Send Your RSS feeds in Global Languages
September 1, 2010
Now the non-English speaking natives can get the RSS feeds in their own language. The mediacastermagazine.com recent news “RSS Feed Translation for Bloggers and Social Networking Firms” informs that the Toronto-based YYZ Translations will make available RSS feeds, translating them into 80 languages.
According to the article, the company claims about its translations, “will be more accurate, culturally correct and contextually to the point than those executed by automated machine translation systems like Google Translate”. This facility will help weblogs, RSS feed publishers, and the other social media platforms reach to a wider international audience.
This useful service will use a combination of digital technology and human translators to make the RSS feeds as powerful and accurate as the source message, after undergoing a qualitative control process of translation, editing, and review. The concept is interesting, and worth a look. The goslings see an opportunity to disseminate information is interesting ways.
Leena Singh, September 1, 2010
Lycos Wants a Come Back
September 1, 2010
Remember Lycos. The search system that made spider names trendy. The search system from Carnegie-Mellon University. The search company that bought our The Point (Top 5% of the Internet) when some of the azurini were playing with toys, not iPad apps? Yes, remember.
The Internet and its search engines continue to evolve and some change hands like Lycos. Featured on brightsideofnews.com, the recent business news article “Lycos, Granddaddy Of Search Engines, Finds A New Home” informs that Lycos has yet again been resold, this time to an Indian Digital Marketing company, Ybrant Digital.
Setup in 1994, Lycos has been one of the pioneers, and soon became the largest search engine. However, its sale price dwindled from $5.4 billion to $36 million in about 10 years. That’s a curve that vectored through the US, Spain, and points beyond.
Having had its own search algorithm and crawler, Lycos now uses the FAST crawler and takes search results from Yahoo!. Amongst many Internet brands that Lycos acquired since its inception, was Chris Kitze and Stephen E Arnold’s ‘The Point’ (Top 5% of the Internet) service. Now that Lycos itself has a new owner, the question is whether Lycos will be able to regain its former position in the world of online.
Leena Singh, September 1, 2010
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Exclusive Interview: Charlie Hull, FLAX
September 1, 2010
Cambridge, England, has been among the leaders in the open source search sector. The firm offers the FLAX search system and offers a range of professional services for clients and those who wish to use FLAX. Mr. Hull will be one of the speakers in the upcoming Lucene Revolution Conference, and I sought his views about open source search.
Charlie Hull, FLAX
Two years ago, Mr. Hull participated in a spirited discussion about the future of enterprise search. I learned about the firm’s clients which include Cambridge University, IBuildings, and MyDeco, among others. After our “debate,” I learned that Mr. Hull worked with the Muscat team, a search system which provided access to a wide range of European content in English and other languages. Dr. Martin Porter’s Muscat system was forward looking and broke new ground in my opinion. With the surge of interest in open source search, I found his comments quite interesting. The full text of the interview appears below:
Why are you interested in open source search?
I first became interested in search over a decade ago, while working on next-generation user interfaces for a Bayesian web search tool. Search is increasingly becoming a pervasive, ubiquitous feature – but it’s still being done so badly in many cases. I want to help change that. With open source, I firmly believe we’re seeing a truly disruptive approach to the search market, and a coming of age of some excellent technologies. I’m also pretty sure that open source search can match and even surpass commercial solutions in terms of accuracy, scalability and performance. It’s an exciting time!
What is your take on the community aspect of open source search?
On the positive side, a collaborative, community-based development method can work very well and lead to stable, secure and high-performing software with excellent support. However it all depends on the ‘shape’ of the community, and the ability of those within it to work together in a constructive way – luckily the open source search engines I’m familiar with have healthy and vibrant communities.
Commercial companies are playing what I call the “open source card.” Won’t that confuse people?
There are some companies who have added a drop of open source to their largely closed source offering – for example, they might have an open source version with far fewer features as tempting bait. I think customers are cleverer than this and will usually realize what defines ‘true’ open source – the source code is available, all of it, for free.
Those who have done their research will have realized true open source can give unmatched freedom and flexibility, and will have found companies like ourselves and Lucid Imagination who can help with development and ongoing support, to give a solid commercial backing to the open source community. They’ll also find that companies like ourselves regularly contribute code we develop back to the community.
What’s your take on the Oracle Google Java legal matter with regards to open source search?
Well, the Lucene engine is of course based on Java, but I can’t see any great risk to Lucene from this spat between Oracle and Google, which seems mainly to be about Oracle wanting a slice of Google’s Android operating system. I suspect that (as ever) the only real benefactors will be the lawyers…
What are the primary benefits of using open source search?
