British Government Reverses Data Support
June 7, 2010
After dog-earing 30 million pounds of financial support at the beginning of the year for a proposed Web Science Institute at Southampton University which was to be headed up by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British government announced plans to cut 6.2 billion pounds from the public sector budget, which unfortunately included the Institute project.
V3.co.uk reports in “Government scraps plans for Web Science Institute“ that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills claimed the government recognizes internet technologies as an important area of research, but that support would come through research councils and the Technology Strategy Board, in supporting the creation of the Institute. Apparently the research and data is valuable, but not enough to pledge public financing for it.
Melody K. Smith, June 7, 2010
Google May Tangle with a Red Bellied Black Snake
June 7, 2010
There are lots of dangerous creatures in Australia. Even the tiniest spider can kill you. Now Google may get a chance to become up close and personal with an Australian Red Bellied Black Snake. Point your browser to “Australia Orders Google ‘Privacy Breach’ Investigation.” The Australian authorities are not likely to kick back and relax over the issue of alleged Wi Fi intercepts. For me, the most interesting comment in the BBC write up was:
Attorney General Robert McClelland said there had been numerous complaints from the public and that police should investigate possible criminal breaches of the telecommunications privacy laws. Australian law prohibits people from accessing electronic communications for unauthorized purposes. Google has said it will co-operate with a police investigation.
Good idea, Google. A very, very good idea. My addled brain generated another observation, “The Math Club method of handling official inquiries from Australian authorities may play in Petaluma, but it may not work in Perth. Oh, here’s more about that Red Bellied Black snake. These creatures sometimes travel in pairs. That’s fun for the unwary.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2010
A definite freebie
June 2010 Columns by Stephen E Arnold
June 7, 2010
Short honk: A reader asked about the for fee columns I do. I don’t put these on my Web site until their value to the publisher has dropped to zero. You can find these columns in the hard copy publications and / or the publisher’s Web sites. Here’s the line up of my June 2010 columns which will run sometime in the next four to 12 weeks. Hey, that’s the way traditional publishing works.
- Information Today, “Google Emulates Bing and Endeca”. The idea is that Google has become a me-too player in the user experience game. The Web site is http://www.infotoday.com
- Information World Review, “A Wandering Yahoo: More Knee Action, Modest Progress”. The point of this write up is that Yahoo has to do more than wave its arms. Real revenue generation is needed, or the company may be in big trouble. Does anyone else see the shadow of Demand Media falling across the purple Yahooligan T shirt? The Web site for the publication is http://www.iwr.co.uk/
- KMWorld, “Google, Rich Media, and the Enterprise”. The idea is that one can learn something about what Google may do with its television / rich media technology by looking at its partner, SnapStream. I know. You never heard of SnapStream. That’s the point of the column. The Web site for the publication is http://www.kmworld.com.
- Smart Business Network, “Dialing in Facebook Privacy”. The column advises a business with a Facebook page about some basic double checks to make on Facebook’s privacy controls. Moving targets are fun, don’t you think? There are 18 or 19 magazines in the SBN network running my column. The 2010 columns are on the company’s Web site at http://www.sbnonline.com. You can see the 2009 SBN columns here.
One person pointed out that my blog sucks compared to these for fee columns. Let me clue you in. The blog is a marketing vehicle, and we crank out stories on a daily basis. Most of the stories in the blog are items that we find potentially useful for our monographs, client reports, speeches, and the for fee columns. Don’t beat up on the people I pay to produce the stories in Beyond Search. We are trying to keep the content flowing in the midst of our begging outside the local Dunkin’ Donuts.
I will try to post the July columns next month. I am a forgetful goose, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2010
Freebie. Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Open Text and an Interesting Assertion
June 7, 2010
Open Text is ramping up its PR blitz in the social media space. We were chatting about a new content client yesterday (June 5, 2010). In that meeting, a person said, “Look at this. Open Text is in the corporate social media business.” I noted the url and took a closer look this morning. The document carried a very MBA type of assertion. Not bad for a company located in Waterloo, Ontario, where search and mobile devices are quite the rage. The title: “Open Text: Open Text Expands Social Media Offerings to Help Businesses Drive Bottom Line Results”.
