Social Media: Making the Personal Impersonal
August 25, 2011
Search engines are now using social media data to rank query results. As crazy as it sounds, your Tweets could now alter the way Google gives you information on such benign things as “George Washington” or “grilled cheese sandwiches.” eSchool News takes a look at how “New Web-Search Formulas Have Huge Implications for Students and Society.”
Search results now differ from person to person based on algorithms have been altered to include social media data. Knowing that most people don’t go past the second page of results, they have tailored their ranking system to consider links you have clicked on and create a filter system based on those previous links. This isn’t something ground breaking since Amazon and Netflix have been using it for years to recommend books and movies, but is new to the major search engines.
At the 2011 Technology, Entertainment, and Design talk, Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble, shared his reservations with the “invisible algorithmic editing of the web.” He believes it only shows us what it thinks we want and not what we need to see.
[I]t was believed that the web would widen our connections with the world and expose us to new perspectives, Pariser said: Instead of being limited to the newspapers, books, and other writings available in our local communities, we would have access to information from all over the globe. But thanks to these new search-engine formulas, he said, the internet instead is coming to represent ‘a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers [of information] to algorithmic ones.’ Yet, algorithms don’t have the kind of embedded ethics that human editors have, he noted. If algorithms are going to curate the world for us, then ‘we need to make sure they’re not just keyed to [personal] relevance—they also should show us things that are important, or challenging, or uncomfortable.’
It seems that search engines may be focusing on personal factors, but are not personalizing the process. The user has no control over results. That customization is left to a rigid algorithm. If a restaurant says that they make burgers “made-to-order,” then I expect to be able to pick mustard and onions on one visit, and pick cheese and ketchup on the next visit. The server should not just look at my past orders and make an educated guess. There is nothing “personal” about that.
Could this lead some well meaning people down an unintended and risky path to censorship-by-computer. Users must gain more control over these search formulas. There are certainly times when social media parameters are acceptable, but sometimes you want and need to see the other side. It depends if you are settling an argument between your friends over song lyrics or writing a thesis on communism. Until users are offered more liberal control, I think this “personal” ranking system will actually suppress and limit a lot of important information that users are seeking. The social impact on a search comes at a pretty high price.
Jennifer Wensink, August 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Screen Scraping: Boon or Bane?
August 22, 2011
Everyone who has ever thought about information extraction has considered screen-scraping software. Marco Albanico Inbound MLM does the legwork by explaining, “What You Need To Know Regarding Lead Screen Scraping Software.”
Clever folks can take content from a Web site which some of those original publishers assume will be “safe” from content predators.
We learned the following from this article:
[In addition] to streamlining content, these businesses gather ingenious information, [w]hich happens to be an important resource for just about any company or private group’s use. [It’s] not just for collecting and refining content, you may also take advantage of collected information within an organized form for reasons of intelligence, study, and storage for future use.
Mozenda is the leading software, as proclaimed by users on websites like theeasybee.com. For anyone completely new to Web extraction, they offer to setup the first project for free. They also convert your web data into a myriad of different formats.
Kapow Technologies offers the ability to extract without any coding, using a point and click technology. Their partnership with IBM has enabled them to produce a Web 2.0 Expo application for the iPhone in less than three hours.
The best suggestion Marco Albanico offers is to take advantage of the free trials that these two services and others advertise on their websites. Why limit yourself before exploring all of your options if they’re free?
Megan Feil, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Alerts When Search Is Hit and Miss
August 21, 2011
Search seems like the answer to Every Man’s information needs. It is not. Not by a long shot.
If organizations cannot search by individual as to who needs information, they will invariably push content onto a whole group of people. AFV-News reported “U.S. Army Deploys AtHoc IWSAlerts Emergency Mass Notification System.”
Businesses, schools, universities, and military groups all employ the usage of emergency alerts, providing mass notifications to everyone in their system. Fort Jackson brags that their AtHoc alerts span 25,000 personnel and dependents.
AtHoc IWS Alerts offer control from a unified Web-based console, which allows Fort Jackson to send alerts to cell phones, landlines, smart phones, SMS text and email. It’s not just Fort Jackson—AtHoc services more than 1.5 million Department of Defense, more than any other provider.
We learned about AtHoc’s capabilities and infrastructure from the AFV-News article:
[The] system integrates with the post’s existing Internet Protocol network services, which means reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs. Personnel accountability is accomplished through the bi-directional capability, allowing responses to notifications in real-time. Network alert delivery and response can be tracked, ensuring that targeted recipients have received and responded to alerts.
While alerts for dangerous situations and testing can save lives and are obviously a necessity, mass alert systems also unfortunately end up in too many unnecessary inboxes.
Megan Feil, August 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
ZyLAB eDiscovery Goes to Extremes
August 19, 2011
The field of eDiscovery is growing, with ZyLAB and Brainware both leading the pack in terms of the marketing buzz that flows through our Overflight intelligence service. Chris Dale reports on evaluating eDiscovery services in the most extreme circumstances in, “ZyLAB eDiscovery tools as a Prototype for Removing Discovery Bottlenecks.” He writes:
The . . . extreme in eDiscovery terms, apart from the ability to handle very large volumes, is a war crimes investigation and tribunal. The data sources are often far removed from the neat corporate environment of servers and laptops; the events took place in circumstances where data preservation was the last priority; the required standard of proof is a criminal one.
Underscoring this argument is the idea that if eDiscovery tools can handle the disorganization and intense pressure of a war crimes tribunal, the same tool can perform beautifully in the more predictable and ordered environment of the corporate and financial world. This logic seems sound. If the product is effective for firms in the context of war crimes tribunals, the same product is likely to increase the speed and productivity of firms operating in a much more controlled environment.
Our view. Work flow is a hot sector, and it seems to be paying dividends for ZyLAB and for Brainware, a firm pushing into this sector with what looks like increasing determination.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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