Matt Cilderman of Seeking Alpha recently discussed the rise of Google Now, the service’s potential, and its effect on our privacy. He writes, “In Google’s ’2012 Update from the CEO,’ Larry Page explains the importance of one of their free services, Google Plus: ‘Imagine how much better search would be if we added… you. Say you’ve been studying computer science for awhile like me, then the information you need won’t be that helpful to a relative novice and vice versa. If you’re searching for a particular person, you want the results for that person – not everyone else with the same name. These are hard problems to solve without knowing your identity, your interests, or the people you care about… Google+ helps solve this problem for us because it enables Google to understand people and their connections…This kind of next-generation search in which Google understands real-world entities – things, not strings – will help improve our results in exciting new ways. It’s about building genuine knowledge into our search engine’.” Read more

There’s no such thing as too much post-election coverage, is there? Alright, maybe there is. But we couldn’t let things die down without at least a nod to those in our space that have delivered the semantic industry’s own take on the topic.

Here are a few you may want to review:

Twitris Election Insights:

“The Twitris system had an amazing night–while Nate Silver’s model might have received well deserved attention, Twitris gave better indications and insights and large majority of the polls,” wrote Dr. Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, in an email to us. The semantic social web application (first covered here) is a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University.

Read more

Did you ever take a survey and wonder if anyone actually was paying attention to your input? Here’s a tip: If it’s more than 20 questions, ignore it, advises Sam Keninger, director of product marketing at customer experience vendor Medallia.

“That’s the old market research way of doing things, and [the resulting big report compiled by market researchers] ends up in a binder on someone’s desk and no one will read it,” he says. A shorter survey – about a page long, and generally with a question about whether you’d recommend the product or service – signifies that attention will be paid.

Why? “The survey is an extension of the customer experience itself, so the shorter it can be the better,” Keninger says. And surveys can be shorter – and more effective at telling the company what it needs to know in real-time – when they can depend more on free-form text responses. They can do that when they can leverage both text and sentiment analytic engines to understand which topics are trending and to identify emerging issues, and ideally route those in real time to the front-lines where workers understand and can take action to fix the underlying problems.

Read more

Heading into the Labor Day weekend, Wolfram|Alpha released a new feature that lets users perform personal analytics with Facebook data, for free. Users can head here and type in “Facebook Report” for an analysis of their Facebook data.

Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the computational knowledge engine, alerted the world to the news in this blog post. “When you type “facebook report,” Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report—almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc.,” he writes.

Read more

Real-time social analytics platform Topsy, which earlier this month debuted Twindex to provide insight into Twitterati sentiment on the presidential candidates, today unveils Topsy Pro Analytics. It delivers in-depth metrics based on the Twitter firehose via API to the general public. Previously, the company had API access for some metrics in a machine-to-machine interface, but nothing near the full interactivity nor access to all the measurements that are propagated into the new user interface.

Topsy’s technology was created to ingest huge amounts of authored content, with Twitter as its primary data source — all 400 million tweets a day, with an index that goes back multiple years. Topsy also does a full public scrape of Google Plus and indexes that data. It offers its own sentiment classification and dictionary scheme tuned for tweets, takes every link published in tweets and unpacks them to their native states to produce measurements around them, provides a geoinference model to see where people are communicating from (to the country level today but soon to city and state level), and also can deliver an influence and author graph.

Read more

If there’s one thing the Semantic Web arena is full of, it is start-ups. In fact, the slew of creative and innovative ideas out there coming from young companies is one of the reasons for the first Start-Up Competition to be held at the Semantic Tech & Business conference in San Francisco this June.

If you fit the bill and haven’t checked out this opportunity, you should, right this way. Are more opportunities waiting in the wings for entrepreneurs? Yesterday Congress sent the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business) Act bill to President Obama for his signature. Once he signs it – and the White House has said that is the intention – entrepreneurs no longer will be prohibited from advertising their intentions to raise funds for their companies to investors, because the Act abolishes the general solicitation ban. As reported by The Washington Post, “the bill also establishes a framework for crowdfunding — which enables small companies to solicit equity capital from myriad small-dollar investors.”

What’s the reaction from some members of the Semantic Web community?

Read more

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, is percolating another project: The Smallest Federated Wiki. This week he gave a presentation entitled, Missing From the Beginning: The Federation of Wikis Abstract, at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) theatre, which is viewable here, and he’s been hosting Google+ hangouts about the work, too.

So, what is the Smallest Federated Wiki? The idea behind the work-in-progress, launched at IndieWebCamp this past summer and as explained here, is to innovate in three ways: The new Wiki shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization. As Cunningham said in the March 7 presentation, “We’re making an ecosystem here for sharing data about ideas. I’m taking the conversation about how we’re going to live going forward, to be based on ideas backed up by data that we can understand because it has sensible visualizations.”

Read more

ComScore this week issued a report that wasn’t particularly flattering to Google Plus. It noted that users spent just 3.3 minutes on the social network in January compared to 7.5 hours for Facebook. Much discussion revolved around the fact that Google last month touted that the service had grown to 90 million users from 40 million in October.

Google Plus, as The Semantic Web Blog reported here, informs the personalized results that are delivered through Search Plus Your World, such as the Google+ photos and posts users have shared or that have been shared with them through the social network.

One question raised by the ComScore report is what impact the slow takeup might have, if any, on Search Plus Your World. Shortly after Google Plus’ debut, The Semantic Web Blog published a post by Christine Connors, principal at TriviumRLG LLC, discussing why, as she has put it, the service is “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.” Of the ComScore data , she says, “that’s an ‘average’ number. Which means that millions of folks who’ve signed up haven’t used it, and far fewer millions spend hours on it every month. What that says to me is that for some people Search Plus Your World would be almost useless, and for those who use G+ regularly SPYW has a decent and always improving personalized algorithm and index behind it.  Take out the privacy concerns and the people using G+ will have an increasingly positive sense of satisfaction with Google for Search and more.  Problem is, taking out the privacy concerns is very troublesome.”

Speaking of privacy: Today, of course, is the date that Google’s privacy policy changes.

Read more

It’s been said that I’ve called Google Plus “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.” I did, and you can listen for yourselves on the Semantic Link podcast.

Why did I do so? Well, G+ follows some of the basic principles of linked data: it uses persistent HTTP URIs for people, Sparks (concepts) and posts. It allows you to indicate a relationship between to entities and give that relationship a type. It collects, and types,  attributes about entities from the expected experts – the entities themselves. This is a “Field Trial,” so basic is just about all we should expect. Given the reported adoption rates, I think it’s made a pretty good start.

Let’s take those points one at a time, with pictures.

Read more

Dan Verhaeghe recently gave a less than glowing review to Google+’s social media aggregation feature, Sparks: “While Techvibes’ Knowlton Thomas reported that Google + reached 10 million users in 16 days, let’s not jump the gun and call Google’s latest foray into social media a smashing success yet. I wasn’t impressed by Google Sparks, a feature released in Google+, which shows results based on keywords that you search, but the depth of the results are terrible, and not remotely comparable to Google News. Matthew Ingram, beat writer at Gigaom says that one part of the future of media certainly is aggregation, but realistically, it’s already here and has been for quite some time.” Read more