For me, the one key passage was:
Now, Open Text leads the way for social media to be successfully deployed across the enterprise in a more secure environment. We are focused on helping customers realize practical and measurable business benefits such as faster time to market, higher customer retention or greater team productivity, while helping to reduce compliance, security and privacy risks. To support its customers as they seek to take advantage of the early-days social media explosion, Open Text stepped up quickly by adding blogs, wikis and other native Web 2.0 capabilities to the Open Text ECM Suite in 2008. Open Text, leveraging its strength in information governance, also took the lead in allowing customers to apply regulatory and legal rules to user-generated content. Then, last year, Open Text announced a completely new solution that lets companies create social workplaces for internal use cases, followed by the social media capabilities for marketing and external audiences from the acquisition of Vignette. Now, Open Text is evolving this foundation with a range of enhancements and new social media capabilities as part of the Open Text ECM Suite, building on a core strategy to apply social media technologies to pressing business challenges. Open Text enables companies to apply social media capabilities to drive marketing effectiveness, as well as customer support, sales and consulting, and strategic client engagement, among many others.
Then this caught my attention:
Open Text helps companies drive productivity within the enterprise with social media solutions that let users create profiles, follow co-workers and generate news feeds, or collaborate on projects. This dramatically improves information sharing and captures corporate knowledge, while reducing dependence on email. With the new and enhanced capabilities announced today, careful attention was paid to ease of use for business users and application to real business challenges, along with continued full support for Open Texts core competence in information governance and control. Expanded and enhanced offerings include: Open Text Social Communities Formerly Vignette Community Applications and Services, Open Text Social Communities is an enterprise social media solution that empowers organizations to engage with their customers, employees, and partners. As part of a broader marketing and CRM strategy, social media can give companies greater market insight, improved market engagement and, more importantly, significant improvements in customer satisfaction and retention.
This is an excellent example of how a company with roots in SGML databases, command line searching, and enterprise collaboration has embraced social media. I find the inclusion of Vignette, a content management system which can be quite a challenge to get up and humming like my late, dear grandmother’s treadle Singer sewing machine fascinating.
If there is a faux enterprise software niche, I would be among the first to nominate vendors of content management systems. When the Web became the rage, some entrepreneurs built systems to allow non coders to create a Web page. Over the years, the mess that some of these systems generate became a breeding ground for azure chip consultants. Not since Microsoft’s COM and DCOM has so much consulting work flowered.
Is Demand Media the Facebook of Content?
June 6, 2010
Update: 10 48 am. Link error fixed. The goose screws up again.
Newspapers have not flowed into market for fresh content. The company that has emerged as the Facebook of content may be Demand Media. Most Web surfers don’t know good content from bad content. Google’s smart software also has a tough time figuring out if a comment from an addled goose like me or a highly paid azure chip consultant is “better.” Hey, those former journalists and PR people are much better than a water fowl. At least that’s what the 20 somethings tell me.
The reality of Demand Media is that the company can sell content and generate traffic. Have you looked at Cracked.com or eHow.com today? To get some insight into the Demand Media juggernaut, you may want to read the Ad Age story “Bradford: Demand Media Will Take Out AOL First, Yahoo Later.” If Ms Bradford makes good on her assertion, AOL’s Googler-in-charge may want to ink that Microsoft deal as quickly as possible and become a venture capitalist. AOL is a weak sister in the ring with Demand Media.
For this addled goose, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
Every marketer will tell you they do not have enough content. We are in phase one of “let’s tell our story.” We will package it and make it easy to sell and easy to buy for advertisers. How do we provide content and integrate it with them? We will provide content for brands. Tide, for example. We’ve integrated their point of view into our experience. We’ve had a Tide stain expert sponsor a section. We want to be the biggest, best destination for brands. Our goal ultimately is, No. 1, be bigger than AOL, and No. 2 to be bigger than Yahoo.
Net net: trouble brewing in content land. Here are the war zones:
- Demand is emerging as the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature on steroids. Not only is it providing content, Demand has figured out how to let others index and expose the content. The Readers’ Guide was a great idea decades ago. Demand has leapfrogged the finding and accessing of popular content. Big implications has this action.
- The people with Web sites are not able to sustain content streams. Sure, anyone can do a blog for a short period of time. But blogs are black holes for content. New info must be produced continuously. Demand is in the custom content business and may emerge as the info juggernaut that newspapers and traditional news services failed to become.
- The Demand Media ecosystem is morphing. The company has technology, big name customers, writers, and digital information. These can be mixed in interesting ways. The competitors may not be able to match what Demand can do with its as-is assets.
Who can match Demand Media? AOL? Long shot. Yahoo? Long shot. Established publishing company? Longer shot. Established commercial database company like LexisNexis? Longest shot of all. Need reasons? Alas, not for free, gentle reader, not for free.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2010
Freebie, of course
Exalead Cloudview Lets Fingers Do the Walking and Caring
June 4, 2010
Yellow Pages Group’s phone application, Urbanizer, selected Exalead Cloudview to collect customer sentiment information. This innovative product is the first restaurant recommendation application that aligns with the emotional element of consumer decision making.
