Seth Grimes on the semantic web – but is B2B media ready to benefit?

Seth Grimes, an analyst specialising in business intelligence and text analysis, gave a fascinating presentation – “an introduction to the semantic web and text-mining” – last week in London.

I will try and give you a flavour of his presentation and Peter Thomas wrote it up. But he certainly got me thinking about whether B2B media is ready to benefit from the semantic web.

What is “the semantic web”
When you look up a key word or phrase on Google, the search engine returns content on the basis of the frequency of those words within the text and the links to it from other sites, among other things. The semantic web takes that concept further, returning content by recognising not only the frequency of the words and calibre of the links, but also the context of the request. In short, the semantic web aims to understand user searches in a more human way, adding context to queries.

Seth kicked off with an article by Hans Peter Luhnin the IBM Journal of 1958 which has Luhn, the pioneer of information services, complaining that “no attention is paid to the logical and semantic relationship the author has established”.

Hans Peter Luhn, “The Automatic Creation of Literature Abstracts,” IBM Journal, April 1958

Seth argues that even then Luhn was perceiving a time when “sense making” would matter:-

Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance

Today that need for sense among all the disorder of content is even greater with the “unstructured data challenge”, as Seth called it, of blogs, emails, surveys and office documents.

Ever more relevant today

Seth used, as an example, a Twitter application called twitrratr which assesses Tweets for “sentiment analysis”. But, using the word “kind” as an example, he showed how difficult it is to do that with the multiple-meaning English language.

Sentiment analysis by twitrratr of the word "kind" by Seth Grimes

“Is seach up to the job?” he asked.

Only if it provides content semantically enriched with linked data, that is context sensitive and location aware.

And the sooner media companies get in on the act, the better.

The digital universe by industry 2007 from "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe” IDC, 2008

Seth quoted from a survey  by IDC to show just how little those who are responsible for content benefit from it.

The broadcast, media and entertainment industries garner about 4% of the world’s revenues but already generate, manage, or otherwise oversee 50% of the digital universe

Finally Seth went to push textmining on sites using automatic content categorization, text augmentation and information extraction (disclosure the presentation was sponsored by text mining platform Nstein). The market, he argued, from a study (partly funded by Nstein) he had published “Text Analytics 2009: user perspective on solutions and providers”,  was worth $350 in 2008 and due to increase by 25% in 2009.

Seth’s own research showed…

Yet, surprisingly, when clients were asked about relative importance of several online qualities, clients placed content management a lowly fifth below brand values.

"What are the primary applications where text comes into play?" survey by Seth Grimes

But, interestingly, clients were more likely now to analyse social media content than traditional news articles.

Is B2B media ready to exploit the semantic web?

B2B media is the opposite of mass media, the former a mass of sites for small but very well defined communities rather than the latter with its few big sites for millions of people. Indeed B2B sites do not want millions of the wrong people coming to their sites but rather few of the right people. Users’ familiarity with an existing print brand, social media activity, all help to refine those who get to the sites. But key to this refinement is search.

Take SHP, a B2B site for the safety and health professionals, as an example. It boasts articles on stress. We do not want millions of people finding the site because they are Googling the word “stress”. What we do want is for safety and health practitioners who are looking for such phrases as “stress in factories in northern England” to find the site. The more complex the keyword phrase used to get to a B2B site is, the more qualified the user.

And, finally…

The issue for us, therefore, is that our more qualified readers have been making choices informed by Seth’s linked data, context and even “location aware” for years. How then will the semantic web benefit them? In fact, does the semantic web have something to learn from B2B?

Photo credit:dullhunk

These Digital Times is one year old today!

Guest post: what do traditional print and broadcast media have to learn from the music industry?

I attended Music Week’s ‘Making online music pay’ conference last week (run by colleagues from UBM) and got into conversation with Mark Muggeridge. He argued that some of the lessons learnt by the music business might apply to the some of the traditional and broadcast media landscape.

Mark is Creative Director at Evil Genius Media.  He Tweets @MM_EGM. The company works with clients to create and deliver events and communications via an Event Management Division, and Create Music Strategies via their Music Consultancy Division. Mark organised the recent visit of Seth Godin to London.

This is what he had to say.

The online and mobile space is arguably more developed for music than it is for other media, with a few notable exceptions. It’s too complex to discuss in one blog post here, however here are a few brief thoughts.

