Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 06/11/2008 - 04:06
Unstructured Data
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/10/2008 - 19:40Just about every year, I find a key theme from the Technology Management Conference (TMC), and this year’s theme seems to be unstructured data. Other years, compliance seems to be an issue, such as the year after Sarbanes Oxley took effect. Another year seemed to be about phone turrets, but that might have been because I was in the market for phone turrets that year.
So, I’m not sure if it is because I am attending TMC this year, in part as a blogger, or if it is just that much more prominent, but unstructured data turned out to be a key part of my discussions.
When I picked up my press credentials, there was a press release from Firstrain announcing the FirstRain Blog Monitor. The press release talked about the proprietary FirstRain MarketScore Algorithm “to conintually analyze and identify the most impactful blogs from the hundreds of thousands across the broad web”.
Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain was quoted as saying, “Blogs are where many of the most intriguing questions, trends and ideas first come to light”. The press release ended with a pointer to Penny’s blog.
NewsEdge was also on the first floor of the show. They are a news searching tool that has been around for several years. They do not current crawl blogs as part of their real time news, but they do have the ability search blogs and they hope to add blog crawling by the end of the year.
At the other end of the spectrum was NewsWare. They do not track blogs because “blogs don’t factcheck” a spokesperson for the company said.
Not far away from NewsEdge and NewsWare was Dow Jones Newsfeeds. They were touting their Solutions for Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading. In essence Dow Jones is taking key reports and providing elementized newsfeeds that are especially interesting to algorithm traders. I keep hearing good stuff about their feeds and it was my first chance to get details. They do not include information from blogs in their elementized news feeds, however they make extensive use of it in other products, such as Factiva.
In addition, the Dow Jones representative spoke about “Generate”, a Boston based firm that Dow Jones recently acquired which dynamically tracks information on around 4.7 million executives, ties it together with other news data to provide a solution something like what you would expect from a businessman’s mashup of Google and LinkedIn.
All of this led to a particularly interesting company, JackBe. JackBe provides an ‘Enterprise Mashup Platform’, that gathers information from many platforms on the web and within the enterprise so that it can be presented as a widget that a company can use internally or externally. They have done work in other businesses and are starting to explore providing their technology to the financial services sector. They were the most interesting tool I found on the first day of TMC for structuring unstructured data. It will be interesting to see what day two brings.
Content and Advertising Strategy - EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/10/2008 - 10:07Yesterday, I read a great blog post about a daughter and her mother as they were leaving a hospital. Whether or not you’re interested in the relationship between good content and advertising, you should go out and read that article.
I stumbled across it as I was reading various blogs I found with EntreCard. EntreCard, like many other emerging sites ends up having a lot of people currently writing blog posts about their thoughts and experiences with it, as well as how they use it. One popular discussion is how people find sites on EntreCard. Do they follow the advertisements? As a person that both advertises using EntreCard and has others advertise on my site using EntreCard, I would encourage everyone, especially EntreCard users to follow the advertising links.
Technology Management Conference
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/09/2008 - 15:08As many of my friend microblog from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m preparing to head to the SIFMA Technology Management Conference 2008. SIFMA is the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association. It was formed by the merger of the Security Industry Association and the Bond Market Association. I’ve gone to the Technology Management Conference for many years as part of my work with Wall Street firms.
However, this year, I’m wearing a slightly different hat. I’m going as a member of the press, a credentialed blogger. I’ll be looking for things similar to those that I looked for when I went as a Wall Street technology executive, what is the interesting hot new technology. Other years, I’ve simply explored the exhibit hall, which is typically more than a full days work in and of itself. This year, I’ll try to attend some of talks as well.
At first glance, the talks don’t sound especially interesting. Perhaps the most interesting will be discussions about computing capacity or open source software. Yet there are bound to be surprises, and by being on the press list, I’m getting little hints here and there. So far, the most interesting press release has come from Tick Data which is announcing the availability of “trade and quote data for equities traded on Japan’s six major stock exchanges back to January 2003”. I was always fascinated by this sort of data and have been trying to gather it for the stock exchanges in Second Life. Tick Data’s press release says that “the firm expects to expand its coverage further into this region in the near future.” This sort of data illustrates just one of the reason why Wall Street technologists are always looking for more compute power.
