UK Publisher Repositioning
December 15, 2015
I read “How Dennis Publishing Created a New Tech Media Brand.” I was looking forward to a how to, the nuts and bolts of converting a print and online operation into a zippy digital brand.
The write up explains what most folks involved in “real” journalism know: Publishing outfits are good at outputting content and maybe not so good at the organization of the overall operation.
I learned from the write up:
Dennis Publishing wants to be the top destination for technology-related content in the U.K. in the next two years, spurred by the quick success of its new digital brand, Alphr.
I remembered seeing Alphr on iTunes. A podcast about technology ran for a while and then disappeared in October 2015 with nary a peep. I noted the odd ball spelling, which I assume allows the company’s content to be located with a Google or Yandex search.
The write up said:
That decision seems to be paying off. Alphr attracted just under 600,000 unique visitors in the U.K. in November and 1.5 million globally, according to Google Analytics….Dennis claims that the latest data shows that it outstripped Wired U.K., Quartz and Tech Insider in November in terms of shares in U.K. visits across these categories.
So what was the “how”? The write up pointed out that the company:
- Centralized certain operations
- Implemented testing procedures for products
- Kept the same headcount
- Embraced the Ziff “network” ad sale model from the late 1980s.
In short, in 2015, Dennis took steps that other publishers have been forced to adopt for a number of years.
The one thing the new plan did not do was communicate that the podcast, one of those hippy dippy social media things, was not relevant to the firm.
Communication about podcasts, it seems, is not germane to the new digital brand.
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2015
Understanding Trolls, Spam, and Nasty Content
December 9, 2015
The Internet is full of junk. It is a cold hard fact and one that will never die as long as the Internet exists. The amount of trash content was only intensified with the introduction of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterst, and other social media platforms and it keeps pouring onto RSS feeds. The academic community is always up for new studies and capturing new data, so a researcher from the University of Arkansas decided to study mean content. “How ‘Deviant’ Messages Flood Social Media” from Science Daily is an interesting new idea that carries the following abstract:
“From terrorist propaganda distributed by organizations such as ISIS, to political activism, diverse voices now use social media as their major public platform. Organizations deploy bots — virtual, automated posters — as well as enormous paid “armies” of human posters or trolls, and hacking schemes to overwhelmingly infiltrate the public platform with their message. A professor of information science has been awarded a grant to continue his research that will provide an in-depth understanding of the major propagators of viral, insidious content and the methods that make them successful.”
Dr. Nitin Agarwal and will study what behavioral, social, and computational factors cause Internet content to go viral, especially if they have deviant theme. Deviant means along the lines something a troll would post. Agarwal’s research is part of a bigger investigation funded by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research, National Science Foundation, and Army Research Office. Agarwal will have a particular focus on how terrorist groups and extremist governments use social media platforms to spread their propaganda. He will also be studying bots that post online content as well.
Many top brass organizations do not have the faintest idea of even what some of the top social media platforms are, much less what their purpose is. A study like this will raise the blinders about them and teach researchers how social media actually works. I wonder if they will venture into 4chan.
Whitney Grace, December 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Yahoo: A Partial Catalog of Errors
December 8, 2015
I read “7 of Yahoo’s Biggest **** Ups.” Just seven? With the smell of blood in the air on Wall Street, the jibes on talking head TV, and the endless write ups about the Yahoo Board’s dithering, a catalog of Yahoo’s seven biggest failures seems timely.
What are the mistakes? Here you go:
- Not buying Google
- Not buying Facebook
- Not selling itself to Microsoft
- The Flickr flop
- Not thinking as a technology outfit
- The Tumblr tumble
- Disorganization in the reorganizations.
I have prepared several analyses of the Yahooligans over the years. I once had an illustration for a PowerPoint presentation which showed the Titanic and Terry Semel as the captain. I wish I could find that deck.
There are a couple of points in my list of purple vulnerabilities; for example, the settlement with the Google for the alleged, possible missteps regarding the GoTo, Overture, Yahoo advertising systems was an important milestone. I think that error in judgment was the action that turned on the flashing yellow lights for Yahoo. Yahoo settled a legal matter and took some money. Google then pranced toward its $60 plus billion in revenue dervived mostly from online advertising.
I also noted in my analyses the technical hubris at Yahoo. The company talked a good game and some of the Yahooligans published articles explaining whizzy technology type things. But the company fumbled not one or two technical opportunities. The company has been for a long time essentially a marketing yodler. Yodels are interesting, but yodels do not turn half baked ideas into revenue. The technology matters, not the wild notions.
Poor Yahoo. Its trajectory presages what will happen to a number of other outfits who take their eye off the technology-that-matters ball as it whizzes towards the batter’s head.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2015
The Google Cultural Institute Is a Digital Museum
December 8, 2015
Museums are the cultural epicenters of the human race, because the house the highest achievements of art, science, history, and more. The best museums in the world are located in the populous cities and they house price works of art that represent the best of what humanity has to offer. The only problem about these museums is that they are in a stationary location and unless you have the luck to travel, you can’t see these fabulous works in person.
