Christopher Dawson has commented on Google’s recent changes to their privacy policy. Dawson writes, “I live, eat, breathe, work, and play Google and there aren’t many people more aware of Google’s business model and the amount of data it collects than I. So is it just sheer stupidity and naiveté that has me utterly embracing the Google ecosystem and relatively unconcerned about newly announced privacy policies that have caused so much consternation this week? Before you jump down to the talkbacks to tell me how stupid I really am, read on for another couple paragraphs.” Read more

Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Google has decided to discontinue Needlebase.com, “a service Google acquired in April 2011 [read about that acquisition here]. Needlebase will run until 1 June 2012, to allow current users to download their material. Needlebase is a platform for acquiring, integrating, cleaning up, combining, analyzing and publishing data on the web, and is being used in the open data community to turn available public sector information into re-usable data. It lowers the threshold for people to work with data significantly.” Read more

Online publishers and other content providers have a new analytics tool to help them understand what their readers care about and use that information to better connect them to their sites’ relevant and compelling content. Launching today is Dash, based on the predictive content analytics platform Parse.ly. The technology crawls every article page for Parse.ly’s publisher-partners, and analyzes, in real time and at scale, the text to identify relevant topics to group related content together. Behind this lies natural language processing technology, which uses language queues hidden inside the text to determine its affiliated topics. To date Dash has extracted over 350,000 unique topics through all the URLs is has crawled during private beta for a healthy taxonomy of topics across the web being consumed by users.

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The Common Crawl Foundation’s repository of openly and freely accessible web crawl data is about to go live as a Public Data Set on Amazon Web Services.  The non-profit Common Crawl is the vision of Gil Elbaz, who founded Applied Semantics and the AdSense technology for which Google acquired it , as well as the Factual open data aggregation platform, and it counts Nova Spivack  — who’s been behind semantic services from Twine to Bottlenose – among its board of directors.

Elbaz’ goal in developing the repository: “You can’t access, let alone download, the Google or the Bing crawl data. So certainly we’re differentiated in being very open and transparent about what we’re crawling and actually making it available to developers,” he says.

“You might ask why is it going to be revolutionary to allow many more engineers and researchers and developers and students access to this data, whereas historically you have to work for one of the big search engines…. The question is, the world has the largest-ever corpus of knowledge out there on the web, and is there more that one can do with it than Google and Microsoft and a handful of other search engines are already doing? And the answer is unquestionably yes. ”

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Editor’s Update Jan. 19: DBpedia, Wikipedia and company are all back online, while some lawmakers have taken their support for SOPA and PIPA offline. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.), an original co-sponsor of SOPA, also has asked to have his name removed from the bill.

 

It’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) day. At 8 a.m. EST  OpenLink Software began a 12-hour blackout of the following sites it controls in support of Wikipedia, Reddit and others spearheading the online protest against the legislation:

• http://dbpedia.org
• http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com
• http://lod.openlinksw.com
• http://uriburner.com

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Kingsley Idehen yesterday directed interested parties to a Linked Data-driven poll for the opportunity to vote on taking this step, and the ayes, so to speak, had it.

Turn to any of the above sites and you’ll see:

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What do big companies have that most emerging businesses don’t have to help them get value from Big Data? Well, to start with, there’s lots of money and a ton of technology resources.

Never fear. At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business conference in Berlin, Christopher Testa, CTO of startup WhiteBox Inc., plans to give companies with considerably fewer resources than giants like Google and IBM insight into how to use Big Data as a small, lean startup. His guidance will draw from his own past experiences at Google training AdSense; lessons learned studying the development of IBM’s Watson; and his current efforts to apply Big Data principles to create an expert system for amateur radio operator license exams at his own startup, with limited engineering resources. Most recently Testa was head of engineering at Ad.ly, and that will factor into advice about how to run a data center with free and open source solutions, too.

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Google has introduced a new feature to their search engine: Search, plus Your World. The official announcement states, “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features: (1) Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; (2) Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, (3) People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.” Read more

Attendees at the fast-approaching Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin will find one of the opening conference sessions, The Simple Power of the Link, to provide a good introduction to the value proposition of Linked Data.

Presenter Richard J. Wallis is happy to be on the docket early, so that those in the audience who aren’t coming from a died-in-the-wool semantic web background will get a sense of the big-picture benefits to be realized, and incented enough to explore the possibilities that they won’t be scared off by the more technical discussions later in the program. “Later on, when presenters start talking about graph models and SPARQL endpoint performance, hopefully they can harken back to the simple basic benefits I’ll be discussing,” says Wallis, who will be conducting the session as an independent associate on behalf of Kasabi, the Linked Data marketplace from Talis Systems Ltd. Wallis, currently Kasabi technology evangelist, is launching his own semantic web consultancy this month.

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Google has purchased over two hundred IBM patents including one patent for a semantic social network. Peter Pachal reports, “While the patents cover a variety of topics, one in particular could give the search giant a new tool for its social network, Google+. The patents cover many different technologies, but they mainly deal with data services like email management, online calendars and transferring web apps between devices. The patent grab, first reported by SEO by the Sea, potentially serves two purposes: providing avenues to develop new products, and providing ammunition in litigation.” Read more

StreamGlider, which we first covered here, made its debut yesterday. The iPad news and social reader application in its initial version debuts sans the location-aware and some of the more heavy-duty semantic topic stream smarts discussed in that piece, but newly named StreamGlider Inc. CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application – says to expect them in updates beginning in March. McDaniel is partners in StreamGlider with co-founder Nova Spivack, also CEO of Bottlenose among other pursuits, and co-founder John Breslin, DERI researcher, NUI Galway lecturer,  and founder of New Tech Post.

What’s in the current version that McDaniel says differentiates the software from other iPad news reader apps like Pulse and Flipboard are real-time news streams composed of mixed media – sources such as RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook – so you can see news items, images, video, social media updates and more about particular content of interest, any way you like in a stream. “You can put them all together in a single stream so you can build streams to be more topic-oriented,” McDaniel says.

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