Sys-Con Media reports in “Urbanizer iPhone Application Uses Exalead CloudView to Collect Customer Sentiment Data” () that this new phone application allows users to choose from a selection of pre-defined moods or use Urbanizer’s equalizer function to create a custom mood based on combinations of cuisine, ambiance and service categories. Exalead’s CloudView search-based application platform is embedded into the Urbanizer application architecture and uses semantic extraction capabilities to distill sentiment from unstructured web data from consumer comments posted to Urbanizer.
The advanced semantic technology that Exalead brings to the table seems to be reshaping the digital content landscape. Cloudview collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured business information that can be directly searched and queried.
Melody K. Smith, June 4, 2010
A freebie but maybe a Coca lite when I am next in Paris?
Expresso 2.0 from Coveo Available
June 3, 2010
We learned about Coveo’s release of Expresso 2.0 in a news item sent by one of my two or three readers. The story “Coveo Launches Coveo Expresso 2.0 Beta” stated:
At no cost, Coveo Expresso offers enterprise-class, advanced information access for small- and medium-sized businesses or corporate departments, for up to 50 users, 1 million email items and 100,000 documents. Coveo Expresso is easily expandable to accommodate a larger number of users, at a price point significantly lower than any other enterprise search platform on the market, including appliances, and with far superior functionality. Coveo Expresso has already been downloaded by hundreds of organizations at www.coveo.com/expresso.
Expresso includes expanded access to enterprise information including desktop content, SharePoint files, and file shares, through the Coveo Outlook Sidebar. Users can search across enterprise systems without leaving Outlook, allowing them to "search where they work."
One interesting innovation is what the company calls its “Outlook Sidebar.” This is an enterprise search Outlook plug-in, also includes conversation folding, related conversations, related people, and related attachments, as well as faceted search, allowing users to more quickly find information, helping to speed productivity. We look at a large number of search systems and cannot recall having seen this approach before.
More information about Coveo is available from www.coveo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2010
Freebie
Google Blocked from Indexing a UK Newspaper
June 2, 2010
Short honk: I may have missed the item “Murdoch Blocks Google from Indexing London Times Articles.” News Corp. may be testing different approaches to making content available to search robots from the Google. The Wall Street Journal approach seems more stringent that the London Times approach. My view is that traffic will drop. The revenue from for-fee sign ups will take time to ramp up. The margins enjoyed in the salad days of newspapers may be difficult, expensive, and time consuming to rebuild. This will be interesting to watch. Google has time on its side, however. On the side of News Corp. are the many legal hassles that Google faces. Legal eagles may change Google’s methods helping to make News Corp. the winner again. On the other hand, Google may win and the News Corp. end up in a worse mess than its management envisioned.
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2010
Freebie
Kill Facebook Day, Ho Hum
June 1, 2010
Short honk: I like the use of the word “kill” when talking about services available via the Internet and much loved by those younger than I. If the story “Quit FB Day Goes Bust” is accurate, the anti Facebook crowd will need to find another way to tame the Facebook juggernaut. The privacy card did not seem work based on the Facebook Day report. Let me be clear. I am not sure if Facebook will survive. There are too many unpredictable currents in the digital atmosphere. Look at Google. The company behaves as it did before the WiFi problem. Countries are trying to put leg irons on Googzilla and not have much luck. Facebook may be an even more significant disruptive force if you are a believer in social media as the next big thing.
If the story is accurate, privacy is not the issue the change a deep and fast moving current of user activity. Perhaps aggressively monetizing Facebook may be the environmental factor that erodes the foundations of Google? On the other hand, Orkut and Diaspora may displace Facebook with alternative that behaves in a similar manner? Will the behavior of those who operate the service be different from Facebook’s actions?
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2010
Freebie
Royal at Autonomy
May 30, 2010
“His Royal Highness the Duke of York Visits Autonomy Headquarters” may not do much for the three North Americans reading this blog. A visit from a royal is a very big deal in Cambridge, England. For me the key passage in the write up was:
Autonomy Corporation plc, a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced that His Royal Highness, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York will be visiting its European headquarters in the Cambridge Business Park. During his visit today His Royal Highness will learn about Autonomy’s unparalleled journey from the engineering research labs of Cambridge University a little over a decade ago to become the largest software company in the UK, a FTSE 100 company and the winner of two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in the Innovation and International Trade categories. In addition to introductions from Autonomy’s senior management executive team, His Royal Highness the Duke of York will meet Autonomy employees from a range of departments including Autonomy’s award-wining Research & Development team which leads the world in meaning-based software technology solutions.
So what about that next tender offer for search and its requirement for a reference? The Duke of York is an name for the procurement team to consider calling for an Autonomy reference.
Stephen E Arnold, May 30, 2010
Freebie
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