Open Source AdDetector Flags Native Advertising
September 24, 2014
Though many news sites allow ads to more or less (depending on the site) blend in with their real articles, this native advertising is usually easy enough to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Still, it can put a crimp in one’s skimming speed. Now, Google engineer Ian Webster offers the open source AdDetector, a browser plug-in that makes such “stories” more obvious. The plug-in is currently available for Chrome and Firefox. The description states:
“AdDetector reveals articles with corporate sponsors. This browser plugin puts a red banner above articles that may appear unbiased but are actually ads or press releases. Its goal is to improve transparency in media and on the web. Trusted by 14,000+ people, AdDetector spots ads in over 100 top newspapers and online publications. More sites are being added daily. If you’d like to see a site added, tweet, email, or use this form.”
The page includes screenshots of its banners in action. The software works by detecting sponsor markings on these pages, many of which are not visible to readers. There is no word on the plug-in’s error rate, but it seems bound to smooth the path for news speed-readers like me.
Cynthia Murrell, September 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Lucid Works: Pando Daily Sets the Record Straight
September 23, 2014
On LinkedIn I learned about this Pando Daily write up: “How Disgruntled Ex-Employees and Bad Reporting Hung LucidWorks Out to Dry.” I noted the Venture Beat analysis of Lucid Works in my post on September 6, 2014. My focus was the wild and crazy information from an “expert” about various factoids. You can read my reaction to the “Trouble at LucidWorks” story here.
The Pando Daily story comes at the issue in a different way. I was delighted to see that Pando found the “expert’s” comments a bit wobbly. There was an interesting run down about Lucid Works that seems to have come from a different point of view. In a way, the two stories—Venture Beat’s and Pando Daily’s—are a bit like the he said, she said information provided to police investigating a married couple’s disturbing the peace incident. I am no cop, so I can’t figure out who is correct and who is incorrect.
Pando takes this tack:
More accurately: It’s [Lucid Works] a startup, and this shit is hard.
I understand that search is hard, but is an eight year old company a start up? That time span baffled me. Coveo asserts that it too is a start up. Other search vendors dating from the implosion of the Big Five in 2006 also use the start up moniker.
the article points out that there are happy employees and positive investors. More money is likely to be needed. Pando Daily quotes a backer as saying:
We won’t start looking for an expansion round until early next year.
ElasticSearch has amassed about $90 million in funding. So LucidWorks may be thinking it needs the same scale of investment to take wing.
With regard to management, Pando Daily reports that the new top dog is the type of CEO who can deliver revenues. The new president—Will Smith—is described in this context:
On this point, VentureBeat seems oddly hung up on the idea that Hayes is a first-time CEO, perhaps failing to realize that Silicon Valley was (and continues to be) literally built on the success of first-time CEOs. Not to over egg the point, but Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs were first-time CEOs.
Pando Daily added:
As an early member of the Splunk team, Hayes is certainly more qualified for this job than 99 percent of the candidates out there, and more importantly, given that he didn’t found the company, he appears excited about the category.
Pando Daily reminded me that good start ups fire people. I understand the difference between the Silicon Valley approach to management and that practiced at Halliburton and Booz, Allen & Hamilton where I worked for many years. The idea of stability is not always congruent with the needs of a fast moving, pivoting technology company.
Pando Daily also takes issue with Venture Beat’s report that Lucid Works fumbled deals with some real big companies. Pando Daily asserted:
These accounts may or may not have any basis in reality, but they hardly indicate a failing company. The very nature of sales and business development is that deals fall apart all the time. Sometimes those are big deals, sometimes not. The facts are that LucidWorks counts Apple, Sears, Verizon, ADP, Raytheon, Zappos, Qualcomm, Ford, eHarmony, Cisco, and others among current customers.
My reaction to this is okay, but won’t naming these firms give ElasticSearch and other firms a target at which to shoot. Some content processing vendors like Palantir and Recorded Future don’t provide too much information about their customers.
