Discovery Interfaces: The Next Generation
September 15, 2010
The development and enhancement of open source Online Public Access Catalog Services (OPACS) have become extremely valuable. The Catalogue and Index Blog “Discovery Interfaces (Next Generation)” provides readers with a glimpse of the type of interfaces that the British Library uses. The discovery interfaces have been designed to “offer improved access to contents.” These interfaces in many ways are similar to traditional Online Public Access Catalog Services but they go a step further and offer users some notable enhancements. The article notes the products “provide modern web interfaces that can compete with commercial offerings such as Amazon and the BBC.” A few extra additions are improved visual presentation and additional options besides those included in the local catalogue. Many of the listed product systems help to improve the search and find capabilities of library systems which in turn give users access to a larger and more detailed pool of information. “Finding a needle in a haystack” seems to have gotten a little easier for researchers.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2010
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Social Media and Attensity: Pushing Forward
September 15, 2010
The social media world has become deeply rooted into the business world. The ZDNet article “Social “Rising Stars: Maria Ogneva on Scaling Social Media” gives Attensity’s Social Media Director, Maria Ogneva, a chance to discuss the importance of knowing what is going on in the social media world. According to the article social media is “heading straight into mass-market adoption, with no signs of slowing down.” It is the “#1 activity on the web” and with so much influence companies must find ways to listen to their customer online chatter and properly respond. Tools are needed that allow companies to filter customer responses, route them to the appropriate department and provide a prompt response. With so many different social media outlets, companies must decide which ones to put emphasis on and the employee assistance set up needed in order to properly handle customer issues. The social media world has become like a gossip column where customer comments, especially negative, spread like wildfire and can have lasting effects.
April Holmes, September 15, 2010
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Squiz Suite Does Experience Management
September 15, 2010
The open source technology continues to allow developers to meet the changing needs of the business and technology world. The PR Leap article “Squiz Announce The Squiz Suite – The World’s First Supported Open Source Web Experience Management Suite” provides details about the upcoming Squiz release, Squiz Suite. This new release is slated to be the first open source web experience management suite. It is designed to offer clients some groundbreaking options. The suite incorporates a content management system, innovative analytics capabilities, highly effective search and a robust platform for integrating applications and data.” Customers can also count on 24/7 global support as well as convenient automatic updates. Users can also rely heavily on the Funnelback search engine to deliver accurate results “contextual navigation and search based applications.” Open source once again opens the opens the door to innovative Web sites and online applications.
April Holmes, September 15, 2010
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The Future of Books?
September 15, 2010
Short honk: I came across this scanning items in my not-yet-dead Overflight service. Is this the future of books? I hope not. But with libraries facing budget pressure and library vendors scrambling, the optimal use of books may be to make furniture.
Source: http://i.imgur.com/ia1yy.jpg.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2010
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More from Sematext
September 15, 2010
After the publication of Lucene in Action, 2nd edition, I wanted to more information about Otis Gospodnetic’s company Sematext. Mr. Gospodnetic, who is a busy professional, agreed to an interview with me last week. The full text of that interview is now available as part of the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series. You can read the full text at this link.
Mr. Gospodnetic will be a speaker at the October Lucene Revolution Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Space at the conference is limited due to the influx of early registrations. My hunch is that those who have an interest in open source search want an opportunity to hear from professionals like Mr. Gospodnetic. There are 25 or 30 other experts on the program, which makes the conference on of the few places the best minds in open source search and content processing can be tapped for their insights and knowledge.
You will want to read the full interview. However, I wanted to flag two comments offered by Mr. Gospodnetic.
First, his firm offers engineering and consulting firms to organizations. His approach struck me as interesting:
We primarily provide our knowledge and expertise in dealing with volume “problems”, be that data volume or request (search/query) volume. In addition, we have experience with tools that are designed to work well in high data (change) volume environments. For example, for our search customers we regularly design highly distributed search backend on top of Lucene or Solr or other search solutions that involve index sharding and distributed search or index replication, or both. While we focus on Lucene and Solr on the search side of our business, we are constantly looking at and evaluating new search technologies. In a recent engagement we looked beyond Lucene/Solr and, after evaluating several other solutions (although all based on Lucene!), decided to go with a solution that turned out to be more appropriate for the customer.