While books have often served as the gateway museums’ collection, it is not the same as seeing an object or exhibit in real life. The Internet with continuously evolving photographic and video technology have replicated museums’ collection as life like as possible without having to leave your home. The only problem with these digital collections are limited to what is within a museums’ archives, but what would happen if an organization collected all these artifacts in one place like a social networking Web site?
Google has done something extraordinary by creating the Google Cultural Institute. The Google Cultural Institute is part digital archive, part museum, part Pinterest, and part encyclopedia. It is described as:
“Discover exhibits and collections from museums and archives all around the world. Explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail, from hidden gems to masterpieces.”
Users can browse collections of art, history, and science ranging from classical works to street art to the Holocaust and World War I. The Google Cultural Institute presents information via slideshows with captions. Collections are divided by subject and content as well as by the museum where the collections originate. Using Google Street View users can also view the very place where the collections are stored. Users can also make their own collections and share them like on Pinterest.
This is an amazing step towards bringing museums into the next step of their own evolution as well as allowing people who might not have the chance to access them see the collections. The only recommendation is that it would be nice if they put more advertising into the Google Cultural Institute so that people actually know it exists.
Whitney Grace, December 8, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Cybercrime to Come
December 2, 2015
Apparently, we haven’t seen anything yet. An article at Phys.org, “Kaspersky Boss Warns of Emerging Cybercrime Threats,” explain that personal devices and retail databases are just the beginning for cyber criminals. Their next focus has the potential to create more widespread chaos, according to comments from security expert Eugene Kaspersky. We learn:
“Russian online security specialist Eugene Kaspersky says cyber criminals will one day go for bigger targets than PCs and mobiles, sabotaging entire transport networks, electrical grids or financial systems. The online threat is growing fast with one in 20 computers running on Microsoft Windows already compromised, the founder and chief executive of security software company Kaspersky Lab told AFP this week on the sidelines of a cybersecurity conference in Monaco.”
The article also notes that hackers are constantly working to break every security advance, and that staying safe means more than installing the latest security software. Kaspersky noted:
“It’s like everyday life. If you just stay at home and if you don’t have visitors, you are quite safe. But if you like to walk around to any district of your city, you have to be aware of their street crimes. Same for the Internet.”
Kaspersky’s company, Kaspersky Lab, prides itself on its extensive knowledge of online security. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Moscow, the company is one of the leading security firms in the world.
Cynthia Murrell, December 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
EHR Promises Yet to Be Realized
December 1, 2015
Electronic health records (EHRs) were to bring us reductions in cost and, just as importantly, seamless record-sharing between health-care providers. “Epic Fail” at Mother Jones explains why that has yet to happen. The short answer: despite government’s intentions, federation is simply not part of the Epic plan; vendor lock-in is too profitable to relinquish so easily.
Reporter Patrick Caldwell spends a lot of pixels discussing Epic Systems, the leading EHR vendor whose CEO sat on the Obama administration’s 2009 Health IT Policy Committee, where many EHR-related decisions were made. Epic, along with other EHR vendors, has received billions from the federal government to expand EHR systems. Caldwell writes:
“But instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can’t be assured that their records—drug allergies, test results, X-rays—will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. But it also means we’re all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly seven years ago, when the federal government poured billions of dollars into digitizing the country’s medical records. ‘Within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,’ he announced in January 2009, when visiting Virginia’s George Mason University to unveil his stimulus plan. ‘This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.’ Unfortunately, in some ways, our medical records aren’t in any better shape today than they were before.”
Caldwell taps into his own medical saga to effectively illustrate how important interoperability is to patients with complicated medical histories. Epic seems to be experiencing push-back, both from the government and from the EHR industry. Though the company was widely expected to score the massive contract to modernize the Department of Defense’s health records, that contract went instead to competitor Cerner. Meanwhile, some of Epic’s competitors have formed the nonprofit CommonWell Health Alliance Partnership, tasked with setting standards for records exchange. Epic has not joined that partnership, choosing instead to facilitate interoperability between hospitals that use its own software. For a hefty fee, of course.
Perhaps this will all be straightened out down the line, and we will finally receive both our savings and our medical peace of mind. In the meantime, many patients and providers struggle with changes that appear to have only complicated the issue.
Cynthia Murrell, December 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Interview with Informatica CEO
November 26, 2015
Blogger and Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf interviews Anil Chakravarthy, acting CEO of Informatica, in a series of posts on his blog, Big Data & Brews. The two executives discuss security in the cloud, data infrastructure, schemas, and the future of data. There are four installments as of this writing, but it was an exchange in the second iteration, “Big Data Brews: Part II on Data Security with Informatica,” that captured our attention. Here’s Chakravarthy’s summary of the challenge now facing his company:
Stefan: From your perspective, where’s the biggest growth opportunity for your company?
Anil: We look at it as the intersection of what’s happening with the cloud and big data. Not only the movement of data between our premise and cloud and within cloud to cloud but also just the sheer growth of data in the cloud. This is a big opportunity. And if you look at the big data world, I think a lot of what happens in the big data world from our perspective, the value, especially for enterprise customers, the value of big data comes from when they can derive insights by combining data that they have from their own systems, etc., with either third-party data, customer-generated data, machine data that they can put together. So, that intersection is good for, and we are a data infrastructure provider, so those are the two big areas where we see opportunity.
