A good read is “How AOL—Aka Facebook 1.0—Blew Its Lead” by Jesse Kornbluth. What is interesting is that this is a report from a person with Guccis on the ground. According to my hard copy edition, February 8, 2012, page A15:

Mr. Kornbluth was editorial director of America Online from 1997 to 2003. He now edits Headbutler.com.

I did a quick search on Facebook 3.0—aka Google—and learned from no less an authority than the Huffington Post the Mr. Kornbluth edits a blog which is a “cultural concierge service.” He is a “real” journalist and has been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and new York, and a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, etc.”

The addled goose is still in recovery mode, sort of like a very old restore from the now disappeared Fastback program. Thinking of old software and AOL, I think in 1999America Online was in hog heaven in terms of stock price. I recall shares coming in the $40 to $100 range. The accounting issues of 1993 were behind the company. The merger with Time Warner was a done deal by mid January 2000. The $350 billion was a nice round number. The New York Times marked the 10th anniversary in its “analysis” on January 11, 2010, with the story “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong.”

Now I learn that AOL was Facebook 1.0. I had forgotten about AOL’s chat rooms. When I think of chat rooms, I recall CompuServe, but I was never into AOL despite the outstanding marketing campaign with the jazzy CD ROMs that seemed to be everywhere. Here’s Mr. Kornbluth’s Facebook parallel:

Community drove the growth of the service. And grow AOL Did. A million members in 1993. Five million 1998. And from there, exponential growth, another million every 125 days, all of them eventually paying $23.95 a month to enter our walled garden. For the most part, they stayed there too.

So what happened? Here’s the explanation which exonerates “real” journalists and MBAs:

I don’t believe management was evil or stupid. The shortsighted approach of the MBAs had a simpler origin: They didn’t use the service the way members did. They didn’t know how often Community leaders talked would be suicides off the ledge or how many desperate housewives found recipes and advice. All these points of deep engagement were driven from the bottom, from users. (Note that there are only two businesses that call the customers “users”—drugs and the Internet. For management, though, AOL was just an Instant Message service by day an email service by night. The ultimate verdict: Since advertisers shunned Community, what was it really worth? Very quickly, Community became AOL’s ignored child.

Interesting but several thoughts crossed my mind:

1. What’s with the “they”? Wasn’t the author in management? If so, what actions did he take to make this Community point and drive the message through. I think there are usage data to trot out? There are in most organizations opportunities to give briefings or present alternative ideas are there not?
2. If community were so obvious to AOL, it strikes me that community is a bit like Microsoft search. Management tosses in functions to make the service or software that much more valuable. Perhaps the core problem has more to do with attentiveness and motivation than what some MBA thinks or believes.
3. AOL, like Google has today, many different products and services. The fat, friendly days of dial up modems were going away. The alleged financial cartwheels were like catnip to some I surmise. With myriad opportunities, was the whole ball of wax unable to figure out how to set priorities on tasks which mattered strategically?

The net net is that AOL did not know what it had beyond the dial up business and what could be done with those captives.

Facebook is not AOL. Facebook is not Google. Facebook faces challenges, and none of them has much to do with AOL. What is important about this Wall Street Journal editorial is that AOL is reaching for a semantic link to Facebook. What will a semantic tie up generate? Maybe some clicks. Otherwise, AOL is, like Yahoo, in for an interesting year. And search at AOL, well, there once was PLS, then Fast, and now who knows? I will ask someone of Facebook, which seems to be increasingly useful. Many Xooglers find Facebook a useful information service. Community? Don’t know.

Stephen E Arnold, February 8, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

What is an outside factor?

Let’s think about value adding indexing, content enrichment, or metatagging. The idea is that unstructured text contains entities, facts, bound phrases, and other identifiable entities. A key word search system is mostly blind to the meaning of a number in the form nnn nn nnnn, which in the United States is the pattern for a Social Security Number. There are similar patterns in Federal Express, financial, and other types of sequences. The idea is that a system will recognize these strings and tag them appropriately; for example:

nnn nn nnn Social Security Number

Thus, a query for Social Security Numbers will return a string of digits matching the pattern. The same logic can be applied to certain entities and with the help of a knowledge base, Bayesian numerical recipes, and other techniques such as synonym expansion determine that a query for Obama residence will return White House or a query for the White House will return links to the Obama residence.

