CNN: The Coming Cost Cataclysm
June 8, 2009
I found myself in Atlanta, stranded because of modern air travel. What to do with a few spare hours? The Atlanta Dot Net Web site had one suggestion. Tour CNN Headquarters. I navigated to this link and read here:
Ever wondered what the inside of a news studio looks like? Take the Inside CNN Studio Tour in Atlanta and view for yourself. Guests can take a 50-minute CNN studio tour featuring the Control Room Theater, Special Effects studio and Interactive News Desk section.
As a senior, I qualified for a $12 admission. My impressions:
- The CNN studios in Atlanta occupied a building that once housed an amusement park. The cavernous atrium was a reminder of wasted money. The area sucked energy, heat in the winter and A/C in the summer. I tried to calculate the cost per square foot but I got a headache and the tour guide did not know how to respond to my question, “What is the total cubic feet of this atrium?” He smiled a lot and pointed out that CNN was the first 24 hour video news outlet.
- There were a lot of people in the usable space in the gargantuan structure. There were security guards at every stairwell. There were security guards at the metal detector which I set off thus triggering a pat down. I had no contraband, and I did enjoy the frisk, quite up close and personal.
- The guide pointed out that 20 percent of the staff were engaged in information technology. He pointed out cameras that were run from a control room, obviating the need for a human to keep the red eye in front of the talent. There were dozens of people performing work flow functions like research, writing, editing, and directing. The talent read stories that floated in front of their eyes so “eye contact was intimate”.
Stepping back after the tour, I reflected on my impressions and the three observations I summarized in the dot points above. I thought about the Google Wave technology. At some point in the future, I envisioned moving the CNN news process to the Wave system. I also thought about the one person television network that Leo LaPorte has built in Petaluma, California. I thought about the number of people on the tour who took pictures and made videos with mobile phones. I thought about the billboard ad I saw whilst riding Atlanta’s truncated mass transit system for high speed wireless networks. I through about the young man on the tour who sent SMS messages to his pals who were apparently interested in what he had to say about the inner sanctum of CNN.
Bottom-line: CNN is on track for a cost cataclysm. In my opinion, software can reduce the friction in the CNN process. By pushing news down to those with mobile devices and out to the fringes of civilization, a software based company can offer good enough video news without the punishing cost burden CNN as well as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters must bear.
CNN sits on a San Andreas fault of costs. The earthquake can come at any time.
If this analysis sounds familiar, it is the same theme that has been running through some of the business commentaries about the problems traditional newspapers face. Upstarts using technology have sucked ad revenue and content from the custodial embrace of traditional publishing companies. The result has been a divorce of information methods and revenue. The traditional approach finds itself bleeding from many tiny wounds which sap its ability to leapfrog from where the organizations are today and where they have to be tomorrow.
The young people whom I know (few in number and quite strange to me) love video info. In fact, I note with some horror the dependence Google has upon videos to explain complex processes. I think the trend is locked in because when one writes, there is a formalism imposed. Even an addled goose like me has to plan what’s up. With a video, the rhetoric is that of the demo, a conversation, or a YouTube.com “insider” video. If the message is garbled, just do another video. Easy and without boundaries. The approach is just right for those decades younger than I.
How does this create trouble for a “too big too fail” television news operation?
MarkLogic: The Shift Beyond Search
June 5, 2009
Editor’s note: I gave a talk at a recent user group meeting. My actual remarks were extemporaneous, but I did prepare a narrative from which I derived my speech. I am reproducing my notes so I don’t lose track of the examples. I did not mention specific company names. The Successful Enterprise Search Management (SESM) reference is to the new study Martin White and I wrote for Galatea, a publishing company in the UK. MarkLogic paid me to show up and deliver a talk, and the addled goose wishes other companies would turn to Harrod’s Creek for similar enlightenment. MarkLogic is an interesting company because it goes “beyond search”. The firm addresses the thorny problem of information architecture. Once that issue is confronted, search, reports, repurposing, and other information transformations becomes much more useful to users. If you have comments or corrections to my opinions, use the comments feature for this Web log. The talk was given in early May 2009, and the Tyra Banks’s example is now a bit stale. Keep in mind this is my working draft, not my final talk.
Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to be at this conference. My topic is “Multi-Dimensional Content: Enabling Opportunities and Revenue.” A shorter title would be repurposing content to save and make money from information. That’s an important topic today. I want to make a reference to real time information, present two brief cases I researched, offer some observations, and then take questions.