Freedom is the key one – freedom to choose how your search project is built, how it works and its future. Flexibility is important, as every project will need some amount of customization. The lack of ongoing license fees is an important economic consideration, although open source shouldn’t be seen as a ‘cheap and basic’ solution – these are solid, scalable and high performing technologies based on decades of experience. They’re mature and ready for action as well – we have implemented complete search solutions for our customers, scaling to millions of documents, in a matter of days.
When someone asks you why you don’t use a commercial search solution, what do you tell them?
The key tasks for any search solution are indexing the original data, providing search results and providing management tools. All of these will require custom development work in most cases, even with a closed source technology. So why pay license fees on top? The other thing to remember is anything could happen to the closed source technology – it could be bought up by another company, stuck on a shelf and you could be forced to ‘upgrade’ to something else, or a vital feature or supported platform could be discontinued…there’s too much risk. With open source you get the code, forever, to do what you want with. You can either develop it yourself, or engage experts like us to help.
What about integration? That’s a killer for many vendors in my experience.
Why so? Integrating search engines is what we do at Flax day-to-day – and since we’ve chosen highly flexible and adaptable open source technology, we can do this in a fraction of the time and cost. We don’t dictate to our customers how their systems will have to adapt to our search solution – we make our technology work for them. Whatever platform, programming language or framework you’re using, we can work with it.
How do people reach you?
Via our Web site at http://www.flax.co.uk – we’re based in Cambridge, England but we have customers worldwide. We’re always happy to speak to anyone with a search-related project or problem. You’ll also find me in Boston in October of course!
Thank you.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2010
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Attensity and Its Positioning
August 31, 2010
I found it notable that Attensity, a company known for its “deep extraction” technology, authored a feature in Mashable. Mashable is a Web publication that touches the throbbing heart of the Web world and its denizens. I cannot recall a company with roots in the arcane world of content processing and the government information projects contributing a story about social branding to the pulsing Mashable readership.
But the story appeared. You will want to read “7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand’s Social Media Health”. Like Lexalytics and Vivisimo, Attensity has been working overtime to develop a product and service line up that would generate healthy revenue and deliver a stakeholder pleasing profit. Attensity’s positioning seems to be expanding to embrace the world of processing social media to determine if a company is hot or not, provide insight about opinion upticks and downticks, and other “metrics” that are useful to sales, marketing, and azurini.
Here’s the passage I found quite interesting:
Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success. Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.
The “easily” through me for a moment as did the reference to a previous Mashable story. I think I understand the message, but I am not sure how “easy” the methods for determine social health are. What’s easy is providing the client with a report without any of the details about what’s going on under the hood. If Attensity can package “a social health monitoring service,” then the company could steal customers from Lexalytics and other companies chasing the ad sales and marketing sectors.
My thoughts on the positioning followed a slightly different line.
First, Attensity’s no cash merger with German firms and its push into social media reminded me how much the market for next generation content processing has changed in the last 36 months. The US government funds that spawned many content processing companies may be tapering off. This means that companies with the type of technology that makes Department of Defense professionals salivate has to be repurposed to new markets. Is this what Attensity is doing?
Second, the positioning and verbiage used to make the firm’s technology outputs “easy” remind me that the new markets want vastly simplified value propositions. “Easy” can generate new sales, and I know that “easy” rings the chimes of consulting firms who are abandoning the traditional information retrieval sector like rats leaving a sinking ship. I expect to see a flurry of consulting reports that describe these new, “easy” products and services. I don’t think the methods are easy, but I want Attensity and similar firms to thrive. “Easy”? Never.
Finally, the vocabulary in this Mashable write up and on the Attensity Web site follow the approach taken by Vivisimo. These former search and content processing vendors are like leopards who have pulled off a genetic trick. The spots are gone, replaced by language and services that sound more like companies that are in the research and integration business. Little wonder Garnter folded its search quadrant tent. I think more search and content processing companies will try to pull off this leopard-changing-its-spots trick.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2010
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Will Microsoft Be Able to Succeed Online?
August 30, 2010
It has been nearly a lost decade for Microsoft online, generating no returns on its Internet ventures. The ZDNet.com article “Microsoft’s Lost Eight Years Online: More Than $6 Billion Down the Tubes” discusses the financial hits of Microsoft’s Internet follies, comparing its fiscal reports of the past ten years. Microsoft has delivered a profit here and there since it has been consolidating online results, but the profits are rare.
Though the software giant says it believes in the shareholder value and thinks of the Return on Investment (ROI), it has ever been in huge operating losses, and did not make much money. Microsoft has recently touted its success with Bing, and the search engine will continue to gain share on successful partnership with Yahoo. Microsoft’s ineptness has until now cost it what Amazon, Google, and Face book have gained, but now all eyes are on cloud computing to cover the lost grounds.
On the other hand, Microsoft has a stake in Facebook. Google doesn’t. Who looks smarter in social media?