One wishes that value added indexing systems were as predictable as a kabuki drama. What vendors of next generation content processing systems participate in is a kabuki which leads to failure two thirds of the time. A tragedy? It depends on whom one asks.

The problem is that companies offering automated solutions to value adding indexing, content enrichment, or metatagging are likely to fail for three reasons:

First, there is the issue of humans who use language in unexpected or what some poets call “fresh” or “metaphoric” methods. English is synthetic in that any string of sounds can be used in quite unexpected ways. Whether it is the use of the name of the fruit “mango” as a code name for software or whether it is the conversion of a noun like information into a verb like informationize which appears in Japanese government English language documents, the automated system may miss the boat. When the boat is missed, continued iterations try to arrive at the correct linkage, but anyone who has used fully automated systems know or who paid attention in math class, the recovery from an initial error can be time consuming and sometimes difficult. Therefore, an automated system—no matter how clever—may find itself fooled by the stream of content flowing through its content processing work flow. The user pays the price because false drops mean more work and suggestions which are not just off the mark, the suggestions are difficult for a human to figure out. You can get the inside dope on why poor suggestions are an issue in Thining, Fast and Slow.

Second, there is the quite real problem of figuring out the meaning of short, mostly context free snippets of text. These can be internal social postings such as those supported by Salesforce.com or the millions of messages dumped into Facebook, Twitter, and other social media systems. Automation can pull geocodes, perform look ups in knowledge bases, and look for messages with a common word or phrase. But for most of the systems, keeping up with the throughput is a big problem. Most of the automated indexing outfits talk about value added processing and real time data but few are able to deliver. In fact, when it comes to integrating large data flows into a system such as Microsoft SharePoint compromises are taken even if these are not fully disclosed or explained to the licensee. As a result, making decisions on subsets of “big data” leads to interesting indexing issues and possibly to decisions that are essentially laughable. The “data” are nearly useless. Once again, you have to dig out your math books from college and check out how many of what must be analyzed to have a confidence level in any output from a numerical recipe.

Third, there is the issue of people and companies desperate for a solution or desperate for revenue. The coin has two sides. Individuals who are looking for a silver bullet find vendors who promise not just one silver bullet but an ammunition belt stuffed with the rounds. The buyers and vendors act out a digital kabuki. Those involved in the deal know the outcome, but the play is the thing. The actual system rarely works, costs more than anticipated, and sets the stage for another round of cotnnt processing craziness. The drama engulfs the second string consulting firms looking for a quick consulting buck, the blog experts who explain what went wrong and why, and the coders who suggests fixes, work arounds, and solutions. See this interesting post at Quora.

The exogenous complexity, then, is putting a system which works in a controlled situation in the real world. When I describe a vendor’s system as subject to exogenous complexity, I am suggesting:

1. Budget additional funds for either a complete rebuild or a massive, emergency room crisis assault on the patient. Saving a life or a system costs a great deal in time and resources.
2. Be prepared to fail. I know that one must be optimistic. I am okay with a positive outlook, but I am even more satisfied when those buying a system which has a verifiable probability of failing in two thirds of its installs are pragmatic.
3. Recognize that in processing unstructured content, there are problems which no software nor human centric system can solve. Even human indexers are lucky if they can deliver 90 percent accuracy in tagging. Software does not do as well as humans, a fact many vendors do not explain because the “accuracy” is usually what one would get from a dull normal human.

So, when I use the phrase exogenous complexity I am embracing the messy and uncontrollable aspects of language, software, and human behavior. In short, exogenous complexity means trouble ahead. You are free to define the bound phrase any way you want. I just try to steer clear. I try to cover some of these issues in SharePoint Semantics and Inteltrax.

Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The Multilingual Challenge

Multilingual search increases the value of research output by making it available to a wider audience. Seamless federation and automated translation makes available research from China, Japan, Russia, and other countries prolific in science publication to researchers who may lack facility in certain languages. In the area of patent research, multilingual search greatly broadens the scope of patent research. For English speakers, the availability of multilingual federated search exposes English speakers to diverse perspectives from researchers in foreign countries.

