Google Plus Grafted Onto WordPress
November 24, 2013
The article on c/net titled WordPress Folds in Google Plus For Authentication, Comments offers insight into the new changes. Justin Shreve from WordPress described the benefits of the deal as increasing the verification of ones’ posts by creating an “official connection” between the Google Plus Profile and WordPress.com content that is being generated.
The article explains:
“WordPress, the widely used blogging system, has built in Google+ technology that will let publishers use the service for authentication, comments, and sharing.
The deal, announced Monday, spreads Google’s influence into a Web site that’s very widely used for blogs and other self-publishing needs. Even as it elevates the profile of Google’s social-networking technology, though, it also lowers barriers between Google+ and other parts of the Web. “
There’s nothing like forcing an agenda, but both companies seem to benefit from this deal, with WordPress users able to send their content to Google Plus with a feature called publicize, as well as receive a more prominent position in search results. Google will gain more information about its users from the pages created, improving search result accuracy. Furthermore, WordPress users will now be able to embed onto their WordPress sites what they have published on Google Plus.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
MarkLogic: Data Management and Healthcare.gov
November 23, 2013
I read “Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash.” The good news is that the story focuses on what is now old news: Management challenges at the agency responsible for Healthcare.gov. The bad news—at least for champions of XML repositories, XML normalization, and XML as the “answer” to a wide range of information management woes—is that XML (extensible markup language) is not the slam dunk, whiz bang solution some true believers hope.
Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
Another sore point was the Medicare agency’s decision to use database software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. CGI officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar. Government officials disagreed, and its configuration remains a serious problem.
MarkLogic has not been identified as a vendor creating some headaches until now. MarkLogic has a system that can store information and data in an XML data management system. The trick is that content not in XML must be normalized; that is, converted to XML. MarkLogic has developed some proprietary methods to perform its data management operations. A person familiar with XML may not be conversant with the MarkLogic conventions. The upside of this approach is that MarkLogic has experts who are able to address most customer requests. The downside is that a person familiar with XML but not MarkLogic can introduce some problems into an otherwise spiffy system.
In the last few years, MarkLogic has had a number of senior management changes. I track the company via my Overflight system and have noted that the firm has gone from a company that does a good job of publicizing itself to an outfit that has trimmed back on its public presence. You can check out the MarkLogic Overflight on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. The minimal news flow, the absence of tweets, and the termination of public blog content can be verified by visiting the paste every few days.
One interesting aspect of MarkLogic is that the company has positioned itself as a publishing platform. Once content is in the repository, it is possible to slice and dice information and data. Publishers can use this feature to whip out books with little or no involvement of human editors. But the company has, like Verity, grafted on other features and services. These range from enterprise search to text mining to electronic mail management.
I heard that the company was to have been a $200 or $300 million dollar a year operation a few years ago. The firm may be the best kept secret in terms of its revenues and profits. If so, kudos. But if the company has not been able to demonstrate strong growth and healthy net profits, the firm may need to ramp up its publicity and marketing activities.
The New York Times’s comment may be hogwash. Even if a stretch, getting a paragraph that strikes me as less than favorable raises some questions; for example:
- Are proprietary extensions a good idea for an XML system that must be used by folks who are not into XML?
- Will the transformations between and among content from disparate systems remain bottlenecks during periods of high content flow and usage?
- Will Oracle seize on the MarkLogic system and revive its flow of information about the weaknesses of XML as compared with content stored in an Oracle data management system?
MarkLogic has rolled through three of four presidents in the last few years. Dave Kellogg departed, and I mostly lost track of who followed him. At the time of his departure MarkLogic was in the $60 million estimated revenues. Will the management turmoil kick in again? Will the company continue to expand its features and functions as Verity did prior to its initial public offering? Are there parallels between the trajectories of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, and Verity and MarkLogic. For some case analyses, check out www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
Stephen E Arnold, November 23, 2013
The Paris PayPal Mafia
November 23, 2013
IT professionals in Silicon Valley can trace their jobs or some connection back to PayPal. When PayPal was acquired by eBay in a $1.5 billion acquisition, its founders Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and their surrounding network has since been referred to as the PayPal Mafia. Why? The PayPal Mafia has reinvested that money into VC Funds, startups, and more in Silicon Valley. Rude Baguette explains how Paris is getting its mafia in the form of Exalead: “Paris Has Its Own PayPal Mafia: How Exalead Spawned Dozens Of Startups.”
