So THAT’S why Andrew Orlowski still has a job (Part 2)
Andrew Orlowski is an over-the-top jerk, and a pretty sloppy reporter and analyst to boot. But he occasionally makes a good point even so. In the most recent instance, he confronted Tim Berners-Lee. As the article makes clear, Berners-Lee reacted badly to Orlowski, reflecting an attitude that is probably shared by 99% of the people who encounter the guy, and in the future will probably be adopted by sentient computers as well. Even so, Orlowski’s underlying point is valid: If the Semantic Web is going to be any more spam-free than the current Web, nobody has adequately explained why.
| Categories: Ontologies, Spam and antispam | 2 Comments |
Uncyclopedia
If you haven’t seen it yet, Uncyclopedia is an occasionally hilarious parody of Wikipedia. Definitely worth checking out.
| Categories: Humor, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
Clarabridge takes on Attensity
Text mining newbie Clarabridge gave me the all-too-customary “Please let us brief you, but then don’t write about it for a while” routine. Now that it’s OK to post, what I’m up for offering is a few salient points in bullet form.
- The closest analogy to what Clarabridge does is Attensity’s new(ish) strategy – extract “facts” from documents and dump them into a relational database management system. In particular, Clarabridge and Attensity alike make the case “Our categorization is more flexible because it’s applied only after the extraction happens.”
- Clarabridge’s sweet spot is extracting user opinions from short documents. E.g., the customer uses cases they talk about are customer feedback forms, public blog postings, etc. about A. hotels and B. consumer software products.
- Clarabridge has a strong business intelligence mentality, describing the product as “ETL for unstructured data.” But then, it’s spun out of a BI consultancy that itself was founded by Microstrategy veterans.
- Clarabridge uses a different database schema than Attensity. Attensity’s fact-relationship network (FRN) is basically just two thin, long tables. Clarabridge, however, uses a Microstrategy-like star schema, in which different kinds of things that you can tokenize correspond to different dimensions.
Frankly, if somebody wants an alternative to the Attensity/Teradata/Business Objects partnership they could do worse than talk with Clarabridge.
| Categories: Attensity, BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
European Text Analytics Summit
If you go to one text analytics conference, the choice should probably be the US Text Analytics Summit in June. For one thing, it should have a great marketing panel. 🙂 But if Boston is a little far away for you, there’s also a European Text Analytics Summit in Amsterdam, April 26-27, 2007, by the same organizers. And if you register with the discount code MONASH07EU, you’ll save 100 Euros.
| Categories: Text Analytics Summit | Leave a Comment |
Text Analytics Summit marketing panel: Membership firmed up
We’ve now solidified the membership of the Text Analytics Summit marketing panel. It is:
- Curt Monash, President, Monash Information Services
- Dave Kellogg, CEO, Mark Logic Corporation
- Michelle De Haaff, VP Marketing, Attensity Corporation
- Michel Lemay, VP Marketing, nstein Technologies
- Mary Crissey, SAS Analytics Marketing Manager, SAS Institute
Michelle, Michel, and Mary are all obvious choices, responsible for marketing at leading text mining vendors. In addition, Mary has excelled on the same panel in the past, Michel sent me e-mail with some brilliant thoughts on the panel subject, and Attensity has one of the most interesting strategies in the text analytics market.
As for Dave — he’s simply one of the most astute marketing theorists working in software today. And he runs a very interesting text technology company. And he used to be most senior marketing guy in all of business intelligence, when he was SVP at Business Objects. In his copious free time, he writes a really cool blog.
| Categories: Attensity, Mark Logic, nStein, SAS, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining | 3 Comments |
What’s going on at ClearForest?
I tried to invite Jay Henderson so speak on the Text Analytics Summit marketing panel, but got no answer to my e-mail. The company phone directory didn’t work so well for him either. I sent e-mail to a general PR company e-mail address, and that didn’t get returned. And Ravi tells me he has had similar difficulties reaching them. Read more
| Categories: ClearForest/Reuters, Text mining | 5 Comments |
Circlesourcing at Wikipedia
Tim Melly makes an interesting point about Wikipedia. Since he was fairly meandering about it, I’ll recap it here in telegraphic form:
- Wikipedia is full of claims that are sourceable in principle, but aren’t actually sourced.
- Mainstream journalists use information from Wikipedia, even if it is not further sourced. (He has an anecdote to illustrate the point.)
- Those very articles can be viewed as authoritative for Wikipedia’s own sourcing purposes.
- Thus, unsourced information could, by virtue of having been placed in Wikipedia, grow to be regarded as authoritative by Wikipedia itself.
| Categories: Social software and online media | 2 Comments |
Discount to the Text Analytics Summit
If you plan to attend the Text Analytics Summit, there are two things you can do to minimize your registration fee:
- Register by March 16 to get a $400 discount.
- Use the coupon code 3TAMONASH for an additional $100 off.
| Categories: Text Analytics Summit | Leave a Comment |
Three crucial issues in text analytics
As so often happens in life, I have gotten the job of fixing something that I was complaining about. Specifically, I’ve been asked to run the Marketing panel at the Text Analytics Summit in Newton, MA, June 12-13. In connection with this, organizer Ravi Virpal has asked me to come up with three major points or themes I feel we should address. Read more
| Categories: Text Analytics Summit, Text mining | 4 Comments |
How to lose your credibility in 24 hours and 49 minutes
Deeply loathed football writer Ron Borges of the Boston Globe has just been brought down by plagiarism. This detailed timeline of the events is probably indicative of what happens in many other blog-driven flaps.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |