Russia Passes Internet Censorship Legislation Impacting LiveJournal Blog
August 26, 2012
Internet censorship is a hot topic these days due to the fact that some countries do not value freedom of speech and choose to restrict it. ZeroPaid recently reported on this issue in the article “Russia Censors LiveJournal.”
According to the article, Russia has passed internet censorship legislation in the name of protecting its citizens from suicide, drug use, and other criminal activity. The impetus for censoring LiveJournal, a social network owned by SUP Media where Internet users can keep a blog, occurred on July 18 when:
“Local law enforcement informed a Yaroslavl court about pat-index, a neo-Nazi blog it had found on LiveJournal during a sweep. The blog’s hateful message violates Russian federal laws against extremism. Because of Bill 89417-6, the court now has the power to stamp it out completely and immediately. The court ordered Internet provider Netis Telekom to block, among other illegal sites, this blog’s IP. The court order shows the IP to be blocked as 208.93.0.128.
However, LiveJournal blogs don’t have unique IP addresses. That IP belongs to all of LiveJournal Russia, effectively blacking out LiveJournal for everyone in Yaroslavl (a city of nearly 600,000) and all the surrounding areas to which Netis Telekom provides service.”
Despite the fact that the censorship only occurred for a short period of time, the fact that legislation restricting Internet rights, which have been deemed part of freedom of speech by the United Nations, exists is very problematic.
Jasmine Ashton, August 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Dedicated iPad Content is No Media Savior
August 25, 2012
It seems that content tailored to the iPad is not the panacea media outfits hoped it would be. Gigaom examines the (lack of a) trend in “HuffPo, The Daily and the Flawed iPad Content Model.”
It has been just over a month since The Huffington Post launched their paid iPad content service, and already the site announces it is reducing the price. To zero. Meanwhile, News Corporation‘s dedicated iPad division The Daily has sharply reduced its staff and, it is rumored, may be on its way out altogether. What’s happening? Is the iPad not the savior of news organizations?
Writer Matthew Ingram suspects the culprit is the very way users have come to access media online. He explains:
“Whether media companies like it or not (and they mostly don’t), much of the news and other content we consume now comes via links shared through Twitter and Facebook and other networks, or through old-fashioned aggregators — such as Yahoo News or Google News — and newer ones like Flipboard and Zite and Prismatic that are tailored to mobile devices and a socially-driven news experience. Compared to that kind of model, a dedicated app from a magazine or a newspaper looks much less interesting, since by design it contains content from only a single outlet, and it usually doesn’t contain helpful things like links.”
This viewpoint, though probably correct, seems to leave little hope for traditional publishers who strive to make it in today’s media landscape. Ingram acknowledges that a couple of organizations who already had a very strong brand, like the New York Times, and some that target niche audiences are doing well. For the field as a whole, though, fresh ideas are desperately needed.
Cynthia Murrell, August 25, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Measuring Emotion in the Enterprise
August 24, 2012
We thought SharePoint incorporated social functions. We also thought Fast Search offered sentiment analysis via Lexalytics‘ technology. More must be needed, since CIO now declares, “Yammer Lets Organizations Measure Emotions in Enterprise Social Networks.” The write up informs us:
“Yammer is adding functionality to its cloud-based enterprise social networking (ESN) software that lets organizations gauge the types of emotions expressed in employee posts.
“The new capability will be provided via an integration with Kanjoya, whose Crane software is designed to identify and analyze ‘sentiment’ in text, Yammer said on Thursday.
“Yammer customers who sign up for this feature will have a new Crane dashboard in their Yammer admin console that will describe the prevalent mood in reactions from employees in the ESN about specific topics.”
The example given—use the software to analyze emails and other communications to determine how employees feel about a recent benefits change.Crane tracks about 80 different emotions; it allows administrators to search by keywords, narrow reactions by office or department, and create graphical representations of their workers’ feelings.