Leena Singh, August 30, 2010
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Tooting Tut Texts
August 27, 2010
The spirit of monitoring stretches to almost all areas of business, but nobody ever imagined it would pop up in a pyramid. While they are not using monitoring technology, we were struck with the similarities between a recent project by Oxford University and monitoring technology. Featured in a Read Write Web article, “iTut: All of Carter’s Tutankhamen Materials Now Online,” this fascinating story detailed how the mostly unseen documents of Howard Carter’s famous 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb are fully available online. “In 1995,” the article says, “the staff of Oxford University’s Griffith Institute of Egyptology, the custodians of Carter’s papers, started digitizing his Tut archive. The collection included all the photographs, glass negatives, reams of notes and diaries.” This now gives archeologists access to the tomb from anywhere on earth.
Pat Roland, August 27, 2010
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Digital Information and Progress?
August 25, 2010
Progress is an interesting idea. I read the “A Smartphone Retrospective” and looked at the pictures on August 19, 2010. To be candid, I didn’t give it much thought. Math Club types, engineers, and Type A marketers have been able to cook up the progress pie for many years. In fact, prior to the application of electricity, life was pretty much unchanged for millennia. A hekatontarch in Sparta could have been dropped into the Battle of Waterloo and contributed without much effort. Drop that same grunt into a SOCOM unit, and he wouldn’t know how to call in air cover.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane.
Most people in Farmington, Illinois, not far from where I grew up, believed that the world got better a little bit at a time. The curves most people believed and learned in grade school went up.
Well, most people believed that until the price for farm output stagnated. Then the strip mining companies made life a little better by pushing some money into the hands of farmers. Well, the money dried up and the land was not too useful for much after the drag lines departed.
Then the price of chemical fertilizer climbed. Well, then the government paid farmers not to farm so things looked better. Each year the automobiles got bigger and more luxurious and those who wanted the make the American dream a reality left for the big city. Now Farmington, Illinois, is a quiet town. Most of the stores are closed, and it is a commuter city for folks lucky enough to have a job in the economically-trashed central Illinois region about one hour south of Chicago.
Progress.
What’s happening in online and digital information is nothing particularly unusual. The notion of “progress”, at least in Farmington, is different today from what it was in 1960. Same with online, digital information, and technological gimcracks. I realized that most folks have not realized that “progress” may not be the bright, shiny gold treasure that those folks in Farmington accepted as the basic assumption of life in the U. S. of A.
Adobe and Its Digital Clay Bricks: No Search Needed
August 25, 2010
Former Ziffer John C. Dvorak (the real Dvorak and podcast personality) posted “Adobe Has the Right Stuff.” In the write up, Mr. Dvorak points out that Adobe has some competition-killers like Photoshop and the company has an opportunity to roll out some interesting new money makers such as a Linux-centric content creation center.
I don’t agree.
I am not too interested in graphics, although I know that is Adobe’s cash cow. I do know that Adobe has been unable to deliver acceptable search and retrieval across its own content for as long as I can remember. The company has floundered from search vendor to search vendor and still seems unable to make a snappy, intuitive search system available. Federation across Adobe’s wacky line up of sites is not working for me. Anyone remember Lextek International in Acrobat 6? Didn’t think so?
Adobe’s patent application US2010/0185599 underscores how Adobe’s own approach to content is designed to allow other vendors to index content created by an Adobe application. Adobe has worked hard to convince publishers to standardize on the Adobe platform, not the evil empire’s Quark system or even more expensive, bespoke solutions from specialist firms.
Adobe is rooted in print production and approaches many problems from the print angle of attack. Our tests of Adobe’s rich media applications reveals unstable, buggy and unpredictable behavior. Performance problems plague Adobe products even when the applications run on zippy, multi-core processors.
How’s that Adobe Premier interface grab you? At my age of 66, I can’t read the darned labels. What happened to black text on white background. I sort of can see the color video content. I don’t need it to “jump” at me. And the state shifting controls? Those are a wonder to behold. When Sony Vegas is easier to use that an Adobe product, I know something is off center.
Our view is that Adobe is trying to maintain its position in the market, and it is going to have an increasingly difficult time. Here are the points we noted in our recent review of Adobe:
- Security. Adobe products are potential challenges for enterprise system administrators. I love PDFs with embedded excutables but after a decade no control to permit a specific number of PDF openings by a user in a password protected PDF.
- User experience. Sure, a Photoshop or Illustrator professional can use Adobe products, but this is the equivalent of learning that Oracle’s database is a piece of cake from an Oracle system administrator. Ordinary folks may have a different view of usability. I can’t even read the interface for Adobe’s new products with its wacky gray background and tiny white type. Am I alone?
