Oxford Flexes Its Reference Muscles
April 22, 2010
I go to a gym every couple of days when I am in town. So happens that that a number of semi pro wrestlers go to the gym. Big people. Tattoos. Muscles. I an old wimp and I graciously give up my place when one of these steroid stallions trots to the workout station I favor. Academics have muscles, but I think that my image of a muscular academic and one from Oxford University at that is of a milder, more gentle giant.
The Oxford muscle builders have turned their attention to creating online bibliographies. I think, based on reading the write up “Oxford University Press Launches the Anti-Google” that these will be variants of the old Goldentree bibliographies or the type of reference book Constance Winchell cranked out.
Here’s a synopsis of the product:
The OBO [Oxford Bibliographies Online] tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library’s own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.
Sounds good but there may be some challenges:
First, these hand crafted bibliographies are expensive to create and keep current. The rush of enthusiasm for a project of this type gets some bibliographies out the door. However, the ongoing costs are likely to be an issue because libraries may not have the agility to buy this online service. Oxford University has the money, but once the reality of the costs sink in, my hunch is that push back from the finance person will be coming in 12 months.
Second, revenue. The spreadsheet fever makes the project look pretty tasty. Oxford will find itself dancing with some big outfits in the commercial database world. My view is that Oxford will have to find a partner quickly because, let’s face it, universities are not exactly the top guns in the marketing arena.
Third, the anti Google thing is cute but irrelevant. The Google is muddling along with probes into different market sectors. The Google is in the “good enough” game and that’s where Google’s search and reference services will aim. Google may end up with some academic wonder products but that will be exhaust from the Google revenue machine. Red herring to even mention Google.
Fourth, users want to click and get the full text. When I am doing research, I know how to do the primary and secondary research drill. The problem is that time and resources force me to use my own tools like the Overflight system. But for some tiny percentage of folks looking up information online Bing, Google, and Yahoo will pretty good. To dig into the next level, libraries have Ebsco products. Those who need more are going to be Oxford level researchers, and I am not sure a product aimed for this tiny slice of online users can generate enough revenue to exist without subsidies. Will Oxford fund the rowing team or the bibliographies? Time will tell.
In short, interesting but a bit of anachronism in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
No one paid for this post.
Facebook May Be the Next Google
April 22, 2010
Short honk: I read a number of posts about Facebook’s new services. Impressive. The key item for me was the tie up between Facebook and Microsoft’s cloud services. The Facebooker can use Microsoft Docs for social networking. You can find lots of write ups. I liked “Microsoft Beats Google at Social Networking with Docs for Facebook.” Lots of gems in the article but I noted this passage:
Talk about turnaround: Google Docs is aimed at business users; Docs for Facebook at consumers. This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has beat Google at social networking. The Outlook Social Connector does a very solid job of integrating Outlook with social networks, as I detail in my review for Computerworld. And it is far superior to Google Buzz, Google’s attempt to integrate social networking with Gmail. As I write in a blog post, Microsoft Outlook Social Connector beats Google Buzz, hands down.
Will Google get its act together and deal with Facebook? Will Facebook keep on charging forward? Fascinating shift may be taking place.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
No one paid me to write this.
Cuil Founder Lands Another Google Invention
April 22, 2010
I have been reluctant to beat up on the alleged weaknesses of the Cuil.com system for one good reason. Dr. Anna Patterson is a very sharp computer scientist. She developed a quite ingenious system called Xift which she sold to the AltaVista.com crowd. After more engineering and family work, she joined Google and invented some fascinating technology which I discuss in Google Version 2.0. Even though she and her equally smart companion founded Cuil.com, the Patterson impact on Google continues. One example is the April 20, 2010 patent granted for her invention “Information Retrieval System for Archiving Multiple Document Versions.” You can read in my studies The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 about the importance of this technique to some Google “time” centric processes. A moment’s reflection will reveal that this ability to traverse deltas has some interesting applications. There are other benefits as well, but the invention is meritorious in my opinion and worth reading in US 7,702,618. Here’s the fine Google/lawyer explanation in the patent’s abstract:
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases. Index data for multiple versions or instances of documents is also maintained. Each document instance is associated with a date range and relevance data derived from the document for the date range.
