My career mission since I launched this blog several years ago when I was running social at Hitachi (Shel Israel is writing a book about the early days) is to focus on how companies use web technologies to connect with customers.
Ross Mayfield, who recently joined Slideshare, has now conducted analysis using the same data set from my blog listing to find out how these strategists are using Slideshare, in particular, there’s a few folks that have shared some files that have travelled far and wide, and a few early adopters of the technology. This is an important channel to watch, as thought leaders are emerging by publishing their philosophies on slideshare (don’t be so myopic in focusing on Twitter).
In particular, I’d like to salute the following Corporate Social Strategists:
Also Niall Cook, from H&K who joined Slideshare as an early adopter way back in 2006.
Top contributor to slidehsare Lee Aase who I’ve known for over 5 years, has been sharing, sharing, sharing.
It’s one thing to use social media for your business objectives, but to also share what you’ve learned to better the industry, and I wanted to salute all those listed above, thank you!
Christopher Poole, also known as Moot and famous as the founder of online image board 4chan, has been hard at work on another project called Canv.as. It looks like the site finally has some legs, since Business Insider managed to snoop around a bit.
Poole’s project is worth watching closely, since a lot of sites have tried to replicate the same community energy that 4chan seems to have — for example, the comment streams in news aggregators like Reddit.com — but the 4chan magic just doesn’t seem to pop up anywhere else.
On first impression, I’m really impressed by Canvas It’s elegant and simple — users upload an image to begin a thread where anyone can reply. Commenters can remix the image using images from Google search, stamps or personal uploads. It’s a way to replicate the same kind of trainwreck commentary that generates some of the most famous images edited with Photoshop that then go on to circulate widely on the Internet. In short, Poole may have identified the secret formula behind viral meme generation — an insight that may well have mainstream marketers salivating.
4chan has 4 million monthly visitors in the U.S. and 8 million globally — many of whom are tech-savvy and know their way around image-editing programs like Photoshop. It looks like Canv.as is trying to remove that technical barrier to entry by making it simple to edit images.
On 4chan, the content isn’t curated and there are basically no rules, which is part of the appeal. That chaos, while offputting to conventional publishers and advertisers, ends up breeding some of the most creative memes the Internet has to offer. But the site is plagued with racist remarks and other distasteful content — sometimes even questionably legal content — as a result of the lack of curation. It takes a pretty brave soul to venture over to the main website, much less the site’s random board /b/ — where some of the best content on the Internet takes shape.
It’s nosecret that I’ve spent my fair share of time on similaronlinecommunity sites. What I’ve learned by watching them is that it’s almost impossible to force a meme to take shape, and it’s completely unintentional most of the time. The only way to increase the chance of producing something popular on the Internet is to produce even more content — another appeal of 4chan, which boasts almost a million posts every day. It looks like Canv.as is designed to do just that, with gusto.
4chan is a tough sell for advertisers. Canv.as seems built to avoid attracting that kind of content and has a little bit more moderation than 4chan does. The question is whether Canv.as can bottle 4chan’s magic — and sell it.
Much has been made of the role that social media played in the Egyptian revolution, including the way international news network Al Jazeera used social media in its reporting. But the crisis also taught the organization a number of lessons about digital media — lessons we’ll see the impact of as Al Jazeera continues to cover ongoing turmoil in other parts of the Middle East.
“I’ve always pushed our newsrooms to… go out and find stuff where people are putting it already,” said Al Jazeera English online chief Mohamed Nanabhay, with whom we had the opportunity to speak earlier this week at the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.
Don’t Call It a Facebook Revolution
Nanabhay is quick to acknowledge the role social media played from a newsgathering perspective in Egypt, but he also dismisses some of the hyperbole that has emerged in the revolution’s aftermath.
“It’s not a Twitter of Facebook revolution… It’s an Egyptian revolution. Social media and mass media were important and had multiplying effects, but people didn’t protest because of Twitter,” he said.
That said, the network quickly discovered how it could more effectively use Twitter as the crisis in Egypt escalated.
Nanabhay said, “When you go to 24/7 rolling news, the way people expect their content to be delivered is different. We used to be hesitant to send out too many updates [on Twitter]. But when it’s 24/7, they want to be flooded; they want to know [even if it’s not big news].”
Noticing this trend, Al Jazeera shifted resources to ensure that on every shift, the network had someone whose sole task was to keep the Twitter feed updated. The organization also began to see some of its viewers tweeting information based on its on-air reporting quicker than they were tweeting it on their own account. In these cases, Nanabhay said, they simply started retweeting their viewers.
Live Blogging and Tumblr Emerge
The demand for real-time reporting also saw Al Jazeera’s live blog grow immensely popular. “At any given time there were three times more people on the live blog than on the main story [on Al Jazeera’s homepage]. Your editor usually invests [so much time] in the lead story… but if you look at the numbers, people were on the live blog hitting refresh. [So] we threw more resources into that,” Nanabhay said.