When Shawn Fanning launched Napster in 1999 the game changed forever.  The creativity of artists and the fight-or-flight instinct for survival, of the commercial music business has seen music delivery develop on numerous fronts ever since. These being:-

• Music Discovery – MySpace and it’s imitators have delivered a platform to artists that allows them to give listeners access to their work and build communities of fans.
• Access to Music – The ‘always on’  generation of music consumers born 1988 onward who take technology for granted don’t need to own music but just want access to it. Think ‘Comes with Music’, other subscription services etc.
• Legal Download – iTunes, Amazon etc.

These developments and others have fuelled changes in the music industry such as the current trend for artists to self release and market their own material, sell merchandise retaining 100% of the margin and perversely, focus on live performance as a primary source of income until the industry settles on a way to financially revalue music on line.
So what about other media ? How does the situation in, music compare with them?

Photo credit: James Cumpsty

• Book Publishers – Are only just coming to terms with the problems faced by the music business.  With electronic book readers now becoming more ubiquitous both publishers and retailers are waiting to find out if sales plummet via piracy and users distributing titles between themselves. They know that Digital Rights Management layers are got around easily. However the purchasers of expensive book readers tend to be older and the owners of publishing rights are hoping that this older generation will respect copyright.
• Newspapers – Have taken a range of approaches, from putting part of their publications on line, to placing valued content in the ‘Walled Garden’. However some, are beginning to take a distributed approach such as the UK Guardian Newspaper which recently began offering an API which will allow third-party developers to access and reuse the Guardian’s content database in their own applications
• Television – Is finally beginning to deal with the challenge of lower viewing numbers by allowing us to time shift via the use of products such as the BBC’s iplayer and Chanel 4’s On Demand Service.

Conclusion

‘Other’ media is beginning to see that by distributing it’s media, they can distribute their brand and make it stronger; that trying to ignore the digital space won’t work in a world  where digital touch points are accessible and intertwined into our lives, via phones, computers, game platforms etc.

Some of the speakers from print and publishing media were pretty confident that they had found a successful way forward at the conference.  Perhaps they need to acknowledge that the growing pains of the music business has been of benefit to them too.

Why it matters that I successfully bagged my Facebook username

It’s 4.58 am this morning in the UK and the alarm kicks off. I’ve set it to bag my Facebook username. What this means is that whenever I direct people to Facebook, I will no longer send them to a URL ending in a strange collection of numbers but rather to my name. Facebook only let us know about this around four days ago.

It’s 4.59 am and as the laptop boots up, I’m thinking that I must me mad. Or, worse still, is this yet another sign that I am addicted to the web? My friend Peter Moore seems to give the theory substance with a Tweet saying “Working with social media can be like having a serious drug problem“.

Facebook’s username selection page loads up and is now counting down the seconds. I am actually shaking.

It’s 5.00 am I begin to remember why it is I am doing this. Try having a pretty average name like “John Welsh”. Google Alerts make it clear just how widespread it is. In one week, all these John Welshes are mentioned:

• John Welsh, of the Hibernian Society of Utah
• John Welsh, the photographer
• John Welsh, principal of Key West High School
• John Welsh, a US trader
• John Welsh of the Riverside County Department of Animal Services, CA
• John Welsh, an English actor in the Duchess of Duke Street
• John Welsh, an English footballer
• John Welsh will sell you tickets to the John O’Leary band
• John Welsh, a Liberal Democrat councillor came second in a recent election in Sudbury, England

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of us.

It’s 5.01 am and the countdown reaches zero. I am just about to claim my name and deep peace settles in. I am almost in a state of Zen-like kama. If you, like me, came late to social media, you will have a ragbag of names on your social media profiles. Yes, I’ve managed to bag

• John Welsh on Twitter
• John Welsh on WordPress

But I don’t own John Welsh dot com, taken quite sensibly years ago. And, as for the majority of my social media profiles, they boast a confusion of letters and numbers attached to my name, all of which seem pretty straightforward when compared to my utterly ridiculous Gmail address – johnchriswelsh@googlemail.com. It’s very length and complexity seems to deny the very purpose of social media.

Addicted to the web maybe, but desperate to unclutter my social media footprint, yes! Chuffed to be sufficiently up to speed with social media nowadays that I can do today what many people have been doing for years and lay claim to my name first, yes! Keen to take control of my username for any eventuality the future might throw up, yes!

It’s 5.02 am my name sits there beside a radio button, I press enter and that is it, I’ve nabbed www.Facebook.com/johnwelsh. Back to bed.