On the all important revenue front, Pando Daily quoted the new top dog at Lucid Works as saying:
“$12 million in services revenue isn’t worth shit,” Hayes says. “But $12 million in product sales on subscription? That’s a $100 million business.”
I agree. Unless the subscriber terminates the subscription. As the competition among content processing vendors heats up, some firms will be quite aggressive in their attempts to take away business. Amazon, for example, seems to be struggling with search, but it could get its act together and offer both a good enough solution at very competitive prices. Amazon is not the only sharp toothed outfit in the pond.
Pando Daily tracked down its own search wizard. That poobah said:
Not everyone agrees that enterprise search is quite this sexy. One enterprise analyst, speaking to Pando on the condition of anonymity, describes it as “not that big of an end market.” But at the same time, it’s one that’s still out there for the taking. “There isn’t really a single company or set of companies that have dominant products in the space,” this analyst says. Google and Microsoft have entered the market (the latter via acquisition) with low-cost offerings that would seem to make the competitive environment more challenging for LucidWorks and other upstarts. But according to the company’s supporters, these products are targeting different, less big data-centric applications and are thus not a valid comparison.
If you have ever listened to opposing expert witnesses in a legal dispute, the same factoid gets very different treatment by each expert. That’s what makes subjective expertise difficult to interpret. My view is that enterprise search is struggling for credibility. Some of the value for information retrieval has been exhausted by vendors now out of business. These include Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Siderean, and others. Some credibility has been eroded as a result of the Fast Search & Transfer matter. The CEO was hit with a jail term and a ban on working in search for a couple of years. Then there is the on going dispute between Hewlett Packard and Autonomy. IDOL is an aging technology like Endeca. But the mud slinging about search and content processing does not improve the image of those working in this sector.
Consequently information retrieval companies are working overtime to explain their solutions in terms that do not invoke memories of Convera or Fast Search. Palantir is a data mining company. Record Future does predictive analytics. Coveo is eDiscovery and customer support. Search vendors are using a wide range of jargon to describe findability. Lucid Works is brave in using enterprise search with a dash of Big Data in its marketing.
Pando Daily said:
Journalism is tough, particularly in the technology sector. Reporters in this industry asked to cover complex and rapidly evolving companies that often take on hordes of venture cash and set outrageous performance expectations. Unseemly as it may be, stories of failure and calamity make for good scoops, and in these cases ex-employees and competitors often make the best sources. Unfortunately, they also can be the most biased sources and are often are in the best position to credibly lead a journalist astray. LucidWorks certainly has its warts and its scars. But that doesn’t make it trouble, that only makes it a startup.
One question remains: When does a company cease to be a start up and start to be a viable company? Is it one years, four years, or eight years? I just don’t know, but I think that companies that have been in business for almost a decade may not be start ups. Management with a start up mentality may not want to face the cold realities expected of established, stable firms. With Lucid’s technology originating with a community, management may be the issue to watch at Lucid Works. Good management can produce revenue, happy employees, and contented customers. Its absence is often evidenced by a lack of harmony.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2014
Concept Searching: More Smart Content Rah Rah
September 23, 2014
I read “Concept Searching Taxonomy Workflow Tool solving Migration, Security, and Records Management Challenges.” This is a news release and it can disappear at any time. Don’t hassle me if it is a goner. The write up walks me rapidly into the smart content swamp. The idea is that content without indexing is dumb content. Okay. Lots of folks are pitching the smart versus dumb content idea now.
The fix? Concept Searching provides a smart tool to make content intelligent; that is, include index terms. For the youngster at heart, “indexing” is the old school word for metadata.
The company’s news announcement asserts:
conceptTaxonomyWorkflow serves as a strategic tool, managing enterprise metadata to drive business processes at both the operational and tactical levels. It provides administrators with the ability to independently manage access, information management, information rights management, and records management policy application within their respective business units and functional areas, without the need for IT support or access to enterprise-wide servers. By effectively and accurately applying policy across applications and content repositories, conceptTaxonomyWorkflow enables organizations to significantly improve their compliance and information governance initiatives.