The popularity of the live blog inadvertently pushed Al Jazeera onto a new platform: Tumblr. When the live blog went down due to heavy traffic, the company quickly set up shop on Tumblr to keep its updates coming. When its live blog came back up, it dropped off Tumblr. But then a user put up a graphic asking Al Jazeera to come back, so it did; and the organization have been updating its Tumblr ever since.
New Appeal With U.S. Viewers
Demand for Al Jazeera in other places — most notably on U.S. television networks — also got a big boost from social media during the Egypt protests. According to Nanabhay, the company’s “demand Al Jazeera” campaign saw more than 45,000 people e-mail their cable providers requesting they carry the channel, and more than 7,000 Twitter uses tweeted with the #demandaljazeera hashtag.
In spite of the success stories and his role in formulating digital strategy — including getting the network on YouTube way back in 2007 — Nanabhay still views Al Jazeera’s first responsibility as reporting the news.
“What’s behind [our social media success] is excellence in world-class journalism. The social media campaigns have been methods to get people to watch that content and make up their minds. Once you see it, you’ll be hooked and come back for more.”
Wadah Khanfar Speaks at TED
Director General of the Al Jazeera Network Wadah Khanfar spoke on stage at TED. You can watch his talk in the video below:
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Projeqt is a creative storytelling platform.
Genius Idea: The art of online storytelling is all about presentation. As a non-linear storytelling engine, Projeqt gives creatives the ability to weave together stories dripping with style and personality from Flickr photos, RSS feeds, tweets, YouTube or Vimeo videos, and any media stored on their own computers.
The accidental startup came to be after creative director and co-founder David Lee was tasked with redesigning creative advertising agency TBWA‘s website to better display client work and do so in a Flash-free fashion that would work across any device. Projeqt was born then as a device agnostic web-publishing tool for TBWA and later spun off as its own entity.
Today, Projeqt is a private beta startup for the creative community with two primary use cases: a simple portfolio tool for artists to showcase their work and a presentation tool for brands and business users.
The service’s 2,700 beta testers have been using the platform for said purposes since its release in December. Projeqt users are also repurposing the experience for personal start pages, press rooms, virtual classrooms and even company websites, says Lee.
Users can craft “projeqts,” whatever their purpose may be, by adding content in the form of slides. Create a slide, name it, add tags, and fill the slide with a photo, text, video or feed. Slides are published to create the web story and be can reordered via drag and drop. Users can also create a projeqt within a projeqt to serve as a story inside a story.
More advanced users can tinker with the branding and design tools to adjust the appearance of the projeqt and add footer links and social network buttons.
In the coming months, Projeqt hopes to tap into additional social APIs — Instagram integration, for instance, is in the works and will allow users to display their Instagram photos in their projeqts. Also coming soon are theme options, though Lee insists that the startup won’t exactly follow the theme direction of WordPress or Tumblr.
Projeqt remains free for now, though the startup’s long-term plan is to develop a freemium model that would charge users for more advanced features.
Projeqt is graciously giving interested Mashable readers invites. Want in? Send an email to [email protected] with “Mashable” in the subject line.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry.
Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.
Semantic search is one broad area within the higher realm of semantic technologies, which also includes knowledge storage, information extraction and reasoning, among other topics. The goal of semantic search is to improve search result accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual relationships between the terms used in the search.
We spoke with Evan Sandhaus, lead architect of semantic platforms at The New York Times Company, and Jeff Catlin, CEO of text analytics company Lexalytics, to better understand how semantic search is affecting news and social media.
News Media
The New York Times morgue, a collection of topical and biographical clippings and photographs from The Times and other publications, once existed in the old Times headquarters on West 43rd Street, but has since been relocated.
“All websites are in the business of capturing people’s attention,” said Sandhaus, recalling a recent presentation he had attended. This is especially true for news organizations and blogs, which push out piles upon piles of online articles each day. In the end, the news isn’t exactly useful if no one reads it. So, the goal is to make content as findable as possible.
The fundamentally challenging structure of the web, Sandhaus says, isn’t exactly helping the cause, though. The web is predominantly written in HTML, a markup language that focuses on expressing how information on a webpage should look, not what it means. As a result, important pieces of information within webpages, such as headlines, bylines and publish dates in news articles, are formatted within HTML, but aren’t explicitly labeled as “headline, “byline” and “publish date.” “As a consequence,” Sandhaus explains, “it makes it difficult for a wider web ecosystem to have an idea of the structured nature of content.” That is, while webpages are formatted for humans to easily read them, machines can’t easily determine the underlying meaning of content on a page if it doesn’t follow a consistent structure. Thus, devaluing the utility of data.
So, what is being done to combat web content from falling into the great abyss that is the web? Many communities are working on this problem, with the concept Linked Data being a central part of the conversation. Linked Data is a best practice for exposing, sharing and connecting pieces of data, information and knowledge on the Semantic Web.
Since its inception, The New York Times has set itself up nicely to participate in the Semantic Web. Since the late 1800s, it has maintained an authoritative and controlled news vocabulary to archive clippings from its and others’ publications, which were then stored in “the morgue” at its old New York City headquarters on 43rd Street. These archives were originally created so that reporters could easily research historical documentation on a certain topic in the reporting process. Little did anyone know, this organized structure would set The Times up for having an amazing amount of useful data once semantic technologies would evolve more than a century later.
