Social software and online media
Analysis of social software, blogging, microblogging, and online media. Related subjects include:
The silly fuss over Obama’s use of YouTube
President-Elect Barack Obama is posting videos on YouTube. Clearly, his use of relatively cutting-edge communications technology is a Good Thing. It’s also unsurprising, giving the sophistication and importance of video in the recent presidential campaign.
However, various commentators — even ones as smart as Dan Farber — see something wrong with the use of YouTube for this purpose. I think that’s silly. Read more
| Categories: Google, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
Google and the Author’s Guild establish an ASCAP for books
Most of the coverage of the Google/Authors Guild settlement today seems to focus on Google’s side of things. But I think the authors’ side is much more important. This deal paves the way for traditional publishers to become quaint and useless — and not a moment too soon.
Below are some quotes — fair use!! 
— from the Authors Guild official statement on the deal (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: Google, Search engines, Social software and online media, Specialized search | Leave a Comment |
Blog user interfaces
Over on A World of Bytes, I’ve started highlighting interesting tech blogs people might enjoy. However, I chided each of my first three selections for UI failings. A comment thread quickly ensued, and social media maven Jeremiah Owyang asked how he could make his blog easier to read. This post is a followup to that discussion.
Jeremiah’s blog and my most active ones – DBMS2 and Text Technologies – have a lot in common. Specifically, they are multi-hundred-page websites, featuring dense material meant to be read by busy, tech-savvy people. And so my core advice boils down to: Make it as easy as possible for people to find and recognize what is interesting to them.
In particular, I suggest:
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 5 Comments |
A cautionary tale about Facebook ad targeting
Washington Post writer Rachel Beckman complains that Facebook inundated her with ads accusing her of being fat and then, when she got engaged, warned her of being a “fat bride”. Now, although she’s newly married or about to be, Facebook is (obviously prematurely) advertising fertility treatments to her.
It’s just the early days, but this sort of thing is bound to create backlash. I don’t think there’s going to be a resolution until people can create profiles so detailed that, for example, they contain the fact that you disapprove of ads about weight-loss aids.
In the short term, e-commerce software vendors should be thinking about how to create UIs that offer most of the benefit of this kind of targeting, but without giving offense.
Sigh. I guess today’s my day for writing about offensive marketing.
Evidently I’m a social media expert too. Who knew?
Network World asked me to do an online chat. That isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is that they asked me to focus on social media. My views on social media boil down to:
- Get off the stick and blog!
- Social media are a part of life, especially if you have any valued employees under the age of 40. Get used to it.
- The “dangers” of social media are the same as the dangers of other forms of internet communication. If your employees can’t use email or web surf safely, you’re dead anyway. So stop fretting.
The long form of my views on social media — with a little data warehousing thrown in — may be found here.
In somewhat related news, Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal showed his exquisite good sense by quoting me carefully about online presence, and expanding upon my points at length.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
LinkedIn name search is ridiculously bad
Somebody named Conor O’Mahony has posted excellent comments about XML databases on a couple of DBMS2 threads. After a look at the blog URL he provided and the job description he posted there, I resolved to look him up. LinkedIn seemed as good a way as any of figuring out where he was geographically located. But on the first try I typed his name from memory as Conor Mahony. LinkedIn had no idea who I meant.
Once I confirmed that he was indeed listed, I went on to test such errors as Connor Mahony, the very common misspelling of my name as Kurt Monash, and several variations on Dan Weinreb. Almost nothing worked. LinkedIn did get Daniel/Dan, and didn’t require the hyphen in Tony Lacy-Thompson, but otherwise pretty much every misspelling I could think of stumped it. Read more
| Categories: Search engines, Social software and online media | 7 Comments |
A startup that could improve all our lives
Apostrophee aspires to hugely improve the experience of cyberspace, by applying grammar and spelling correction to online content, especially blog comments and forum posts.
Too bad the article is a spoof.
Reflecting on why it has to be spoof could be somewhat enlightening. 
| Categories: Blogosphere, Fun stuff, Humor, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
Micro- and full-length-blogging use cases overlap greatly
Steven Hodson ranted on Mashable that Twitter is not a micro-blogging tool. His case was, in essence, “Blogs are thoughtful and Twitter isn’t, so the two aren’t comparable.” I disagree. Hodson was over-glorifying blogging, while trivializing the broad variety of Twitter use cases.* Consider, if you please, the following list of use cases that are met both by Twitter and by conventional blogging:
- Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging. Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
- Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
- Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too.
- Communicating news.
- Expressing analytical opinions.
- Promoting your services, opinions, and links.
*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize. That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability. Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | 1 Comment |
Communication, culture, and short text messages
Tom Davenport offers a lot of skepticism and a little hope about Enterprise 2.0: Read more
| Categories: Microblogging, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
6 trends that could shake up the text analytics market
My last two posts were based on the introductory slide to my talk The Text Analytics Marketplace: Competitive landscape and trends. I’ll now jump straight ahead to the talk’s conclusion.
Text analytics vendors participate in the same trends as other software and technology vendors. For example, relational business intelligence and data warehousing products are increasingly being sold to departmental buyers. Those buyers place particularly high value on ease of installation. And golly gee whiz, both parts of that are also true in text mining.
But beyond such general trends, I’ve identified six developments that I think could radically transform the text analytics market landscape. Indeed, they could invalidate the neat little eight-bucket categorization I laid out in the prior post. Each is highly likely to occur, although in some cases the timing remains greatly in doubt.
These six market-transforming trends are:
- Web/enterprise/messaging integration
- BI integration
- Universal message retention
- Portable personal profiles
- Electronic health records
- Voice command & control