The product name is indeed a unique string in the Google index. The company asserts that the notion of a workflow is strategic. Not only is workflow strategic, it is also tactical. For some, this is a two for one deal that may be heard to resist. The tool allows administrators to perform what appears to be tasks I think of “editorial policy” or as the young at heart say, information governance.
The only issue for me is that the organizations with which I am familiar have pretty miserable information governance methods. What I find is that organizations have Balkanized methods for dealing with digital information. Examples of poor information governance fall readily to hand. The US court system removed public documents only to reinstate them. The IRS in the US cannot locate email. And when the IRS finds an archive of the email, the email cannot be searched. And, of course, there is Mr. Snowden. How many documents did he remove from NSA servers?
The notion that the CTW tool makes it possible to “apply policy across applications and content repositories” sounds absolutely fantastic to a person with indexing experience. There is a problem. Many organizations do not understand an editorial policy or are willing to do much more than react when something goes off the tracks. The reality is that the appetite for meaningful action is often not in commercial enterprises or government entities. Budgets remain tight. Reducing information technology budgets is often a more important goal than improve information technology.
What’s this mean?
My hunch is that Concept Searching is offering a product for an organization that [a] has an editorial policy in place or [b] wants to appear to be taking meaning steps toward useful information governance.
The president of Concept Searching is taking a less pragmatic approach to selling this tool. Martin Garland, according to the company story, states:
Managing metadata and auto-classifying to taxonomies provides high value in applications such as search, text analytics, and business social. But many forward thinking organizations are now looking to leverage their enterprise metadata and use it to improve business processes aligned with compliance and information governance initiatives. To accomplish this successfully, technologies such as conceptTaxonomyWorkflow must be able to qualify metadata and process the content based on enterprise policies. A key benefit of the product is its ease of use and rapid deployment. It removes the lengthy application development cycle and can be used by a large community of business specialists as well as IT.
The key benefit, for me, is that a well conceived and administered information policy eliminates risks of an information misstep. I would suggest that the Snowden matter was a rather serious misstep.
One assumes that companies have information policies, stand behind them, and keep them current. This strikes me as a quite significant assumption.
A similar message is now being pushed by Smartlogic, TEMIS, WAND, and other “indexing” companies.
Are these products delivering essentially similar functionality? Is any system indexing with less than a 10 percent error rate? Are those with responsibility for figuring out what to do with the flood of digital information equipped to enforce organization wide policies? And once installed, will the organization continue to commit resources to support tools that manage indexing? What happens if Microsoft Azure Search and Delve deliver good enough indexing and controls?
These are difficult questions to answer. Based on the pivoting content processing vendors are doing, most companies selling information solutions are trying to find a way to boost revenues in an exhausting effort to maintain stable cash flows.
Does anyone make an information governance tool that keeps track of what information retrieval companies market?
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2014
Quote to Note: Google Tells Europe to Embrace Disruption
September 23, 2014
The quote to note is from an EC Web page in an article called “Boosting Digital Europe.”
Europe needs to accept and embrace disruption. The old ways of doing things need to face competition that forces them to innovate. Uber, for example, is shaking up the taxi market — for the good. It offers riders convenience and cheaper fares. Understandably, the incumbent taxi industry is unhappy.
Context: French farmers setting fires. German political tensions increasing. Scotland’s voting to leave the United Kingdom. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. The PIIGS. Well, you get the idea.
And, of course, Google continues to wrestle with the EC’s decidedly un-Googley privacy concerns.
Google wants more disruption. That should play well in Austria and Switzerland, two nation states really into radical change.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2014
Mondeca: Content IQ
September 23, 2014
I reacted strongly to the IDC report about the knowledge quotient. IDC, as you know, is the home of the fellow who sold my content on Amazon without written permission. I learned that Mondeca is using a variant of “knowledge quotient.” This company’s approach taps the idea of the intelligence quotient of content.
