Whatever Happened to Social Search?
January 7, 2015
Social search was supposed to integrate social media and regular semantic search to create a seamless flow of information. This was one of the major search points for a while, yet it has not come to fruition. So what happened? TechCrunch reports that it is “Good Riddance To Social Search” and with good reason, because the combination only cluttered up search results.
TechCrunch explains that Google tried Social Search back in 2009, using its regular search engine and Google+. Now the search engine mogul is not putting forth much effort in promoting social search. Bing tried something by adding more social media features, but it is not present in most of its search results today.
Why did this endeavor fail?
“I think one of the reasons social search failed is because our social media “friendships” don’t actually represent our real-life tastes all that well. Just because we follow people on Twitter or are friends with old high school classmates on Facebook doesn’t mean we like the same restaurants they do or share the politics they do. At the end of the day, I’m more likely to trust an overall score on Yelp, for example, than a single person’s recommendation.”
It makes sense considering how many people consider their social media feeds are filled with too much noise. Having search results free of the noiwy makes them more accurate and helpful to users.
Whitney Grace, January 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
OpenText: IGC Joins Nstein and BRS
January 6, 2015
I read a news release with the click bait free headline “Open Text Acquires Informative Graphics Corporation.” I quite like that “informative graphics” idea. Quite a few graphics I see are not informative. Graphics are eye candy for some folks like generals and admiral giving briefings to the denizens of the Pentagon and White House. Graphics are useful in Hollywood. Where would commercials be without After Effects?
OpenText is a mash up of content centric businesses. Somewhere deep in the company is the original Tim Bray SGML data management system. The remnants of his pre-sell out search system are probably chugging along as well. OpenText owns content management companies, indexing companies, and search and retrieval companies. OpenText owns Fulcrum and that late 1980s systems is still in use, which is not too surprising. OpenText offers BRS, an older information retrieval software, BASIS (also an old school system with search functionality), and other interesting technologies like content management software.
The new purchase, according to the news release, “strengthens its capabilities for secure access to any content, on any device, on premises and in the cloud.”
IGC was an OpenText partner. IGC offers products and services that seem to overlap with OpenText’s. My hunch is that OpenText bought a partner who could make sales.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2015
Amazon and Its Management Approach
January 6, 2015
I find that analyses of high-tech company management gyrations quite entertaining. Once a company is successful, does it not follow that other projects will be successful? Aren’t managers of high-tech wonders able to manage other businesses owned by their employer? I hear a Greek khoroos intoning, “True, true, true.”
Within the conventions of Greek drama as understood by one of my somewhat addled high school teachers, “Stuff then happens.”
“Following Fire Phone Flop, Big Changes at Amazon’s Lab126” captures one of these moments in the Amazon melodrama, “As Profitability Remains Elusive.” (Will this become a CNBC reality show?)
The article explains that the Fire Phone was a failure. Okay, got that. The management fix is to shuffle some senior managers. The issue of having a 3,000 person research outfit is ignored, which is a Silicon Valley tradition—Hop over the underlying question, “Who was managing this operation from Amazon’s headquarters?”
Therefore, management change commences.
The most interesting part of the write up was this quote:
As Bezos has told employees there in the past, his goal is to make it so Lab126 can take a hardware product from ideation to market in just months, a cycle as ruthlessly efficient as the company’s retail operations.
The assumption that if one thing works (selling like Wal-Mart) then making hardware will work too. Barnes & Noble has demonstrated its acumen with what I call “the Nook cook.” Failures are like bad burritos. Reheating a bad burrito does not improve the burrito. Now Amazon is emulating Barnes & Noble and adding the zesty seasoning of assuming that success in one business automatically triggers success in another, unrelated business. Pizza Hut has a pretzel pizza. Amazon has a Nook Fire.
What’s next? Maybe Amazon should buy Yahoo and stir it into the mix.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2014
Maggie Simpson and Kim Jong Fun Get Published
January 6, 2015
Ah, the world of professional publishing. Is there anything like it? In an effort to lure shady journals into exposing their nonexistent peer-review processes, one engineer succeeded in catching two publications in his ridiculously obvious ploy. Vox reports, “A Paper by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel Was Accepted by Two Scientific Journals.” The article relates:
“A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled ‘Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.’ Rather, it’s a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose a pair of scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the comic sans-loving Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology.