Many vendors focus “in”. Sematext continues to look “out” when it comes to information retrieval.
Second, he identified the three major trends in search. He told me:
Large-scale data processing (think Lucene/Solr and Hadoop family of products), distributed everything (think Solr, Nutch, Hadoop, HBase…), learning from data (think machine learning, Mahout…).
This statement makes clear that Mr. Gospodnetic sees open source in general and search in particular as having an important role to play in the months and years ahead. Some of the mid tier consulting firms have been slow to recognize the impact open source software is having. I am confident in 2011, there will be many “experts’ rushing forward to document what Mr. Gospodnetic, Lucid Imagination, and others have been doing for several years. Better late than never I think.
For more of Mr. Gospodnetic’s comments, click here.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2010
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Azurini Line Up Behind Other Azurini to Praise Google Android
September 14, 2010
From coast to coast the azurini (non blue chip consulting firms and their experts) are really excited about a Gartner Group prognostication. I won’t mention the demise of certain “magic quadrants” but I will urge you to read “And Android Will Crush Them All… Eventually!.” You can even get a glimpse of the Gartner future think market share projections. You can see the Gartner data at the link above. What’s projected? Nothing less than the triumph of Android over the pathetic pretenders. Who are the also rans, Also Participateds, and the losers? How about Nokia, Research in Motion, Microsoft, and Apple? Did I leave anyone out.
Now the mobile space is an interesting arena. The appeal of a “free”, “open” mobile operating system is undeniable. But there are some potential trip wires across the jogging track.
- Android exists to help the Google. Those using Android are enlisted in the Google militia. Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots often have second thoughts. Regulations and rules can make some in the militia long for sleeping late and leisurely showers. Open source software can fork and then, in turn, fork and fork again. How long will the Google watch Verizon rely on Bing search? Hmmm.
- Those lawyers just keep catching flights to SFO. The reason is that Google has an uncanny ability to collect lawsuits. Now I know that oodles of money can flummox the great US judicial system. But every once in a while there is a deposition, a non Googley judge, and a law suit that won’t go away. Anyone remember Viacom, Germany, and an annoying SEO vendor in the UK?
- Google has had a tough summer. Instead of surfing from big wave to big wave, Google fell off its surf board. I don’t have a comprehensive list but I do recall Buzz, the Frankfort police’s irritation over StreetView and Wi-Fi, and the weird trajectory of Wave. In the meantime, the Xooglers at Facebook pulled ahead of the Google in traffic. Bummer of a summer.
So what?
Google is no longer a slam dunk. Too many variables for me to dial in. The azurini want to have Google do things that help the azurini consulting business. Consumers, on the other hand, respond to different signals. Those pesky consumers.
In short, Android is zooming along but those trip wires. Oh my.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2010
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Exalead Anchors US International Trade Commission
September 14, 2010
Drowning in a sea of data, one government agency recently had a life preserver tossed its way from one of the search industry’s best and brightest. “U.S. International Trade Commission Selects Exalead CloudView as Primary Search Engine” said:
USITC end user site surveys indicated that people couldn’t easily find the information they were looking for on http://www.usitc.gov via its search function. In 2009, USITC decided to replace its previous search software and reviewed a number of other enterprise search options for a solution that met its needs, was easy to administer, and fit its budget.
The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) (http://www.usitc.gov) handles issues of global and domestic trade with its quasi-judicial authority. In doing so, the agency collects massive quantities of data that both employees and visitors to its site needed to access.
The solution was Exalead CloudView, which “uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud.” For the USITC, specifically, CloudView aimed to provide two very specific functions. First, it gave outside users access to over 40,000 documents ranging from PDFs, spreadsheets, Word docs and more. Secondly, CloudView gave employees the ability to search file systems, folders and data repositories that, previously, had to be searched for in a time-consuming manual process.
The result is a highly efficient enterprise and web combination that improves the agency’s ability to monitor trade around the globe. The new system increased the range of available information, boosted performance and provided much-needed speed and simplicity to the Web site.
This is not only a big win for Exalead.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2010
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MarkLogic: Nothing Flat about New Tie Up with Flatirons
September 14, 2010
There’s an exciting partnership brewing in the search business and the aerospace industry could be the big winner. We learned of this union via a recent Business Wire release, “MarkLogic and Flatirons Announce Reseller Agreement.”