Let me begin with a summary of an event that took place in Manhattan less than a month ago.
Real Time Information
America’s Top Model wanted to add some zest to their popular television reality program. The idea was to hold an audition for short models, not the lanky male and female prototypes with whom we are familiar.
The short models gathered in front of a hotel on Central Park South. In a matter of minutes, the crowd began to grow. A police cruiser stopped and the two officers were watching a full fledged mêlée in progress. Complete with swinging shoulder bags, spike heels, and hair spray. Every combatant was 5 feet six inches taller or below.
The officers called for the SWAT team but the police were caught by surprise.
I learned in the course of the nine months research for the new study written by Martin White (a UK based information governance expert) and myself that a number of police and intelligence groups have embraced one of MarkLogic’s systems to prevent this type of surprise.
Real-time information flows from Twitter, Facebook, and other services are, at their core, publishing methods. The messages may be brief, less than 140 characters or about 12 to 14 words, but they pack a wallop.
MarkLogic’s slicing and dicing capabilities open new revenue opportunities.
Here’s a screenshot of the product about which we heard quite positive comments. This is MarkMail, and it makes it possible to take content from real-time systems such as mail and messaging, process them, and use that information to create opportunities.
Intelligence professionals use the slicing and dicing capabilities to generate intelligence that can save lives and reduce to some extent the type of reactive situation in which the NYPD found itself with the short models disturbance.
Financial services and consulting firms can use MarkMail to produce high value knowledge products for their clients. Publishing companies may have similar opportunities to produce high grade materials from high volume, low quality source material.
Search Archaeology
May 30, 2009
I find it amusing to look at articles about search, content processing and text mining. Perhaps I am tired or just confused. The past to me stretches back to cards with holes and wire rods and to the original NASA RECON system. For Computer Active, the past stretches all the way back to Lycos. You may find this revisionist view of history interesting. Click here to read “Bunch of Fives: Forgotten Search Engines.”
Let me comment of the five search engines, adding a bit of addled goose color to the authors’ view of search:
- Cuil.com. Cuil is a product of a Googler (Anna Patterson), her husband, and some other wizards. The company had a connection to Google. Dr. Patterson’s patents are still stumbling out of the USPTO with Google as an assignee. Xift, Dr. Patterson’s search system, was not mentioned in Computer Active. It was important for its semantic method and it exposed Dr. Patterson to the Alta Vista team. Alta Vista played some role in Google’s rise to success and its current plumbing. Cuil has improved, and I thought I saw a result set including some Google content before the system became publicly available. I use Cuil.com, and I am not sure if “forgotten” is a good word for it or its technology.
- MSN Live. I have lost count of Microsoft’s search systems. Microsoft search initiatives have moved through many iterations. The important point for me is that Microsoft is persistent. The search technology is an amalgamation of home grown, licensed, purchased, and reworked components. The search journey for Microsoft is not yet over. Bing is a demo. The rebuild of Fast as a SharePoint product is now in demo stage but not yet free of its Web and Linux roots. More to come on this front and, believe me, Microsoft search is not forgotten by Google or others in the search business.
- Alta Vista. Yep, big deal. The reason is that Alta Vista provided the Googlers with a pool of experienced and motivated talent. The job switch from the hopelessly confused Hewlett Packard to the freewheeling Google was an easy one. Alta Vista persists today, and I still use the service for certain types of queries. What’s interesting is that Alta Vista may have been one of the greatest influences on both Google and Microsoft. Again. Not forgotten.
- Lycos. We sold our Point system to Lycos, so I have some insight into that company’s system. The key point for me is that Fuzzy and his fellow band of coders from Carnegie Mellon sparked the interest in more timely and comprehensive Web search. Lycos was important at a sparkplug, but the company was among the first to add some important index update features and expanded snippets for each hit. Lycos has had a number of owners, but I won’t forget it. When we sold Point to the outfit, the check cleared the bank. That I will remember along with the fact that architectural issues hobbled the system just as the Excite Architext system was slowed. These are search as portal examples today.
