Darwin Discovery Engine Blog

YouTube Video on Social Media Revolution

Here is great video full of data on the impact of social media. Facebook would be the fourth largest country in the world, the top Twitter people have more followers than many countries and 24 of the top 25 newspaper have had significant decreases in circulation.  The video itself has had well over a million viewers so far and will likely gain many more soon. 

Our Favorite Tweets for January 16 - 31 2010

Here is the ninth in a new series of posts that provide access to our favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these we did to link to things we found useful and others are RTs. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, we are now going to post our favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later. We will repeat this once a month if that timing seems to work best. We may adjust the timing.

We spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. We hope this is also useful for you.  Let us know your favorite tweets for the month.

RT @SameerPatel: Google searches getting more social -CNN http://flne.ws/23037088 on Fluent News 9:11 AM Jan 30th

Google Social Search Arrives to Challenge Facebook http://bit.ly/9fbuss Jan 29

RT @dhinchcliffe: PC officially died today: http://bit.ly/aATwBS Nick Carr probably does best sum of week #ipad 10:41 PM Jan 28th

Challenging the old media business models http://bit.ly/b7xjop Jan 28th

RT @BillIves: The iPad and the Chasm between Work and Home Computing from @robpatrob http://bit.ly/dmh76z 6:12 PM Jan 28th

NY Tines on Apple iPad http://bit.ly/dgs6g8 2:25 PM Jan 28th

RT @forrester: Forrester's @jmcquivey: Apple iPad: The Best iPod Touch Available http://bit.ly/b9oSVJ #Apple 11:16 AM Jan 28th

PC World on Apple's iPad Mistakes http://bit.ly/dh3aGt 10:22 AM Jan 28th

Apple’s iPad: A New Category Of Device http://bit.ly/99siex via @psfk  A Jan 28th

RT @robpatrob: Will the iPad Help Media? Possibly. Save Media? No. – GigaOM It's the Costs! http://post.ly/KuEN Jan 27

Apple Seeks to Avoid Past Tablet Flops http://bit.ly/aVMARp Jan 27

RT @SBoSM: 4 essential real-time trend-monitoring tools, yesterday's most clicked in @SBoSM: http://ow.ly/10xd5 8:41 AM Jan 26th

RT @hebsgaard: 6 Ways Document Management and Records Management Differ #ediscovery http://tinyurl.com/ybgee72  Jan 25

via @GeorgeDearing: over half of “best-selling” e-books on Kindle are free [NYT] http://ff.im/-eL7to  Jan 24th

RT @Stefan_Fischer: The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration http://ow.ly/YAyD  Jan 23rd

RT @dkasrel: test of Google's personalized search; how much does it really change rankings http://bit.ly/918oOB #seo 5:14 PM Jan 19th from web

RT @tobyward: Skype explodes, steals big money from phone cos http://bit.ly/8Y7B2P 4:54 PM Jan 19th

more interesting data visualizations from @psfk http://bit.ly/4OMCJ1 10:09 AM Jan 19th

 As Shrinking Newsrooms Use Upstarts’ Content, Vetting Questions Arise http://bit.ly/62u8TC Jan 18th

 RT @amcafee New blog post : 'Signs of Intelligent Life in the Corner Office' - http://bit.ly/7Tj2IY Jan 18th

 RT @rossdawson: RT @webtechman: Great Architecture and Data Visualization Collection http://bit.ly/7TkRdO 9:04 AM Jan 16th 

What Others are Saying about the Apple’s iPad

On Monday Thierry shared his thoughts on Apple’s iPad on this blog. As the tweets started to flow with the announcement with links to other reviews I saved some of the more interesting ones. There was certainly a lot of buzz. The tweets reached over 7,000 a minute during the actual announcement. It ranked close to the 9,000 a minute during President Obama’s State of the Union address.  Here are some useful reviews:

The iPad and the Chasm between Work and Home Computing (Rob Paterson)

With Its Tablet, Apple Blurs Line Between Devices (NY Times)

Apple iPad: The Best iPod Touch Available (Forrester)

Apple's iPad Mistakes (PC World)

Apple’s iPad: A New Category Of Device (PSFK)

Does the Apple iPad Make Strategic Sense? (HBR)

Will the iPad Help Media? Possibly. Save Media? No. – GigaOM It's the Costs! (Rob Paterson)

 

Initial Thoughts on Apple's iPad

Where to begin about the iPad? The name? the iPhone OS? ATT? No camera? Lack of interconnectivity? Storage? USB? Lack of ingenuity perhaps?... and the list goes on. I will not repeat what every one has said on the Web and the press. It is now very obvious that Apple disappointed its fan-base with a lack of vision and absence of revolutionary thinking. It seems they lost their magic on that one, and the hype that they created is now hurting them.