“These outlets both belong to a world of predatory journals that spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work — whatever it is — for a fee, without actually conducting peer review. When Smolyanitsky was contacted by them, he submitted the paper, which has a totally incoherent, science-esque text written by SCIgen, a random text generator. (Example sentence: ‘we removed a 8-petabyte tape drive from our peer-to-peer cluster to prove provably “fuzzy” symmetries’s influence on the work of Japanese mad scientist Karthik Lakshminarayanan.’)
“Then, he thought up the authors, along with a nonexistent affiliation (‘Belford University’) for them. ‘I wanted first and foremost to come up with something that gives out the fake immediately,’ he says. ‘My only regret is that the second author isn’t Ralph Wiggum.’”
Why would any journal do such a thing? It’s all about the publishing fees, of course. Simpson et al continue to receive an invoice for $459 from just one of the journals. The article points out this is not the first time such “predatory publishing” has been exposed, and it is unlikely to be the last. See the article for more examples, as well as a brief history of the practice. (It seems to have begun in earnest in the early aughts.) Apparently, new shoddy publishers keep popping up. Researchers and readers should keep the phenomenon in mind when considering whether to submit to, or trust the information in, any given journal.
Cynthia Murrell, January 06, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Palantir Raises More Money
January 6, 2015
Sometimes it seems like Palantir is constantly enticing investors. Forbes reports, “Palantir Aiming to Raise $400 Million in New Round.” Writer Ryan Mac tells us that, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents, a planned round of additional funding could rake in that sum if all shares sell. Mac continues:
“If the round is completed in full, Palantir’s total funding could swell to about $1.2 billion. It’s currently unclear what the company would be valued at if it were to raise the $400 million round….
“Palantir previously raised about $450 million at about a $9 billion valuation in a round that began in December of last year. That round finally closed in September, after the company continued to add additional shares and investors.
“Even at $9 billion, Palantir was already among Silicon Valley’s most valuable private technology companies, some of which have seen massive bumps in valuations recently.”
Current Panantir investors include In-Q-Tel and Tiger Global Management, and co-founder Peter Thiel remains its largest shareholder. It seems unlikely that the growing company will go public any time soon; last year, CEO Alex Karp noted that Palantir’s existing relationships with government agencies and global corporations make the company ill-suited for IPO status.
Palantir’s massive-scale data platforms allow even the largest organizations to integrate, manage, and secure all sorts of data. Its founding members include PayPal alumni and Stanford computer science grads. The company is based in Palo Alto, California, and has offices around the world. It should come as no surprise that they are currently hiring.
Cynthia Murrell, January 06, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Power User Cheat Sheet
January 6, 2015
been improved and future plans for better efficiency. Regarding SharePoint, this reflection can be especially helpful with the complicated platform. You can start the process with a well-written article like CMS Wire’s most recent, “The Power User Cheat Sheet to SharePoint 2013 Search.”
The article begins:
“If you’ve spent any time researching SharePoint 2013 you already know that one of the most exciting components was Microsoft’s integration of FAST Search features into the product . . . As a Power User of SharePoint what do you need to know to make the absolute most out of these features? There is a lot to learn, but in working with SharePoint 2013 over the past two years I have identified three areas that are a great place to begin your search journey.”
Stephen E. Arnold offers lots of resources for reflection and improvement on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. His SharePoint feed is full of useful information that end users and managers alike can benefit from. Staying on top of the latest tips, tricks, and news can make a big difference in SharePoint use and satisfaction.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 06, 2015
Palantir and 2014 Funding
January 5, 2015
I read an article that confused me. Navigate to “Palantir Secures First $60M Chunk of Projected $400M Round as Market Asks, “Who?”
This sentence suggests that Palantir wants to go public. What do you think?
