Dr. Jay's Blog

AEP Talk on User-Generated Content

I gave a talk on Monday at the Association for Educational Publishers summit in DC.  The group was interested in user-generated content and how to leverage it.  My presentation lays out an argument for why publishers should be paying attention to this important category.  MediaRiver helps publishers get their content where the action is: even when users are outside of the programmed experiences provided on a publisher's web site. 

Download AEP_MediaRiver_UGC.pdf to find out more.

The word and the widgets are spreading

Cliff Reeves at Microsoft did a nice post about the 3 scenarios in which partners are using our ClickSurge contextual search platform.  Thanks, Cliff!  And he didn't even bite on my story about how easy it was to move our software off the desktop onto the servers because of Windows.... He and his team provide amazing services to startups including advice on how to architect applications for scale.  This really helped as we made the transition from desktop to web app development.

On our launch day a post about our new name MediaRiver and the new ClickSurge platform also appeared on Mashable.  Thanks, Kristen!

And finally, you may have noticed The Motley Fool has officially launched our widgets on their site.  You can see them most visibly on their video pitches page.  Look for the Grab buttons and the MediaRiver logo.  John Keeling even put a post about the new MediaRiver-powered CAPS widgets on his CAPS blog.  Thanks for all your help, John!

-j

New Name, New Product!

I've been quiet for a while because we've been super busy. 

Intellext is now MediaRiver, and we've developed a new content delivery platform, ClickSurge!

The last few months have been a whirl preparing for this change. 

When we started, some said, "that'll be easy," others, "you can't possibly do that..."  It turned out to be somewhere in between.

You might be asking yourself: What's this all about? And what happened to Watson?

Well, as you may have noticed, we began to work more with media companies like AOL and Ziff Davis, to help deliver their content to people using custom versions of Watson that tied to specific information sources.  It didn't take long for us to figure out we needed a solution for web sites (although our friends out east may have thought otherwise). The web is where the consumer's attention is, and we wanted to be there with them. 

We took the Watson Engine that ran as part of the desktop product, ported it to an ASP.NET web service, wrote some Javascript that does some fancy remoting, tested and tuned our content analysis and query formation algorithms for social networks and blogs, and, voila, ClickSurge was born.  No sweat?  Yeah, right!  We had to invent new search algorithms and solve some pretty tough engineering problems.  But believe it or not, there are several widgets built using the ClickSurge contextual search platform are out there live on the web! 

Widget? What's a Widget?

A widget's a piece of code that runs on a website that adds functionality or information. Sometimes it's just for show (the kids call this *bling*).  Hooman at Clearspring wrote a great intro to widgets you should check out if you're interested.

Widget strategies help our customers (media companies) reach new audiences, because widgets tend to spread virally, out onto the "long tail."  People copy and paste them onto their web pages and then their friends copy them onto their own pages and so on.  This helps a company "stake out" virtual real estate out in the "wild wild west of the web" where it wouldn't be economical for them to go do a business development deal. 

ClickSurge uses the contextual search technology we invented at Northwestern to find the right content to display in widgets wherever they happen to land.  See, there are a zillion blogs.  It's not feasible to do a deal with every blogger.  And so it's even less feasible to hire an editor to pick the best links to ask the blogger to put on their blog.  Contextual search helps out because it means software can read the post, figure out what it's about, and then select some relevant links automatically.

An aside:  It's strange to me that it took so long for power laws to get so popular, especially when there were several prominent papers (pdf) in 1998 tying power laws to human behavior on the web.  Thoughts?

OK, Enough about power laws. Where are these widgets you built? Can I see them?

Sure can. 

Check out Pencils Blog. Dave, an investment prodigy, put The Motley Fool's Top 10 Video Pitches widget in his blog sidebar. It shows some fun stock pitches on top, and related links on the bottom. Since Dave's last post was about Rubios, the related links are about the same.

Check out Making Sense of my World, another financial blog. This one has a Motley fool CAPS player badge on it. Since Deborah's last post is about CAPS, the related links in her CAPS player badge are about the same.

You even find one of our widgets on Clubplanet.com (Hint: look for a link in the lower right hand corner of a profile page).

Go ahead, click the Grab button to get a copy for your own blog.

This is great, but what else can ClickSurge do?

ClickSurge can power content distribution partnerships for large web sites too, not just blogs. We're working on some pretty interesting projects... Stay tuned.

Questions? Comments? Post your thoughts here!

-j

AOL@SCHOOL Sidebar Now Available

We announced AOL@SCHOOL Sidebar last week at FETC, the Florida Ed-Tech Conference.  The reaction to the new AOL product was awesome.  The teachers attending the show loved the idea that safe, educational content could be made available to students based on what they are working on.  It's a great use of our technology -- chances are, students are already interested in whatever it is that they're doing on their PC.  Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.  If we can serve up educational material that's related to what they're doing, then maybe we can harness their natural curiosity and help them learn more.  Since it's stuff the student is interested in, maybe it'll even be fun for them.  (If not, at least we can still help them with their homework!)

For us this was really big news, because it's a deal with internet giant AOL and because AOL@SCHOOL attracts so many visitors per month.   Thanks to the AOL team who made this possible, and thanks to Elisabeth Osmeloski at Search Engine Watch and the rest of the press for the great coverage!

-j

Masked Intentions: When will the big guys catch on?