I interpret content with a high IQ in a way that is probably not what Mondeca intended. Smart content is usually content that conveys information that I find useful. Modena, like other purveyors of indexing software, uses the IQ to refer to content that is indexed in a meaningful way. Remember if the users do not use the index terms, assigning these terms to a document does not help a user. Effective indexing helps the user find content. In the good old days of specialist indexing, users had to learn the indexing vocabulary and conventions. Today users just pump 2.7 words into a search box and feel lucky.
Like vendors of automated indexing systems and software, humans have to get into the mix.
One twist Modena brings to the content IQ notion is a process that helps a potential licensee answer the question, “How smart is your content?” For me, poorly indexed content is not smart. The content is simply poorly indexed.
I navigated to the “more information” link on the Content IQ page and learned that answering the question costs 5000 Euros, roughly $6,000.
Like the knowledge quotient play, smart content and allied jargon make an effort to impart a halo of magic around a pretty obvious function. I suppose that in today’s market, clarity is not important. Marketing magic is needed to create a demand for indexing.
I believe professionally administered indexing is important. I was one of the people responsible for creating the ABI/INFORM controlled vocabulary revision and the reindexing of the database in 1981. Our effort involved controlled terms, company name fields, and a purpose built classification system.
Some day automated systems will be able to assign high value index terms without humans. I don’t think that day has arrived. To create smart content, have smart people write it. Then get smart, professional indexers to index it. If a software system can contribute to the effort, I support that effort. I am just not comfortable with the “smart software” trend that is gaining traction.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2014
Luxid: Positioning Adjustments
September 23, 2014
Luxid, based in Paris, offers an automatic indexing service. The company has focused on the publishing sector as well a number of other verticals. The company uses the phrase “semantic content enrichment” to describe the companies indexing. The more trendy phrase is “metatagging,” but I prefer the older term.
The company also uses the term “ontology” along with references to semantic jargon like “triples.” The idea is that a licensee can select a module that matches an industry sector. WAND, a competitor, offers a taxonomy library. The idea is that much of the expensive and intellectually demand work needed to build a controlled vocabulary from scratch is sidestepped.
The positioning that I find interesting is that Luxid delivers “NLP enabled ontology management workflow.” The idea is that once the indexing system is installed, the licensee can maintain the taxonomy using the provided interface. This is another way of saying that administrative tools are included. Another competitor, Smartlogic, uses equally broad and somewhat esoteric terms to describe what are essential indexing operations.
Like other search and content processing vendors, Luxid invokes the magic of Big Data. Luxid asserts, “Streamlined, Big Data architecture offers improved scalability and robust integration options.” The point that indexing processes often stub toes is the amount of human effort and machine processing time required to keep and index updated and populate the new content across already compiled indexes. Scalability can be addressed with more resources. More resources often means increased costs, a challenge for any indexing system that deals with regular content, not just Big Data.
Will the revised positioning generate more inquiries and sales leads? Possibly. I find the wordsmithing content processing vendors use fascinating. The technology, despite the academic jargon, has been around since the days of Data Harmony and other aging methods.
The key points, in my view, is that Luxid offers a story that makes sense. The catnip may be the jargon, the push into publishing which is loath to spend for humans to create indexes, and the packaging of vocabularies into “Skill Cartridges.”
I anticipate that some of Luxid’s competitors will emulate the Luxid terminology. For many years, much of the confusion about which content processing does what can be traced to widespread use of jargon.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2014
Yahoo: Searching for Luck
September 23, 2014
I read “An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal.” I found it interesting. The one factor not mentioned was luck. The write up explains some of the deal context. My hunch is that Yahoo was in the right place at the right time with Jerry Yang, who hit it off with Alibaba’s founder. Why discount luck in a Harvard Business Review article? Easy. Few MBAs and their ilk want to admit that chance generated a positive payoff.