It looks like Informatica is poised to make the most of the changes prompted by cloud technology. To check out the interview from the beginning, navigate to the first installment, “Big Data & Brews: Informatica Talks Security.”
Informatica offers a range of data-management and integration tools. Though the company has offices around the world, they maintain their headquarters in Redwood City, California. They are also hiring as of this writing.
Cynthia Murrell, November 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
MarkLogic Does Ecommerce
November 25, 2015
On their blog, MarkLogic announces they are “Eliminating Shopper Fatigue: Making Online Commerce Faster, More Accurate.” Anyone who has tried to shop online for a very particular item understands the frustration. Despite all the incentives to quickly serve up exactly what a customer is looking for, ecommerce sites still struggle with searches that get too specific. Writer (and MarkLogic chief marketing officer) Michaline Todd gives this example: A site that sells 652 different versions of a “screwdriver” returns zero results to the phrase “one-quarter-inch slotted magnetic screwdriver.” You know it must be there somewhere, but you have to comb through the 652 screwdriver entries to find it. That or give up and drive to the local hardware store, where a human will hook you up with exactly what you need. Good for local business, but bad for that ecommerce site.
Todd says the problem lies in traditional relational databases, upon which any eCommerce sites are built. These databases were not meant to handle unstructured data, like supplier-created product descriptions. She describes her company’s solution to the problem, which naturally includes MarkLogic’s NoSQL technology:
“The beauty of NoSQL is that it’s a schema-agnostic data model that ingests data in whatever its current form. Codifyd uses MarkLogic to quickly and reliably merge millions of data points from thousands of suppliers into a product catalogue for each of its clients. By gathering such fine-tuned information instantaneously, Codifyd recommends products matched to specific attributes in real time, increasing customer trust, loyalty and retention. This more precise information also allows retailers to bundle relevant product offers in a set, improving upselling and increasing the average order size. For example, a retailer can serve up the ‘one-quarter-inch slotted magnetic screwdriver’ the customers searched for as well as a toolkit that contains that particular screwdriver.”
Todd notes that Codifyd also dramatically speeds up the process of posting entries for new products, since unstructured data can be reproduced as-is. Launched in 2001, MarkLogic proudly declares that theirs is the only enterprise-level NoSQL platform in existence. The company is headquartered in San Carlos, California, and maintains offices around the world.
Cynthia Murrell, November 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Search Experts Looking for Work? Rejoice
November 23, 2015
The article titled 17 Tools to Make LinkedIn Work for You on TNW provides some thoughtful commentary on how to make the best use of the social media platform LinkedIn. The article begins by emphasizing how important and relevant LinkedIn still is, particularly for people in Sales, who use the service to gather information and research prospects. It goes on to highlight the difficulty facing salespeople when it comes to searching LinkedIn, and the myriad of tools and Chrome extensions available to simplify search. The first on the list is Crystal,
“Language matters. How you communicate with someone, the words you use, how you structure your requests etc. affects their initial perception of you. And that’s what Crystal helps with. The standalone app as well as its Chrome extension allows you to profile Linkedin users profiles to detect their personality. And suggest the best ways to communicate with them. Crystal can tell you what to write in an email or how to create a message that engages them in a way they’d expect from you.”
Other resources include SalesLoft Prospector, which aids in building lists of targeted leads with contact information in tow, Elink.Club for LinkedIn, which visits 800 targeted profiles a day with the expectation that just under 10% of those users will, in turn, return the visit and become acquainted, and Discover.ly, which helps users establish mutual friends and social media commonalities with the profiles they view.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Data and Information: Three Cs for an Average Grade
November 21, 2015
I read “Why Companies Are Not Engaging with Their Data.” The write up boils down the “challenge” to three Cs; that is, a mnemonic which makes it easy to pinpoint Big Data clumsiness.
The three Cs are:
- Callowness
- Cost
- Complexity.
How does one get past the notion of inexperience? I suppose one muddles through grade school, high school, college, and maybe graduate school. Then one uses “experience” to get a job and one can repeat this process with Big Data. How many organizations will have an appetite for the organic approach to inexperience? Not many I assert. We live in a quick fix, do it now environment which darned well better deliver an immediate pay off or “value.” Big Data may require experience but the real world wants instant gratification.
Cost remains a bit of a challenge, particularly when revenues are under pressure. Data analytics can be expensive when done correctly and really costly if done incorrectly.
Complexity. Math remains math. Engineering data management systems tickles the fancy of problem solvers. Combine the two, and the senior management of many firms are essentially clueless about what is required to deliver outputs which are on the money and with budgets.
The write up states:
As a recent report from Ernst & Young points out ‘Most organizations have complex and fragmented architecture landscapes that make the cohesive collation and dissemination of data difficult.
In short, big hat, no cattle. Just like the promises of enterprise search vendor to make information accessible to those making business decisions, the verbal picture painted by marketers is more enticing than the shadow cast by Big Data’s Cs. I see that.
Stephen E Arnold, November 21, 2015
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
