Public Web is 15 Years Old Today

BBC article talks to Berners-Lee, Web still in it's infancy. I am still amazed it's only been around that long.

Better Living Through Taxonomies

In the Digital Web Mag, a good introductory article: Better Living Through Taxonomies, by Heather Hedden.

Consumers as Media Planners

From Ad Age: P&G Lets Consumers Act as Media Planners. Well, not exactly, but they can complain about media decisions. How that translates into non PC decisions remains to be seen.

" ... Last week, Procter & Gamble set up an option on its main consumer toll-free line (800 331 3774) in response to a drive from a coalition, dubbed Enough Is Enough, that was urging the company to stop sponsoring hip-hop programs on MTV and BET laced with profanity, liberal doses of the "N word," and scenes the group believes degrade and objectify women.

This week, P&G set up a second toll-free option asking callers to register support or criticism of the "story line" on "As the World Turns," from P&G Productions, which featured fairly passionate kisses between daytime TV's only gay couple .... "

Flowcasting the Retail Supply Chain

I had reason to take another look at this book, which I had reviewed last year. I was involved in a test of the method, with very good results. Here is a recent Extended Retail Systems article that explains the method ...

... the Retail Systems Alert Group (RSAG) recommended Flowcasting from Factory2Shelf as a methodology. I have seen this tested and it's useful for its sheer simplicity. Flowcasting should not be seen as a means of future forecasting, but rather as a capability designed to eliminate the need for most forecasting by using demand data such as point-of-sale information. The companion site contains a good overview and the first few chapters of the book. provided here. Worth taking a look at.

Emerging Trends in Tagging

Gene Smith posts his slides for Five Emergent Trends in Tagging talk. He is the author of a new book on tagging I just received.

Darker Side of Webmail

Scary story, free webmail services are not secure.

Robo Mowers Recalled

Not as bad as the headline seems to indicate. Robots with spinning blades should be paid attention to. Home tasks are hard to generally automate.

Kauffman, Science and Religion

I see that Stuart Kauffman, now with the University of Calgary, will soon have a new book out: Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Look forward to it. We read a number of his early books when we developed complexity inspired models of supply chains. Surprising, since his models were mostly about simplifications of biology. An executive we worked with had read his 'At Home in the Universe ... ' several times, which led to lots of pressure to look at biologically inspired models of trucks. Inspirational from a philosophical point of view. Still waiting for the big modeling win.

Image Search Improvement

I have posted on the general problem of categorizing and finding images. Google and GA Tech just presented a paper about new ways to improve image search, written up in general terms in the NYT. Also, here is the technical paper, presented last week in Beijing. I am reviewing now. From the NYTimes article:

" ... Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said ...

Captchas and Ann Hathaway in Encyclopedias

I mentioned the term Captcha in a recent post. The term refers to the distorted letters you are asked to interpret when you sign up for a new web service. The object of this is to detect that there is a human asking for the service, as opposed to a spam-spewing robot. The term is defined in a detailed article in the Wikipedia. It is not to be found at all in the premium version of the Britannica. Yes, I know this comparison may be unfair, the term is a somewhat obscure, fairly new (coined in 2000 the article says) technical term, and the WP excels at this sort of thing.

Then there followed another, non technology, example. Britannica just sent out a set of topic articles, constructed from BT entries. One was about Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife. Exactly 303 words long. I am a Shakespeare buff, and know there is relatively little known about her except her family ties. No technology here. Then I looked Hathaway up in the WP. Much longer article there, lots of links to recent related books and articles, including Germaine Greer's 2007 book: Shakespeare's Wife. By my non-historian analysis, a similar level of credibility about the few known and and some inferred facts. Nothing controversial I could see, writing clarity good. So there too, the WP won in overall value to someone that wants a credible but detailed overview.

Once more, though, I don't want a winner, I want competing resources.

