ATTEND(ING) THE SENTIMENT ANALYSIS SYMPOSIUM MAY 7th – 8th in NYC  - Discounts available by using code ‘ FOAF‘ when you register.   In any case, if your a reader of this blog and in NYC and want to come by for drinks the night before the main Symposium drop by the  reception Tuesday evening 5:30 pm-7 pm at the Renaissance Hotel 57 at 57th & Third.

Like the Word Cloud but I think what will be presented will be much more than this Cloud shows.

I may also attend the Research Panel on May 7th and the afternoon half day tutorial on Practical Sentiment Analysis which will also have an industry snapshot by Seth Grimes, who is one of the main authorities in the Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis space, and is also the conference organizer.

I attended the original SAS a few years back and spoke at it.   I also attended the last one in NYC, a year ago and it was very good – as well as highly represented by leaders in the text Analytics space.  So I’ll have a write-up about SAS NYC during (tweeting) and afterwards, with a long post wrap-up.

Web Journal

•  The videos and presentations from #measure13 in London that took place on March 27th (I spoke at it) are up care of OurSocialTimes, the conference organizer.  There’s also a photo of me speaking at my session, the presenation which is up on Slideshare, and OurSocialTimes has a copy of it as well.

• One of my Rutgers Students found this link on what the filters you use in Instagram tells about you and there ‘s also a nice infographic that goes with it (below).

• Predictive Analytics as it is applied to Social Media Activity has gotten big – and now Adobe wants to jump in with it’s own offering.  I honestly wonder how good it’s going to be  - most accounts don’t have enough data to do good predictive analysis but lets see what people are going to be saying about Adobe in a few months time, once this stuff is out there and people who can afford to try it, have.
• It’s the end of the Spring 2013 semester and my 95 students of #mgartr13 are busy submitting assignments and final projects like crazy, which has taken up a good amount of my time, I admit.  After about 8 hours a day of grading them using the Pearson eCollege system, there’s not enough left for me to write the blog posts I used to think nothing of doing.  Interestingly, one of my students came up with this Meme, which ties into week 6 of the course (Viral Marketing) but also is what my students are facing today (as Monday, May 6th is the last day they can submit much of their work for the semester and get credit for it).

Sure enough, that image was shared several times on Facebook from the Social Media for the Arts page that I shared it from  - most of the activity was viral.  It shows me what the course teaches is very much aligned with the way things work – people will share what they can relate to and identify with.

By the way, anyone can join the page (where I put many of the insights that go into the course) here.

I signed up for the historical reporting (which doesn’t appear to be retroactive) but it claims to be able to show how a person changes over time, a direction I got very interested in charting while I was in London last month (and which I wrote about here).

Here’s a few charts that were generated from the Facebook report that Wolfram generates – I think a lot of it is not directed right now to anything I would particularly use, but I think it would be useful at times in the future.

As I post a lot to Facebook, often for my Social Media for The Arts page so as to keep track of material I might add to the #mgartr13 course shell at Rutgers, there’s few surprises in this map, above.  The rest of the maps would be more interesting if an additional added dimension was added (such as all my female friends – mapped against a keyword or issue) – something Wolfram Alpha’s reports just don’t do, today.

Web Journal

• If those of us that don’t do a good job capturing the data in web forms, this is for you – Formisimo.  Seems like this is a useful function since capturing the form data is often something that isn’t tracked well, or at all.
  
• Ever want to map your Foursquare check-ins all at one time?  Check out 4sqmap.  I came across this app tying to help a student with her art project for another class that involved mapping door nobs on her way to class.  I thought about it and wondered why not just use Foursquare for that – take pictures – and then generate the map.  Well, I don’t know if that’s the direction she went in, but if you had do something like that – I’d think using modern technology and tools like Foursquare/4sqmap would make a lot of sense.
• Quincy Jones has invested in a start-up platform to teach us piano online – and it looks pretty cool.
• It appear that the deeper your voice is, if your a male, that is, the more money you’ll  make as a CEO (ha!) Do you believe that?
• In 5 years we’ll all have portable versions of this technology if we want it – it matches up real and virtual worlds.
• I’m signing up for DataHero – what about you? Playing with Tableau Public which is great, and there’s always that Infographic or two I’d love to have the time and skill to put together (but the truth is getting a good visualization is pretty tricky and that not that easy to do – lets try to see if DataHero can help out there).
• I was on the Social.com telecast earlier this week where Saleforce.com unleashed the next integration of the Marketing Cloud.  I suppose if we think we’re confronted with too many  ads now, we’re in for a lot more ads.  ”Customers who want to be able to pull in customer data from across Twitter and Facebook will need to put Social.com to work with Radian6, Salesforce’s social listening package. That way, those automated ads can include all the social data like hashtags and location, and they can be instantly updated based on a given set of rules. ”  I’ll not comment on this one.
• Was impressed with this content creation career guide assessment and shared it with my students at Rutgers University.  I think that many of them will want to combine graphic design and writing – but having said that – what’s the future look like there?  The article answers that question.
• I was surprised that of all the things I’ve shared on Facebook, this story about Patti Smith’s advice to Young Artist was the most viral of all, with 158 viral shares. I’m not exactly sure why, except that she is a popular figure.  I saw Patti Smith a long time ago in concert in NYC, maybe it was 1978, but haven’t been aware of much else about her, though she pops up from time to time in the news.  I thought her advice was important as I have a lot of students i work with in the Arts, many of them are also musicians.
• Some are calling Google’s Search Dominance days that are numbered – certainly with keyword search ads enabled in Facebook and Twitter – with more granularity coming soon – the author points out that search ads aren’t just for search engines and Google might find itself challenged in search intent, further down the funnel of a targeted needs, from Social Media.  Perhaps that’s why Google is so into augmented reality with the Google Project Glass.   They won the search war a long time ago, but now, it’s being re-invented for Social Media, and perhaps the next war is about to begin in Search Dominance – this time Google on one side and Facebook / Twitter on the other.
• LinkedIn came out with a contact manager - Finally! This is big news for people that actually need to maintain their business contacts, not just acquire them.
• Twitter is about to enable Local Discovery features and it’s something I’ve wanted for a least the last 5  years.  Finally! Coupled with Twitter Music (which I have been enjoying and will add to #mgartr13 course shell) I think Twitter has finally figured out how to use it’s real time nature to it’s fullest advantage. Even the story of Twitter Music is interesting and unusual.  I am particularly intrigued with the potential for Twitter Music to disrupt the music industry by uncovering local emerging talent that usually has a lot harder time getting audience share.  With Twitter Music and the “emerging trend” music it’s possible to uncover music you’d almost certainly never hear otherwise.
• A lot of my students are freaked out by Geo-Location and things like Geo-feedia and Foursquare – what would they say to this Facial Recognition technology?  Technology will always be dual – it can be used for good or ill, but i doubt there is any way to go back and throw our phones out the window and just live without this stuff.  I’m afraid we will have to make peace with it.