The partnership means that Flatirons Solutions is the first North American reseller of MarkLogic’s system. But this deal is only warming up, because Flatirons has a big vision for its newest product, focusing its “reselling efforts on aerospace opportunities in the North American market.” This seems logical, since “in its nine years of operations, Flatirons Solutions has gained extensive experience with a wide array of aerospace clients, including passenger airlines, airframe manufacturers, and cargo carriers.”
MarkLogic, Flatirons and the aerospace industry sounds like a can’t miss combination. This is an up-and-coming story that we’ll be keeping an eager eye on.
Pat Roland, September 14, 2010
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More Reassurances about Google Instant
September 14, 2010
Me thinks some doth protest too much. Apologies to Billy Shakespeare but the stories running in the “real” media’s Web sites and blog posts are catching my attention. From the goose pond, I see Google Instant as a marketing play, a service designed to pump up revenues, and a reminder that Googlers can have a potentially fatal disease called “feature-itis”.
You make up your own mind. Navigate to “Google: Concerns over Instant Unwarranted.” For professional journalists, the article is a long one. It has two parts. The story is an interview with a Googler wrapped in well-crafted rhetorical bookends. No problem. I could, if I were motivated, identify a quote to note in the verbiage.
instead I noted this passage:
As tends to happen whenever Google introduces a potentially disruptive technology, a debate has sprouted, in this case focused on how Instant potentially changes three things: the way publishers optimize their pages to rank in Google results; the way marketers pick and bid on keywords for search ad campaigns; and the way end users articulate queries and review results.
I look at this from the perspective of an addled goose and ask, “Why bother?” I recall one of the rich guys I used to work for before he keeled over from a stroke in one of his more interesting business facilities, “Never complain. Never explain.” I read the article and noted both complaining, well, maybe just whining and quite a bit of explaining.
Instant is for me a feature that strikes at the heart of search engine optimization’s base camp, gives the Google a reason to captivate the world’s media with crazy statements about saving billions of hours when searching, and triggers a “debate”. The reaction is interesting because it really means little to me.
What it tells me is this:
First, Google wants to capture headlines and attention after the holiday weekend. Mission accomplished. Good job, marketing department.
Second, Google has not really innovated because Instant strikes me as rewarding big companies and deep pockets. With Instant running, one has to focus in order to get a complete, original query into the search box and launched. The suggestions method will appeal to a certain type of Google user. Other types of Google users may shift to advanced search or just use a different service of which there are quite a few, gentle reader.
Third, the Instant function does not address the increasing problems I have experienced in getting fresh, precise, and relevant results. For example, I ran a series of queries on Google and a competitor called DuckDuckGo.com and on the Xoogler site Cuil.com. Guess what I found. I was able to obtain more relevant results on my test topic related to what are called “RAC” in the health care business than on Google.
In short, like Buzz and Wave, the benefits to me are not great. Therefore, the volubility of Google about Instant suggests that what looked so good over Odwallas may be having some unexpected consequences. Words won’t address these. Cats out of the bag are tough to recapture.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2010
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Social Media: Will It Challenge Apple?
September 14, 2010
Google has not hit a home run in the social media market. Now it appears that Apple may face a similar challenge.
Facebook is not ready to shake hands with Apple because it’s got the ‘i-flu’, which could contagiously disrupt its massive user base with spam. It is the curse with which social networking sites are born, and have to live with. The TechNewsWorld article “Can Spam-Swamped Ping Survive Without Facebook?” sings about the spam problem, which few Sophos tech geeks say Apple could have avoided. Remember Facebook was earlier hit by Apple-related spam, and now even ping profiles are spammed, making people wonder why Apple is not beefing up its security.
Facebook is in security frenzy. “It’s looking closely at every link that comes to its service to see if it has malicious content,” reports the article. Normally Facebook’s APIs are open to other services; it isn’t taking any chances with Apple’s new iTunes-related social music network. The negotiation deadlock to let Apple access Facebook’s APIs, now probably depends on Ping’s success. Well, Ping sure needs Facebook, but is Apple repeating the Lord of the Flies plot?
Harleena Singh, September 14, 2010
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