It’s 9.00am and I follow a Tweet by Louis Gray to his blog post and realise quite how lucky I have been.

The Knowledge-time Continuum

When I kicked off this blog almost a year ago, I found it really easy to think of topics about which to write. I was new to social media and what I discovered, I wrote about, as I learnt, I explained how to. There was a sort of innocence in the approach and subject matter as if it was the first time anyone had noticed this stuff. That’s probably why it was so popular. Those even newer to the subject than me did not feel intimidated!

Don’t get me wrong. I went in to blogging the right way round, listening to the conversation before tapping out my posts. If that were not enough, my links alone showed that I was aware of what had been written before. But you could not keep me down. The sheer thrill of those early months made me so excited I just had to add my pennyworth to the blogosphere. The strange thing is that, however unoriginal my subject matter might have been, people found my blog and read it in increasing numbers.  

One year on

But that period has come to an end. Today I am in the midst of “blogger’s block”, a period when the ideas for new posts has deserted me. It is more unsettling than I imagined though very much more rationale. For the simple fact is that having learnt so much, I have stopped coming across facets of social media that are new to me. My source of posts, therefore, has dried up. New subject material is going to have to come from a much more original source within me. Or will it?

I spent over 20 years in traditional print journalism and a year in the blogosphere. You’ve heard it said many times that old media had a monopoly on content – if you did not like the local paper you read or B2B magazine, you did not really have much choice to go elsewhere. But what old media also had was a monopoly on the timeliness and longevity of that content – a story did not exist until the editor published it and the same story remained active only as long as the editor chose to do so. 

The blogosphere has changed all that.

Content no longer belongs to one medium. And the timeliness and longevity of content has now stretched to be as long as anyone person is interested in it. And people are interested in subjects at very different times from each other depending on their experience and exposure. So if you had only stumbled upon the blogosphere within the last year, you would find many of the posts in this blog essential reading. But if you had been blogging for anything more, you would probably find many of the posts in this blog somewhat familiar. ”A list of Google Reader Shared Items,” you might say. “Are people only just discovering them?”Or ”Six types of Tweets if you Twitter everyday. Mmmm, does Twitter really need such analysis?”

The Law of the Blogativity

Just like Space-time Continuum, the Law of Physics that describes time being relative to an object’s speed, so Knowledge-time Continuum is the Law of the Blogosphere which describes this phenomenon. In essence, it states that:

however many people are in front of you in knowledge or understanding of social media, there will be some, if not more, people behind you relative to your knowledge.  

And:

since the number of people within social media is only every going to grow, there will always be more people needing to read what you write.  

So for some, what you write will always be tiresomely unoriginal. But for others, those who are only starting to make a step into the future, you will always be dashingly and seductively interesting.

Indeed Knowledge-time Continuum is not just a law relating to blogs but one also for social media. Take this example. You start following really useful people on Twitter who introduce you to new ideas and teach you what to do. The faster you learn, the more followers you attract who are a week, a month a year behind you. And if the people you once followed on Twitter are not learning as fast as you and continue to Tweet out links to the ABC, then you find yourself looking for fresh Twitterers. 

How do I prove all this? Follow the analytics on your blog. My most popular posts (Five people to follow on Twitter in 2009, Six types of Tweets if you Twitter everyday and A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately) become not just more visited but visited by more people more frequently as time goes by. It is not that the posts get any better or my arguments any more intelligent (far from it, I wince a little on rereading them!). But rather the longer life they have, the more Google shoves them up the search engines and more people find them. Indeed the more people discover just how much they don’t know about social media (and remember a lot more people than that don’t even know what they don’t know), the more people will end up on my blog.

Which type are you?

Indeed I would go so far as to posit three types of people within the blogosphere.

• The latecomers (0-12 months). They’ve just discovered how much they don’t know. 
• The late early adopters (1-3 yrs). They’re already hardened by a few knocks but they’ve stayed the game.
• The early adopters (4-10 yrs). Way out front with great analysis of what’s happening to us all.

All three overlap- the linked in, connected blogosphere could do nothing else – but I would go further. All three are like cogs, one pushing the other on, and sometimes pulling it back. But none operating without the other.

Of course none of this helps my blogger’s block! But I have come up with a list of ideas for my next posts. They are not going to be about the actual kit of social media, as I have done in the past, but rather how you can measure and assess its success.

Photo credit: As you said

Have I become an Instant Message junky?

I can scarcely hold myself back. If I see someone online, I just have to start Instant Messaging them.