I know such a tool can be more efficient than simply asking employees for their opinions, especially in large organizations. Still, I just can’t ignore the Orwellian aftertaste left by such innovations. Maybe it’s just me.
Cynthia Murrell, August 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Social Research: Marketing Fluff as Facebook Cools
August 21, 2012
I read “Social Research Key Findings”. The write up summarizes research which has consumed “most of the year.” Read the original article. Judge for yourself. Is social media applied to sentiment, prediction, customer support, and the other buzzwords associated with the phrase “social media” ready for prime time. My view is that as “the end of search” approaches, vendors are scrambling to find marketing Velcro which will lead to new customers and repeat business.
The write up points out that the research was sponsored by some social media luminaries who, it appears, wanted to know what makes customers’ hearts go pitter patter. There is an interesting but almost illegible graph which runs down the survey respondents’ perception of “hindrances” to social analytics and its assorted children.
The graphed data are based on respondents’ selection of True or False. The scale is wonky, running from 0 to 250, and I am not sure if these data represent individual choices, a subset, or a normalized output. I whipped out my trusty magnifying glass and learned the following from the graph:
The respondents were roughly evenly split on True and False votes for this statement: “Not sure which business can leverage.” The respondents were in the same kettle of fish with regard to “Legal Issues, Security issues, the benefits, and fear of negative impacts.
It sure looked to me as if the majority of respondents agreed that their information technology departments were not a hindrance to social media. Company culture also seems not to be a particular barrier.
The article explains the key findings with nine observations. Let me highlight four findings which I found interesting. You will need to consult the original article to get the full payload from the research.
Allegedly the research supports the statement: “It’s still an early market.” My view is that the dismal performance of Facebook’s initial public offering indicates that social fatigue has set in. Social research is not silver bullet. Customers still want to talk to an informed human. Predictive analytics still cannot pick winners in horse races. Sentiment analysis does little more than flag email with inflammatory language. The ClearForest warranty process works, but it is expensive and depended on rules. Rules were expensive to maintain. In large systems with dynamic content, the fancy math helps but it does not deliver results commensurate with the marketers’ promises. Big surprise? Nope.
A second finding is encapsulated in the statement: “It should not be surprising that video and picture sharing are among the top social media.” The only problem is that understanding the content of videos and pictures is a tough computational problem. Pump through a day of YouTube content and you have a system which is expensive to build, maintain, and scale. In short, words are a very difficult problem. Words have not yet been cracked. The social audio and video is an even more difficult problem. Opportunities? Yes. Solutions for a cash strapped enterprise? Not yet, gentle reader.
A third finding is summarized in this way: “Marketing and service have more uses for social media than does sales, so far.” My interpretation: Pumping out big bucks to analyze social media does not generate revenue. My view is that social research boils down to tracking what individuals do. Even with large amounts of data, the social researchers are not able to hook the data, their analyses, and their services to generating revenue for the licensees. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies, in my opinion, remain juicy prospects. The tire company or the waste disposal business may not buy or even sit through a webinar.
The final finding which caught my attention was “Content is king.” I don’t know what this means. The article explains:
Ranking the three major social media for usefulness, Twitter is first followed by Facebook and then LinkedIn. Interestingly, corporate blogs and product/service blogs are rated higher than the top three services indicating that people want specific content and they are not put off by content size or the time it might take to read or view it. So the three popular social tools might help get the conversation started but successful companies will quickly discover that they need more content for follow up. Our CRM Idol experience this year confirms this point: we are seeing a larger-than-normal number of vendors focused on content creation, tracking, and management.
If this makes sense to you, then get out your purchase order form. The sponsors are ready to rumble.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Stamped 2 0 Released With Celebrity Supporters
August 20, 2012
The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported on the re-release of a new app called Stamped this a bound to give GooglePlus a run for its money the article “Ex-Googlers Relaunch Their Startup Stamped And Get Ryan Seacrest, Justin Bieber, and Ellen DeGeneres to Invest.”