Will there be other interesting innovations reported out of the Technology Management Conference? We’ll have to wait and see. It probably won’t bring as much excitement as talk about the next version of the iPhone, but it will be interesting to watch and see what comes out.
New Social Networks and what you can find with them
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/08/2008 - 13:54Over the past week, I’ve been suffering fairly badly from my sinus infection and bronchitis and haven’t been writing nearly as much as I would like. There are several important blog posts I want to get to, and perhaps even some that have become moot, or at least changed direction considerably over the past week.
I have been trying to keep up with emails, social networks, visiting various blogs, and so on, and have lots of notes to highlight.
In the social network space, the big development is Plurk. You can sign up and follow me there, or if you want to boost my plurk karma, you can signup here.
Plurk is yet another microblog. You write 140 character messages to say what you are up to and your message gets displayed with messages of your friends. Sound a lot like Twitter? Well, it seems a lot of the users are people who were frustrated by Twitter’s downtime. Yet there are some interesting differences. Plurk is a bit like what you might expect to get when Microsoft attempts to take Twitter, shoehorn it into a Gantt chart and display it on an ajax version of MySpace. When I described it that way to my eldest daughter, her eyes just sort of glazed over, but I’m used to that from my daughters. So, if what I said doesn’t make sense, just go over and take a look at Plurk.
So far, most of the discussions on Plurk seem to be about Plurk, with a bit of emphasis on how you build karma there. So, I’ll keep playing with Plurk and building my karma there, but I’ll probably stick with Twitter, even with its downtime, to get my real news.
People have commented that they don’t want yet another site to update their statuses. Why can’t someone build one place where you can update your status and have that sent out to all the other sites? Well, I’m told that ping.fm does that, but you need an invitation, and I haven’t scored one yet. If anyone can get me an invitation, drop me a note.
Ping.fm’s current competition is hellotxt. I’ve signed up for hellotxt and sent a few messages from it. The MySpace and Bebo connectivity didn’t work for me during my test, it doesn’t cover as many sites as ping.fm does, and there isn’t a nice SMS interface right now for people in the States, but it looks promising.
The other site that just came on my radar is mento. Mento is a tool to save a link to a bunch of different places at the same time. They have a Firefox addon which I’m about to start testing. No opinion on this one yet.
My first attempt at using Mento, after bookmarking Orient Lodge, to bookmark an article about an effort to build a Croquet VM. Croquet is a virtual world system, based originally on SmallTalk. It is an important part of Qwaq, and I want to keep an eye on the what goes on in that space.
If I had Mento installed earlier, and felt that it was working properly, I might have used it to flag three recent posts I’ve stumbled across via EntreCard. New York Renovator has this post about Victory Gardens. She talks about people growing victory gardens as part of the effort to live greener lifestyles, less dependent on foreign oil. It fits nicely with my interest in Project Laundry List, an effort to get more people to dry clothes outside, even fighting restrictive covenants that prevent it, and noting that “Electric dryers use five to ten percent of residential electricity in the United States!
Another cool blog entry I found through EntreCard was Your Fun Family’s pointer to a 50 State map game. I’ve played it twice, and do pretty well. Some of the first states that I put on the map are a little bit off, but once a few states are on the map, it becomes easier. My average error has been 11 to 13 miles, missing 3 to 5 states. My last round I got a score of 90.19.
One last blog post, found through EntreCard, is of a waterslide, which I believe is in Germany. Check it out.
One final note: I did get a chance to check a few of my Facebook requests. Facebook has a new application for blog networks. Stop by and join the Orient Lodge blog network on Facebook. If your blog is in a Facebook blog network, let me know.
Enough for now. Now, I need to try and sleep off some of the heat and the sinus infection.