Michael Vizard picked up on a larger trend in his post about HandySoft's OfficeEngine product -- why haven't more vendors integrated information with applications in a way that put the users in the driver's seat?  We hope to help pave the way.

-j

HandySoft and Intellext launch the only exciting thing in the BPM space

BPM is sort of boring. Necessary, sure, but boring. I have to admit I was not very excited when I heard we were working with a BPM company. After all, do people really use that stuff? It seems heavy, hard to use, and too complicated to manage.

Well, I was very wrong to think that about these guys.

HandySoft has come up with a lightweight task tracking and visualization system that delivers real functionality without all the heavy configuration. You can send a task and track it all the way through delegation and completion without ever opening a configuration screen. As a manager you can reach in and reset priorities, redelegate, and more importantly, have visibility into what's actually going on. What’s more, is it’s delivered via Outlook, and on top of that, it comes with Watson.

See, what HandySoft realized was that when you’re assigned a task, you might like to have access to information that could help you figure out how to get that task done. It seems obvious, but no one else out there is doing this, especially not with unstructured information.

So when you open a task in OfficeEngine, Watson opens, and automatically searches your desktop and pre-configured enterprise sources in order to find you the stuff you need to get your job done. It reads the fields of the task record to determine what to search for. And it knows specifically that it’s a tasking document so we’ve been able to tighten up the relevance of the information it finds.

The result is that HandySoft has provided a stickier, more useful interface to existing enterprise information systems, with their tasking and delegation system as the backbone. Pretty smart.

Because it’ Watson, you don’t need to tag all of your content in advance with the particular business process it should be associated with, nor do you have to work under the assumption that everything you need is in one system, or that everyone in your organization needs access to the same data. You can configure Watson to search whatever sources you want, and lock down configuration for certain users, if you’re worried about security. It’s all deployable via SMS and configurable using GPOs.

This is going to be interesting.

-j

Watson 2.5 is here

Watson 2.5 shipped today!

There have been a bunch of changes under the hood, but you'll notice the surface first.

Streamlined UI
We refactored the sidebar UI based on user feedback:

• Pause button -- people got confused by the old "push-pin"
• Search and search in context -- we made the search box work like other search boxes (and improved the relevance of regular searches too). Now when you type keywords and hit enter, Watson will search only based on the words you typed. If you want Watson to consider the words in the context of the document you're viewing, just click "Search in Context". Ideally we would have two search boxes, but there just isn't enough room.
• Focus -- we removed the focus icon because it was taking up too much space.
• Streamlined toolbars -- we removed the grippers.

Watson Toolbars
When we looked at the data two groups of users jumped out right away -- those that like to keep Watson open all the time and those that like to open and close it a lot. For those of you "occasional users" out there, we added Watson Toolbars, so you can easily get back in to Watson from whatever program you're using.

The toolbars make it easy to start a search or search based on the context of your open document.  (In Office 2007 you'll notice these buttons under your Add-ins tab -- Ribbon integration is coming).

More Sources!
We added a bunch of new sources and updated our addons site. I am totally addicted to our new YouTube connector.

Other Stuff
Like I was saying, we changed a lot under the hood, and added some support for more recent versions of software:

• Firefox 2.0 support
• Much smoother Office 2007 integration
• Improved Outlook integration
• Many memory and performance issues solved
• Many bug fixes

Give it a try and let us know what you think. 

And if you're in the US, have a Happy Thanksgiving.

-j

KM World 2006

I recently gave a talk at KM World 2006 about how businesses can use Watson to improve knowledge sharing.  People seemed to like the talk.  I focused on how company intranets are complex and underused and that from a user's perspective you're often better off just doing a web search than slogging through the intranet or using subscription information sources. 

I've attached my slides.  Download jbudzik-KMWorld2006.pdf

At the show, I had a great chat with Daniela Barbosa at Factiva about her success building custom solutions that take her data and surface it in different ways within the enterprise.  From this publisher's perspective, cusomers have been demanding the ability to bring the content to the user -- usually in the context of structured workflows.  Customers have essentially been asking that the information be integrated within existing worflows so that they get the most out of it. 

I think I might have heard that somewhere before...

-j

SystemOne: Watson for Wikis

I just read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on SystemOne, which is launching soon.  SystemOne is like Watson for Wikis.  It finds information for you while you’re working on an enterprise wiki, and presents its information inside the browser.  While we at Intellext think that the user is going to be working on the desktop for some time to come, it’s awesome to see others out there working on contextual search applications for the information worker.  This is great stuff.

-j

Watson 2.4 - Tie Watson to MySpace, LinkedIn and Others

We released the latest version of Watson today.  The most significant enhancement to this version is that users of the free, ad-supported version of Watson will now be able to customize where Watson searches, so each user will now be able to get information from the sources that matter most to them.

We've gotten a lot of requests from users for Watson to search additional places, so we've also launched our new addons page, where you can get additional information sources for Watson.  Check out the addons for MySpace and LinkedIn - as the networking space continues to grow, tools like Watson have the opportunity to bring the networking experience to you even when you are not on the individual sites.

In addition to MySpace and LinkedIn, we've added news and research sources like the Wall Street Journal, blog search engines like Feedster and more.  We'll continue to add new ones, so check back often.  You'll need to upgrade to Watson 2.4 to use these addons.

As always, we love to hear what you think.  Post here, or email us.

-j

Tags: Watson, Search, MySpace, LinkedIn, Wall Street Journal, Feedster, Information Access, Intellext