Dead Tree Publishers Try Reforestation
March 10, 2009
PaidContent.org published a round up of several traditional publishers’ plans to generate revenue from digital content. You can read “@FT Digital Media: Newspapers’ Digital Biz Models: Guardian, FT, Bloomberg” here. The article provides snapshots of the angles of attack on the revenue problem. I don’t want to spoil your fun as you work your way through the case histories that have, after years of effort, generated modest life-saving cash. Bloomberg faces several challenges even though it figured out how to get money from the Wall Street crowd. The other two outfits are paddling furiously as ad revenues sink. My take is that the old B school essay about buggy whips is probably a useful read for these publishers.
Stephen Arnold, March 10, 2009
Amazon Out Googles Google… Again
March 10, 2009
This is like watching reruns of Batman. Every week (well, maybe not that often), Amazon announces another cloud service or technology breakthrough. On a shoestring, compared to Google’s and Microsoft’s R&D and infrastructure budget, Amazon continues to out maneuver these arch rivals.
The most recent example I saw was this story “How Amazon Builds the World’s Most Scalable Storage” by Robin Harris. The wonderful thing about this type of publicity is that only readers privy to the story secrets of Google, Microsoft, and others know whether the assertion is accurate or a bit of flexible reality. Please, read the story here and make up your own mind.
I am less interested in the technology Amazon used to get an indulgence from the sins of its storage past and more interested in the way in which Google looks a bit slow. Don’t get me wrong. My research suggests that Google has a more sophisticated data storage and data management system than Amazon. I have read enough Google open source technical papers to know that Google has some next generation storage and dataspace technology moving from the lab to user. Technology is not the issue. Public relations and marketing are.
For me the most interesting comment in Mr. Harris’ article was: “Amazon Web Services will dwarf their products business within a decade.” Wow. This means that Amazon’s present revenue and its growth projections will be a small part of a far larger revenue stream. I can relax my mental turnbuckles and read into this bold assertion that Amazon will be the big cumulus in the cloud computing sky.
Say this type of big idea enough times and it is possible a self fulfilling prophecy could take place. Will Google respond? Will Microsoft? I don’t think either company will do much, which concedes the assertion to Amazon. That’s how one might create an impression of technical superiority without providing fungible evidence.
Stephen Arnold, March 10, 2009
Link Champ: YouTube.com
March 10, 2009
TechCrunch ran an interesting list of the Web logs which are link magnets. You can find the story “The 50 Media Sites Bloggers Link To The Most” here. The number one site? YouTube.com. My take on this is that the other 49 sites may want to recognize that text is not the top dog in the link world. Good news or bad news? If I were one of the traditional media companies looking at YouTube’s exhaust pipe, I would rethink how I present content before it is too late. One the other hand, it may already be too late and YouTube.com is defining the future of information for the under 24 demographic. Now we need a break through in video search.
Stephen Arnold, March 10, 2009
Twitter Bashing Not
March 10, 2009
Network World’s “To Tweet or Not to Tweet, That’s Not an Option” is an interesting write up about Twitter here. Twitter is a micro blogging service much loved by the mobile phone crowd under the age of 24. Most oldsters in heart and mind don’t understand why anyone would want to know that someone is eating breakfast. I suppose an Athenian would express similar surprise after listening to a chunk of Iliad and then having a colleague point out the wonders of the haiku. The article includes a link to a video with tips for social networking. This is another one of those info pellets designed to eliminate the need for a person who in theory knows something to write a sentence or two. For me, the most interesting comment in the semi clever article was:
Even if my explanations so far aren’t enough to persuade you to put some serious effort into “getting” Twitter” just consider that according to a blog entry on Compete.com in February this year Twitter ranks as the third largest social network with 6 million users and 55 million monthly visitors (it is only beaten by Facebook and MySpace, No. 1 and No. 2 respectively).
A good snip for my Twitter file and maybe yours too. Hey, with a url that would be a Tweet.
Stephen Arnold, March 10, 2009
Wolfram Bids for Dominance in the Search Pack
March 9, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to this news story: “Wolfram Alpha: Next Major Search Breakthrough?” here. The system, according to Dan Farber, is called Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine. The name alone puts to rest any consultant baloney about simplicity and stability in search. Stephen Wolfram is the author of Mathematica, the gold standard in equation crunching. He has whipped out a couple of two pound books that will give most liberal arts grads a migraine. A New Kind of Science has 1,200 pages and lots of equations. Yummy. More detail than a William Carlos Williams’ poem too.
The new system becomes available in May 2009. Not surprisingly, Dr. Wolfram uses lots of math to make the computational knowledge engine sit up and roll over. I don’t have any information in my files about Alpha. You can get the facts from Mr. Farber’s write up.
One item that caught my attention was:
Google would like to own it [Alpha].
With Twitter deemed an also ran by the GOOG, maybe Dr. Wolfram’s math will catch the company’s eye. More information as I find it.
Stephen Arnold, March 9, 2009
Searching Twitter
March 9, 2009
At dinner on Saturday night, the conversation turned to Twitter. One of the guests asks, “Why would I want to use Twitter?” Another asked, “What’s it good for?” I listened. I will forward to each person in the dinner party Chris Allison’s “Welcome to the Hive Mind: Learn How to Search Twitter” here. Mr. Allison does a good job of documenting Twitter’s real time search system. If you too are baffled by Twitter, read the article and give Twitter a whirl. Join the growing number of intelligence and law enforcement and business intelligence professionals who are also learning about real time search. Note: most of the information in a Tweet is inconsequential. Aggregated, the micro blog posts are useful.