In 2009, The Times began publishing its indexing vocabulary, which includes people, organizations, locations and descriptors, as linked open data, enabling other datasets to interact with it, opening up a world of possibilities for useful applications, based on Times data. As of September 2010, there are 203 datasets — including data from The Times — published in Linked Data format. These datasets combined are more powerful together than any one dataset could ever be alone.
Creating standards is the next step in the process towards building a more connected web. Working to further connect information on the web, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), among other communities, continues to develop standards for the Semantic Web, explained Sandhaus, including RDFa, which enables users to embed rich metadata, such as title, author and date information, within web documents. This allows users to call out meanings for specific portions of a webpage, making the information more usable on the greater web.
The problem with RDFa, though, is that different organizations can use it to develop different naming systems for the same pieces of data, says Sandhaus. In the media world, for example, a “headline” could also be called a “title,” or even “Schlagzeile” (in German) or “intestazione” (in Italian).
The New York Times is hoping to alleviate this problem. As of October 2010, The Times, in collaboration with the International Press Telecommunications Council, is working on creating a standard within the publishing industry to express structural metadata within HTML — this framework is called rNews. With this standard, search engines, aggregators and social sites, for example, will have access to the data, making it more useful to the web at large. The project has only just begun, but Sandhaus expects to have more details about its direction in coming months.
Leading innovation in the publishing industry, The New York Times continues to reimagine what is possible within the world of semantic technologies, making its data (and the data that interacts with it), more useful as more technological developments surface.
As users continue to spend more time on social networks, brands are finding it more important to maintain presences on social platforms. Analytics haven’t been a huge focus for early adopter brands, but as companies try to measure the ROI of being active on social networks, analytic tools are taking a prominent position in the discussion.
Over the course of the past year, brands have begun to add sentiment analysis to the list of must-have features in their social media monitoring tools, says Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin.
There are two sides to brand-oriented communication on social platforms — while brands are sending out marketing messages via their social channels, consumers are chatting about brands and products. As a result, there are two main ways that brands are currently using semantics:
Consumer sentiment analysis: Brands want to know what consumers are saying about them. Using text analytics, an increasing number of services are able to analyze a user’s grammar usage and determine the meaning behind his or her mention of a brand or product. In some cases, this may simply mean determining if a user is using a positive or negative tone when discussing a product or service. In other more advanced cases, this could mean determining a user’s specific intent behind a statement. Viralheat, for example, aims to pinpoint social media users on the cusp of making purchasing decisions. This type of service enables brands to weed out irrelevant social updates and access those with the most potential return.
Messaging consistency: Monitoring customer sentiment is a bit obvious, but another use for text analytics in the social realm is for monitoring a brand’s messaging consistency. Catlin notes that it’s important for a brand to “sound like it has a common voice and a consensus of opinion in how it communicates to the world.” Historically, it’s always been a priority for brands to make sure their messaging was consistent and clean — social media is another channel where this is important. Using semantic technologies, brands are now able to analyze what they’ve said and whether those messages were consistent. That information can then be used to determine future messaging strategies.
While semantics is having a clear affect on social media monitoring, Catlin feels that it will also soon play a role in social search from a user’s perspective. Search engines and search features within social sites will have to integrate semantic technologies to stay relevant, says Catlin.
He posed an example: if a user is searching for “Indian food,” a keyword search isn’t as useful as a semantics-driven search could be. “Let’s say you have an interest in Indian food,” explained Catlin. “Imagine that a tweet came out that happened to say, ‘This was the best chicken tikka I’ve ever had.’ [The search tool] would in fact lump that into your interest in Indian food. Even though the tweet never mentioned the term ‘Indian food’ anywhere, it can semantically understand that ‘chicken tikka’ belongs in ‘Indian food.’”
Lexalytics is developing semantic technologies that do just that, and Catlin expects to unleash them later this year. “Imagine digesting all of Wikipedia, if you will,” Catlin supposed, explaining the technology, “If you digested all of the knowledge out there, you would start to see relationships. You would start to see things like ‘chicken tikka’ referenced in things about ‘Indian food.’ We hold onto that knowledge historically, so that we can use it later on.”
Conclusion
As semantic technologies continue to evolve, data on the web will become more meaningful and useful. Traditional media outlets, like The New York Times, are already seeing the benefits of participating in the Semantic Web, as they are able to use other people’s data to reason about their own archives. Likewise, social search stands to gain much from incorporating semantic understanding in order to create better user experiences and enhance analytics for brands.
Which industries are you most interested in seeing adopt semantic technologies? Let us know in the comments below.
Series Supported by SES New York Conference & Expo
The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry. Learn why more than 5,000 brands and agencies from the enterprise level to brick and motor businesses choose SES for their online marketing education.
Christopher Poole, also known as Moot and famous as the founder of online image board 4chan, has been hard at work on another project called Canv.as. It looks like the site finally has some legs, 
Name: 
Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.
