Seeing Forests

The Knowledge Graph and the Local Graph

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:47:06 +0000

Pretty interested in Google’s announcement of the Knowledge Graph today. Finally, someone at the top of the food chain is talking about relationships and how you use them to connect concepts together to provide better search experience. Very interested in how this relates to Local, obviously. Spent a little time this afternoon splitting out our take on what we’ve been calling the Local Graph from how we build pieces of the Knowledge Graph with Trajectory, what I’m now calling our Knowledge Graph Platform, LOL. Going to have a lot more to say about this after I dig into what’s going on with the Knowledge Graph and how it relates to Local. Just thought I’d get this out first.

Top 10 Crowdsourcing Lessons

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:23:29 +0000

Just posted our Top 10 Crowdsourcing Lessons over at Brilliant Arc. Provided some observations on how we’re applying ontology for tagging tens of thousands of photos of homes per week. Hope it makes for some interesting perspective. The focus is mostly on leveraging the benefits of having an ontology for collecting structured data and doing so economically at-scale. But after all the technology is said and done, it turns out doing right by the community is the most important thing you can do - surprise. Think the trick has been to develop a back-end platform that really enhances the engagement experience. Love anyone’s thoughts on the piece.

Updated BrilliantArc.com

admin — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:50:16 +0000

Thought I’d give “making sense” a shot in updating our Brilliant Arc website. Really happy with the level of maturity that our Trajectory Local Knowledge Management platform has reached. Think it’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet for managing a taxonomy of categories and keywords - just without the spreadsheet part. Also, really pleased with our Collaborative Tagging extension to the platform called Crowd. We’re processing thousands of photographs a week, taking a feed of photographs of dubious relevance and returning high-quality, relevant photographs richly tagged. Most happy. Sean is a monster rock star architect and developer. Please, stop trying to hire him.

Done with FourSquare

admin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:58:36 +0000

I’m done with FourSquare. After being Mayor of Sushi Den for what seems like years, I had gotten lazy about checking in and was de-throned (un-elected?) by a clearly obsessive-compulsive. Being hyper-competitive, of course, I made a comeback. Along the way, I learned how cheating gets you dinged (very impressive), and how doing things the right way gets you rewarded (not quite clear how). After checking into Sushi Den 227 times, with 52 checkins in the last month and 11 consecutive days in a row at last count (take that, obsey-compy), I’ve decided to call it quits. And I’ll tell you why. If you know me, you know I can be rather ingratiating (hating people in general seems to help here). I can definitely count genuine friends among the staff of Sushi Den. Overall, I’m confident I have a solid relationship with everyone I know there (the sous chefs not withstanding). Last night I went again (specifically for this kick-ass clams appetizer they have been serving). Because of my nearly religious patronage (enhanced by my FourSquare mayorship - even getting embarrasingly greeted that way), I got very good treatment. While not trying to take overt advantage of this (ok, maybe asking for some people sitting in my usual seat to get seated early was a stretch), I was afforded protection over a new seat opening up for me, got to talk to several of the staff that made it a point to come over and say hello, and ultimately got extra bread for the clam dish (an apparent - and in retrospect clearly selfish - imposition on a very busy kitchen). It was a chaotic evening and my presence (at least in my presumptive opinion of self-worth) was disruptive. So, all-in-all, I have no life and the life I am leading (with behavior driven in part by FourSquare) was making me more of jerk than I already am.

FourSquare, in essence, drives me to be more of a creature of habit than I already am. This is even reinforced by the so-called “explore” functionality of FS. It should be rightly be called “ignore” as the top results give you places you’ve already been! Where’s the “exploration” in that? Of course, it also gives you places nearby that your friends have also visited which, in my case, is usually everywhere I’ve already been as well since I’ve usually gone there with them. I want to DISCOVER new things. I want to EXPAND my world (which, admittedly, isn’t very hard). FourSquare is driving me to be stupidly boring (which obviously isn’t hard). It’s measurably changing my behavior (which is a good thing for Sushi Den). I’m not learning anything new. I’m not being encouraged to get out of my rut (which is incredibly deep and lovingly contoured). And what do I get in return? A pathetic sense of self-importance, a broader waistline and a narrower mind because my real-world behavior have been shaped by this imaginary application

So, I’m done with FourSquare. FourSquare is aptly named. But the brand association is no longer with that fun little game we played as kids. It’s become a box that actually shrinks as time goes by. So, I’m done. I’m stepping out of the box and back into the world. Gonna build a new app along the way.

GeoLoqi Et Al

admin — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:04:17 +0000

Thought I’d get my Latin on with that title. As usual, Greg is spot-on with his take on all the SXSW Local/Social/Mobile apps. The unending fascination this generation’s entrepreneurs have with finding out where their friends are never ceases to amaze. I could care where my friends are and even less where they eat. (Not really, but, hey). I’d say some of these sentiments are echoed in a R/W Web post as well. Coming up with the idea of having an app that recognizes when someone else using the same app is within 50 feet of you is jaw-dropping - in kind of a contracting tetanus kind of jaw-dropping way. Any of those apps that get closer to showing MY TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC in a completely anonymous and preferably historical manner (people like you go to THIS restaurant and avoid THAT restaurant with all the people running all of these other apps) is going to win in my mind. Of course, that’s not enough for an app but it’s a start.