The French equivalent of the PayPal buyout was when Dassault Systèmes purchased Exalead, a semantic search startup, for $162 million. The former Exalead team has then put their money into more companies: Dataiku, Stupeflix, Leetchi, Nitroram, Aloglia, Jellynote, Veezio, OpenDataSoft, MyJobCompany, Bookset, RunOrg, Archivezen, Altirnao, Gumbaya, Nexkap, cogniteev, and Spycommerce. If those companies are not enough, Exalead bred a leading workforce that has found new homes in high-profile companies.
Why do Exalead and its people have all this success? The article explain:
“…What’s interesting is the culture of entrepreneurship that the company bred, as well as the badge of respect that having worked there gets entrepreneurs & engineers today. A Facebook executive recently spoke of one of the above mentioned startups saying, “even if they don’t succeed, we’ll likely hire them just to have their talent working with us on our Graph Search.”
It is as simple as hiring the best of the best and fostering a “we will be the best” attitude. When Dassault acquired Exaead, this mentality was most likely lost in the corporate machine and its former employees left to innovate on their own.
Whitney Grace, November 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search Tech May Shift West from Silicon Valley
November 22, 2013
I read “Chinese Supercomputer Retains ‘World’s Fastest’ Title, Beating US and Japanese Competition” may be nothing more than street racing with silicon. According the the write up:
A Chinese supercomputer has retained the crown of world’s fastest supercomputer, beating competitors from both Japan and the US.
There are several ideas to put the Chinese supercomputer in the back row. Questions about data transfer suggest the new champ has lousy lungs. It is also possible the graphics card makers’ performance enhancing drug—jiggled and manipulated test suites. Yes! Winner!
The Chinese have won the race two years in a row. In terms of my interests, the Chinese performance is one more datum supporting the notion that engineers from other countries have some work to do.
In terms of search, the reality is that most search systems are pretty much the same in terms of what they deliver to users—frustration and off point results. To improve the search and retrieval systems, more computing horsepower is needed.
With zippy computers and their various technologies, will the innovations in search come from the traditional drag race winners? Perhaps faster machines will allow more sophisticated methods of processing text and the magical “Big Data” will come from the Middle Kingdom?
Fast computers are enablers. Worth watching? Probably.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2013
Support From End Users Important to SharePoint Adoption
November 22, 2013
SharePoint is becoming a bigger deployment with each upgrade, making training and professional development increasingly important. PD opportunities abound, including an upcoming one in DC, “Asif Rehmani to Speak on the Importance of SharePoint Adoption in Washington DC.”
The release begins:
“SharePoint for Corporate Communicators takes place from November 13-15 at the Microsoft Technology Center in Washington D.C. The conference features numerous speakers, workshops and break-out sessions to help SharePoint users learn how to create an intranet that boosts knowledge sharing, employee engagement and productivity within SharePoint. On November 13, from 3-5 pm EST, Rehmani will lead a pre-conference workshop on the important topic of SharePoint adoption. He will discuss the importance of having SharePoint work efficiently within an organization as well as gaining support from end users.”
Stephen E. Arnold of Arnold IT has been following SharePoint since its inception. His recent concerns center around the fact that SharePoint is incapable of completing its main mission, search. However, with Office 365, the bells and whistles are taking center stage, and deployments are requiring increasing customization. Keep an eye on Arnold IT for the latest regarding SharePoint and ways to make it work for your enterprise.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 22, 2013
Update On Basis Technology And ODNI And DIA Partnership
November 22, 2013
Basis Technology, a multilingual search and text analytics company, and The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) partnered up not too long ago. Global News Wire updates us on where the partnership has taken the three organizations in the article, “Basis Technology Releases Highlight 6.0 In Continued Partnership With ODNi And DIA.” Basis Technology has added key enhancements to Highlight, its flagship tool for Intelligence Community (IC) linguists and analysts to standardize named entities in documents. The DIA and ODNI will use Highlight to overcome issues related to transliterating foreign names and places into IC standards.
