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Search and Social Media 2010

Matthew Hurst — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:17:38 GMT

Tomorrow I will be attending Search and Social Media (at WSDM) - and am very much looking forward to it. While thinking about the workshop I realised that the title can lead to endless debates around the definition of 'search' and 'social media', so I think it makes a lot of sense to break things down by aspects of the social media space. In particular: search and real time content, search and community, search and influence, authority and popularity, search and geolocated content, search and social networks, etc.

When breaking things down in this manner, we can also reflect on the notion of 'search'. There are many interactions with social media that currently don't follow the traditional search dialogue. TopicFire and Techmeme, for example, are more focused on real time analytics than on search as a primary mode of interaction. Similarly, Bing, Google, Yelp and many others provide a 'what's nearby' interaction which uses context to parameterize content in the spatial dimension, much as TopicFire and Techmeme use time (what's nearby versus what's rightnow).

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Database Snooping Threatens Liberty - And We're All Making Matters Worse

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:30:56 GMT

Every year or two, I get back on my soapbox to say:

Database and analytic technology, as they evolve, will pose tremendous danger to individual liberties.
We in the industry who are creating this problem also have a duty to help fix it.
Technological solutions alone won't suffice. Legal changes are needed.
The core of the needed legal changes are tight restrictions on governmental use of data, because relying on restrictions about data acquisition and retention clearly won't suffice.

But this time I don't plan to be so quick to shut up.

Informatica Starts 2010 with a Bang

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:58:48 GMT

In a move that will send (pleasant) tremors in the world of data management, Informatica snapped up leading MDM vendor Siperian. I'm excited by this event, and here's why.

Informatica's acquisition of Siperian is far from unexpected. Not too long ago, I posed the following question: "What's stopping Informatica from acquiring an OEM partner like Siperian?" Others too would have had the same thought. Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi (indirectly) explains the delay in acquiring Siperian by stating that they are following a roadmap (read here for more). Well, ok, maybe. At this point, that's irrelevant.

So why is this great for Informatica and for customers and IT practitioners?

Semantic Search Footnotes: Concepts, Ontologies & Real Time

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:59:22 GMT

I want to respond to a few comments/suggestions I received about my recent Intelligent Enterprise story, Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search -- it also ran in InformationWeek -- regarding semantic-search definitions and examples.

My article gained hundreds of page views and a couple of dozen tweets, but there was only one suggestion of a semantic-search approach I'd missed, "real-time search with some sort of filtering," that from Jim Hendler, who is certainly an authority on semantics, more on which later. I'll start, however, by elaborating on points raised by NLP/semantics researcher Tom O'Hara in an e-mail message.

Semantic Search Footnotes

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:59:22 GMT

I want to respond to a few comments/suggestions I received about my recent Intelligent Enterprise story, Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search -- it also ran in InformationWeek -- regarding semantic-search definitions and examples.

My article gained hundreds of page views and a couple of dozen tweets, but there was only one suggestion of a semantic-search approach I'd missed, "real-time search with some sort of filtering," that from Jim Hendler, who is certainly an authority on semantics, more on which later. I'll start by elaborating on points raised by NLP/semantics researcher Tom O'Hara in an e-mail message.

Social Psychologists in Las Vegas

Matthew Hurst — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:57:10 GMT

I've just returned from a brief trip to Las Vegas where I had been invited by Sam Gosling and Kate Niederhoffer to participate in a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. I was very happy to participate with Tom Lento from Facebook and Winter Mason from Yahoo Research. The panel topic was Forging connections between Social Media and Social/Personality Psychology and was intended to help bridge the gap between researchers in the social-psych field and those of us in industry working with social and personal data.

Perhaps the most salient point that came out of the discussion was the difference between current social-psych methods and the data scale of the online social world. To help understand this new world, and for social-psych researchers to make the transition, an ability to code and to deal with large amounts of data is required. There was genuine interest in this (provoking questions about the specifics we had in mind, such as working with scripting languages) and I believe a real interest in the opportunity that lies in this data rich online world.

In terms of facilitating interactions, Winter probed the audience regarding knowledge of key conferences for web data analytics, etc. such as WWW and ICWSM. I consider the later to be a perfect forum for this discussion to continue, and with Sam's help I think this can really happen.

The conference itself is run in a manner quite different to that which computer scientists are used to. No papers are submitted and acceptance (which runs high) is based on short abstracts (generally paragraphs). I managed to see one of the poster sessions and was fascinated by the topics (extremely focused accounts of certain behaviours and traits) and the methodologies.