For example, China’s research output is now far outpacing the rest of the world. In 2006 China’s research and development output surpassed that of Japan, the UK and Germany. At this pace, China will overtake the USA in a few years. But non US innovation is not confined to Asia and Europe. Brazil’s share of research output is growing rapidly.

Sample system output from WorldWideScience.org, powered by Deep Web Technologies’ multilingual federating system.

Deep Web Technologies (DWT) is one of the leaders in federated search. Federation requires taking a user’s query and using it to obtain search results from other indexes and search-and-retrieval systems. For example, Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit product handles this process, returning to the user a blended set of results. For the user, federation eliminates the need to frame a query for Google, Medline, USA.gov, and the NASA website. The user frames a query, sends it to Explorit and a single, relevance-ranked results list is displayed to the user.

DWT has moved beyond single language federation and grown to become the leader in federated search of the deep web. This has resulted in the launch of their ground-breaking, patent pending multilingual federated search capability in June of 2011.

“We now live in a much more interconnected world where information is available in a variety of languages,” noted Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies. “Major advances in machine translation have made it possible for DWT to develop a revolutionary new Explorit product that breaks down language barriers and advances scientific collaboration and business productivity.”

According to the Federated Search blog post “Researchers Can Now Search Text, Audio, and Video Images in Multiple Languages.” Multilingual federated search rolled out in 2011 is now available to any of DWT’s customers who require seamless access to foreign language documents. We learned:

Multilingual federated search, unveiled June 11, 2010 in Helsinki at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information’s Summer Conference and originally only available as a beta release to users of the WorldWideScience.org gateway to global science, is now available to all Deep Web Technologies customers who require seamless access to foreign language documents. The system’s multilingual search capability translates a user’s search query into the native languages of the collections being searched, aggregates and ranks these results according to relevance, and translates result titles and snippets back to the user’s original language. The multilingual translation functionality, powered by Microsoft, makes it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the user’s native language.

WorldWideScience.org is a global gateway to international science databases and portals. The content is from national governments or vetted by national governments. The system has been developed and is maintained by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). The DWT powered system provides one stop search and includes database content from China, Japan, Korea, Germany, and other non-English countries

WorldWideScience.org Case Example

WorldWideScience.org searches in real-time over 80 collections of scientific and technical information from more than 70 countries around the world. Included in this search are 20 non-English collections. Introduced this past June is a multimedia federated search capability that allows for the seamless integration of audio, video, and image content sources into a system. WorldWideScience.org searches seven multimedia sources: CDC Pod casts, CERN Multimedia, Medline Plus, NASA, NSF, NBII LIFE, and ScienceCinema.

Applications for Business

Scientific and technical researchers are in the forefront of multilingual federated search. Businesses are increasingly likely to need systems which can retrieve information for disparate sources of information with content in a range of languages.

Applications range from customer support to business intelligence. Social content such as information disseminated via FaceBook and Twitter are no longer limited to English. Text mining systems which ignore language nuances may deliver off center outputs. As a result, applications of multilingual federated search embrace:

• Sales and marketing
• Business intelligence
• Enterprise resource management
• Customer relationship management
• Product and supplier management

Wrap Up

By providing a single point to searching hundreds of sources, researchers can issue a single search request through a simple Google-like interface and get thousands of results sorted by semantically related concepts. Deep Web Technologies’ investment in creating technologies for researchers and the public to perform multilingual searches of global science in their native language is advancing science through innovative search technology.

My view is that many information retrieval vendors talk about federation, only a small number deliver functional federation. Add in the multilingual requirement, and there is a single vendor to consider—Deep Web Technologies.

Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

A happy quack to Net Giant.

Straight away let me say that Apple is happy with “good enough search.” I have had conflicting information about Apple’s apparent indifference to search and retrieval. If you want to locate a particular category of books in the iTunes’ online service, good luck. From its earliest days, the search function in iTunes has been less than satisfactory to me. But who cares? iTunes is part of the software fabric which Apple has woven right in front of Google’s, Amazon’s, and the entertainment industries’ snoots. Apple could not have been more upfront about search. Search is simply not Job One for an iTunes’ user. Why should it be? The service helps Apple generate revenues which have even the greediest MBA drooling.