Stephen Arnold, March 9, 2009
Search: Still in Its Infancy
March 9, 2009
Click here and read the job postings for intelligence professionals. Notice that the skills are those that require an ability to manipulate information, not just in English but in other languages. Here’s a portion of one posting:
Core Collector-certified Collection Management Officers (CMO’s) oversee and facilitate the collection, evaluation, classification, and dissemination of foreign intelligence developed from clandestine sources. CMO’s play a critical role in ensuring that foreign intelligence collected by clandestine sources is relevant,
I keep reading about search is stable and search is simple. I don’t think so. Because language is complex, the challenge for search and content processing vendors is significant. With more than 150 systems available to manipulate information, one would think that software could handle basic collection and analysis, right? Software helps but search is still in its infancy. The source of the jobs? The US Central Intelligence Agency, which is reasonably well equipped with search, text processing, and content analysis systems. Too bad the reality of search is complex, but some find it easy to say the problem is solved and move on in a fog of wackiness.
Stephen Arnold, March 9, 2009
Microsoft Bets on Improved Web Search
March 9, 2009
I saw this story on March 4, 2009, and I came back to it today (March 8, 2009). I thought I could locate my Microsoft Web search timeline. Alas, it eludes me. I have been keeping track of the “improvements” and other Web search initiatives for a number of years. The list is of modest interest. The entries are little more than a sequence of dates and the Web search actions Microsoft took. When Microsoft bought Powerset, a provider of semantic search demonstrated on Wikipedia (a popular corpus for vendors), I made a note, July 2008, Powerset technology based in part on older Xerox PARC semantic components.
The story “Microsoft Eyes Better Searches, Bigger Market Share” via Newsfactor but available to me here said:
Microsoft is testing features that will give searchers organized results to save time, according to Nadella [the Microsoft search wizard du jour]. A feature has been added on the left side of the results pages to give users access to tools to help complete various tasks. The company has also added other features like single-session history and hover preview.
What I found more interesting was the data (maybe assertions?) included in the write up; for example:
- 40 percent of search queries go unanswered
- Half of the queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks
- 46 percent of sessions are longer than 20 minutes.
As I read this, I thought back to the phone call I received when I pointed out that search was pretty awful. The person on that call whose name I can’t recall told me that Microsoft had a system that made my criticism of search in general inapplicable for Microsoft. That call was in 2006 when I was finishing the third and final edition of the Enterprise Search Report that I wrote. (Hooray! I was done with a 600 page encyclopedia).
But this news story made it clear to me at least that search is a work in progress. And the issues addressed in the article and highlighted with the data above suggests to me that Microsoft wants to move from Web search to some richer information centric application; for example, “tools”.
Google enjoys a big lead over Ask.com, Microsoft, and Yahoo in Web search. Over the last year, Google has maintained its lead and in some sectors increased it as Ask.com and Microsoft lost share and Yahoo held steady or experienced fractional increases in usage.
The secret to Web search is anchored in traffic. Lots of traffic dilutes many search sins. Microsoft has to generate traffic. That’s a tough job, and I don’t think a new brand and tools will do the job. Microsoft has tried this before. I remember weird little butterflies stuck to buildings and sidewalks in New York. If I had my timeline, I would have the date. Seems like only yesterday.
Stephen Arnold, March 9, 2009
Digital Reef: A Similarity Search Engine
March 9, 2009
Straightaway, there are two “digital reefs”. One is an elearning company. The other–www.digitalreefinc.com–is a content processing company. In my notes, I described the company as offering an “unstructured data management platform.” The headline on the content processing company’s Web site here is “massively scalable”, which is a good thing. The company, according to my notes, was originally Auraria Networks. When an infusion of venture funding arrived, the Digital Reed name was adopted. I’m grateful. I didn’t know how to spell or pronounce “Auraria”. I filed the company under Aura, which was close enough for horseshoes.
Organizations are awash in data, and most are clueless about the nuggets within nor about the potential risks the data contain. To get a peek under the hood, you will want to download the company’s white paper here. The document is 13 pages long. You can review it at your leisure. The company’s news release here said:
Digital Reef (www.digitalreefinc.com), one of Matrix Partners’ and Pilot House Ventures’ premier portfolio companies, today announces a new approach to discovering and managing unstructured and semi-structured data. The Digital Reef solution helps large enterprises deal with key business issues that cannot be properly addressed using traditional solutions. These issues include eDiscovery, data risk mitigation, knowledge reuse, and strategic storage initiatives—all of which stem from lack of control over unstructured data, and require a degree of scalability and performance that traditional solutions cannot provide.
The company’s system “was designed to rapidly address very large stores of unstructured data, without manual effort or disruption to data center or business activity.” With the company’s analysis and classification tools, a licensee can:
- Locate specific kinds of data, including sensitive data like Social Security and credit card numbers
- Identify regulated data for compliance
- Pinpoint relevant documents for pending legal action
- Find intellectual property that can be reused for competitive advantage.
The company’s Web log with posts from founder and president Steve Askers (a former Lucent executive) is here. Entries are sparse at this time.
Despite the lousy economy, new entrants continue to pursue the content processing sector. With each new system, I chuckle when I read about “simple” and “stabile” market conditions. Crazy. I don’t have screenshots in my files nor do I have pricing. On the surface, Digital Reef seems to offer tools that overlap with Inxight Software‘s and Megaputer‘s offerings. I will add the company to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, March 9, 2009
Site Search Done wihout Big Bucks
March 9, 2009
I want to call your attention to a useful article by Christian Heilmann called “Site Search on a Shoestring” here. Site search refers to a search box on a single Web site. For example, you can limit your query to my site on Google with the qualifier site:. Mr. Heilmann covers a number of options in his write up. What I liked was his inclusion of scripts which can be edited to taste. Highly recommended.
Stephen Arnold, March 9, 2009
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