Small differences in names and places leads to thousands of errors and IC personnel need to eliminate them to save time and resources. Highlight simplifies the process and reduces the number of mistakes and inconsistencies.
The article states:
” ‘The increased data collection of both domestic and foreign information has created a very critical need for quick and accurate text analysis,’ said Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology. ‘Our ongoing work with the ODNI and DIA has uniquely positioned us to provide the Intelligence Community with a proven solution that takes the guesswork out of translators jobs and provides the end user with the actionable intelligence to meet their mission critical needs. We look forward to continuing this relationship and providing our customers with the innovative text analytics and linguistic solutions they have come to expect from Basis Technology.’ “
Is this a form of predictive analytics? Highlight must really come in handy when translating Japanese and Chinese characters when the slightest difference in the wording or tonality of a sentence can change a word’s entire meaning.
Whitney Grace, November 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Elasticsearch Boasts a Gild Cheerleader
November 22, 2013
Luca Bonmasser, the co-founder and chief product and technology officer of Gild, recently presented at RubyConf about the best ways to build Elasticsearch in Ruby. PRWeb details the panel in “Gild’s Luca Bonmasser Presents At RubyConf On The Future Of Search.”
Here is a summary of Bonmasser’s speech:
“A consummate innovator and serial entrepreneur, Bonmassar will discuss how to build an Elasticsearch cluster, create indexes, load data, and format and execute robust search features using the Ruby Tire library. With end users expecting a high-level search experience wherever they go, Elasticsearch allows developers to keep up with UX demands by incorporating auto-suggest, spell-correcting, and personalized search on Ruby applications more easily. For Ruby developers who want to incorporate the highest level search features on their platform…”
Gild uses Ruby in its Gild Source tech hiring software. Gild Source helps companies hire skilled IT professionals, especially Ruby experts. Bonmasser is very passionate about the Ruby Tire framework and advocates for open source. In a personal quote he notes that search is a very difficult concept for engineers, but the technology available, such as Elasticsearch, makes it easier to make search simpler. To further spread his love for open source, he started an open source project on how to utilize Elasticsearch’s power.
Whitney Grace, November 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
kCura And The New Relativity
November 22, 2013
The newest upgrade for kCura’s eDiscovery platform Relativity is available. Version 8.1 includes a boatload of new features as told to us buy Globe News Wire in the press release, “kCura Releases Relativity 8.1.” The inventory option is the release’s flagship feature, it allows users better options for gaining insights and filtering data prior to processing. Along with requested speed upgrades, there are thirty-five other items that kCura added to 8.1.
The article states:
“ ‘Relativity 8.1 is packed with new features and we’re excited to share the release with our users,’ said Andrew Sieja, president and CEO of kCura. ‘The team has done a lot to improve core review functionality and has made major strides with our fully integrated processing engine—all while significantly improving performance in many areas of the software.’ “
Most of the feature upgrades are tied to speed, but the Relativity assisted review and analytics gives users a summary of results with statistics along with high-quality analytics. The workflows have been streamlined and the platform has improved REST API, coverage for dtSearch and analytics, better API performance, and new handler types. Is your excitement building so much that you cannot wait to download 8.1?
Think about this before you press the download option. kCura is an acknowledged leader in its field, but we have heard it incorporates third party solutions. Not the best idea when it comes to customer support.
Whitney Grace, November 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Are Yahoo and PRWeb Confusing SEO and Enterprise Search?
November 21, 2013
I get a Yahoo Alert. My single Alert topic is “enterprise search.” I want a bound phrase match. Like the other alert services I use, there are usually some obvious “false hits.” A “false hit” is an off topic story. The problem with key word alerts is that words have different meaning. A story with the word “search” for a new president often turns up with a story about Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search system. Most of these “false hits” are easily ignored. Another problem is that some “experts” want a user to see something, so the query is relaxed. That’s a problem for me. For you, maybe not. For spammers, relaxation means more content baloney whether generated by an azure chip consultant, search engine optimization maven, or an organization desperate for visibility. In case you have not noticed, traffic to most Web sites is undergoing quite a change. One Web site owner told me, “We averaged 250,000 uniques a month in 2012. This year we are down to 48,000. What am I going to do?”