I read “Apple’s Massive Numbers and Some Context.” My viewpoint is different, but I agree that something big has happened in the numbers and beyond. Here’s the passage I noted:

Towards the end of the earnings call, Tim Cook dropped a huge nugget of information: led by 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market. Someday in the not-too-distant future, the tablet market will be bigger than all of the PC market, he predicts. (Apple has sold 55 million iPads since the original launch in April 2010, Cook revealed.)

Need more proof? Read “Apple Reports First Quarter Results. Highest Quarterly Revenue and Earnings Ever. All-Time Record iPhone, iPad, and Mac Sales.” You can find many pundits, poobahs, and disinformationists explaining why Apple is generating so much dough, selling so many gizmos, and achieving at least momentarily the highest market capitalization in the history of greed.

But there’s an important aspect of these revenue figures which caught my attention. Here’s the point:

Apple has downsized, marginalized, and subordinated search across its range of products. Key word search is a desktop search service. The youth of the world has moved on.

Why is this important to me? Here are the reasons:

Search is now a tertiary operation. Top finding methods are apps. Then there are Web pages with exposed links or facets. Last is good old key word search. Yep, it is time to forget the search as the reason a person uses some type of electronic gizmo. I want to make a distinction between “findability” and “search”. Apple does a pretty good job of making information findable. Whether it is the native search function in OS X or the hot links scattered across Web pages and applications or mobile apps themselves, most folks regardless of age can make Apple machines work. Forget where a document is? Apple provides numerous “punch-the-button, dummy” options.

Users within the Apple ecosystem have a search option available, but the interfaces present options and inducements. The idea is that something catches the attention of the Apple customer and gets clicked. The interfaces are cluttered and confusing to a 67 year old like me. But to the content consumer the jazzy colors, the number of options, and the “hooks” like new music, books, free content, and other Madison Avenue methods generate loyalty and money. Big money. Remember to check those numbers in the Apple quarterly report. The profit is in the billions and bigger than most companies’ net revenue for a quarter. MBAs prepare to slaver.

The last idea I had is, “Google is now in a world of pain.” I know Google is a giant outfit, spending more on lobbying than even established outfits like pharmaceutical companies, and pushing forward on conflict-charged initiatives in the enterprise, mobile, social, and advertising. Integrating user information is a defensive announcement. A growing company just does what it does. Calling attention to Android phone sales and hard wiring Google Plus into basic services are flares that mark a problem.

Bottom line: Google’s peak was in my opinion, 2006-2007. Since then, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have surged. And Google? The giant company is growing but other outfits are moving with less friction. One of them—Apple—has blown away analysts, customers, and competitors. Apple may implode, but for now, the Cupertino crowd seems to be in charge of devices and certain high value information.

Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

A tip of the trident to http://reinventingtheeventhorizon.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/midnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil%E2%80%94mafia-style/

Evil, according to Dictionary.com–which is tough to use because of the ads for Zoho, InetSoft, and RingCentral–iterates through 10 definitions:

1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.
2. harmful; injurious: evil laws.
3. characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering;unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days.
4. due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation.
5. marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.
6. that which is evil; evil quality, intention, or conduct: to choose the lesser of two evils.
7. the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin.
8. the wicked or immoral part of someone or something: The evil in his nature has destroyed the good.
9. harm; mischief; misfortune: to wish one evil.
10. anything causing injury or harm: Tobacco is considered by some to be an evil.

Like many words in every day use, evil can denote or connote different shades of meaning.

I thought about these 10 definitions after I read “Facebook to Google: Don’t Be Evil, Focus on the User.” The write up presents a respected real journalist’s report about information exchanged in a meeting. The main point of the write up describes a way to make Google work the way it did before the social bonus program kicked in and the Google Plus avalanche rumbled down the roof of the Googleplex.

There was another point in the write up which I noted as well. I learned from the article:

It’d be interesting if millions of people adopted the tool, however I don’t think that’s the point. A story such as this is tailor made for the Techmeme leader board, to be sure, and will no doubt be the talk of the Valley today. By tonight, the story most likely will go national, and that can’t help Google’s image. And I’m quite sure the folks at Facebook, Twitter, and others (think LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc) are making sure word of this exemplar reaches the right folks at the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, Congress, and government agencies around the world.

