Ulla de Stricker: Rugge Memorial Winner in 2009
April 3, 2009
Ulla de Stricker, a widely respected information professional, received the Sue Rugge Memorial Award for 2009. Ms. Rugge was one of the pioneers in for-fee research and analysis. Sue Rugge is credited with founding the independent information profession. Through her work and teaching, she inspired many other information professionals to set up their own businesses and helped them succeed by sharing her advice. She is fondly remembered by those who knew her as a generous, caring, and passionate individual who paved the way for a new professional niche. My own recollection of Ms. Rugge is one of bravery. Struggling with a medical condition, she sparkled when talking about her Italian villa rental business, one of her side interests.
Each year in her memory, the Association of Independent Information Professionals (aiip.org) awards the Sue Rugge Memorial Award to a member who has “significantly helped another member through formal or informal mentoring”.
I learned yesterday to my great delight that the 2009 award was given to Ulla de Stricker – to her great surprise, I’m told. I am not surprised. Ulla is the consummate professional. I know first hand that in her more than three decades of work has always helped and supported her colleagues “above and beyond”. She is an inspiration to many who work in the professional information and research sector. Anyone who has attended her talks will testify she is inspiring, energetic, and genuine in her contributions to career building (resume reviews being but one part).
I have asked her to review most of my studies and monographs. Her attention to detail is amazing. Ms. de Stricker operates a consulting practice to assist clients with information and knowledge management challenges (www.destricker.com). She assists me in many ways, not least as a crackerjack editor making me sharpen my thinking. Subscribe to Ulla’s blog here. On offer is a series of substantive essays for information professionals.
Two honks for Ms. de Stricker.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
BoilingPage: What’s Hot among People
April 3, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to the real time search service Boiling Page. The company processes Twitter messages, identifies hot Web pages, and presents a constantly updated list of what people are talking about. The company’s Web site said:
At BoilingPage, you will find the most popular (we call them HOT) and interesting Web pages among people. As we all know, people discuss about their favorite Web pages and interesting Web pages in various networks like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook etc. We basically mine these conversations, organize them properly based on which we’ll show you the best and the most popular Web pages among people. More than just displaying hot Web pages, we’ll show recommendations for each hot page that’ll help you discover more interesting Web pages. We’ll also allow you to create your favorite list by clicking ‘Bookmark’ and bring personalized recommendations based on your favorites. The best part is — you don’t have to keep refreshing our Web page to find new updates on a topic; you can simply register a topic as a feed and you’ll start receiving automatic updates by email.
My search for “business intelligence” revealed some useful links. Here’s a screenshot of the first two hits:
In addition to useful real time insights, I liked the company’s API. You can read about them here .
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
New Column by Arnold
April 3, 2009
I have reached agreement with the Smart Business Network for a new column. I anticipate that the first one will appear in May 2009. The angle will be the use of social systems for marketing. SBN serves small and mid sized businesses in 19 geographic areas in the United States. I won’t repost my columns in this Web log. I think SBN plans to use the content on its Web site and in its business publications. Social system marketing is now an important service. Since Google has decided to sit on the sidelines, I want to follow the horse race in what looks like a crowded field. I am now doing three for fee columns each month: the KMWorld column about Google, the Information World Review column about real time search, and now the SBN column about online marketing via social networks. I will continue to recycle information for my Web log as well. The columns contain fresh information and are less frisky than the addled goose’s musings in this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
OneRiot Twitter News Search
April 3, 2009
Chris Snyder’s “OneRiot Launches Twitter-Powered News Search” struck me as a good write up about an interesting new service. Mr. Snyder wrote:
Unlike Google, which uses page rank and authority to display top results, OneRiot displays the most recent links Tweeted first. The results are updated constantly. Below each linked article, you can see who found it first and how many people have Tweeted it since. Users can also jump in and participate in the conversations.
He includes quite a bit of useful information. I want to fiddle with OneRiot. I have several tools to monitor the Twitterverse, and I am pleased with the results I am able to obtain. I ran a number of queries. Some defaulted to Web search results. I hit a home run with a query for food stamps:
You can try out the service here.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
Cazoodle: Semantic Search
April 3, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Euwyn’s “Cazoodle – Semantic Data-aware Search” here. Developed by Chambana wizards, Cazoodle “looks to create semantic data-aware search for various verticals, starting with apartments, events, and shopping (electronics, for the most part).” Euwyn makes clear that Cazoodle is a vertical search engine; that is, the content focuses on a specific topic such as apartments. Cazoodle said:
[It is] a startup company from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), aims to enable “data-aware” search– to access the vast amount of structured information beyond the reach of current search engines. The company is co-founded by Prof. Kevin C. Chang and his research team of graduate and undergraduate students, with the support of the University and technology transfer from the MetaQuerier research at UIUC. Cazoodle is located at EnterpriseWorks, an incubator facility of the University, on the Research Park of UIUC in Champaign, Illinois.
