This phrase struck me as silly: “announced the planned release of TME 5, a feature rich upgrade to its award-winning Text Mining Engine.” Nstein is telling me that it is planning a release of its text mining engine or TME. But TME is not just a text mining engine. It is an award winning engine. And the upgrade is “feature rich”. Wow. I remember studying the Latin verb for this type of wild future perfect projection of intent. Dead language and dead assertion for me.
- The news release said, “TME 5 gives them unprecedented flexibility and control to support any business model, and to reap highest premium ad rates possible through the micro-segmentation that TME allows.” I like the categorical affirmative. Before I flunked logic, I thought categorical affirmatives were possible. My best friend informed me that categorical affirmatives are risky business in logic class. Black swans, mathematical proofs, and other aberrations have to be considered. No wonder he got an “A”.
- The upgrade * will * include hooks to the Semantic Web, taxonomy administration, methods to determine the “aboutness of a document”, etc. These are complicated issues, and I have to remember that when I ground out the first three editions of the Enterprise Search Report (2004 to 2006), Beyond Search (2007), Successful Enterprise Search Management (2009) and three Google monographs—whew—no vendor delivered this line up of text processing functionality. The reason? The cost, time, babysitting, and computational cost were too rich even for government agencies. Some vendors overambitious systems just caused their search supertankers to run aground.
My suggestion to search vendors is to keep the news releases for members of the news media. I am an addled goose who is sometimes lucky enough to get paid for his analyses. I don’t send vendors unsolicited news releases. I have a 20 something use a PR distribution agency or I let my publishers flog my work. I don’t need multiple copies of news releases. In fact, with my Overflight system, I don’t need or want any news releases from search and text processing vendors.
But if you want to read this news release in full and talk to the Nstein sales professionals about their super system, click here. You can’t read my copies. I deleted them.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009
Monetizing Online Content
June 5, 2009
Short honk: I read with interest “Soon, You’ll Have to Pay for Hulu” here. The story in Daily Finance alleged that the free video service will change its spots. My take on the story is that video may be more easily converted to cash than text. Demographic and user preferences take precedent over tradition.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009
Bing Pun
June 5, 2009
Short honk: The folks at ZDNet are showing their sense of humor. Garett Rogers’ “Google Is in Bing Trouble” is a wry comment about Microsoft’s most recent attempt to close the gap in Web search. Mr. Rogers wrote here:
It’s unlikely Microsoft’s new search engine, or “decision engine” as they would like you to think of it, has a chance to topple Google at a game they have been dominating for many years. Ballmer takes a realistic approach to the situation and confesses that it’s not going to become the search leader overnight — it’s going to take time.
In my opinion, I struggle with the notion of a “decision engine”. Most of the people I have interviewed and surveyed tell me that search systems should provide answers. I want a low airfare. I see the fares and I buy the lowest priced fare. I suppose that’s a decision, but I like the notion of an answer or actionable information. “Decision” is a more pompous word, unlike Bing. Bing is down-home.
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2009
Ivory Tower Thinking about Bing
June 5, 2009
I met a fellow who gave me a copy of Technology Review, the slick magazine linked mysteriously to the the bloodstream of big thinkers and the wizards at MIT. (Tip: Don’t walk barefoot in the dorms. Trash on ground. I once cut my foot.) I told the generous person, “I don’t read print magazines regularly now.” I did read the online story today “What’s Microsoft’s Bing Strategy?” here by David Talbot. The article was okay, and I found this comment interesting:
when a user searches for certain broad and popular subjects (the band U2 or a health condition like diabetes, for example), Bing will show, in addition to the usual blue links, a navigation bar on the left-hand side that breaks down the results by category. Bing decides on these subsections based on previous combinations of queries; each one links to a secondary search. In the case of U2, these categories include “images,” “songs,” “tickets,” “merchandise,” “downloads,” “interviews,” and “video.” In the case of diabetes, Bing shows results in the following categories: “articles,” “symptoms,” “diet,” “complications,” “prevention,” and “test.”