- Ask Jeeves. I can’t forget. One of the first Ask Jeeves execs used to work at Ziff. I followed the company’s efforts to create query templates that allowed the system to recognize a question and then deliver an answer. The company was among the first to bill this approach “natural language” but it wasn’t. Ask Jeeves was a look up service and it relied on humans to find answers to certain questions. Ask.com is the descendent of Ask Jeeves’ clunky technology, but the system today is a supported by ace entrepreneur Barry Diller who, like Steve Ballmer, is persistent. The key point about Ask Jeeves is that it marketed old technology with a flashy and misleading buzzword “natural language”. Marketers of search systems today practice this type of misnaming as a standard practice. Who can forget this when a system is described one way and then operates quite another.
Enjoy revisionism. Much easier in a Twitter- and Facebook-centric world with a swelling bulge of under 40 experts, mavens, and pundits. These systems failed in some ways and succeeded in others. I remember each. I still use each, just not frequently.
Stephen Arnold, May 31, 2009
Enkia: Early Player in Smart Search
May 26, 2009
Last week, I received a call from a defrocked MBA looking for work. (No surprise that!) The young wizard wanted to know about Enkia, a spin out of Georgia Tech’s incubator program in the late 1990s. If you poke around Web traffic reports, you see a surge for Enkia in year 2000 and then a flat line. In November 2008, a person sent this Twitter message that plopped into my tracking system: “Enkia is alive.” I told the job hunter that I would poke through my search archives to see what information I had. I will be in Atlanta in June, and I will try to swing by the company’s office at 85 Fifth Street in Atlanta to see what’s shakin’. (The last time I tried this approach the TeezIR folks kept the door locked. Big addled geese are often not welcome. Gee, maybe it’s because the addled geese don’t believe the chunks of marketing food tossed at them by vendors.)
The Company
According to an August 2000 article here, the company was
building the foundation of the Intelligent Internet(TM) based on the latest discoveries in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Enkia’s middleware products overcome the limitations of current Internet search technology by sensing what a browser or shopper wants and recommending information quickly and automatically. This software enables portal providers to create personalized experiences that encourage return site visits and increased sales. Founded in 1998, Enkia is a member of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the Georgia Institute of Technology’s high-tech business incubator.
What It Does
Enkia, the name of a Sumerian god with special brain power, was an early entrant in the “artificial intelligence for the Web movement”. If you have been following the exploits of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, the notion of smart software is with us today. The marketing verbiage is different, but the notion is the same as it was for Enkia.
Here’s a description from a year 2000 business journal story:
The software [Dr. Ashwin Ram and his students developed, called Enkion, has a type of ESP, if you will, sensing browsers’ needs by what they click. Enkion builds on techniques of artificial intelligence to model the human mind. The technology automatically recommends relevant information so that users don’t have to wade through hundreds of search results.
The company put a demo online, and I had a screen shot of the service. I thought I had results screen shots, but my memory deteriorates more quickly than the value of a US government Treasury note.
Screen shot of the Enkia Search Orbit interface, no longer available.
When the service rolled out, Dr. Ram said here:
“EnkiaGuide helps anyone find their ‘needles’ in haystacks of data on and off the Internet,” Dr. Ram adds. “It can help users find their way through technical support libraries or large e-commerce sites, and allow corporations to organize pathways through their large proprietary databases. The EnkiaGuide can make sense out of information chaos.”
The Technology
In my archive, I had a copy of an older white paper which is still available online as of May 25, 2009, here:
The IRIA architecture builds upon and extends the experience-based agent approach by embedding it in a knowledge discovery and presentation engine using techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning. Crushing demands on resources limit the amount of “smarts” typical web search engines can apply to any particular information resource requests. IRIA’s design overcomes this problem by leveraging existing search engines for the brute force work of indexing and searching the web and by focusing its “smarts” on modeling and understanding the efforts of an individual or workgroup. The core of IRIA that makes this understanding possible is its reminding engine. The reminding engine directly applies the experience-based agent approach to the problem of information search, consisting of a context-sensitive search mediator which uses a unified semantic knowledge base called a knowledge map to represent indexed pages, queries, and even browsing sessions in a single format. This uniform representation enables the development of an experience-based map of available information resources, along with judgments about their relevance, allowing precise searches based on the history of research for an individual, group or online community. The knowledge map is furthermore a browsable information resource in its own right, accessible by standard internetworking protocols; with appropriate security precautions, this enables workgroups at remote sites to view and exploit information collected by another workgroup.
Universal: The New Information Baloney
May 23, 2009
English does not have enough words to keep parvenus, azure chip consultants, and newly minted experts happy. The terminology of search has reached a critical point. Everyone knows how to search. In meetings last week, I learned that “search is a been there, done that” experience. I also learned that “search is not interesting”. One bright young engineer told me and others in the group, “Our employees are basically search experts”.