But although it would clearly find no trouble catching the market’s attention, the company is in rush to take on the pressure of public trading The secretive nature of its clientele and an apparent desire to prioritize long-term strategy over short-term returns are the primary considerations behind that approach, but what facilitates it is the ease with which Palantir has managed to draw private investors so far.
I wonder if this article means “no” rush. I wonder if this article is software generated.
Here’s another interesting passage:
The document [cited by Techcrunch?] doesn’t specify the source of the capital or what Palantir intends to spend it on, but based on the claim in NYT report that it wasn’t profitable as of May, the money will probably go primarily toward fueling operations. The paper also noted that most of the estimated billion dollars that the company raked in this year came from private sector customers, which provides a hint as to the areas where the funding will be invested, namely the development of its enterprise-oriented Gotham offering.
I have my own views about Palantir which are summarized in the forthcoming CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access monograph. (If you want to order a copy, write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. The book is available to law enforcement, security, and intelligence professionals.)
The statement “isn’t profitable” is fascinating if true.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2015
Google and Removed Links for Pirated Content
January 5, 2015
I read “Google Received 345 Million Pirate link Removal Requests in 2014.” In 2008, Google received 62 requests. In 2014, Google received requests to remove 345,169,134 links. As the article points out, that’s around a million links a day.
The notion of a vendor indexing “all” information is a specious one. More tricky is that one cannot find information if it is blocked from the public index. How will copyright owners find violators? Is there an index for Dark Net content?
My thought is that finding information today is more difficult than it was when I was in college. Sixty years of progress.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2015
Inside the Creative Commons Dataset from Yahoo and Flickr
January 5, 2015
These are not our grandparents’ photo albums. With today’s technology, photos and videos are created and shared at a truly astounding pace. Much of that circulation occurs on Flickr, who teamed up with Yahoo to create a cache of nearly 100 million photos and almost 800,000 videos with creative commons licenses for us all to share. Code.flickr.com gives us the details in “The Ins and Outs of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset.” Researchers Bart Thomée and David A. Shamma report:
“To understand more about the visual content of the photos in the dataset, the Flickr Vision team used a deep-learning approach to find the presence of visual concepts, such as people, animals, objects, events, architecture, and scenery across a large sample of the corpus. There’s a diverse collection of visual concepts present in the photos and videos, ranging from indoor to outdoor images, faces to food, nature to automobiles.”
The article goes on to explore the frequency of certain tags, both user-annotated and machine-generated. The machine tags include factors like time, location, and camera used, suggesting rich material for data analysts to play with. The researchers conclude with praise for their team’s project:
“The collection is one of the largest released for academic use, and it’s incredibly varied—not just in terms of the content shown in the photos and videos, but also the locations where they were taken, the photographers who took them, the tags that were applied, the cameras that were used, etc. The best thing about the dataset is that it is completely free to download by anyone, given that all photos and videos have a Creative Commons license. Whether you are a researcher, a developer, a hobbyist or just plain curious about online photography, the dataset is the best way to study and explore a wide sample of Flickr photos and videos.”
See the article for more details on those tags found within the massive dataset. To download the whole assemblage from Yahoo Labs, click here.
Cynthia Murrell, January 05, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ranking Countries Data Openness
January 5, 2015
OpenSource.com is one of the largest bastions for the open source community and they recently published an article that ranks countries around the world in how much of their data is open for public access: “The Global ‘Open’” Pulse From The 2014 Open Data Index.” The information is pulled from Open Knowledge’s 2014 Open Data Index. According to the numbers, governments are not being as open as they should, because the level is down to 11% from 15%.
“The OKF defines “open” in the context of this report as a data set which adheres to the open definition standard as open. The current definition of “open” per OpenDefinition.org can be summarized as ‘open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.’ “
There was progress in 2014, however. The United Kingdom is the most open. France and India rose on the list of openness. The number of countries who are open went from sixty to ninety-seven. The Is 70% open, dropping to 8th place over second in 2013. Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are improving their numbers.
Open Knowledge’s entire goal is to increase the amount of information about government activities, so people can exercise their rights. What is disappointing is that while many more countries are showing up on the list, they are not living up the definition of “open.”
Whitney Grace, January 05, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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