But Greg goes on to discuss GeoLoqi. It seems to me that most location-based services default to what I’d call “point-based” solutions - what is someone’s specific coordinates on the planet right now. GeoLoqi is providing what I’d call “area-based” solutions - what is someone’s specific coordinates relative to some specific geographic area over a period of time (the geek in my really wants to call these “manifold” solutions - what’s my vector relative to the four-dimensional space-time manifold - but I won’t allow him to clutter-up the conversation). I think the point is that out of everything that I can hear echoing from SXSW (which technically is south-by-southeast to me) GeoLoqi seems to have the most substance.

Pinterest - Here to Stay

admin — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 02:23:37 +0000

From this RWW article, Pinterest Isn’t Ready To Focus On Making Money, we have this quote from its help page:

“Even though making money isn’t our top priority right now, it is a long term goal. After all, we want Pinterest to be here to stay!”

Up next, The Daily Show’s Moment of Zen.

Roximity

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:02:58 +0000

Just saw a piece on Roximity on Denver Fox News. Impressed with the coverage they’ve gotten. Impressed with landing Ford as their industrial strategic partner. For those of us in this space, the automobile as a nexus for local has always been something of a holy grail. It’s been obvious but always assumed the auto companies would do this themselves or partner with one of the entrenched data providers. Amazing to see that this niche was actually open to start-ups. Hats off, surely. The real issue I’ve never been able to see how to overcome is the very real concern of the distracted driver. How is it that with all of the pressure against interacting with mobile devices while driving - which can be measurably shown to result in highway fatalities - are drivers supposed to deal with fielding offers while driving? I have a hard time differentiating among LivingSocial offers sitting at my laptop with a cup of coffee in the morning. How am I supposed to do that at 80 miles an hour (er, um, 55)? I’m generally uncomfortable cutting across four lanes of traffic to take an exit I accidentally missed. Doing so in response to an ad screaming EAT AT JOE’s might just make me want to test my Hollywood driving skills. Reminded me of the sarcastic presentation I made in 2008 for Where 2.0 about MapSpam in 2010. Looks like I was a couple of years too late: http://www.seeingforests.com/MapSpam2010Half.mov

20 Something Taxonomies

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:29:51 +0000

We’re in the midst of loading open source data sets like those from Factual and cross-referencing them to other data sets. This cross-referencing involves equating different “taxonomies” in different data sets to one another (amongst other things). I put taxonomies in quotes since, alas, creating taxonomies seems to be a dying art. What are called taxonomies are invariably just hierarchies of generally related concepts that might be useful in some browsing capacity or in some deductive computation but in reality are useful in neither. Since many people think that the actual end of human memory arrived with the initial introduction of Google Search, there seems to be really no need to organize information anymore. We can all just outsource that to Google and search for it later. No need to organize and discriminate one kind of business from another. Except, of course, when it comes to bars. We all desperately need to know whether it’s a “Dive Bar”, a “Hookah Bar”, or an “Oxygen Bar”. The “Restaurant” category should be just fine for all of those places people eat that aren’t “Fast Food”, “Bagels”, or “Internet Cafes”. But we have to get more detail on our Bars. Just seems to be that 20-somethings are designing these categories and are projecting the subjective over the objective. (I’m not actually talking about Factual’s hierarchy here, sort of.)

Local Data vs Local Knowledge

admin — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:06:18 +0000

Just got a great opportunity to participate on a discussion panel at BIA Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies Summit for Small-Business (thanks Peter!). Was a lot of fun (or as much fun as a discussion on listing data can). I went on about us (Brilliant Arc) being all about Local “Knowledge” not just Local “Data”. I realized afterwards that I didn’t really quite define my terms. To us, data is just some string of symbols - a “keyword”, say Pizza. When you get a listing from most providers, you get a business name, a list of keywords, and a set of categories for that business. So, you get a listing for big box store “Target” that has Pizza as a “Product” and listed in categories like Department Stores, Grocery Stores, and even Restaurants. So, when you have the keyword “Pizza” associated with Target, you have no idea what is meant by just the keyword, Pizza. We add more information to the Pizza keyword, treating it like a concept and associating different definitions with it (Grocery Item and Dining Fare), creating more unique identifiers for it, like frozen-pizza and fresh-pizza, and identifying the source of this term (Acxiom). Adding all of this additional information turns data into knowledge and provides a differentiated asset.

Channel Your Wild Bill Hickock - Daily Deal for Concealed Carry!

admin — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:37:47 +0000

The competition for clever and funny Deals between LivingSocial and Groupon looks to park common sense in the interim. Love how a class for concealed carry of a handgun starts with: Are you a Calamity Jane? Channel you [sic] inner Wild Bill Hancock with today’s deal - a Six Hour Concealed Weapons Class. Oh yeah! How about something like, “Don’t be a Plexico! Learn how not to shove a Glock with the safety off down the front of your sweat pants!” Stupid.