Virtual Waiter at Pizza Hut

Evan Schuman reports on Pizza Hut's Virtual Waiter Program. They say this takes data from millions of online orders and suggests add-ons to your order like Amazon does. Beyond the usual data, it also uses location from zip codes. What complex pizza ordering patterns exist in these orders remains to be seen. At the very least it exposes some of your other offerings to your customers, as effectual as a waiter saying 'would you also like an order of garlic sticks'? A common up-sell at restaurants. It's not like books ... to what extent does the fact that others order something with pizza influence you? They should soon have that data.

Gems of Marketing Science

Byron Sharp sends along some interesting articles from the Marketing Science blog of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Worth looking at, includes:

"- How to measure brand salience
- Differentiation vs distinctiveness
- Reasons not to buy
- Engagement and time spent with the ad
- Do 9 out of 10 new product launches fail ?
- Is recognition a better advertising metric ? ... "

Business Intelligence View

I am a long time practitioner of business intelligence methods. In this week's Information Week a fairly good overview of the big players (SAP, MS, Oracle and SAP) in BI. The expense and sometimes narrow views of the big players is outlined. Its important to note that just because you have an ERP vendor buying a BI vendor, it does not mean you have the best way to deliver valuable BI. SAP comes to mind. Yes, data integration is important, but also valuable is to be able to deliver useful solutions, initially solutions that are fundamentally convincing, that can then be continually leveraged to more value. Business intelligence comes from first understanding an industry, then understanding the application of the simplest possible methods to improve it.

New Scientist and Spam's 30th Anniversary

The problem is still not solved. I do remember spam-like things on the Darpanet before 78. It took some time for Spam to show up in corporations.

Captchas and ALIPR

I wrote recently about the hacker cracking of Captchas, those distorted letter problems you see when you sign up for new online services.

This is very serious since it has allowed the release of millions of spam messages from bots posing as people. I have also been looking at methods for identifying things in arbitrary images and using them to tag pictures with identifying descriptors.

One of the most interesting approaches to this latter problem was developed at Penn State and is called ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) It's a fascinating mathematical programming method that can assign sets of tags to images. It turns out that this problem is one of the most difficult immediately practical AI problems known. It is also the case that the ALIPR approach to tagging photos is not perfect, where any particular tagging of a photo includes wrong tags. A recent Cyber Cynic blog post describes how the ALIPR method is being reapplied to the now broken Captcha method, with links to demonstrations of the method. For those with the math background, this paper gives a perceptive view of the ALIPR method.

BrewBlog

A Brewing industry Blog. Such industry covering blogs are useful to get a category introduction. Not sure it will generate any controversy.

Choice Demotivating?

An overview of the problem of choice. Research appears to show that having too many choices can cause you not to purchase at all. Seems like a simplistic view, but this added to the cost of managing too many choices can lead management to reconsider complicating the shelf.

Evolving Answers

A good online newsletter SIGevolution: Newsletter of the ACM Special interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. Moderately technical view of applications in the field.

State and Future of the Smart Home

A number of CG companies are getting together to understand how the future 'smart' home will influence their markets. Includes a positioning quote from Orly Cocco, P&G's future home innovation manager.

" ... The 2008 State of the Connected Home Market Study is being conducted under the auspices of the Internet Home Alliance Research Council, which is part of CABA, a not-for-profit industry association that promotes advanced technologies for the automation of homes and buildings in North America.

The results of the study, which will conclude on May 30, 2008, are expected to be released to the public in January 2009. The study is being conducted by Zanthus, a market research-based consulting firm that serves high-tech companies ..."

The concept of the smart home is always very impressive to people, and much can be done with todays tech. Yet few people would want to pay the required current cost for what many see as frills. To what degree these capabilities will be embedded in the typical home remains to be seen. Eldercare applications, such as those being developed in Japan, seem more likely in the short-term. Also applications that will result in significant energy savings.

A Great UnBundling

In the Britannica blog: The Great Unbundling, by Nick Carr. Insightful pieces, newspapers and mags are getting thinner and different. He does a good job in exploring the difference between on and offline. Economic models. A week long forum will be providing responses to the article. Is the newspaper dead? More ephemeral than the printed book, which I think will be here for a while yet.