My take is that the new Google-Facebook dust up is going to be intermediated and probably infused with oxygen by some Silicon Valley professionals. That’s okay because I think there are both business and technical reasons for Google and Facebook to square off. Among those reasons are ego and money. Google took a punch to the snoot with its softening advertising revenues. Facebook needs to be perceived as pre-eminent because of the initial public offering and the money. Hmmm. The common factor is money.

With online coalescing to monopolies, companies are not content to their gardens. Outfits like Facebook and Google see potential revenue growth via encroachment, me-too plays, and other all-American business methods.

What about evil?

When I think back to those freshman philosophy classes or talks at lunch with mom-free intellects in the university union, evil becomes fuzzy. The proper term may well be “relative.” Companies in online have little choice but fight hard in online. Once a gap in a service is discerned, competitors can use that opening to siphon off money.

What behavior is evil? Is it helping legal eagles in the US government take action against an alleged Google monopolistic method? Is it hiring staff from another company and then doing whatever it takes to tap into those employees’ knowledge to gain an advantage? Is it encouraging consultants and real journalists to write about a topic from a particular point of view? Is it stacking the deck so the user believes one thing about the service operator while the service operator taps into the flow of information to generate money?

My suggestion is to recognize that online at this time is mostly an ethics-free zone. What appears online often lacks context, can be difficult to verify, and is malleable. Evil in online is often necessity limited only by the consequences of taking a step too far. Right now anything goes. That more than the actions of a commercial enterprise managed by young billionaires defines a danger zone.

Who decides what is good or evil? Consultants, real journalists, billionaires, lobbyists, or governmental entities? I know I don’t make this type of distinction. Waste of time.

Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

To get the basics of the event, you will want to familiarize yourself with the write up in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, “Concordia Disaster: Should a Captain Go Down with His Ship?” In my opinion, the key passage in the Daily Telegraph’s story was:

…leadership entails an obligation to be courageous – morally, physically or both. It is the price of leadership; it is why leaders are more highly regarded and rewarded than the rest of us. But even subordinates in certain professions have the duty to be brave, as the rest of us do not. A soldier is expected unquestioningly to put himself in the way of bullets as a civilian is not.

(But my favorite news item was Cruise Captain Says He ‘Tripped’ Into Lifeboat, Couldn’t Get Out.”

Not Taking Responsibility

The alleged behavior of the captain shares one similarity with enterprise search implementations that sink. The person running the operation shirks responsibility for the disaster. My view is that ego plays a part. The more important factor may be the person’s character. I have reviewed a failed search implementation and had a difficult time determining who was responsible. The procurement team has the thick linen of committee think under which to hide. The information technology manager often keeps well away from search, a behavior conditioned by knowledge that making information findable is often impossible. The chief financial officer just counts the dissipated dollars. Accountants are not implementers. The person charged with the failure is often a young engineer whom those ultimately responsible deem expendable.

The first similarity is that in big disasters those who are responsible do whatever is needed to avoid responsibility. In enterprise search, there is a ship captain. Pretending that a captain does not exist is one interesting characteristic of today’s organizational life. Think Jerry Yang at Yahoo. Recall Leo Apotheker. You get the idea. What about the search system at your company? The National Archives? Amazon’s online store? There are captains responsible. Unfortunately these captains do not get global news coverage for their behavior.

Show Boating

The crash and sinking was a consequence of show boating. The idea is that doing something fancy is appropriate and within the perimeter of the job description is allowed. In enterprise search, the show boating becomes visible when one or more people make suggestions along these lines:

• We need to deliver answer to users, not laundry lists
• Natural language processing is essential to the success of our search system
• We need a taxonomy and semantic technology to make information accessible
• Our system has to work just like Google.

Each of these is similar to the Concordia’s buzz close to shore. Few of those involved in an enterprise search implementation realize how downright expensive, complicated, and resource intensive these “suggestions” become. Vendors go along to keep the contract. The deployment team is thinking about making search headlines and maybe getting a raise and a promotion. Great idea but when the effort sinks the search project, the result is a disaster.