Go out of business? Change your Web site? Get a different job?
Perhaps the answer is, “Anything.
Desperation generates some darned interesting business actions in my experience.
There is another problem, particularly with the word “search.” I am interested in enterprise search, and I want to learn about new, substantive information related to information retrieval. The poor word “search” has been sucked dry of meaning. The wispy husk carries zero meaning. For most people search means Google or taking what an app delivers.
I noticed in my Yahoo Alert this morning these two items listed as the number one and number two most relevant stories for me:
Both of these are about an outfit that delivers search engine optimization services. The problem is that this sense of the word “search” is of little interest to me.
What is more interesting is that the outfit generating these items for Yahoo is called PRWeb. I don’t know much about PRWeb. My hunch is that one of the PR professionals I have used over the years knows about this firm.
I wanted to capture several thoughts about what I call “alert corruption.”
Lost and desperate for relevance. Those in the woods are probably evil. See Canto One of the Divine Comedy.
First, Yahoo is not doing a particularly good job providing me with new information about enterprise search. Today I saw items related to OpenText, an outfit that owns a number of search engines. The story, however, talks about enterprise information management. I do not know what that phrase means. There was a story about Imprezzo, a company that purports to “overcome the problem of traditional text based search.” Well, maybe that is worth a look. Of the five items sent me, one was possibly of interest. Does a score of 20 percent warrant a pass or a fail.
Second, four of the items in the Yahoo Alert were from the PRWeb outfit. One thing is certain. PRWeb can get its clients’ content into the Yahoo system. The problem is that two of these stories are about practices that I find like tight shoes. I suppose the shoes look okay but I am uncomfortable. But SEO outfits and those who assist them make me uncomfortable. A buck is a buck, but content manipulation is like wearing small shoes that are damp.
Third, after 40 or 50 years of search innovation, endless surveys from outfits like azure chip consultants and morphing vendors like BA Insight, Smartlogic, and LucidWorks, I am not sure if significant information retrieval progress is evident. One would think that Yahoo would tap some super sophisticated new technology to filter out baloney, deliver on point alerts, and work with vendors who exercise some judgment about what passes for search related content.
My hunch is that PR is in a bit of a sticky wicket. It joins content management, governance, search, and Big Data. These disciplines have to find some way to call attention to themselves. Perhaps these “legitimate” disciplines should emulate the search engine optimization crowd. Visibility without a thought about precision and recall is their game.
I would like to receive alerts that actually match the string “enterprise search.” I think that is just too much for those who think that a user absolutely must have a “hit” whether that item is relevant or not.
Search and marketing may be a match made in heaven. Those who are interested in precision and recall occupy one of Dante’s less salubrious regions.
Stephen E Arnold, November 21, 2013
SharePoint Online Capitalizes on Consumer File Sharing
November 21, 2013
Security concerns plague the enterprise when employees turn to unsanctioned cloud-based file sharing. But for years, the convenience of services like Dropbox could not be matched by sanctioned enterprise services. SharePoint Online hopes to change that by offering convenient and safe cloud storage options for employees. CMS Wire covers the story in their article, “What Consumerization of IT Means for SharePoint Online, SkyDrive Pro.”
The article begins:
“BYOD has taken over the enterprise, whether the enterprise likes it or not. But it’s not just BYOD. Employees are turning to consumer versions of file sharing cloud solutions like DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive (not to be confused with SkyDrive Pro) and others to access their documents no matter where they are. IT needs to resolve this problem, and it won’t be done by banning the use of these devices and apps. There’s a smarter way.”
ArnoldIT.com, a service run by longtime search expert Steven E. Arnold, is skeptical of SharePoint’s continued relevance in the changing enterprise environment. Arnold often argues that SharePoint is not capable of its main function, search, and has diluted its mission by focusing on add-ons. Regardless, SharePoint is still a large portion of the market and is worth following.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 21, 2013
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