I am sure that they will recover. Now all the competitors are going to try to move quickly... and of course this is good for users and innovation. This time I am sure that innovators were overrun by business people who had their fingers in iTunes’ store, ATT and new imaginative ways to perform consumer cashectomies. To add insult to injury, Apple saw the writing on the wall as every day we saw emerge what the users, experts and developers expected to make this a great breakthrough. The iPad is an ideal case study of the failure to leverage Web communities to create a product that meets and exceeds expectations; this should go in the business book of what not to do in the age of information sharing. Apple lost over 4% when the market closed today.

Now let’s innovate Apollo13-style. What can, after all, I use this iPad for? It’s a screen, it can be programmed, it can access data, it responds to my touch, it’s feels good to hold, and it is an oversized iPod. Now what? It’s all about the apps. Regardless of the eBooks, movies, pictures, email, games.... this iPad opens a new world of applications for very specific and unexpected use. I think we will see more business applications come out of the iPad than the iPhone simply because business applications are process-driven and need to show more screen real-estate than a phone.

But it will not be so easy for organizations to think outside the box considering that today’s applications need to be ubiquitous to the enterprise standards. So who will use them? In my opinion it will be defined according to roles and functions instead of an homogeneous platform requirement (after all the data access is/should be supported by server services and not applications themselves; review your IT director’s compensation if that is not the case ;-). I can imagine CEOs and executives changing their reports and dashboards for iPad applications that provide them with more mobile and instinctive interactions, medical personnel using the iPad for charting instead of nurse-station or bedside computers, and many other specific uses that the iPhone was too small to do efficiently.

I also see new opportunities for information consumption models that involve visual representation of shared and/or large amount of information that require more tactile interactions than retyping a search query or browsing pages and pages of results before discovering what matters to the user. . But, maybe I am being optimistic.

Yes I am disappointed by Apple’s iPad limitations, but I am interested in the potential it offers for developers and innovators alike. Apple has proven time and again what it can do. That’s what it needs to remember today as the critics speak

Changes in Media Consumption: TV Rises in Popularity, Unlike NewsPapers, While Mobile Devices Also Move Up

Television does not appear to be suffering the same way as its older mainstream media cousin, the newspaper. Deloitte’s 2009 “State of the Media Democracy” survey reports a 26 percent increase in the Americans choosing TV as their favorite type of media compared to the previous year. This is likely influenced by the recession. More than 70 percent of those surveyed rank watching TV in their top three favorite media activities. When ranked alongside activities such as surfing the Web, listening to music or reading, 34 percent of consumers place it at the top. This is a substantial increase from last year and more than double those selecting the number two choice, the Web, which came in at 14 percent. 

When watching their favorite TV shows, 86 percent of respondents prefer watching on their television set, either live, via their DVR/TiVo, or using an “On Demand” feature.  While less than 10 percent of Americans say they prefer watching the same content online, a growing number of consumers are using online platforms to watch their favorite TV shows. 

Consumers are watching close to 18 hours of television programming on their home TV in a typical seven day week — up notably from less than 16 hours last year. Looking at the interest in TV – Web convergence, 65 percent of respondents would like to be able to easily connect their home TV to the Internet so that they can view videos or downloaded content. This is a significant trend that has gained strength over the last three years. Of course, the reverse could occur with more TV on computers.  A move in this direction would allow for more search and data mining capabilities.

The study also looked at mobile device use. One-third of surveyed consumers use their mobile phone as an entertainment device and 47 percent of smart phone owners identify the device as one of their three most valuable media and entertainment products — a significant increase from 20 percent last year. I certainly use my iPhone as an entertainment device as much as a mobile phone.

The Deloitte survey also indicates that mobile phone use is rapidly separating the Internet experience from the desktop for almost half of the population.  Forty-eight percent of those surveyed have data plans for their mobile phones and 42 percent are using their phones to access the Internet. The report suggests that this decoupling is expected to facilitate new consumer behavior including mobile search, social networking and purchasing.

The most popular mobile activities, according to the survey include: text messaging (72 percent), accessing the Internet (42 percent), online search (30 percent), downloading applications (27 percent) and using GPS (26 percent).

