Digital Reasoning Continues to Expand
May 16, 2011
Move over Palantir and i2 Ltd. Digital Reasoning is expanding due to its rapid growth. As reported in MSN’s “Digital Reasoning Introduces Federal Advisory Board,” the data analytics leader has created a board to guide its push into the federal market. We learned:
With the federal government’s increased focus on cloud computing, (Digital Reasoning’s) flagship product Synthesys® provides a unique Entity Oriented Analytics solution that enables government agencies to tap into the power of big data. The Advisory Board represents a team with unique insight into the requirements of Big Data, text analytics and intelligence solutions for government agencies.
The board members are: Gen. William T. Hobbins, who retired as Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Bob Flores, founder and president of Applicology Inc., who spent 31 years in the US intelligence community; Anita K. Jones, who managed the Department of Defense’s science and technology program; Capt. Nick Buck, who spent 15 years in National Security Space, including 10 years in the National Reconnaissance Office; and Mike Miller, currently president of M4 Associates and previously VP of Juniper Networks’ Public Sector Division where he was responsible for all business with Juniper’s Public Sector customers in the US. This kind of talent should be valuable guiding Digital Reasoning’s federal sector strategy.
We have tracked this Franklin, Tennessee, company since its inception. To get some insight into the firm’s approach, you may want to read these two interviews ArnoldIT.com, the owner of this news service, conducted with Tim Estes, the founder of Digital Reasoning. The February 2010 interview explores the core technology of the firm and how it differs from other vendors’ methods. The December 2010 interview probes the new version of the firm’s flagship technology.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2011
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Twitter Firehose News
April 15, 2011
There is a tweak to the Witter and Mediasift partnership. You can read about it in the DataSift write up “Twitter Partnership”.
Mediasift and Twitter have agreed to a partnership that has the potential to change how marketers and companies understand conversations about their products as well as how they choose to market them to target audiences. By utilizing the advanced DataSift software they are able to break down “tweets” into a language that is easily understandable and searchable and is still quite cost effective with it’s “pay per use” subscription. The article said:
As a company we have been very fortunate to have access to the Twitter Firehose for quite some time. This has enabled us over the past two years to refine our thinking, leading to the incarnation of DataSift.
DataSift compiles multiple social media feeds and additional data sets to create a common abstract layer which provides meaningful insight into much of the chaotic and unstructured data from the outlets. It took nearly 18 months to complete the DataSift platform but it has already seen a huge outpouring of company and marketing support with more than a billion requests per month.
Important stuff for the real time crowd.
Leslie Radcliff, April 15, 2011
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Down from the Mountain and Being Tracked en Route
April 8, 2011
No need to chop off one’s arm if monitoring goes big time. Now everyone has heard of “big brother” and no, I’m not talking about the television show. Though it used to be just a theory spouted by crazed and deranged individuals who wore tin foil hats and swore they’d been probed by aliens, in 2011 with “the age of the Internet” firmly underway, the “big brother” concept has become a very real, very scary (in my opinion) piece of reality.
According to a report by The New York Times and reported on by Digital Trends, many cell phone companies can and do track your movements without ever divulging to the consumer that they are keeping an “eye” on them. This information came to light after Malte Spitz, a German politician, sued his cell phone carrier, Deutsche Telekom, for information that they had acquired about him. What came out was somewhat shocking but nothing less than any “tin head” could have told us about.
Between August of ’09 and February of 2010, Deutsche Telekom, recorded the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of Spitz more than 35,000 times. The snippet that caught my attention was:
We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” Sarah E. Williams, a graphic information expert at Columbia University. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
In the United States it is unclear exactly what level of surveillance is conducted on consumers and what information is saved because companies are not required to divulge the information they collect…though I would argue that the documents are public record and could possibly be demanded under FOIA laws since it is not optional to opt out of consumer tracking initiatives.
Cynthia Murrell, April 8, 2011
Freebie just like a tagged bovine in the feedlot
Tips for Google RSS Feeds
March 29, 2011
Google News is a quick and easy way to keep on top of world and local events. With Google paying more attention to real time and social content, we find that good ideas to manage the “fire hose” quite useful. Here at the goose pond, RSS feeds are helpful when they alert us in real time about current news. When you combine the two, you have a great news application. One wouldn’t think there would be a way to improve such a great tool, but “Five Interesting Ways To Use Google News RSS Feeds” gives us great tips!
By learning more about these RSS feeds and incorporating a few interesting tricks to display and read these RSS news feeds, you’ll be able to stay on top of all the very best news as easily as possible.
