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I remember reading that Google Plus was the new Google. I remember hearing that Googlers were induced to use Google Plus. I heard on a podcast that Google Plus was a lame duck thing, a modern Orkut.
If you are an avid social media maven, navigate to “Why Google+ Failed, According to Google Insiders.” If accurate, the write up suggests that Google’s powers of innovation are more like the power of imitation. Am I correct in recalling that Google’s ad business was foreshadowed by Overture/GoTo. Nah, that can’t be write. Imitation?
I read:
The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook. Another former Googler agrees, saying the company was “late to market” and motivated from “a competitive standpoint.” There may have been some paranoia — Facebook was actively poaching Googlers at a certain point, one source said. Google+ employees within Google were sectioned off, this person said, possibly to prevent gossip about the product from spreading. Google+ employees had their own secret cafeteria called “Cloud,” for example, and others on the Mountain View campus weren’t permitted. “There was definitely an aura of fear for a time,” this person said.
I quite like that phrase “aura of fear.” Poetic. I ran into a fear of Google. A PR distribution service would not distribute a news release with a reference to Google. No explanation, just a rejection. Interesting.
For more comments about Google Plus, read the story. I thought their might be trouble when the “+” was used in the service name. Ever try to search for a plus in the new, mobilized Google? I guess more effort went into name X Labs. Ever try to search Google for “X”?
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2015
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, News, Social Media | Comments Off on Is Google Plus Like Glass?
Need a GIF file? Check out “5 GIF Search Engines & Tools You Haven’t Heard Of Yet.” Searching for GIFs using some Web search engines can yield interesting results.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2015
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Image search, News, Search | Comments Off on Looking for GIF Files?
Need patent information? Lots of folks believed that making sense of the public documents available from the USPTO were the road to riches. Before I kicked back to enjoy the sylvan life in rural Kentucky, I did some work on Fancy Dan patent systems. There was a brush with the IBM Intelligent Patent Miner system. For those who do not recall their search history, you can find a chunk of information in “Information Mining with the IBM Intelligent Miner Family.” Keep in mind that the write up is about 20 years old. (Please, notice that the LexisNexis system discussed below uses many of the same, time worn techniques.)
Patented dog coat.
Then there was the Manning & Napier “smart” patent analysis system with analyses’ output displayed in three-D visualizations. I bumped into Derwent (now Intellectual Property & Science) and other Thomson Corp. solutions as well. And, of course, there was may work for an unnamed, mostly clueless multi billion dollar outfit related to Google’s patent documents. I summarized the results of this analysis in my Google Version 2.0 monograph, portions of which were published by BearStearns before it met its thrilling end seven years ago. (Was my boss the fellow carrying a box out of the Midtown BearStearns’ building?)
Why the history?
Well, patents are expensive to litigate. For some companies, intellectual property is a revenue stream.
There is a knot in the headphone cable. Law firms are not the go go business they were 15 or 20 years ago. Law school grads are running gyms; some are Uber drivers. Like many modern post Reagan businesses, concentration is the name of the game. For the big firms with the big buck clients, money is no object.
The problem in the legal information business is that smaller shops, including the one and two person outfits operating in Dixie Highway type of real estate do not want to pay for the $200 and up per search commercial online services charge. Even when I was working for some high rollers, the notion of a five or six figure online charge elicited what I would diplomatically describe as gentle push back.
I read “LexisNexis TotalPatent Keeps Patent Research out of the Black Box with Improved Version of Semantic Search.” For those out of touch with online history, I worked for a company in the 1980s which provided commercial databases to LexisNexis. I knew one of the founders (Don Wilson). I even had reasonably functional working relationships with Dan Prickett and people named “Jim” and “Sharon.” In one bizarre incident, a big wheel from LexisNexis wanted to meet with me in the Cherry Hill Mall’s parking lot across from the old Bell Labs’ facility where I was a consultant at the time. Err, no thanks. I was okay with the wonky environs of Bell Labs. I was not okay with the lash up of a Dutch and British company.
Snippet of code from a Ramanathan Guha invention. Guha used to be at IBM Almaden and he is a bright fellow. See US7593939 B2.
What does LexisNexis TotalPatent deliver for a fee? According to the write up:
TotalPatent, a web-based patent research, retrieval and analysis solution powered by the world’s biggest assortment of searchable full-text and bibliographic patent authorities, allows researchers to enter as much as 32,000 characters (comparable to more than 10 pages of text)—much over along a whole patent abstract—into its search industry. The newly enhanced semantic brains, pioneered by LexisNexis during 2009 and continually improved upon utilizing contextual information supplied by the useful patent data offered to the machine, current results in the form of a user-adjustable term cloud, where the weighting and positioning of terms may be managed for lots more precise results. And countless full-text patent documents, TotalPatent in addition utilizes systematic, technical also non-patent literature to go back the deepest, most comprehensive serp’s.