For someone who never clicked on that “chat” icon in his life before, I now find it my latest addiction on the web. 

Whether it is Facebook, GMail, Skype or, rather surprisingly, my Blackberry Storm, I cannot keep away from it. 

Have I become an Instant Message junky?

I hope not.

Social media is, in essence, about the conversation. If not, it is traditional broadcast media.

So it would seem a contradiction in terms to interact with “friends” on Facebook and NOT occasionally Instant Message them. It would be like looking at all their vacation shots but NEVER commenting on them.

It would seem rather snooty to give contacts access to your Skype account and NOT Instant Message them. Are you waiting for them to make the first move?

It would seem a waste of effort to upload a portrait of yourself to your GMail account and NOT Instant Message contacts, particularly since you can now video chat.

And, if you really do not want an interruption, click the “busy” icon on Skye and GMail

But key to Instant Messaging, like any other social media, is to follow a few rules.

• If someone’s icon says they are offline, they probably are offline.
• Don’t even think about that chat icon, if you do not have something to say (how often do you Tweet when you have nothing to say?).
• Always give the other person time to type their response before you do.
• Provide an exit route at the end of each subject. Better still, why not provide one at the end of each paragraph?
• Just do it!

Photo credit: Rodrigo Senna

On Being John Welsh: why you need to change your social media identity to remain authentic

I’ve done it. I’ve changed the design of my blog. Out has gone the masthead that has loyally followed me for the first tempestuous 11 months in the blogosphere. And in comes a new one by Claudia Moeller (who Tweets @ludg8cre8ive).

Why did I do it? 

I loved my original social media identity, used on my blog’s masthead (above) and as an avatar. The photograph that I used was taken during UBM Live’s first ever Digital Achievement Day.  I got a call to go down to another floor of our office and everyone (I mean everyone!) was wearing a paper mask of my face. I am the digital director so it showed that “we are all digital now”.

Very On Being John Malkovich.

I loved that photo. My reason for plunging into the social web in the first place was to find out what our company needed to know and work with my colleagues to make the social web fun and profitable. The photo made me feel that my colleagues were holding my hand in what was, at first a pretty, lonely place.

Then a month ago, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was the first time I had had the opportunity to transform many online relationships into face-to-face. One of the people I met up with was Hollis Thomases (who Tweets @hollisthomases) who just could not see the similarity between my social media identity and myself in person. Peter Kim has recently given this phenomenon a name and a definition:

Headfake, noun.  A situation in which you are familiar with a person’s avatar picture, which gives you an inaccurate idea of how that person appears in real life.

Luckily Hollis grabbed her iPhone, took a picture and my new social media identity was formed. My social media avatars now look like me and, finally, so does the masthead of this blog.

The strange this is, I should have worked this out for myself. I have spent 14 years as an editor of three different B2B magazines. Each one bore a photo of myself as editor. Every time I attended an industry event people would come up and start speaking as if they had known me for years. In a way, they did know me. For, just like social media, the repetition of my photo and my weekly or monthly leader plus personable, if not personal, words made them own a little of me. 

So why should you change your design? Not because it might attract more readers (they probably read you in RSS). Certainly not for vanity. But for what we are all looking for on the social web – authenticity.

I must just make sure I do not have a haircut anytime soon.

JEEcamp 2009: Interview with Paul Bradshaw – on the future of journalism

Paul Bradshaw, JEEcamp organiser, has strong views on journalism’s future.

People will not pay for content but only a platform, he argues, so journalists should create their content around services. Hear what he has to say in a short interview outside the event.

If your reader does not let you see the video, click on this link to access the post and see the video.

Paul Tweets @paulbradshaw and writes the Online Journalism Blog.

JEEcamp 2009: pictures from the event

For coverage of the event go Martin Belam here or here, Michael Haddon here and Kasper Sorensen here.  But for those wanting pictures, my photos are in a slideshow below and can be found in a Flick set here. And finally here are Jemimah Knight’s photos of the event.  

JEEcamp 2009: Interview with Martin Belam – on the future of journalism

I was in Birmingham yesterday for JEEcamp. It’s a great opportunity to talk about journalism and, more specifically, how to make money from it.

I met Martin Belam and asked him his views. I’ve always been a great fan – I put him in my list of UK bloggers and Twitterers who are beginning to rival their US peers for my attention. Listen to what he had to say.

Martin Tweets @currybet and blogs at Currybet and MediaGuardian.