I rarely run test queries for topics that are broad or popular. I wonder if the Technology Review team runs queries for ternary nonequilibrium phase diagram. Not when reviewing Bing I learned.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2009
Compare Bing and Google
June 5, 2009
Short honk: A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to SEA Munich. Click here and you can enter queries into each system and easily compare the results.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2009
Twitter Link Indexing
June 5, 2009
Today after my talk at the Gilbane content management conference in San Francisco, a person mentioned that Twitter was indexing links in Tweets. I said that I included this information in my Twitter Web log posts. But when I looked at my posts, I found that I had not been explicit. You can get more info at http://www.domaintweeter.com.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2009
MarkLogic: The Shift Beyond Search
June 5, 2009
Editor’s note: I gave a talk at a recent user group meeting. My actual remarks were extemporaneous, but I did prepare a narrative from which I derived my speech. I am reproducing my notes so I don’t lose track of the examples. I did not mention specific company names. The Successful Enterprise Search Management (SESM) reference is to the new study Martin White and I wrote for Galatea, a publishing company in the UK. MarkLogic paid me to show up and deliver a talk, and the addled goose wishes other companies would turn to Harrod’s Creek for similar enlightenment. MarkLogic is an interesting company because it goes “beyond search”. The firm addresses the thorny problem of information architecture. Once that issue is confronted, search, reports, repurposing, and other information transformations becomes much more useful to users. If you have comments or corrections to my opinions, use the comments feature for this Web log. The talk was given in early May 2009, and the Tyra Banks’s example is now a bit stale. Keep in mind this is my working draft, not my final talk.
Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to be at this conference. My topic is “Multi-Dimensional Content: Enabling Opportunities and Revenue.” A shorter title would be repurposing content to save and make money from information. That’s an important topic today. I want to make a reference to real time information, present two brief cases I researched, offer some observations, and then take questions.
Let me begin with a summary of an event that took place in Manhattan less than a month ago.
Real Time Information
America’s Top Model wanted to add some zest to their popular television reality program. The idea was to hold an audition for short models, not the lanky male and female prototypes with whom we are familiar.
The short models gathered in front of a hotel on Central Park South. In a matter of minutes, the crowd began to grow. A police cruiser stopped and the two officers were watching a full fledged mêlée in progress. Complete with swinging shoulder bags, spike heels, and hair spray. Every combatant was 5 feet six inches taller or below.
The officers called for the SWAT team but the police were caught by surprise.
I learned in the course of the nine months research for the new study written by Martin White (a UK based information governance expert) and myself that a number of police and intelligence groups have embraced one of MarkLogic’s systems to prevent this type of surprise.
Real-time information flows from Twitter, Facebook, and other services are, at their core, publishing methods. The messages may be brief, less than 140 characters or about 12 to 14 words, but they pack a wallop.
MarkLogic’s slicing and dicing capabilities open new revenue opportunities.
Here’s a screenshot of the product about which we heard quite positive comments. This is MarkMail, and it makes it possible to take content from real-time systems such as mail and messaging, process them, and use that information to create opportunities.
Intelligence professionals use the slicing and dicing capabilities to generate intelligence that can save lives and reduce to some extent the type of reactive situation in which the NYPD found itself with the short models disturbance.
Financial services and consulting firms can use MarkMail to produce high value knowledge products for their clients. Publishing companies may have similar opportunities to produce high grade materials from high volume, low quality source material.
Time Sees Tweetness in Twitter
June 5, 2009
Fresh from dumping the AOL-batross, Time Magazine’s editors have developed a Tweet tooth. Twitter is useful and it warrants a round up of buzzwords. How does “ambient awareness” grab you? Maybe “Twittersphere”? You can read the beatific write up “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” here. Steven Johnson finds utility in the service that is getting close to three year olds and having a revenue model… sort of. Never mind, the point that struck me was:
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
I am all for real time messaging, but I come from the intercept and analysis side of the coin. The flow is interesting, but I want to find the diamond amidst the pebbles. I am not too interested in “a suspension bridge made of pebbles”. My engine rev with the notion that for the first time, non governmental entities can monitor, analyze, and extract information from real time flows.
Twitter is important to me because it provides a “nowness” lacking in Web log indexes and traditional Web indexes. I love Bing, Google and Yahoo, but at this time, the notion of real time gains extra dimensions of usefulness for quite different reasons that juice Time’s editors and Mr. Johnson.
With Twitter now quite obvious, why didn’t the managers of Time Magazine snag Twitter or create a Twitter like service? It is easier to write about three year old services than recognize their potential I opine. So much for Time’s ambient awareness of online.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2009
Google Is Square
June 4, 2009
Another edge of Google’s multidimensional data functionality poked its nose through the bushes in Mountain View. Google made Google Squared available. You can read about the service here. The official Google post is here. The GOOG said:
Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.
The technology is not new, but it is now publicly viewable. Is this a response to Wolfram Alpha? No, just a tiny bit of a far more potent platform for manipulating data. Stay tuned.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