Some of the tips are very simple to follow: find your preferred Google RSS feed, find news feeds for your topic of interest, create your own, and edit it to suit your preferences. By managing your feeds, you can keep yours news content relevant. The article goes on to explain ways that you can use the feeds for business, social networks, or personal Web sites and how to keep the content updated. You can use Google Alerts, add new search terms, add a NewsShow, get Google Reader, or read them via NetVibes. Before reading this article I did not realize how applicable RSS feeds were to every day websites. Try them out for yourself.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2011
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Google Speeds Tweet Information
March 14, 2011
If you can say one thing about Google is that it likes to do things for itself. Soshable reports “Forget Indexing Tweets: Google Is Pulling Them Directly from the API.” Google launched Caffeine last year as a tool for real time web indexing with a heavy influence on social media.
Google used to display tweets from people’s accounts, but now we have learned the company is linking directly to Twitter’s API, thus reducing latency. Our source said:
“Most tweets are eventually indexed – some within minutes, some within hours or even days. These Tweets are being presented in their raw form prior to being indexed. The Tweets themselves are not being used in search results through this new method. They will be indexed separately and can then appear in searches as their own listings, but this is different. Just as with Google’s “Real-time” search, this feature is a fire hose.”
Once tweets are indexed they can be added to search results as individual listings. One might think this is a new endeavor, but it’s not. It’s only a quicker way for Google to provide real time information, but it is fact to keep in your frontal memory.
Google continues to make speed a differentiator. In addition to reducing latency for Twitter content, the Chrome Version 10 browser has been positioned as “faster” as well.
Whitney Grace, March 14, 2011
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Topsy on Top for Real Time Search
March 13, 2011
Last year I was involved in several real time search projects. In 2009, I was writing about real time search in my Information World Review column. There were many players and quite a bit of excitement. However, the cost and challenges of coping with flows of information updated in a low latency work flow winnowed the field. I continue to use itPints.com and Topsy.com. Both are quite good. In “Topsy Raises Another $15M for Real-Time Search” we learned that Topsy – well – raised more money. Here’s the passage we liked:
Topsy isn’t just offering a consumer service. It recently launched Topsy Social Modules, which allow publishers to add real-time content to their websites (you can see a sample module above), and Topsy Social Analytics, which helps businesses see what’s becoming popular on social networking services.
With the real time thing and social, we rely on Topsy for some of our more interesting research. Think about individuals who work to keep a low profile. Topsy outputs some useful links. If you have not tried the system, give it a whirl. Highly recommended.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2011
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The Wages of SEO Sin
February 13, 2011
So Google can be fooled. It’s not nice to fool Mother Google. The inverse, however, is not accurate. Mother Google can take some liberties. Any indexing system can. Objectivity is in the eye of the beholder or the person who pays for results.
Judging from the torrent of posts from “experts”, the big guns of search are saying, “We told you so.” The trigger for this outburst of criticism is the New York Times’s write up about JC Penny. You can try this link, but I expect that it and its SEO crunchy headline will go dark shortly. (Yep, the NYT is in the SEO game too.)
Everyone from AOL news to blog-o-rama wizards are reviling Google for not figuring out how to stop folks from gaming the system. Sigh.
I am not sure how many years ago I wrote the “search sucks” article for Searcher Magazine. My position was clear long before the JC Penny affair and the slowly growing awareness that search is anything BUT objective.
Source: http://www.brianjamesnyc.com/blog/?p=157
In the good old days, database bias was set forth in the editorial policies for online files. You could disagree with what we selected for ABI/INFORM, but we made an effort to explain what we selected, why we selected certain items for the file, and how the decision affected assignment of index terms and classification codes. The point was that we were explaining the mechanism for making a database which we hoped would be useful. We were successful, and we tried to avoid the silliness of claiming comprehensive coverage. We had an editorial policy, and we shaped our work to that policy. Most people in 1980 did not know much about online. I am willing to risk this statement: I don’t think too many people in 2011 know about online and Web indexing. In the absence of knowledge, some remarkable actions occur.
You don’t know what you don’t know or the unknown unknowns. Source: http://dealbreaker.com/donald-rumsfeld/
Flash forward to the Web. Most users assume incorrectly that a search engine is objective. Baloney. Just as we set an editorial policy for ABI/INFORM each crawler and content processing system has similar decisions beneath it.
The difference is that at ABI/INFORM we explained our bias. The modern Web and enterprise search engines don’t. If a system tries to explain what it does, most of the failed Web masters, English majors working as consultants, and unemployed lawyers turned search experts just don’t care.