Read more
In 2014, we noted that Scientel’s Norman Kutemperor was a leader in NoSQL data management. We learned that Scientel is beating the drum for an integrated, user friendly content management, search, and analytics system. Kutemperor has been described as the father of NoSQL.
According to “Scientel Releases EZContent Content Management and Search System for the Small Enterprise,”
Scientel’s EZContent™ Content Management and Search system operating under GENSONIX® NoSQL DB is an advanced ECM solution for “Big Data” content for the smaller enterprise. Scientel’s EZContent is derived from Scientel’s primary Enterprise Content Management & Search System (ECMS). It is the ideal, most cost-effective, and simple to operate tool for organizing, managing, and retrieving your Big Data contents at all organizational levels. Powerful, yet comprehensive and fun to use, it can start small and is highly scalable. The system can be configured for various system requirements. This makes it ideal for use in small offices/organizations as well as medium and large enterprises.
The company asserts that it has a search system which displays an information object thumbnail. The user drags a document to the system. EZContent processes 40 different file types, including images and video clips. Kutemperor explained the search system this way:
With ECMS, we are able to move the contents of that CD into our ECMS system, and all 100+ people can access that all at the same time. They can also do searches from within what we call textual documents – PDFs, Microsoft documents mostly are all textual documents, whereas clips, videos and pictures are not. By being able to search inside the textual document, we can actually locate what we are looking for and get to the right page that we want to read. Content management is a very valuable tool for all of us, and it is a very helpful tool for all organizations, whether it is non-profit or profit, commercial, corporate, scientific, medical, city government, small businesses or large enterprises. Everybody needs it and now can have it cost-effectively. The basic offering that we can start with is a very small appliance that is turnkey and virtually maintenance free. It is easily installed into the network and pretty much goes to work without having to do too much in the way of setup. For larger organizations, we offer appliances that can scale to very large configurations, that can store very large numbers of documents efficiently, and that are able to locate these documents rapidly.
According to CIOReview:
Scientel’s Gensonix DB is an all in one SQL. Gensonix based solutions can take the place of SQL, NoSQL and storage systems and can process large data sets in real time. Its massive core based parallel solutions deliver performance in range with in memory systems. thus performance of Gensonix on Scientel LDWA hardware matches the performance of in memory systems and with higher reliability.
In 2014 the database was described as “polymorphic.” One explanation is:
Polymorphism is the ability of an entity to behave like more than 1 of its counter parts given a set of circumstances or criteria; or, the provision of a single interface (a shared boundary across which separate components of a computer system exchange information) to entities of different types. In other words, in a polymorphic DB, you can use a relational approach when that is appropriate, hierarchical when that is, and so on. No one paradigm is fully implemented, but the DB uses enough of the features/capabilities needed to provide a reasonable solution to a problem.
These are envelope stretching assertions. The Manta entry for the company reports, perhaps erroneously, that the company has three employees. Another Manta entry asserts that the company employs five to nine people and has revenues of $1.0 million to $2.5 million. For more information about Scientel, navigate to the company’s Web site at www.scientel.com.
Should MarkLogic and other vendors offering similar products up their game? Worth monitoring this Swiss Army knife approach to information access.
Stephen E Arnold, April 25, 2015
Sponsored by CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access
Short honk: I read several articles about the financial reports of Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. I enjoyed the explanations about the revenues and profits. Here are the write ups open on my desktop monitor at this moment:
Is there a message to be decrypted from these data? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2015
Wow. I read some interesting and often crazy stuff. But this is a keeper. Navigate to “Google Builds a Data Platform That’s the Last Piece of Its Ad Empire. Connects Dots for Marketers and Challenges Facebook.” Never mind that the Google has been working on the data platform thing for advertising for what is it now, 12 or 13 years. Never mind that the guts of the ad system’s interfaces have been a project at the Google for more than a decade. Never mind that the guts of the data platform idea originated before Google hired Drs. Halevy and Guha along with hundreds of other scientists and engineers eager to knit together data from Google’s various repositories. But, hey, it is an advertising Web site, and I assume advertising experts are a heck of a lot more informed than little old me.
I read:
Of course, Google faces regulatory scrutiny for any move it makes, as well as talk of anti-competitive practices. In fact, the company was charged in Europe last week with behaving like a monopoly in search. The ad tech community has been concerned that Google is offering all the services that lock advertisers into its ecosystem and squeeze out rivals.
What the write is about is the “lead” which Facebook has over Google. The problem is not technology, in my humble opinion. The problem is that Google is focused on technology and Facebook was built to allow a person to get a date. Facebook followed its social-human thing, and the GOOG has been embracing the ever lovable zeros and ones. There are Googlers at Facebook, but Facebook will not become a Google. I would argue that Google cannot become a Facebook.
The data platform is secondary to the source of the information fueling the respective systems. Facebook users are the content sources. Google’s content comes from other places. Both companies face significant challenges and neither is likely to morph into another.