What about Yahoo in the post Alibaba IPO environment?
According to “Welcome to the Strange, Upside-Down World of Yahoo after the Alibaba IPO,”
According to another analysis, by Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider, the rest of Yahoo really is worth nothing at all, after subtracting its stake in Yahoo Japan (a separate company) and its cash reserves. What this means for Mayer is that she’s in the strange position of running a company whose core business the stock market values at less than zero. Yet she has a pile of cash and a site that is one of the most popular on the Internet, attracting over one billion visitors per month, and generating $4.62 billion in advertising revenue over the last year.
If accurate, Yahoo may need some more of that rarely mentioned key to business success—luck.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2014
Twitter Bots Abound
September 23, 2014
Quartz grabs our attention with its headline, “Twitter Admits That as Many as 23 Million of Its Active Users Are Automated.” These accounts, which automatically request updates and may or may not also auto-post, include “users” like third-party data-display apps. Reporter Zachary M. Seward writes:
“The new disclosure was an attempt to clarify an earlier statement (pdf) that 14% of MAUs access the service outside of the official website and mobile apps, by using Twitter’s API. Twitter’s update today specifies that the 14% figure ‘included certain users who accessed Twitter through owned and operated applications.’ Those are likely TweetDeck and Twitter for Mac, which are favored by power tweeters but, for technical reasons, aren’t counted in many of the company’s official statistics. The company said only 11% of MAUs accessed Twitter from applications that the company doesn’t own, like Tweetbot or Flipboard.
“To be clear, automated accounts aren’t necessarily spam accounts, which according to Twitter make up less than 5% of MAUs. Bots can be useful, even essential, accounts for many Twitter users. But once they’re set up, they don’t usually have any humans behind them, which matters greatly to advertisers who are interested in reaching potential customers.”
Seward maintains that Twitter should be concerned for its advertisers (itself included), who may feel they are pouring ad dollars down a black hole. I’m sure they can work out some equitable fee structure(s). We wonder, though, what the implications are for high-value content that attracts interested readers.
Cynthia Murrell, September 23, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Is Jörmungandr
September 23, 2014
In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr or the Midgard Serpent is a snake that surrounds Earth and eats its own tail. Jörmungandr constantly eats itself in an unending cycle. The group Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) operates on a similar principle. GWEI describes their mission as:
“We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisement! Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it! By establishing this auto-cannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisement mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.”
Once they own all of the shares, GWEI plans to give them back to the users. It is an admirable and interesting concept to take control of the search giant. Feasibility is another story. GWEI’s Web site has not been updated since 2006. GWEI also only owns 819 Google shares and they have a nifty Google Ownership Counter that says it will take 202,345 years before they will own the company. This data was last tabulated in 2006, so it is unknown how long it will take in 2014.
GWEI has a long way to go before they own Google and their efforts are admirable, but maybe they have given up.
Whitney Grace, September 23, 2014
Leidos To Make Digital Maps
September 23, 2014
GCN reports good news for Leidos: “Leidos To Produce Digital Maps For Intelligence Community.” The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency granted Leidos $20 million for digital mapping production services to be used for national security and geospatial intelligence communities.
Leidos is a large supporter of the National System for Geospatial Intelligence, which governs the technology, policies, and programs behind geospatial intelligence. Leidos Inc. provides solutions for health, engineering, and national security. The company has made many endeavors in map-based intelligence, imagery, and geospatial intelligence, making them an ideal candidate for this new project.
“Under the single-award, indefinite delivery requirements contract, Leidos will work on production flow efficiencies and improved customer services for producing mapping deliverables to the intel community. It will also provide online and on-demand capabilities to the mapping production process, according to the company.”
Leidos is looking forward to making global products that will further NGA’s efforts to deliver them to clients. It looks like Teratext is branching out and trying its hand at mapmaking.
Whitney Grace, September 23, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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