Search and content processing are complicated businesses, and the appetite for the gory details about certain issues are of zero interest to most professionals. Here’s a quick list of “decisions” that must be made for a basic search engine:
- How deep will we crawl? Most engines set a limit. No one, not even Google, has the time or money to follow every link.
- How frequently will we update? Most search engines have to allocate resources in order to get a reasonable index refresh. Sites that get zero traffic don’t get updated too often. Sites that are sprawling and deep may get three of four levels of indexing. The rest? Forget it.
- What will we index? Most people perceive the various Web search systems as indexing the entire Web. Baloney. Bing.com makes decisions about what to index and when, and I find that it favors certain verticals and trendy topics. Google does a bit better, but there are bluebirds, canaries, and sparrows. Bluebirds get indexed thoroughly and frequently. See Google News for an example. For Google’s Uncle Sam, a different schedule applies. In between, there are lots of sites and lots of factors at play, not the least of which is money.
- What is on the stop list? Yep, a list can kill index pointers, making the site invisible.
- When will we revisit a site with slow response time?
- What actions do we take when a site is owned by a key stakeholder?
Collecta to Reconfigure
February 2, 2011
Collecta has totally changed directions, says Mashable.com in the article, “Startup Collecta Shuts Down Its Product, Working on a New One.” The real-time search engine that launched in 2009 has been closed and the company has decided to concentrate their efforts on new ideas. Most of Collecta’s money is still in the bank and their retaining many of their original employees.
Gerry Campbell, the CEO, states that while running the real-time search engine they learned three lessons: there’s a huge need for real-time information, a destination site is not the way to reach people, and new trends, i.e. Facebook, are growing.
“It’s interesting to note that Collecta’s major rival in the real-time search space, OneRiot, also completely changed product directions this year, dumping its search engine and moving into the online ad game.”
Everyone appears to be switching to the real-time market. While this is where the money appears to be going at the moment, I wonder who will foot the bill? Is this a pivot point for social content search engines? Could be.
Whitney Grace, February 2, 2011
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Search and the Responsive Web
January 13, 2011
I hate the term UX, shorthand for user experience. “Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It” introduced me to a new term, “responsive Web design.” I like it. The article that explains what responsive Web design is. The passage I noted was:
We should rather start a new era today: creating websites that are future-ready right now. Understanding how to make a design responsive to the user doesn’t require too much learning, and it can definitely be a lot less stressful and more productive than learning how to design and code properly for every single device available. Responsive Web design and the techniques discussed above are not the final answer to the ever-changing mobile world. Responsive Web design is a mere concept that when implemented correctly can improve the user experience, but not completely solve it for every user, device and platform.
The article includes a number of excellent examples and some of those very useful, ready to edit code snippets that the goslings and I love.
What can search vendors learn from this write up? In my opinion, vendors can learn how to break out of the search box. Times and user needs have changed. It’s not experience. It is responsiveness.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2011
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Enterprise Search: Baloney Six Ways, like Herring
December 21, 2010
When my team and I discussed my write up about the shift of some vendors from search to business intelligence, quite a bit of discussion ensued.
The idea that a struggling vendor of search—most often an outfit with older technology—“reinvents” itself as a purveyor of business intelligence systems—is common evoked some strong reactions.
One side of the argument was that an established set of methods for indexing unstructured content could be extended. The words used to describe this digital alchemy were Web services, connectors, widgets, and federated content. Now these are or were useful terms. But what happens is that the synthetic nature of English makes it easy to use familiar sounding words in a way to perform an end run around the casual listener’s mental filters. It is just not polite to ask a vendor to define a phrase like business intelligence. The way people react is to nod in a knowing manner and say “for sure” or “I’ve got it.”
Have you taken steps to see through the baloney passed off as enterprise search, business intelligence, and knowledge management?
The other side of the argument was that companies are no longer will to pay big money for key word retrieval. The information challenge requires a rethink of what information is available within and to an organization. Then a system developed to “unlock the nuggets” in that treasure trove is needed. This side of the argument points to the use of systems developed for certain government agencies. The idea is that a person wanting to know which supplier delivers the components with the fewest defects needs an entirely different type of system. I understand this side of the argument. I am not sure that I agree but I have heard this case so often, the USB with the MP3 of the business intelligence sound file just runs.
As we approach 2011, I think a different way to look at the information access options is needed. To that end, I have created a tabular representation of information access. I call the table and its content “The Baloney Scorecard, 2011.”
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