In such an environment, I concluded that words like “universal”, “unified” and “user experience” define the search landscape. Toss in the notion of a “social experience”, a “community”, and “real time” and we have a new way to make information available.
Search has been thrown from the marketers’ bandwagon. Out of sight, search is no longer a problem. This seems now to be a universal truth.
What’s happening is the poeticization of search. The people whom I have been encountering have adopted a weird language that does little to resolve challenges in finding information. Let’s look at several examples and see if there is a message in this linguistic information baloney.
First, read “Yahoo Eyes Acquisitions, Social Media” here. The story exists without much context, which is understandable in a short write up. The language regarding search illustrates the baloney to which I have referred. The author Alexei Oreskovic offered me this statement: “Yahoo will introduce new products this fall that will give users a more unified experience across its network of websites and showcase the company’s strategy to grow again, after much of 2008 was marred by the failed deal talks with Microsoft Corp.” A “unified experience” is a phrase that seemed to suggest Yahoo’s making or becoming a single unit. Yahoo is not a single unit. When I go to the Yahoo splash page, enter search terms, and get a result list, I get one thing. When I navigate to my Yahoo Mail account and enter search terms in one of the * two * search boxes, I don’t get unity. I get a list that may or may not be what I expected. Forget relevance. The user interface offers me two search boxes instead of one box with a way to indicate which collection I wish to search. Make a goof and you don’t get unification. If you are like me, you get what’s unexpected. The relevance and precision of the results are lost in the “experience”. On a very fundamental level, Yahoo has quite a bit of work to do across and within its high traffic services. A “unified experience” does not mean very much. The reality is the opposite of unity.
Second, in 2007, Google rolled out “universal search”. You can refresh your memory of this notion here. Two years later, there is no “universal” in Google search. Look at the main page at Google.com. You have to select a specific collection or index and then run your query within that collection. Universal means run separate queries and then glue together the results. I don’t see much “universal” in this approach. i see separate tasks and lots of manual grunt work. Other vendors have adopted the word “universal” in a lemming like response to Google’s own baloney. What other search vendors trot out universal search recently? Kosmix here. Search Cowboys and the search engine optimization crowd here. And many others. The phrase “universal search” connotes some magic land where information is available in a form that goes down like a child’s breakfast of Fruity Pebbles.
Early Days for Information Management
May 21, 2009
In the last two weeks, I have been crisscrossing the United States. On last night’s fab flight from Philadelphia to Louisville, I watched the lights and thought about the comments I heard about data management. I have to mask the clients with whom I spoke and fuzzify the language, but I think I can communicate several key points.
Search Is a Symptom, Not the Cause
One idea that hooked me was an observation about search and the turmoil and confusion it creates and leaves behind once a new system is up and running. Search is not the problem. Search is a manifestation of the organization’s broader information management situation. If information management is lousy, then search will be lousy as well. The problem is that fixing information management in an organization under financial pressure is a big job. Furthermore, it involves change which is often resisted when job loss and work responsibilities are likely. It’s much easier to slap in a new search system and move on. Unfortunately, search gets another black eye and a vendor can be criticized, sometimes in a scathing manner, because the information management approach was flawed, broken, or non existent.
Fatigue or diabetes?
No Clue about Volume
Most of the people with whom I spoke sang one verse from one hymnal, “We have no clue about our data. We don’t know how much info we have. We are lost in bits. We are lost in bits. We are clueless.”
Most of the savvy information technology professionals know that the volume of digital information is increasing. The problem is that no one knows exactly how fast, what to do with the emails and documents, or how to keep track of what’s where. The Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” anticipates the statements about the hassle information volume poses.
One doesn’t need a degree in information science to recognize that if you can’t collect digital information, you don’t have much of a chance answering this question: “Are you sure we don’t have that document?” Finding is now becoming a must have function, and the Catch 22 is that most organizations don’t have a grasp on the amount of data in the organization or where an item is, search becomes a bit tougher.
How big is the information task?
Boye 09 Overflight Awards
May 19, 2009
The Overflight Award for Excellence, created by ArnoldIT.com and JBoye.com, was presented to Volker Grünauer, head of E-marketing at Wienerberger in Austria, at the JBoye Conference: Philadelphia 2009, http://jboye08.dk/]http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/, May 5-7, held at the Down Town Club in Philadelphis.