The report also looked at advertising. TV still holds strong here with 83 percent of consumers identifying TV advertising as one of the top three media with the most impact on their buying decisions.  In the online world, over half of all U.S. consumers believe that online customer reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising, and 51 percent have purchased products based on an online recommendation. In addition, 24 percent of U.S. consumers would like to have an online service that recommends a product based on other consumers’ preferences.

Social networking continues to rise. According to the survey, one-quarter of U.S. consumers are socializing online almost every day and nearly 60 percent currently maintain a social networking site, up from 48 percent last year. The connections maintained over social networks provide powerful sources for trusted recommendations.  The content generated through social networking provides a rich source for understanding the collective mindset of consumers. A tool such as Darwin’s Awareness Engine (TM) can help understand the themes emerging from these conversations and discover the unexpected. 

Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Blog

I have written about 50 top journalism blogs and here is another list of 91 Journalism Blogs and Websites You Will Love that I found from Bob Stepno through Twitter.  In this post I want to bring your attention to Bob’s own  Other Journalism Blog where he discusses online journalism. It is an excellent resource. I have known Bob since the early days of the Berkman blog group. Bob now teaches journalism, media studies, digital culture, and Web production at Radford University in Virginia. 

Bob provides useful coverage of the recent of Editor & Publisher. This publication was a trade journal for the newspaper industry,” which, Bob writes, “in recent years has made it a chronicle of the industry’s decline, while juggling its own print and online editions.” Bob writes about the need to preserve E&P’s archive for journalism historians and offers links to other coverage.

There is a nice post on the online, ‘cross-generational’ features of the new PBS NewsHour.  This is another creative combination of old and new media.  PBS merged broadcast and digital staffs in an expanded newsroom, with part of the goal to provide reporting, “that is cross-generational, diverse and dynamic.” They have also created a partnership with GlobalPost, a Boston-based network of international correspondents already online as http://globalpost.com. Bob mentions that, Hari Sreenivasan, a major part of the broadcast/Web crossover, will write a news commentary blog that will share links to primary source documents so that viewers can make up their own minds about stories. This is a nice old-new media combination feature. There is more about out how the online and broadcast operations are being reorganized by Anna Shoup, local/national editor of the program at her PBS MediaShift blog.

 

 

YouTube Attempts to Move from Search to Discovery

The New York Times had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue. Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.

To increase time spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific user from their library of over 100 million.

The process starts with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8 billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.

One challenge is when to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and proactively offer related content to keep them on site.  One way to provide good options suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.

Darwin Ecosystems is also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™ that correlate with the original search term or, as we say attractor. Then you can hop around to explore the related topics based on your interests. It is an alternative model to trying to read your mind as YouTube and Amazon do.  Instead, it gives you a range of choices in an easy interface to allow you to better make up your own mind. 

Social Media is Breaking Down the Google-Gutenberg Dam on Content

Here is an interesting post by Aaron Kahlow. He writes about the information curation potential of social media in his post, 2010: Social Media Removes the Dam of Gutenberg-Google. We certainly agree with his message.

Aaron begins with the effect of the printing press. It certainly opened up content distribution way beyond what the monks doing hand written work could accomplish. However, it established new controls over what content got out. You still needed to have the resources to set up a printing press, print and distribute works.

Now we have the Web and you might think the dam is broken. In one sense it has, as there are very few barriers to getting content out on the Web. In 2008 there was more content created than in the entire prior history.  The trick is finding this content, especially the quality stuff. This is where Google has both helped and created a new bottleneck. As Aaron writes, “With only 10+ organic results and a similar number of paid results, consumers will only find content they seek in those 20 places -- with less than 20 percent being relevant as it relates to information they seek.” For example a search on “green card” will get you a lot of services that want to charge you money for what the US government does for free.

Aaron goes on to comment that social media can help break this new dam. Now we can “get good information through tweets of those we follow, Facebook Sharing, and from others within our networks who are usually connected online. We have a new discovery outlet and a new way to find stories, whether mainstream or from an unknown blogger. We find things based on recommendations of trusted colleagues, friends, etc.”  This is how I found Aaron’s post.

Peter Cashmore raises a similar point in his predictions for 2010 than we commented on earlier (see Reflecting on Peter Cashmore's Web Trends to Watch in 2010). Peter wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions.