The second similarity between the Concordia and the ill fated enterprise search system deployment is that getting cute can wreck havoc. Now you may say, “Hey, semantic methods will only help our search system.” Maybe, maybe not. My view is that show boating is one characteristic of doomed enterprise search system. The fix? Just do the basics well, then add some special sauce.

Exploding Costs

The cost profile of the Concordia problem is far from complete. The broad outlines are visible. There is the cost of clean up. There is the cost to the Israeli-American owners of Carnival Cruises. There is the cost of the ship. And there is the cost to the cruise industry itself at a pivotal time in the booking season. I can summarize other costs, but you have a base upon which to plan the amount of dough the captain of the Concordia placed at risk with his alleged course adjustment.

The third similarity between the Concordia’s sinking and enterprise search is that the cost of a failed project are far greater than those involved perceive. The license fee is irrelevant. The stakeholders of the company with the albatross have to pay for remediation, lost opportunities, and possible increased risk associated with regulatory or legal requirements. Sweeping a failed enterprise search system under the rug is as difficult as making the half sunken hull of the Concordia disappear from TV news programs. The wreck is too big to hide.

Bottom Line

The Concordia, like most enterprise search systems, should have unfolded in a predictable, acceptable way. Human error, not vendor methods or a specific search algorithm, is the cause of most enterprise search failure.

The question I am considering is, “How many of those involve in an enterprise search project will abandon ship?” My hunch is that there are more Captain Francesco Schettinos than many believe.

Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

Boston-based Inforbix is responding to the rising issue. The company develops intelligent apps for CAD and product data access and is rolling out an iPad mobile application that allows customers to search engineering data anywhere, anytime.

Inforbix is a software company founded in 2012 that addresses the excess of product data within manufacturing companies. The company strives to develop software solutions and apps to address specific data trends and improve productivity. Inforbix is currently a cloud service accessed by web browser and assists customers in finding and sharing product data companywide.

Inforbix products work together with Product Data Management systems that may already be in place at organizations and connect companywide product data. Smaller companies without PDM systems can find an affordable alternative with Inforbix.

The new iPad app is the first mobile application release by Inforbix. The app is powered by InforBix’s semantic technology, which connects structured and unstructured related product data. This link allows users to find and access product data quickly on-the-go, while still providing correct and thorough information that is crucial to efficiency and productivity.

The service is cloud-based and requires no data migration or maintenance. The app can also access multiple file types and addresses searching and accessing product data, as well as other product data tasks such as organizing and presenting data patterns. The app is easy to use and requires no training or prior experience to use.

Chief Executive Officer Oleg Shilovistsky speaks on the topic of the mobile app release in the PR News Release:

“There’s lots of data everywhere. Customers are asking ‘How can I access it all with a single solution?’ Enter Inforbix, and the new iPad app will take Inforbix, a fresh new approach to find, engage with, and administer product data in manufacturing companies, a giant step forward in accessibility.”

The software is simple for companies to employ and is an intelligent solution to sorting through the endless product data that is available. The app can be demoed by pointing to http://www.inforbix.com/demo. Current Inforbix customers can already begin using the iPad app, which is available for free on the Apple App Store. New users can register with Inforbix to enable the app and begin accessing company product data.

At Beyond Search, we applaud companies that are focusing on creatively solving the issue of excess data and are impressed with Inforbix’s move to mobile. The future of technology is going fluid and companies need to remain accessible in the transition.

Andrea Hayden, January 16, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The “real” journalist’s research vehicle. This is the Herman Miller Aeron Chaise 2/3. Kick back and get the news via an Internet connection. No need to talk to humans. No reason to ask vapid questions. No need to get a first hand feel of the crowd. Put the anterior in an aeron and produce news. Get static, dude. Image source: http://www.kalkwijk.com

The company takes a different approach to events such as the anachronistic Consumer Electronic Show. CES is held in the new, spiritual and emotional heart of America—Las Vegas. As you may know, this is a city where a destination looks as if one could walk to the status of Liberty in a couple of minutes. The spatial distortion often means a slog of 30 minutes through a crowd of America’s most intelligent and productive citizens.