Why not merge into a Googbook or Facegle? If it works for Comcast and Time Warner, it might work for Google and Facebook. Ad buys just become easier. Ad people often prefer the easy approach.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2015
There was a time before the Internet that if you wanted to research something you had to go to the library, dig through old archives, and check encyclopedias for quick facts. While it seems that all information is at your disposable with a few keystrokes, but search results are often polluted with paid ads and unless your information comes from a trusted source, you can’t count it as fact.
LifeHacker, like many of us, knows that if you want to get the truth behind a topic, you have to do some old school sleuthing. The article “How To Research Like A Journalist When The Internet Doesn’t Deliver” drills down tried and true research methods that will continue to withstand the sands of time or the wrecking ball (depending on how long libraries remain brick and mortar buildings).
The article pushes using librarians as resources and even going as far as petitioning government agencies and filing FOIA requests for information. When it makes the claim that some information is only available in person or strictly for other librarians, this is both true and false. Many libraries are trying to digitize their information, but due to budgets are limited in their resources. Also unless the librarian works in a top secret archive, most of the information is readily available to anyone with or without the MLS degree.
Old school interviews are always great, especially when you have to cite a source. You can always cite your own interview and verify it cam straight from the horse’s mouth. One useful way to team the Internet with interviews is tracking down the interviewees.
Lastly, this is the best piece of advice from the article:
“Finally, once you’ve done all of this digging, visited government agencies, libraries, and the offices of the people with the knowledge you need, don’t lose it. Archive everything. Digitize those notes and the recordings of your interviews. Make copies of any material you’ve gotten your hands on, then scan them and archive them safely.”
The Internet is full of false information. By placing a little more credence out there, will make the information more safe to use or claim as the truth.
These tips are useful, even if a little obvious, but they however still fail to mention the important step that all librarians know: doing the actual footwork and proper search methods to find things.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The article titled Integrate Data with Cloudant and CouchDB NoSQL Database Using IBM InfoSphere Information Server on IBM offers a breakdown of the steps necessary to load JSON documents and attachments to Cloudant. In order to follow the steps, the article notes that you will need Cloudant, CouchDB, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage. The article concludes,
“This article provided detailed steps for loading JSON documents and attachments to Cloudant. You learned about the job design to retrieve JSON documents and attachments from Cloudant. You can modify the sample jobs to perform the same integration operations on a CouchDB database. We also covered the main features of the new REST step in InfoSphere DataStage V11.3, including reusable connection, parameterized URLs, security configuration, and request and response configurations. The JSON parser step was used in examples to parse JSON documents.”
Detailed examples with helpful images guide you through each part of the process, and it is possible to modify the examples for CouchDB. Although it may seem like a statement of the obvious the many loyal IBM users out there, perhaps there are people who still need to be told. If you are interested in learning the federation of information with a logical and simple process, use IBM.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Yahoo is a tired old girl much like my 10 year old boxer. Some days Tess chases a butterfly or bird. She takes five or six steps and then flops down to catch her breath. Other days, Tess just naps and lets the hectic high tech world of Harrod’s Creek drift past her.
Yahoo is like Tess.
I read “Yahoo’s Mayer Buys Herself More Time.” Hiring a Xoogler to run a giant company is not a sure fire management move destined to deliver success. Some Xooglers do okay for themselves away from the quirky, attention deficit disorder, and entitlement charged world of Google. Others struggle.
This Bloomberg story seems to highlight a candidate for a business school case study. I can visualize the opening sentence now: “Marissa Mayer looked up from her tidy pile of Yahoo home page redesigns to learn from her new assistant to the assistant to the assistant vice president that she was one hour late for her 9 am meeting with the heads of ABC, CBS, and NBC…”
Back to the real world of hard hitting journalism. The article reported:
Mayer has proven she has the skill to get what she wants from adversaries, allies and partners. But her negotiation with Wall Street is her riskiest yet. She’s painting herself into a corner if her turnaround strategy fails. If it does, she will have shrunk Yahoo down to a size that attracts an aggressive buyer.
Perhaps the Xoogler at AOL will buy Yahoo? One plus one equals three for some Xoogler fans. I don’t care. I am more interested in the great new world of Yahoo search. Yikes, I have to take Tess for a short walk. She is a tired girl and needs special consideration. Just like Yahoo.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2015
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Yahoo | Comments Off on Is Yahoo Is Like a 10 Year Old Rescued Boxer?
Do you know Ontotext? The company is making an effort to become more visible. Navigate to “Vassil Momtchev talks Insights with the Bloor Group.” The interview provides a snapshot of the company’s history which dates from 2001. After 14 years, the interview reports that Ontotext “keeps its original company spirit.”
Other points from the write up:
- The company’s technology makes use of semantic and ontology modeling
- A knowledge base represents complex information and makes asking questions better
- Semantic applications can deliver complete applications.
For more information about Ontotext and its “ontological” approach, visit the company’s Web site at www.ontotext.com.
Stephen E Arnold, April 23, 2015
Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Indexing, News, Semantic | Comments Off on Ontotext Pursues Visibility
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