Content Quality

A while back, when 365 Media was figuring out how to determine which information sources were more reliable than others - we developed the concept of the 'content momentum' of a site. Our NLP-based system were scouring content to find described business events to convert into data changes in existent (customer) databases. We were constantly looking for ways for our system to make better decisions based on things like priority (which news piece is more reliable), efficiency (which site is churning out re-runs and wasting good server time) and ranking (in this industry, which are the best sources of primary news).

Content Momentum was a concept that enabled us to do this - it worked loosely around the mass (size of overall content on site) multiplied by velocity (rate at which new content appears on the site) concept (hence 'momentum') with added caveats around the value of that content as it was processed through our system and then fed back to the training set.

All very interesting. Why am I mentioning this? Well, today Google announced a change to its search algorithm in order to "provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content". Google now cares whether the site has content quality? Well, duh, that's great.

Process This

Mainstream media has temporarily got caught up in the discussion about meaning-based computing and processing with IBM's Watson kicking some champion butt on Jeopardy! My first thought when I heard about this a few month's back was - why is this IBM? OK, the Deep Blue chess master and all that, but this is the leading edge of software. Why is this not Microsoft, Autonomy or another software company leading the way in showing how NLP has broader application?

Then I went to the IBM website and I realized the answer. Watson is a marketing gimmick to demonstrate the power of IBM's Power7 processor. IBM's marketing team are using natural language processing as a theme to show how powerful it's hardware is, because natural language processing requires a heck of a lot of, well, processing. So, in some ways this both undermines and supports the sense that NLP has real world application by firstly showing it in a mainstream application (answering questions on Jeopardy!) but secondly where "a single, precise answer to a question requires custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and thousands of POWER7 computing cores working in a massively parallel system".

OK, so bringing in Moore's Law, that's how long til I can give my laptop a name and it can make me some money on Millionaire?

Solipsists don't care about their online reputation

We had an internal discussion about the target market for our new social media monitoring and sentiment analysis system. Our marketing department demonstrated its insight and expertise by deliberately excluding solipsists as a target market. This was funny, but we won't be sending them a brochure.

The Web Effect

Part of our new social media listening app is Influence Tracking - our team has created a ranking mechanism to determine the level of influence a particular review/comment has comparatively over another review (factors like reach, traffic, relevance, brand value) in order to identify differentiators (that need further action).

This has moved us into an interesting area - tracking who are the 'influencers'. A few companies are providing services in this area (PeerIndex, Klout). So, our intrepid R&D team have started developing in this direction (watch this space etc etc).

Question is - how do we describe the effect an influencer has.. is it a ripple effect, a snowball effect, a butterfly effect or a domino effect? OK butterfly is the coolest but also the least likely. If we were to visually map out the effect of a good review - track it through hashtags and hyperlinks - which type of effect would best describe it..

Who's Listening?

Interesting study by Markettools a couple of months ago that postulated that 94% of companies do not use monitoring of social media to find out what customers or prospects are saying about them.

Actually I'm surprised 6% do actually listen to customers via social media. Is this 6% of the 18 million companies in the world - are you telling me over 1m companies are using social media monitoring - or is this 6% of the top ten thousand companies in the USA? Probably the latter. Radian 6 - who my guess is the leader in the field right now - claim 1,700 customers.

I don't see anyone debating the value - so if only 6% are actually using this type of service, then it must be because of education and accessibility.