Navigate to “Microsoft CEO Hits Familiar Chord in CES Swan Song.” Skip the ambiguity of “swan song” and pondering whether its reference is to Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft, or CES itself. Here’s the new “real” journalism method:

The Associated Press watched Ballmer’s speech in Las Vegas on a webcast.

Whether it is an online university or an update on a legal matter via YouTube.com, why go to an event, interview attendees, check out the crowd reaction, and maybe ask a “real” question? Irrelevant to modern news work.

Here in Harrod’s Creek, this 67 year old goose does not go to many trade shows and he never, ever visits Las Vegas. The older, gentler America in rural Illinois and the mine drainage choked pond are what he prefers.

Does he miss “real” life and information by relying on his Aeron and Internet connection? Well, he thought he did. But what’s good enough for the AP, a “real” news outfit is definitely good enough for an old person like me. Life as it is viewed is definitely better than life as it is actually experienced. Here’s another video on YouTube that makes the first hand experience essentially irrelevant. Good to know how news works today. A video is just like life now. Progress? Not for me but that’s a personal opinion.

Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata.

Years ago I studied at Duquesne University, a fascinating blend of Jesuit obsession, basketball, and phenomenological existentialism. If you are not familiar with this darned exciting branch of philosophy, you can dig into Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint by Franz Brentano or grind through Carl Stumpf’s The Psychological Origins of Space Perception, or just grab the Classic Comic Book from your local baseball card dealer. (My hunch is that many public relations professionals feel more comfortable with the Classic approach, not the primary texts of philosophers who focus on how ephemera and baloney affect one’s perception of reality one’s actions create.)

But my personal touchstone is Edmund Husserl’s body of work. To get the scoop on Lebenswelt (a universe of what is self-evident), you will want to skip the early work and go directly to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. For sure, PR spam is what I would call self evident because it exists, was created by a human (possibly unaware that actions define reality), to achieve an outcome which is hooked to the individual’s identify.

Why mention the crisis of European  thought? Well, I received “American Society for Microbiology Teams Up With TEMIS to Strengthen Access to Content” in this morning’s email (January 10, 2012). I noted that the document was attributed to an individual identified as Martine Fallon. I asked to be removed from the spam email list that dumps silly news releases about Temis into my system. I considered that Martine Fallon may be a ruse like Betty Crocker. Real or fictional, I am certain she or one of her colleagues, probably schooled in an esoteric discipline such as modern dance, agronomy, and public relations are familiar with the philosophical musings of Jean Genet.

You can get a copy of Born to Lose at this link.

I recall M. Genet’s observation:

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

Temis, a European company in the dicey semantic game, surely appreciates the delicious irony of explaining a license deal as a “team”. The notion of strengthening access to content is another semantic bon mot. The problem is that the argument does not satisfy my existential quest for factual information; for example, look at the words and bound phrases in bold:

Temis, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise, today announced it has signed a license and services agreement with the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the oldest and largest life science membership organization in the world.

Do tell. Leading? Semantic content enrichment. What’s that?

What about outfits like Access Innovations, Concept Searching, Expert System SA, Smartlogic, and more than 75 other firms in the semantic space. The “leading” word is interesting but it lacks the substance of verifiable fact. Well, there’s more to the news story and the Temis pitch. Temis speaks for its client, asserting:

To serve its 40,000 members better, ASM is completely revamping its online content offering, and aggregating at a new site all of its authoritative content, including ASM’s journal titles dating back to 1916, a rapidly expanding image library, 240 book titles, its news magazine Microbe, and eventually abstracts of meetings and educational publications.

I navigated to the ASM Web site, did some poking around, and learned that ASM is rolling in dough. You can verify the outfit’s financial status at this page. But the numbers and charts allowed me to see that ASM has increasing assets, which is good. However, this chart suggests that since 2008, revenue has been heading south.

Source: http://www.faqs.org/tax-exempt/DC/American-Society-For-Microbiology.html

In my limited experience in rural Kentucky, not-for-profits embrace technology for one of three reasons. Let me list them and see if we can figure out what causes the estimable American Society for Microbiology.