Dr. Patterson has tallied more than a half dozen inventions for the Google. I pay attention to her work and I discount much of the criticism aimed at her most recent activities. In my experience, the systems reveal significant insights into the trajectory of search. Care to disagree? Just bring some facts and your list of inventions and your record of innovation in search. Dr. Patterson may find the dust up amusing. I will.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
Unsponsored post. Dr. Patterson let me pet one of her dogs once. Does that count as a payoff?
Endeca Moves toward Video Search
April 22, 2010
I am putting the finishing touches on Google Beyond Text and came across a news release from Endeca with the catchy title “Endeca Extend Partner Program Adds Leading Video Search Software Vendors”. I was intrigued and partly because I could not figure out the “extend” and “video search” notions. The idea seems to be a good one. With interest in non text content drifting upwards, Endeca is taking steps to allow its McKinley search platform to process video objects. According to the release:
Inaugural Endeca Extend partners in the video search category include 3Play Media, Brightcove and Nexidia. The majority of video and audio files do not have highly attributed meta-data surrounding them. However, through the Endeca Extend program, Endeca and its partners allow customers to use extracted meta-data and high quality, time-synchronized transcripts to increase search recall for audio and video content, and provide new facets for Guided Navigation, cluster related topics, offer landing pages, and improve search relevancy. Endeca customers can easily run their data through an Endeca Extend partner solution, extract additional meta-data elements or transcripts from the most common audio and video file formats and append that information to the original content. Through the partner solutions, search and navigation results will also offer segment-specific playback capabilities for audio and video content. This lowers the integration costs and adds significant structure to the content to enhance the overall user experience. The pre-built integrations allow joint customers the ability to implement best-of-breed technologies without sacrificing ease of integration.
Will Endeca gain traction in the fiercely competitive video search sector? Many organizations put their videos on YouTube and link to them. The pointers and description of the video are text descriptions of the videos. The SEO crowd is chattering about the usefulness of videos and descriptions of them in a Google PageRank effort. We are not too sure about the SEO angle, but we know video is hot for the under 25 crowd.
In our experience, talking about integration of video content and implementing video search can be one of those management tasks where slips between cup and lip can occur. More information is available directly from Endeca at www.endeca.com.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Search Marketing Losing Effectiveness
April 21, 2010
My feedreader yielded an article called “Atlanta Marketing Research Company Reports Marketing Metrics Show Declining Success.” Lousy economy. Inflated specious claims. Meaningless glory words. Yep, marketing at its finest. The write up (if it is still online by the time you read this post) documents some of the dull edges of today’s marketing methods. The source is an outfit called Polaris Marketing Research and the write up provides some interesting factoids, largely out of context, I wish to note. Nevertheless, several are suggestive and triggered my thinking about the reliance on newer forms of marketing.
Here are the three factoids that caught my attention:
- “The Marketing Science Institute (msi.org) reports that a 100% increase in advertising expenditures yields a 1% increase in sales.”
- “The University of Michigan (umich.edu) has discovered that customer satisfaction has fallen below 77%”
- “The MMA (mmaglobal.org/favicon.ico) finds that $54 are returned for every $100 invested in advertising. Further, taking Consumer Package Goods (CPG) advertising expenditures out of the measurement yields a return of $87 for an investment of $100 in all other types of advertising.”
Assume these factoids are reasonably accurate. My thoughts about search and content processing ran along this path:
First, the hyperbole and freneticism that I perceive may be an example of vendors’ inability to find prospects and make sales. If the problem persists, then the noise in the search and content processing sector will go up. I find that some of the search vendors see salvation in more public relations, more spending for azure chip consultants, and more churning of their sales managers. If the factoids from Polaris are accurate, results will be difficult to deliver.
Second, the notion of spending more on marketing may be incorrect. The choking off of technical investment and the elimination of old fashioned interest in a customer will accelerate problems in sales and marketing. Jumping off a roller coaster is tough, but the present marketing thrill ride is a closed loop and may become less enjoyable with each cycle.
Third, spending more on marketing may not increase sales. More marketing means more costs which may increase the financial pressure on search and content processing companies.
In the last few weeks, I have gathered some interesting information about the problems some search and content processing companies are experiencing. The issues range from somewhat wild and crazy “mergers” to investing in trade show exhibits, hoping that conference organizers can deliver qualified buyers with checkbooks.
