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一部破舊電腦，二扇遠眺淡水河口的落地窗，三張高矮不一的椅子，四份每月必翻的藝文雜誌，五雙各有功能的鞋子歪斜在六間套房共用的走廊，七天去台北看八場 電影，九成的機率會遇到十個遊民。再回到有九年屋齡的住處，八方散落著七本還未讀完的新書，六支還沒整理場記的拍攝帶卻只各謄寫五分鐘，四下無人叨擾的凌 晨或許是企劃編寫三段故事的好時間，二年結案之後導演帶來一份微薄片酬。當初跟製片說好你半份我半份。我說：「謝謝！」。
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November 21 2009
Peripherals, they say, are the spice of life. Well, maybe they don't say that, but they do say it about variety, and peripherals add variety to your computing life. If you're reading this on a stock HP desktop, clicking on links with the mouse that came with it, and trusting your data to that 512MB USB stick they gave you at work, then you should consider accessorizing.
Getting To The SuperTweet: Speedi.ly Classifies The Real Time Web
Keith Teare was hanging around the Real-Time CrunchUp today showing off his newest project – Speedi.ly.
What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional metadata. This metadata payload is exactly what Robert Scoble is talking about with his SuperTweet idea.
Here’s what Speedi.ly returns for this story we wrote on the Skype/eBay sale:
Speedi.ly successfully categorizes the story as about technology. Not bad for on the fly and human-free categorization. You’ll see the field for entities as well, which is currently blank. Speedi.ly will soon turn that on as well.
Now check out the results for this article from the SF Chronicle, properly categorizing it under sports:
Why is this useful? Most URLs passed around today on Twitter and Facebook are completely metadata free. Search engines like Topsy are forced to look at the text in the Tweet or status message, if any, for context on what the URL is about.
Even Digg and Delicious rely on data entered in by humans to categorize URLs. With a service like Speedi.ly, those services can create a sort of real time page rank on the fly.
If you want to try it out yourself, go to http://classify.speedi.ly/fun and us login:customer and password: logmein. Note that this isn’t going to be a huge wow moment for most users, but potential partners will be able to see what Speedi.ly is capable of.
There are a couple of other services sniffing around the same space as Speedi.ly. Factery, which we wrote about earlier this week, looks at shared URLs and pulls out key facts. And Thompson Reuters has OpenCalais, which has 18,000 customers.
I interviewed Keith this afternoon about the service on video. It’s embedded below. He also mentions that Speedi.ly is already working with a partner to categorize URLs on the fly.
Disclosure: I’m friends with and have had business relationships with both founders – Keith Teare and Louis Monier. And Keith is a shareholder in TechCrunch.
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The Ellerdale Project Mines The Semantic Web To Help You Make Sense Of Real-Time Streams
Extracting meaning from the Web is a difficult undertaking. Keyword search skims the surface of contextual meaning that is locked in Web pages, Tweets and feeds. That’s where semantic search comes in. The semantic web deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web to understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The Ellerdale Project, which launched in alpha this past week, is hoping to add context to search by using semantic technology to power a real-time search platform.
Ellerdale mines the real-time stream, including Tweets, RSS and the, to identify topics, messages and articles that link together based on content, not keyword. So If you looked up Sarah Palin on Ellerdale’s site, you’d see a semantic graph of related content, such as Oprah Winfrey (Palin just appeared on Oprah a few days ago), The Republican Party and John McCain.
The data on the site is mostly collected from Wikipedia, Freebase, Twitter, RSS, and by crawling the web. Ellerdale then analyzes and index the data to identify topics in text. Using this information, Ellderdale will show you the latest tweets, RSS articles and trending URLs, organized by topic. The site also analyzes trends in Tweets and feeds to display trending topics and topic clusters organized by categories (i.e. politics, sports, style).
For now you can only see topics on the site and cannot actually search for any keyword. While Ellderdale’s platform is still a work in progress, it’s already caught the eye of notable angel investor Ron Conway, who has made an investment in the startup. Startups and companies using the semantic web for search is steadily growing. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise. Hakia, NetBase, Textwise, Twine and other startups are also working on semantic search.
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This Week On TechCrunch: Real-time distractions, Indian outsourcing, rumours, layoffs and Scoble’s brave new world of tweets
Honestly, it’s impossible to work in these conditions. I’m writing this from the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp; a one-day event in San Francisco celebrating the joys of the ‘real-time’ web. Sounds awesome, right? It is.
I’ve been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I’ve been Tweeting from the audience, I’ve been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I’ve been living the real time dream – which probably explains why I haven’t done any actual work all day. And now I’m twenty minutes away from my deadline, and I still have to read a week of TechCrunch and figure out everything that’s happened this week.
Oh, and to make matters worse, Arrington has filled my work room with dogs.
Welcome, then, to a completely – and appropriately – real-time edition of This Week On TechCrunch.
From first glance, it seems that the entire site has been outsourced to India, with both Lacy and Vivek reporting from the ground. And at one point on top of a camel. On Friday evening Sarah kicked things off with a useful primer on why ecommerce has been slow to take off in the country, and how travel sites like MakeMyTrip.com are acting as a gateway drug to get Indians shopping online, starting with ex-pats.
Vivek went one stage bigger, asking whether India has the potential to ‘take on’ Silicon Valley. His conclusion: yes. He’s wrong of course, but it’s an fascinating discussion. As Vivek headed back to the US, Sarah headed to Delhi, and the slums made famous by Slumdog Millionaire. But what she discovered couldn’t be more different from what we saw on the big screen: surrounded by grinning children, she met NIIT, a for-profit company that’s introducing the poorest children to computers by, well, leaving kiosks lying around and letting human curiosity take its course.
Meanwhile, back in the Valley, Arrington was starting his working week with rumours that MySpace was on the verge of buying iMeem; a rumour that he gleefully confirmed two days later. A million dollars in cash, with half of iMeem’s 55 employees (27.5 people) moving to MySpace – and the others looking for new jobs.
Speaking of people looking for new jobs, Robin reported on AOL’s appeal for 2,500 employees to voluntarily hand in their notice as the company heads for IPO. The alternative, according to CEO Tim Armstrong? They’ll just be fired. This just a week after the company announced 1000 involuntary layoffs. Cast aside like so many unwanted sign-up discs.
Hey, but at least Don Dodge got a new job.
What else?
In real-real time presidential news, Obama admitted that he has never used Twitter, but – as MG puts it – he’s adamant that people in China should have the right to.
In real-time celebrity news, Shakira used UStream to stream her new album to 95,000 live viewers and a further 400,000+ watching the reruns over the next 24 hours. (Incidentally this story saw Jason narrowly missing out on the Headline Of The Week award for: “Shakira’s Stats Don’t Lie“. I mean, seriously Jason? “Stats?”. The correct title of course is “Shakira’s Hits Don’t Lie”. Better luck next time.
In real-time things that I’m already bored of even though they’re not launching until at least next year news: Google previewed their new Chrome OS and rumour has it they’re on the verge of launching a new Google phone. It’s ‘very real‘ says Mike. And it may even be VoIP-only. Splendid.
Which brings us nearly to the real-time event. It’s still going on right now, so it’s too early to say what the highlights are – tune in next week, etc – but newsworthy segments include the creator of GMail admitting that he hasn’t used Wave, an interesting discussion on how to monetize ‘real-time’ and, of course, MG’s Headline of the Week: Google And The Amazing Technicolor Search Options.
And that’s just about it. The after-party is calling, and I’m eager to talk to Scoble more about his ‘Super Tweet‘ idea. I have no idea what it is, but it sounds like the future.
Have a great week!
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