The company seems to be going in the same direction as Classifieds.com, a Web start up that I found quite interesting. Cazoodle delivers a “semantic data-aware search.” I ran a query for an apartment in Urbana, where I worked on my PhD many years ago. The Cazoodle results looked like this:
The service looks interesting, demonstrating that dataspaces can be useful. I detected a few Google influences as well. Click here to try the beta search.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
Amazon Embraces Hadoop
April 2, 2009
The fleet footed Amazon surprised me. I read Larry Dignan’s Amazon Launches Hadoop Data Crunching Service” here. What interested me was Amazon’s use of the Hadoop framework. According to Mr. Dignan’s write up,
The service, called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is designed for businesses, researchers and analysts trying to conduct data intensive number crunching (statement). Hadoop, which is used by companies like Google and Yahoo, is trying to be pushed into the enterprise data center by startups like Cloudera.
I found this interesting for three reasons:
- Amazon has consistently beaten Google to the punch in the cloud computing push for developers and startups. Google has, in my opinion, watched from the sidelines.
- Google influenced the Hadoop system, which is a variant of the Google MapReduce system. You can find a description in my The Google Legacy (2005) here.
- Amazon, despite its early somewhat unusual approach to infrastructure, has gotten its act together. The clearest indication of this is that the company can integrate new technology into its existing data centers and not go down.
In my view, Amazon is making the transition from digital retail operation to a more serious online force.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Google Leximo Tie Up
April 2, 2009
Leximo is a social dictionary; specifically, “a Multilingual User Collaborated Dictionary that lets you search, discover and share your words with the World.” Google snapped up the company. You can read the Leximo manifesto here. One of the tenets is:
Open community-based and user-friendly functions promote participation, accountability and trust.
What’s Google need a dictionary for? In my opinion, the GOOG wants a flow of new words plus definitions to fatten up its existing knowledgebases. I am confident the idealism of Leximo will persist at the GOOG.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Digital Video Delivery Cost
April 2, 2009
Short honk: ZDNet Blogs ran a short item called “$400 Mln Spent on Delivering Video via CDNs in 2008” here. Note: the link to the story is longer than the news item. So, $400 million spent hosing digital video. Question: who pays for this stuff? Not me. I prefer text which allows me to acquire information quickly, not at a fixed speed in linear streams. Will Google continue to subsidize YouTube.com? Stakeholders may want some of that money returned as dividends or invested in services that return a profit. Just my opinion and I am not a video person.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
QuePlix: Legacy Data Search
April 2, 2009
Several years ago I listened to a presentation from Index Engines. The company developed an appliance that sat in a back up stream. The idea was that an authorized user could search for a document processed by the back up system. I thought the idea was an interesting one. A number of eDiscovery firms address the legacy data issue via other methods. Today the organization wanting to query legacy information has a number of options.
QuePlix offers a search system for legacy data. Troy Dreir’s “QueSearch: A Search Engine for your Legacy Data” here alerted me to another vendor in this market space. Mr. Dreir wrote:
QuePlix has just released the second of its platform-agnostic programs which are each designed to retrieve information from legacy applications. The first solution was QueWeb, which not only extracts legacy application metadata, but then builds a user interface on top of it. The allows the company to make a transition toward new applications while still using the data from legacy apps. Because it’s based on existing systems, there’s no need to train staff on how to use it and that allows for a smoother migration. The program’s simplicity and usefulness translates into a huge ROI, Tenberg says. QueWeb was launched in 2001 and is already up to its third version.
I did have some information in my files about this company. The key points I had noted when I got a demo in 2007 included:
- The company is a Google partner so there’s an integration capability available to its customers
- Customers can use QuePlix’s cloud option and shift some of the hassles to hosted services such as Amazon’s S3
- A white paper provides more detail. You can get it here.
More information as I locate it.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Traditional Journalism Is Dead, Well, Not Exactly
April 1, 2009
Short take: the Huffington Post has a way to keep investigative journalism alive. I hope so. Since Gannett bought the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co. in 1986, the investigative and the journalism have disappeared from the newspaper. Click here to read “Huffington Post Launches Investigative Journalism Venture” here. I think this warrants close observation. Great idea.
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
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