Industry Analysis
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The Social Graph Must Die
Have we reached the breaking point? Has our collective exhaustion with social media — the incessant notifications, the oppressive filter bubbles, the outright denial of our individuality — finally exhausted the excuses, apologies, and band-aid fixes? Here’s the #ElephantInTheRoom: The social graph is a terrible basis for matching…
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Are Machines Stealing Your Job?
Three myths about artificial intelligence and its impact on content creators. Industrialization is transforming our information economy, destroying old business models and creating new opportunities. The impact it will have on content professionals will make social media seem tame in comparison. To understand this…
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The Industrialization of the Internet
The industrialization of the internet is driven by the relentless pursuit of productivity advantages, not quality improvements. “The digital revolution is probably going to be as important and transformative as the industrial revolution.” — Ryan Avent, The Economist columnist, author of The Wealth of Humans (via…
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The History of the Semantic Web is the Future of Intelligent Assistants
The Semantic Web provides an enticing vision of our online future. This next-generation Web will enable intelligent computer assistants to work autonomously on our behalf: scheduling our appointments, doing our shopping, finding the information we need, and connecting us with like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, the…
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Goodbye .@, Hello Messaging?
A single-character change in how tweets are distributed highlights a massive strategic decision for Twitter. When I first started using Twitter, I’d start my tweets with the names of other users. I wanted to give them credit for their ideas. I later discovered very…
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The Surprising Potential of a De-Smooshed Twitter
A unique real-world experiment, powered by an AI, that highlights the rewards and challenges of treating people on Twitter like individuals. Read the full report on Primal for Twitter, a personal intelligent assistant for content discovery. The Surprising Potential of a De-Smooshed Twitter
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Content curation is disrupting content creation. Are content marketers moving fast enough?
First published on LinkedIn. #457212153 / gettyimages.com A few weeks ago, I made the trip down to Content Marketing World, “the largest content marketing event on the planet” with over 2600 delegates representing 50 countries. I wanted to explore how the activity of content curation—the process…
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There’s a Graph for That!
According to Murthy Nukala, “any marketer who doesn’t have a graph within the next twelve months will be at a permanent competitive disadvantage.” That’s a pretty ominous warning, particularly when most marketers have no idea what a graph is, let alone how to use…
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Big data’s creative and empathetic sibling (and why they struggle to get along)
Joyce Hostyn argues that Better Human Understanding, Not Big Data, Is the Future of Business. Some excerpts (with my emphasis): Despite the best of intentions, we’re not data driven, we’re hypothesis driven. Our stories (our mental models) are merely hypotheses of how the world…
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Human-Guided Sentiment Analysis: Beyond the Cold Hard Stats
Call me sentimental, but perhaps some of you, too, are starting to miss the human side of sentiment analysis. Machine-based statistical analysis is not the entirety of sentiment analysis – or at least it shouldn’t be. There is still an important role for humans…
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Confessions of a Twitter Bot
Source Talking Politics Bots have a bad reputation. Whether they’re sinister botnets, carrying out coordinated attacks, or annoying spambots, polluting our digital universe with crappy auto-generated content, bots are a much maligned bunch. You might ask, if bots are bad and a huge portion…
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How to Tell If Your Recommender Will Fail (Before You Spend All That Money On It)
Awhile back, we started exploring how individual interest graphs, powered by Primal’s data service, can be used to improve the performance of recommendation engines. Our surprising conclusion: Marketers and technology buyers are sold on the promise of personalized recommendations. Unfortunately, they don’t know how…
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The Myth Behind Big Data and Privacy
We know what personalization means and the compromises it imposes on our individual privacy. Or do we? This is perhaps the most insidious myth among the technorati: In order for people to benefit from advanced and personalized technologies, they need to compromise their individual…
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Trixie’s Story: Virtual Assistants and Interest Graphs
I was meeting with two guys, one a technologist, one a business advisor. The discussion was focused on Primal’s technology: semantic user models, knowledge representation, yada, yada… The business advisor, having listened patiently for some time, finally interjects, “Tell me what this means to…
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Why The “Star Trek Computer” Needs Open Data…And Scotty, Too
Do you share this opinion? So given that, what can we say about the eventual development of something we can call “The Star Trek Computer”? Right now, I’d say that we can say at least two things: It will be Open Source , and…
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How to Train Your Personalization Dragons
I love this post by Joshua Fruhlinger, Please don’t personalize me. I know who I am. It captures a sentiment that many of us share (1) (2) (3). Joshua provides a wonderfully non-technical and simple summary: I know who I am. I don’t need…