1. Cost reduction. Professional associations are not usually in growth mode. Health is a hot area, but it is looking at green eyeshades covering accounting programs that have to chop jobs. Automated indexing is one of those teen fantasies about silver bullet solutions that sound good in a meeting but can prove a bit of a challenge in the real world. Not even the medical vocabularies are immune to the disease of language drift and neologisms, issues that marketers and PR professionals often ignore.
2. Declining traffic. There are folks inspired by taxonomy fire drills, boot camps, and triage sessions who assert, “Better indexing will boost traffic.” Sorry. Life does not work that way. Annoyed users may become less annoyed if the indexing changes deliver on point content. In my experience more than a single system’s indexing is needed to remediate the often lousy usage of an increasingly expensive enterprise or Web site indexing system. Once again, it is often easier to focus on a component of a far larger problem than tackling the cause of poor usage. Perhaps management, resources, and technical expertise are the issue? Again, most sales oriented organizations ignore the facts documented in Successful Enterprise Search Management.
3. Remediation of a lack of planning and management actions. I am 67, worked at a couple of reasonably respectable management consulting firms, and have had to investigate vendor compliance with statements of work in search and content processing. What I have learned is that short cuts are preferable to hard work, truism more important than facts, and hope valid than the blunt edge of reality. Without effective management, do we end up with search disasters? Perhaps.

Why focus on Temis? I previously asked the firm’s public relations expert, who seems to be more inclined to spam than research, to cease sending me meaningless spammy news releases. My request was ignored. Nifty. What fascinated me is that Temis asked me to facilitate an introduction for them to a $1.2 billion company’s president. I did this and moved on. I assumed in the manner of French cultural norms that I would be rewarded with entrecote. Wrong. My reward has been spam.

Does this illustrate how Temis perceives equity? Does the spirit of M. Genet apply? My recommendation? Check out the semantic products from the Temis competitors. I quite like Expert System SA in Bologna, Italy, and Bitext in Madrid, Spain. Great food, interesting culture, and–nota bene– no spam. One has to get the semantics correct. No spam from Italy. No spam from Spain. Hmmm. There’s a cultural message perhaps?

What PR spam connotes is what in my opinion could be characterized as desperation marketing. The phenomenon itself defines the act and its progenitor, does it not? And what about those semantics? As M. Genet allegedly said:

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com, publisher of the New Landscape of Enterprise Search which does not include an analysis of Temis and the firm’s technologies which are asserted to be from “the leading provider of semantic content enrichment solutions for the enterprise.” I just don’t believe this, but the outfit is good at spam.

The blogger reports:

They (Elsevier) haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material.

Splash page of arxiv.org shows the seal of Cornell University and the phrase “We gratefully acknowledge supporting institutions. See http://arxiv.org/

Social media and copyright are inherently opposing concepts. User-submitted material, as it is referred to above, will almost always infringe upon copyright. In fact, very few submissions aside from the users own thoughts and words will not infringe upon copyright. If the legislators supporting SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) make good on all their promises, eventual showdowns with social media heavy hitters like Facebook or YouTube could occur.

American copyright was established by the founding fathers in our constitution to balance the protection of intellectual property with the ability to foster creativity and innovation. However, copyright has evolved in the modern era into a blanket protection policy, primarily serving corporations. Libraries and other institutions of learning champion the cause of open access, but even these civic organizations are threatened by corporate lobbyists in their constant quest to have copyright protection extended tighter and longer.

Original American copyright protected works for 14 years, with one optional renewal if the creator was still alive. Now, countless revisions later, copyright protection extends to the life of the author plus 70 years for individuals, and 120 years past origination for corporate authors. Legislation like SOPA is just one more step toward stifling creativity and controlling information for the sake of a profit.

In the case of academic literature, academics and librarians are moving toward open access journals and institutional repositories in an attempt to stop the information bottleneck of academic publishing.

Back to the Quantum Pontiff:

We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine. There is another concrete way to stand up for open access. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has requested comments on the question of public access to federally-funded scientific research.

If open access is cause of interest to you, let the White House hear your opinion. Tell them a librarian sent you, and that she did her research on Wikipedia.

Emily Rae Aldridge, MLS, January 3, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com