The award recognizes the best presentation at the conference on digital media, which featured more than 50 speakers from around the world.
Grünauer offered a relevant talk called “Developing a customer centric web strategy.” This presentation discussed smart web strategy for promoting real brick and mortar products, including how Wienerberger defines the four elements of web success and how customer behavior has become the trigger for every eMarketing decision. Slides of the presentation are available at http://jboye08.dk/downloads/download.php?file=1226063851.pdf. He was awarded an engraved Lucite trophy and 500 Euros.
Volker is responsible for the marketing strategy of all websites at Wienerberger, the world’s largest manufacturer of bricks, clay roof tiles and clay pavers. In this function he also developed a new brand and domain management strategy. Together with the IT department he managed the rollout of the CMS into new Wienerberger markets. See his profile athttp://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/speakers/volker_grunauer.
An honorable mention went to Donna Spencer, a freelance information architect and interaction designer, a mentor, writer and trainer from Australia, who presented a discussion on the user experience track called “Getting Content Right.” She was awarded an engraved Lucite trophy. Her profile is at http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/speakers/donna_spencer.
Stephen E. Arnold and Janus Boye created the award to permit the community attending the conference to identify presentations that met the following criteria: information that would be useful to delegates upon returning to work; research supporting the presentatio; quality of the delivery and examples; and importance of the speakers’ topics at the time of the conference.
A panel of distinguished attendees and information practitioners had the task of assessing the presentations and determining the winners. The judges were Dana Hallman, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Karen Rosenzweig, Novartis;Peter Svensson, Lund University; and Troy Winfrey, University of Baltimore.
About ArnoldIT.com
Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his office in Kentucky. He works with colleagues worldwide on a wide range of online and content-related projects. The company’s Web site is http://arnoldit.com, and the Beyond Search blog is at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/.
About JBoye.com
J. Boye, a digital media enterprise, is frequently contracted to help with strategy and governance, project planning, requirement specifications, vendor and software selection, project management and ROI optimization. They also produce industry reports and organize educational conferences. Contact the company at info@jboye.co.uk or info@jboye.dk.
Jessica Bratcher, May 19, 2009
SEO Guru Reveals His Inner Self
May 18, 2009
I found the article “Dammit, I’m A Journalist, Not A Blogger: Time For Online Journalists To Unite?” here quite interesting. The reason? It makes clear that “real journalists” want more respect than a “real blogger” gets. The schism will ignite a firestorm of Tweet and probably lead to the formation of a not-for-profit organization, a certification program similar to that required of medical doctors and air craft pilots, a Web site, and maybe a movie deal.
The author of the “Dammit” essay is Dan Sullivan, who is the oft-quoted expert in search. The distinction between search as in marketing and search as in the enterprise is not usually made. I have seen Mr. Sullivan’ statements about Google, online marketing, and other aspects of the online world, I associate him with search engine marketing, conferences chock full of ad executives and stressed Web site managers, and newsletters that explain the intricacies of getting a Web page to be trim and fit for indexing.
You real digital journalists, fall in, hustle, hustle, hustle.
The “Dammit” essay turns on a different color spot light. Mr. Sullivan wrote:
Bloggers got bumpkiss. We have no lobbying group. We have no organization designed to help members learn the intricacies of uncovering government documents. We can’t get government agencies to call us back at all, at times (I know, been there and done that). And we’ve got a newspaper industry increasingly portraying us as part of an evil axis that’s killing them. Blogs steal their attention, and Google steals their visitors.
But the gravel in the craw is that existing associations are not doing what needs to be done to preserve the reputation, professionalism, and statute of digital journalists. He asserted:
I want online journalists to get organized. Yes, there’s the Online News Association, but that seems an extension of “traditional” journalists working in mainstream organizations with digital outlets. I think we need an “Online Journalists Association,” or a “United Bloggers” or whatever catchy name you come up with.
The author of “Dammit” then shifted into what struck me as “plea bargaining mode”. He wrote:
But while I love newspapers, came from them and hope they continue to find a place (more on their future later, short story, expect 4-5 “nationals” to survive), I’m begging them to stop seeing bloggers as enemies. Many bloggers are journalists, part of the news ecosystem, colleagues that are entitled to respect.
Yes, I shouted. Yes, bloggers deserve respect.
Respect, digital journalists deserve respect.