According to the article, Stamped is an app that was originally created by former Google employees Robert Stein and Bart Stein to make small business reviews more social. But after the app was launched, the Googlers quickly realized that they had an even better idea for it. They wanted Stamped to be a place where users could keep track of all of their favorite things, from restaurants to books, movies and music.
So after spending six months of rewriting the app coding, the small team of ten has now released Stamped 2.0:
“Stamped 2.0 now app operates like Twitter; you can follow others and see their activity in your feed. Each user only gets 100 stamps to use on their favorite things and they’re given more if users interact with their recommendations. The stamp limit, Stein believes, will make every recommendation more authentic.
In addition, Stamped creates personalized guides for users based on their interests and their friends’ recommendations. It pulls together lists of books, restaurants, movies and songs for users to try based on suggestions from trusted people and publishers. The New York Times, for example, will be putting all of its Best Sellers on Stamped as book recommendations.”
The Stamped team has done a great job of getting celebrity support. It will not take long before their fans follow suit.
Jasmine Ashton, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Imagining The Future of Search
August 20, 2012
Citing (and sharing) an Israeli short film titled “Sight,” CNet News gives us “A Look at Our Gamified, Augmented-Reality Future.” Maybe a virtual librarian is the next innovation?
Perhaps, but that is not the focus of this film from student filmmakers Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo of the Screen-Based Arts Department of Bezaleal Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. (There’s a more extensive article on the film here, but do not read it before you view the film if you dislike spoilers.) Writer Eric Mack summarizes:
“Imagine a future where everything is a game, from cooking to dating, thanks to pervasive augmented-reality technology.
“That’s the premise behind this deliciously geeky, but ultimately disturbing Israeli short film titled ‘Sight.’ This seven-minute flick takes us along for a day in the life of an engineer at a dominant AR company, from breakfast to a date that goes off the rails and has to be ‘reprogrammed.’ The concept imagines the merging of big data, social media, gamification, and augmented reality into something that ultimately doesn’t seem that far-fetched, or even that far down the road.”
I agree with Mack, and I thoroughly enjoyed the video. It extrapolates a possible future that could quickly arise from something like Google’s Project Glass, and at least most of it seems quite probable to me. Definitely worth the eight minutes of your life; check it out.
Cynthia Murrell, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Twitter Number of Interest
August 14, 2012
Australia’s 9 News reports on a milestone in “Twitter Clocks Half-Billion Users.” This factoid comes courtesy of social media monitoring firm Semiocast, whose recent study analyzed data on time zone, geolocation, and language to determine Twitter trends. The write up also tells us:
“The US accounted for more than 141 million of Twitter users, with Brazil ranking second with 41 million after seeing its number rise by 23 per cent since the start of the year. Japan came in third with 35 million users.
“Americans also posted the highest number of messages on Twitter, with 25.8 per cent of all tweets hailing from the US.”
The study also reveals that Japanese is the second most common language on Twitter after English, and that Japan produced over 10 percent of all tweets over the period studied. Interestingly, Indonesia’s capital Jakarta was found to be the most active Twitter zone.
Also noteworthy—Arabic is now the sixth most common language on the networking site; Twitter’s popularity soared in the Arab world after the events of the Arab Spring. Go figure.
Based in Paris, Semiocast supplies consumer-insight and brand-management solutions that tap into data on the real-time Web. The company was founded in 2009.
Cynthia Murrell, August 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Acquisition Pressures Newsgator
August 14, 2012
A recent Microsoft move may be bad news for NewsGator, ComputerWorld reveals in “Microsoft’s Yammer Buy Raises Questions About NewsGator’s Future.” Yammer and NewsGator are competitors in the SharePoint enterprise social add-on market. Does Microsoft’s acquisition of one spell trouble for the other?