My view is that the economic challenges that roil certain markets may be abating in some niches. However, search and content processing is beginning to run into headwinds caused by larger firms treating search and content processing as an add in or a utility. Examples include Microsoft’s forceful approach with the Fast ESP system and SAS’s stepped up push in text analytics.
What can most of the 300 vendors of search and content processing systems do? I have some ideas, but I don’t have answers. The upside is that the Polaris factoids are wrong and my preliminary thinking is skewed into the rain shower, not the sunny day. Marketing has not lost its effectiveness and pays off for those who have mastered the art. The downside is that the Polaris factoids are correct. Maybe the future belongs to those who come at search and content processing in a fresh, imaginative way?
An even larger thunderstorm may be building for text content. In a world in which audio and video seem to be outpacing text, what’s the role of key word search and online marketing tied to words? Incumbents in key word search advertising may face a shrinking or at least more reluctant market.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Eclectic List of Semantic Tools
April 20, 2010
I reviewed a list of semantic tools in the write up “Brown Bag Lunch: Methods for Semantic Discovery, Annotation and Mediation”. If you want a list of links to help orient you to the varied, interesting world of semantics, take a peek at the table in this article. I noted some unusual and possibly incorrect entries, but on the whole you will find the information in the table thought provoking. The list begins below the somewhat intimidating diagram of a semantic process.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2010
Lexalytics Reaches for the Cloud
April 20, 2010
Reaching out to a varied audience of users, Lexalytics Web Service can augment brand/reputation management by providing advanced text analytics from a variety of sources.
PRWeb reports in their article, “Lexalytics Unveils Lexascope Web Service for Social Media & Sentiment Analysis” that this new service works easily and inexpensively from the get go to integrate Lexalytics’ sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and thematic analysis directly into the user’s own business intelligence applications. According to Seth Redmore, vice president of products, “If it’s text, and it’s English, we can read it and add value to it.”
Targeting three different types of audiences, Lexalytics is looking at larger enterprises with specific, “point” text analytics problems they need to address; companies that are providing specific media and reputation management service; and companies who want to add value to the content that they are distributing. In short, this Web services provides an extremely quick analysis of thousands of documents; the work of many, many humans.
Melody K. Smith, April 20, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
Facebook Global Growth
April 19, 2010
Facebook is not into search. Facebook is into a new space where “friends” do the work of some search and retrieval tasks. I urge you to read “Is Facebook Becoming the Whole World’s Social Network?” The most useful part of the write up is the table showing one month’s changes in 10 countries. These data suggest that Facebook may be doing to Google what Google did to incumbent Web search systems, if the data hold up.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2010
A freebie.
Zoogma Targets Buried Treasure
April 18, 2010
CMSwire recently reported that “Zoogma, An Automated Intelligence-Gathering and Analysis Platform” is attempting to track all the unstructured content lurking in the corners of every enterprise content management system. Much like a detective, it does this by detecting and deciphering clues to make the data findable. A number of companies are entering this “intelligence” sector, including Fetch Technologies and Kapow Tech. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Zoogma collects information from web scrapers, databases and other repositories, stores that information, analyzes it and delivers it through a web services interface. According to Alex Emmermann, general manager of Cormine Intelligent Data, “While keywords help you find what you know, Zoogma is specifically geared towards finding what you don’t know.” Zoogma reportedly can plug in to many enterprise content management systems, but specific names have not been released. Currently there is little feedback to indicate whether Zoogma works as claimed; only time will tell.
Melody K. Smith, April 18, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
Arnold Keynote about Google Technology Excites Young PhDs
April 18, 2010
On April 15, 2010, Stephen E Arnold addressed an audience of 250 people at Slovenia’s annual technology conference. Here’s a picture of Mr. Arnold pointing out that Lady Gaga had one of the most popular videos on YouTube.com.
The other picture shows Mr. Arnold cornered by a large group of PhD students who were disappointed that Mr. Arnold did not make the PowerPoint presentation available on this ArnoldIT.com, which allegedly provides one click access to his public presentations.
Mr. Arnold eluded these young wizards and sought refuge in Trieste, Italy, prior to returning to rural Kentucky on April 16, 2010. He enjoyed his visit to Slovenia, saying, “I get the same reaction to my lectures wherever I go.”
Filed by Donald Anderson, April 18, 2010
Mr. Arnold paid for this write up.
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