Well, some bloggers. There are the bloggers who write about their cats, personal tastes in breakfast food, long form bloggers, and the newer microbloggers. My thought is that bloggers have to be separated into the ones who are “digital journalists using the Web log form” and the run-of-the-mill millions who start a blog, quit, or rant and foam in a manner that often surprises me.
Microsoft and Search: Interface Makes Search Disappear
May 5, 2009
The Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog here published the second part of an NUI (natural user interface) essay. The article, when I reviewed it on May 4, had three comments. I found one comment as interesting as the main body of the write up. The author of the remark that caught my attention was Carl Lambrecht, Lexalytics, who commented:
The interface, and method of interaction, in searching for something which can be geographically represented could be quite different from searching for newspaper articles on a particular topic or looking up a phone number. As the user of a NUI, where is the starting point for your search? Should that differ depending on and be relevant to the ultimate object of your search? I think you make a very good point about not reverting to browser methods. That would be the easy way out and seem to defeat the point of having a fresh opportunity to consider a new user experience environment.
Microsoft enterprise search Web log’s NUI series focuses on interface. The focus is Microsoft Surface, which allows a user to interact with information by touching and pointing. A keyboard is optional, I assume. The idea is that a person can walk up to a display and obtain information. A map of a shopping center is the example that came to my mind. I want to “see” where a store is, tap the screen, and get additional information.
This blog post referenced the Fast Forward 2009 conference and its themes. There’s a refernce to EMC’s interest in the technology. The article wraps up with a statement that a different phrase may be needed to describe the NUI (natural user interface), which I mistakenly pronounced like the word ennui.
Microsoft Suface. Image Source: http://psyne.net/blog4/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/microsoftsurface.jpg
Several thoughts:
First, I think that interface is important, but the interface depends upon the underlying plumbing. A great interface sitting on top of lousy plumbing may not be able to deliver information quickly or in some cases present the information the user needed. I see this frequently when ad servers cannot deliver information. The user experience (UX) is degraded. I often give up and navigate elsewhere.
Evvie 2009 Winners: David Evans and Martin Baumgartel
May 4, 2009
Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com, http://www.arnoldit.com, announced the Evvie “best paper award” for 2009 at Infonortics’ Boston Search Engine Meeting on April 28.
The 2009 Evvie Award went to Dr. David Evans of Just Systems Evans Research for “E-Discovery: A Signature Challenge for Search.” The paper explains the principal goals and challenges of E-Discovery techniques. The second place award went to Martin Baumgärtel of bioRASI for “Advanced Visualization of Search Results: More Risks or More Chances?”, which addressed the gap between breakthroughs in visualization and actual application of techniques.
Stephen Arnold (left) is pictured with Dr. David Evans, Just System Evans Research on the right.
The Evvie is given in honor of Ev Brenner, one of the leaders in online information systems and functions. The award was established after Brenner’s death in 2006. Brenner served on the program committee for the Boston Search Engine Meeting since its inception almost 20 years ago. Everett Brenner is generally regarded as one of the “fathers” of commercial online databases. He worked for the American Petroleum Institute and served as a mentor to many of the innovators who built commercial online.
Martin Baumgartel (left) and Dr. David Evans discuss their recognition at the 2009 Boston Search Engine Meeting.
Mr. Brenner had two characteristics that made his participation a signature feature of each year’s program: He was willing to tell a speaker or paper author to “add more content,” and after a presentation, he would ask a presenter one or more penetrating questions that helped make a complex subject more clear.
The Boston Search Engine meeting attracts search professionals, search vendors, and experts interested in content processing, text analysis, and search and retrieval. Held each year in Boston, Ev, as he was known to his friends, demanded excellence in presentations about information processing.
Sponsored by Stephen E. Arnold (ArnoldIT.com), this award goes to the speaker who best exemplifies Ev’s standards of excellence. The selection committee consists of the program committee, assisted by Harry Collier (conference operator) and Stephen E. Arnold.
This year’s judges were Jill O’Neill, NFAIS, Sue Feldman, IDC Content Technologies Group, and Anne Girard, Infonortics Ltd.
Mr. Arnold said, “This award is one way for us to respect his contributions and support his life long commitment to excellence.”
The recipients receive a cash prize and an engraved plaque. Information about the conference is available on the Infonortics, Ltd. Web site at www.infonortics.com and here. More information about the award is here. Information about ArnoldIT.com is here.
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
