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
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