Aaron offers some good points to make effective use fo social media to get your content out. Instead of having to contact a prominent journalist to write a story about your company, you can use your own channels such as blogs to consistently write good content worth tweeting and sharing.
 You can also leverage your own social networks to start sharing content. 
These are all reasons that we write this blog and participate in Twitter and other social media.

Darwin Ecosystem Awareness Engine™ is designed to address this issue of finding relevant quality content without having to go through the filter of Google or other search engines. Unlike Google, it does not decide what content is most relevant but rather lays out the content related to your topic of interest in clusters of themes and lets you explore what themes interest you. (see: A Comparison of Google Web Search and the Darwin Awareness Engine™). 

Darwin allows you to become your own curator for topics of your interest. You can also go beyond this to act as a curator for friends or colleagues You can set attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You can create your own online magazine. It can cover a much greater array of source than Google News and it will show the relationships between news items that emerge rather than simply displaying them. You can adjust your filters to further focus you’re your curation efforts. We see content curation as one of the major applications for the Darwin Awareness Engine™.

I like Aaron's conclusion about the effect of social media, "In the end, the winner is content. Good content, sharable content, and consumer-driven content will allow us all to have a broader spectrum of information and, for the marketer, an easier way to connect with their base." We hope to contribute to this outcome. 

CI Expresso - Interview: Thierry Hubert, Darwin Ecosystem : « Vers un dialogue communautaire étendu »

Interview by CI Expresso in french on customer intelligence loyalty through on-line communities.  

Text Analytics Provides a Discovery Channel to Obtain More Value from Content

Here is a post from my Portals and KM blog that I want to share on this blog. Socrates said that, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  In perhaps a parody of this statement the Forrester report, Text Analytics Takes Business Insight To New Depths, states that “unexamined content is a wasted opportunity.” They look at an array of tools that go beyond simple search. This might be a good thing as a Google search on the term, the unexamined life is not worth living, turns up a number of term paper services in its top ten.  The Forrester team of Leslie Owens with Matthew Brown, Sara Burnes, and Peter Schmidt conclude through the report subtitle that “An Obscure Technology Has Found Its Killer App.” I would certainly agree and appreciate receiving a review copy of this report. 

The authors note that customers, employees, and competitors comment on products, personalities, and companies in increasingly public places, like Twitter and discussion forums. Forrester that online ratings and reviews topped the list of trusted material. The abundance of news and commentary on the Internet could contain actionable knowledge for your business. This is not simply a Web issue as internal sources like emails and call center notes are full of product suggestions, feedback on competitors, and thoughts on the market.  With the rise of enterprise 2.0 and related social media data, the opportunities for data mining and information overload are expanding. To make sense of all this content, businesses are turning to text analytics tools.

The team concludes that this “little-known technology has a compelling value proposition: extract meaning out of large quantities of text by mining, interpreting, and structuring information to reveal hidden patterns and relationships.” I am not so sure about the little known part but I agree with the rest of the statement.  Perhaps I am biased because I have been talking with a lot of vendors in this space.  One of the great opportunities of both Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is all the conversational content that it creates. You would be losing a good bit of the value it you do not look at this content but you need good tools to do it.

The team found that here is too much content to review by hand, It is hard to separate a signal from noise, and here is no way to know what questions to ask.  They add that when you don’t know what’s significant about a set of content, you can’t investigate it with a search engine. The report reviews a number of the major text analytic players and should be useful for those making decisions in this space. Text analytics software typically includes four key components: entity extraction, categorization, relationship mapping, and sentiment analysis.

The authors caution that “until recently, text analytics software was obscure and academic, used primarily by early adopters in the life sciences field… Text analytics is a framework and a process. It is not always necessary or possible to deploy text analytics as a single, linear solution from a single vendor.” It does seem that many of the solutions are complex and are designed to be used by professionals, often with subject matter expertise in linguistics and statistics. There is much more and you can obtain the report at the Forrerster web site.

As a post script to my comments on this useful report I want to say a bit about Darwin Ecosystem. The Darwin Awareness Engine™ offers a different approach to the same issue. Using chaos theory it uncovers the emerging themes about a topic, a form of categorization. However, it operates through a simple interface that is designed to be accessible by a wide range of people. The Scan Cloud™ visualization allows you to see immediately the relationships between content groupings in real time within your chosen theme and draw your own conclusions as to what trends are occurring.  It is another way to get into content discovery. Putting The Darwin Awareness Engine in the hands of experts, will better equip these individuals to discover new trends in their field. However, ii is also accessible to the average business user so they can have a greater awareness of their areas of interest.