I feel that there is a lot

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Oracle on SharePoint: Waiting for Answers

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:09:33 GMT

Among the various categories of content technologies that CMS Watch evaluates, Oracle has been very quiet over the past year. For the past two years, actually, Oracle has urged customers and partners to look forward to the "11g" series of upgrades across its various application sets. In certain cases, various 11g-labelled capabilities have been slipstreamed into existing versions, especially on the ECM and WCM side. But overall, the major 11g-branded upgrades have created enormous expectations among Oracle customers.

Malaysian Blogosphere Division

Matthew Hurst — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:03:58 GMT

(Briefly) I've been working with some new data that our team has produced and created the view below. What I find striking about this visualization of 6k blogs is the clear division between two major clusters. A very limited drill down on the data suggests that all of these blogs are Malaysian in origin (and most are on Google's Blogspot). I don't yet have enough insight into this component to understand why there is a split - perhaps more to follow.

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A Different Way to Think About Apps

Matthew Hurst — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:30:32 GMT

I use an app to check on the skiing conditions at local slopes. I click on the icon on the iPhone, the app pops up and I see some data. When I'm on a desktop, I do exactly the same thing, except the app I click on is a web page. While Apple claims 140, 000+ apps available for their phone, and others in the space do the same, a good number of these apps are really just thin clients backed by the same sort of data that usually goes to populating a web page.

This prompts an obvious question: how many 'apps' are really just thin clients backed by web servers similar to those for traditional browsers? An initial answer to this might be constructed out of a break down of app categories (games, for example, are less likely to fit this model).

In addition, as we hear more and more about crawling the deep web, what are the rules of engagement for crawling the data services that back these thin client, browser-like apps?

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Google Updates Whistler Aerial Imagery with Snow

Matthew Hurst — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:07:53 GMT

I just noticed that Google Map's aerial images of Whistler (hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics) is now nice and white. This is definite a change (and other ski locations I visited have not been updated with winter data).

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MicroStrategy Says It's Time for Mobile BI

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:39:35 GMT

There was record attendance at MicroStrategy's annual conference in Las Vegas this week, with more than 1,500 customers and partners attending. While a conference in Las Vegas may have the perception of extravagance, in reality, the hotel and flight were the cheapest I can recall.

As is this vendor's tradition, the general session kicked off with a rock impersonator, this year, Gwen Stefani. The performance wasn't particularly memorable, in contrast to last year's Tina Turner ("we're simply the best") or to the both daring and amusing Kinks' Lola in 2008 ("BI bake off"). (Truly, if there were a YouTube clip of this rendition, I know BI teams around the world would be playing it at their selection kick offs.)

Visualizing Network Evolution

Matthew Hurst — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:04:41 GMT

New to me is this work by Bergstrom and Rosvall on discoverying and visualizing changes over time in networks. The basic idea is to track nodes as the join and migrate between clusters in a network.

Some additional visualization are available here.

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Netezza Skimmer Joins the Short List

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:14:27 GMT

As I previously complained, last week wasn't a very convenient time for me to have briefings. So when Netezza emailed to say it would release its new entry-level Skimmer appliance this week, while I asked for and got a Friday afternoon briefing, I kept it quick and basic.

That said, highlights of my Netezza Skimmer briefing included:

Sentiment Analysis, Enterprise Content, and Social Media, Year 2010

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:24:36 GMT

Sentiment analysis is one of my favorite topics: one of the most challenging and one of the most interesting uses of text technologies. News and social media, e-mail, surveys -- the gamut of text sources -- are full of subjective information: opinion, attitudes, emotion, and mood -- and with a wider variety of current and possible business uses. Application areas include customer satisfaction and support, marketing, financial markets, media and publishing, and politics and policy: essentially any computing application sourced from human communications.

Sentiment analysis represents a huge opportunity and it presents technical and solution challenges. That's why I've created a new conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for April 13 in New York.

Hear BI Survey Results, Plus Donald Farmer

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:07:23 GMT

I'll present the results of the latest Intelligent Enterprise business intelligence survey and Donald Farmer of Microsoft will surely talk about the new PowerPivot add-ins for in-memory analysis in Excel. That should be enough to attract more than a few registrants to this week's "BI Agenda for 2010" webinar. But there's more...