Photo Courtesy: Flickr/katerha

Among the topics covered at this week’s Sentiment Analysis’ Symposium was an exploration of just how much the negative or positive expression of sentiment about a company or a product really matters – and in what context it does. (Another one, which The Semantic Web Blog covered yesterday here, looked at the expected transition from sentiment to emotions analytics.)

Augie Ray, director of social media at Prudential Financial, and formerly a social media leader at USAA and Forrester, recounted some of the bigger blow-ups online in recent years: The passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines and made a Youtube video that went viral; NBC’s 2012 London Olympics coverage that was criticized for dissing a tribute to the victims of terrorist bombings, among other things; and Bank of America’s being castigated for its announced plan to institute debit card fees.

“We live and die by the concept that negative sentiment matters,” he said.

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MOOCs (massive open online courses) are gaining greater ground. Earlier this year we looked at some semantics-related MOOCs of study from outfits like Coursera, edX and Udacity. Since then, news has gone around about some other MOOC opportunities (albeit not necessarily with semantic course offerings), such as MOOC2Degree, Canvas Network, CourseSites, Udemy and Thinkful. The Hasso Plattner Institute also is involved with its openHPI courses, including coverage of semantic web technologies.

Now, word comes that Iversity, which offers its own MOOC platform, and the Foundation for German Science are sponsoring a competition to produce ten MOOCs, five courses for the winter term 2013/14 and five courses for the summer semester 2014. Winners will get  25,000 Euro grants each towards production. The MOOC Production Fellowship selection process is being managed by Iversity, as is the subsequent course production.

About 250 concepts for online courses have been submitted so far, and Internet users have up until May 23 to cast their votes for the ones they view as particularly interesting and groundbreaking. A list of submissions is here.

The categories range from linguistics and cultural studies to interdisciplinary work to natural and computer sciences. The entries include courses focused on semantic, social analytics and related technologies:

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Swipp, which in January launched its social intelligence platform and consumer social networking app (see our story here), today follows through on the plans it alluded to then of letting businesses leverage its technology for merging social and knowledge streams. Structured data is at the heart of the Swipp platform, with the Freebase entity graph providing reference knowledge and context for topics; its value propositions are that comments are tied to a specific, exact topic and that it creates a real-time Index for users’ social data sentiment scores for each topic that can be combined and sorted by geography, time, gender, and age.

The new Swipp Plus tool suite, the company says, draws on its social intelligence platform to prepare businesses – from consumer brands to content providers – to better connect with customers on today’s social web. Swipp Plus now enables them to leverage capabilities in its platform to add a Swipp widget to their web sites, blogs, maps, QR codes, and various online arenas around pieces of content, particular products, or concepts, and it also is working to build out mobile capabilities for direct feedback.

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Devindra Hardawar of Venture Beat reports, “While I was impressed with Thirst’s gorgeous Twitter client when it launched over the summer, the app was ultimately just that — a very pretty Twitter client. Now Thirst has revamped its iOS app to create a social network for personalized news discovery, taking advantage of the language processing tools it previously developed along with the experience of building a client for a major social network. It’s also launching a web client to satisfy desktop news junkies. ‘Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,’ Thirst Labs chief executive Anuj Verma said in an interview with VentureBeat, hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse.” Read more

A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

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Ken Yeung of TheNextWeb reports, “Finding ways to keep track of what’s happening in the world and in various markets can be pretty difficult, especially on mobile devices. People are interested in seeking out new ways to allow them to get information that’s relevant and important to them. Apps to help with this problem include Flipboard, a popular social news aggregator that has helped to change the way people consume content, Zite, Cir.ca, and Summly. Now, Clipped is seeking to take its place as one of those services and has launched its iOS and Android apps to help optimize the way people consume the news on their mobile devices. An alumni of the Teens in Tech incubator, Clipped says that it delivers top news content in the form of bullet point summaries that it believes will ‘save users time and energy.’ Its app also includes a summarized search engine that allows users to ‘read summaries about exactly what they want’.” Read more

Erin Griffith recently opined that 2013 will be the year of storytelling. She writes, “Since social networking was invented, it has been powered by users. We happily fuel our favorite social networks with the snippets of content that make them so valuable: our photos, check-ins, reviews, likes, hearts and shares. We post status updates about how we feel on Facebook, photos of what we’re eating on Instagram, links to what we’re reading on Twitter, and the lowbrow gifs we’re laughing at on Tumblr. The result is a fragmented group of social media actions that, as we witnessed with the Twitter-Instagram spat this year, don’t care to include content from competing social networks. If Facebook-Instagram/Twitter/Pinterest/Tumblr/Quora don’t have to play nice with each other, they won’t.” Read more

Like lots of other families over the recent Thanksgiving weekend, we made our way to the movies. Our choice: Life of Pi. We’d highly recommend it, and according to the IBM Social Sentiment Index, as applied to Moviegoer Social Sentiment over the holiday weekend, so too would a lot of other folks. It earned a 90 percent positive rating.

IBM has engaged in the social sentiment index pursuit in some other endeavors – using its advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data, it had another recent take on Black Friday, for example. It tallied up that shoppers expressed positive consumer sentiment on promotions, shipping and convenience as well as the retailers themselves at a three to one ratio (see our story here for other takes on semantic tech weighing in on the holiday shopping season).

It’s also applied its social media analysis smarts to studying births of trends (cycle chic is on the rise), and which tennis player was on the hearts and minds of the crowd at the U.S. Open (Novak Djokovic and Laura Robson winning the love, with positive sentiment scores at 90 percent or better).

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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.

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Xen has announced that the company is launching a new interest engine as well as a suite of products “including its online site (xen.com) and three apps (Interesting, Meedar and TalkTopic), to illustrate how fluidly your interest graph can travel with you.  Xen enables you to take control of your online persona and take it wherever you go online. Interests connect everybody and everything across the open web.  Today’s announcement is the first of a multi-part strategy to turn interests into a currency that engages people, developers, publishers and brands. By creating a standard for expressing interests and a platform to take ownership of them, the Xen interest exchange becomes a standard for personalization across applications, sites and social networks.” Read more