- Stability. Maybe Photoshop doesn’t crash as often, but there are some exciting moments with Adobe’s video production software. Lots. Of. Exciting. Moments.
- Focus. Adobe has kicked Framemaker under the bus. I abandoned Version 9.0 for Version 7.0. Adobe has lost track of who uses what products for what purpose. The Linux version of Framemaker sucked, and Framemaker once ran natively on Solaris.
- Production. Professionals from magazine make ready shops to printers have learned to live with Postscript, InDesign, and PDFs. I am not sure I am happy with my hard won knowledge because quite a few of the issues have to do with careless programming by contractors or staff in far off lands than what is required to create a content object. Let me give one example that bedeviled me yesterday: Color matching across Adobe’s own products and into whizzy digital printers. Hello, hello. Anyone at Adobe actually do this type of work for real?
In short, search is a core function. Adobe has never gotten it right either on its Web sites, in its products Help function, or in its “content objects”. If you can make information findable, that’s sort of a core weakness, and it is a key indicator of how many “content” issues Adobe has not handled in an elegant, effective manner.
Bottom-line: Revenue growth will be an interesting challenge for Adobe’s management team. I just rolled back to Photoshop Version 7.1 on one production machine. The interface is usable, not logical, but closer to the real world in which I work. Search. Long walk ahead. Linux support. Adobe has to spend a lot of money to keep its sail boats in trim. I don’t think the company has the cash or the technical resources at this time. In short, Adobe is more vulnerable than some perceive.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
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Google Ads and Their Limitations
August 24, 2010
Publishers are not going to be happy with the tidbit tucked into “iFive: Goggles Coming to iPhone, Google Ads Can’t Fund Magazines, Cairn Energy, Smelling Robot, Russian Criminal Life.” Here’s the factoid from Fast Company:
A British business specializing in digital versions of magazines has revealed just how much money Google Ads can make for established magazines. “Nuppence ha’penny.” Hah!
What’s this mean? First, Google Ads require lots of traffic to generate a big payoff. The tinier the topic, the less likely Google Ads will generate huge bucks. Try Tiger Woods and now you are talking.
Second, subscriptions or outright grants, donations, or government support will be needed to make some online content viable. Most vulnerable? The traditional media.
Third, as challenging as Apple’s business methods are, the iPad and its kin may become the life preserver many information companies will try to grab. The problem is that the iPad does not solve fundamental problems of readership, demand, cost of content creation, and marketing.
My take is that publishers will try to jump into rich media, which is not these firms’ core competency. The result? More losses and more opportunities for those with a core competency in new media.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
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The Google Commodity Problem
August 23, 2010
Fast Company ran an interesting story after the goose headed for the pond this afternoon. “Google’s Success in Facebook Game: Handicapping the Odds” zipped through some familiar observations about Google and its somewhat tardy response to Facebook. One highlight was pointing out that Google’s senior manager for things social and mobile, Vic Gundotra, presented a Math Club rationalization about Google. Fast Company reported:
Former head of Google’s mobile unit, Vic Gundotra, posted a spicy blog message yesterday to note that over 100 million Google users check places on Google maps, lots use Google’s MyLocation feature (that lets you track your position even in the absence of GPS), many people love Latitude on Android–the Google “checkin” and friend-tracker app, as well as Place Pages which adds extra local info to locations in Latitude, such as photos or reviews. In the immediate aftermath of the roll-out of Facebook’s Places application, it’s obvious what Gundotra was trying to do: He was engaging in a little feisty PR along the lines of “But Google lets you do all that stuff already, and millions of folk have been using it for years!”
Very good. The key passage in the write up was, in my opinion, this statement:
But the biggest problem Gundotra inadvertently highlighted is that (with the admitted exception of Android, which is a strong offering that stands alone) Google’s users tend to think of its services as a commodity.
Bingo.
The addled goose’s thoughts after reading the story were:
- The past may not be a predictor of the future. What Google did when it was in happy face mode does not seem to have the same magic now that the company has made some interesting moves with regard to Verizon, Wi-Fi, child care, China, and acquisitions.
- Oracle may rain on Google’s Android parade. The Sun is not shining on Java at the moment.
- Amazon and Apple keep on moving forward. Amazon is doing a good job in cloud computing and Apple is certainly pumping hardware and hooking folks into the iTunes’ ATM.
Can the Math Club ethos triumph? I am not so sure. Even cheerleaders like Leo LaPorte and his band of Twits are singing different tunes of late. Fast Company nailed it: commodity products and services for free. If ads weaken, the Google may be in a frenzied search for new revenue. That will be exciting. After 11 years, the company has essentially one revenue stream. What are the weaknesses of a monoculture? Shoot. I can’t remember. Something about an inability to resist a fungus or blight. Does not matter. Math is math. Just the addled goose’s opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2010
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