Social Sites is the name of NewsGator’s SharePoint add-on. Since it launched in 2007, it has accumulated an impressive roster of clients. If Microsoft integrates the similarly successful Yammer into SharePoint, that could change. NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston remains optimistic, though, insisting that the two products attract different types of customers. Writer Juan Carlos Perez explains:
“While Yammer is a multi-tenant, cloud-based software, Social Sites is designed for on-premise and dedicated hosted environments, offering IT more controls, [Holston] said.
“‘The fact that Microsoft now owns Yammer doesn’t change the reasons why our clients came to us originally,’ he said, adding that most NewsGator customers aren’t comfortable using this type of software in a multi-tenant cloud. ‘Our customers are hyper-focused on security, governance, scalability and privacy.'”
Not only that, but NewsGator stands out as a developer of applications for specific industries. Will these unique qualities be enough to protect the company? We won’t know for a while, Perez says, since it would take a couple of years for Microsoft to mimic Social Sites with Yammer functionality. If it even chooses to do so at all; Holston thinks Microsoft only loves Yammer for its successful “freemium” business model. Hey, he can hope.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, NewsGator proclaims a passion for customer satisfaction. The company asserts that they are (so far, I’d add) the social software vendor most deeply integrated into the Microsoft stack.
Yammer launched in 2008, and seems to be very proud to be joining the Microsoft universe. They assert that, with former Facebook innovators on their team, their social products have the advantage of “Facebook DNA.” Interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, August 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Japanese Government Uses Social Network Data to Reduce Suicide
August 13, 2012
Technology Review recently reported on behavior analysis through social networks in the article “Spotting Suicidal Tendencies on Social Networks.”
According to the article, a history of abnormally high suicide rates among Japanese men (ages 20 to 44) and women (ages 15 to 34) have caused the Japanese government to invest heavily in suicide research and prevention in hopes of cutting the rate by 20 percent by 2017.
One of the tactics that is being discussed is by identifying people who have regular thoughts of suicide, also known as suicide ideation, through their social networks. At the University of Tokyo, Naoki Masuda and a few others have taken to researching the popular Japanese social network Mixi which has over 25 million members.
After identifying user communities that may be more prone to suicide ideation, and comparing them with a control group, Masuda found that the differences were quite subtle. There were no differences in friend numbers, age, or gender between the two groups.
Some differences included:
“People prone to suicide ideation are likely to be members of more community groups than the control group. That may be the result of spending longer online and of a desire to want to interact. But a key indicator seems to be that these people are much less likely to be members of friendship triangles. In other words, they have fewer friends who also friends of each other. This low density of friendship triangles appears to be a crucial.”
This is an interesting application of algorithms. Utilizing social networks to discover the links between online and offline behavior is still a burgeoning field and there still remain gaps in our understanding.
Jasmine Ashton, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Advancements in BI Semantics Asserts FiirstRain
August 11, 2012
Business Intelligence or BI is steadily becoming more and more relevant as we consumers continue to pursue online activity. The article, FirstRain Spotlights Semantics Across Domains discusses more about the application of newer BI technologies like FirstRain and how they are revolutionizing the playing field. The article claims that this particular BI can process thousands of pages of consumer relevant data for businesses on a daily basis from online content like news, blogs, PR, web sites, etc. YY Lee who is the head of the intelligence for FirstRain explained a little bit about how the company got to this point.
“Ten years ago we tried a taxonomy but they don’t really work because they are static…So we created a flexible data structure that could reflect the different atomic players and pieces in the business, and based on the information we see coming over we could [semantically] categorize and derive the structure of different business and relationships between entities. So, over time our internal data structures are driven by the information we process.”
By implementations like the addition of FirstTweet, a technology that processes Twitter postings for customer data it is clear sign that BI advances at least as fast as consumer activity does. But even this technology is flawed, “With tweets and social content the information ambiguity could just kill you,” Lee said in the article. One has to wonder if these kinds of kinks in the newest BI can even be solved before the technology becomes outdated.
Edie Marie, August 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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