Well, that’s it for now.

Next week should be pretty exciting – speaking at NYU on Tuesday night with a friend, Barry Fleming, at a Web Analytics class and on Thursday night, there’s the Rutgers MFA show that I’m attending in New Brunswick.

More to come soon.

Working on a few ideas and often we come to the same thing but with a different expression that works better for where ever we are at just now.  The expression for me today is “Maximizing Information” and it happens when we decided how we’re going to use what data we’re collecting.

Case in point, I’m collecting information from my students at #mgartr13 for Social Media outreach and it’s a crowd-sourced project I came up with to leverage students own influencers with an influencer gathering exercise.  At first, I put all the data into Salesforce/Radian6 (because that was what I was used to, didn’t have Sysomos just now either) and figured that would work.  But as soon as I began to build out the topic profile and keyword groups it dawned on me that I was just exploring, getting my feet wet, and I didn’t really know how I was going to organize the information.

So, I stepped back and decided, at least, at this point, I didn’t need a social listening platform, what I need to do was organize the information in some useful way first – and I didn’t need any listening for that – just an idea and perhaps, some tools like Tableau Public.

Anyway, the point I’m making for myself and for you is that working with any platform will not be “productive” until you understand what the end point is going to look like and how the information is going to be used.  Perhaps, using the platforms for exploration makes sense, but then you’ll still need to figure out what your going to build – and only then does it make sense to put effort and money into monitoring results and perhaps, intelligence extraction (I pointed out some of that in my last post).

From left to right, the value of data has gone down to 0 while the value of extracted intelligence has gone up (to infinity), depending on how much effort and insight you want to put into it, it all depends on what you need the information for and what value you place on it (what you can do if you had that information).

Geo-Location Insights

This week in my #mgartr13 classes that I teach @RutgersU we’re focusing on Geo-Location, and what could be more timely than what happened in Boston yesterday with the Boston Marathon explosions.  It was horrible to see the carnage and my thoughts go out the victims, the spectators there and the city of Boston.

What kind of Analytics tool could really be useful for that sort of experience?  Well, it’s probably going to have to be a platform that deals with Geo-Location, getting real time data from various social feeds of the people in the area affected.  Normally, this is good for reporters and news teams in general, as well as the public.   But, for all the pros of geo-location tracking, there are many pitfalls to it, including being tracked when we don’t want to be.    On the other hand, we know news is quickly “re-edited” to make it more digestible  and perhaps, to slant it, and Geo-Located data, caught early on, avoids those pitfalls to some extent – so we might want to promote it’s use just for that reason alone.

Yet most of the monitoring platforms for online Analytics don’t seem to be built to  capture the real time data and ORGANIZE in a way where it might actually be useful.  I wrote a book on it two years ago which is still selling decently (and most of it is still relevant) but for all that, just about every platform I’ve used from any vendor was developed for a different use case and a different customer than it’s sold to or presented to, and very few pull in real time geo-located data in the way where it would actually be all that useful for almost anything.

But I saw a platform called Geofeedia that actually looks very promising and did capture the essence of what was going on in Boston yesterday, right down to the block it was happening on.  Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like.

Source: Geofeedia.com

Notice, the data Geofeedia is gathering isn’t really all that different than what you typical monitoring or social intelligence platform captures, and does largely capture, but the organization, the purpose, the use case is entirely different and the results are much more immediate and useful for this use case.  So that idea that your gathering data and presenting it in a useful way is probably the most important thing you can do (with the data).

I suppose that would be called “packaging of data” –  much like we buy packaged food – we know what’s inside may or may not be of value, but we’re sure sold on how it’s packaged.  In this case, the data is pretty much the same that most platforms pick up, but how it’s packaged and organized, the options it presents make all the difference in the world as to the usefulness of the information for you and me, and the usefulness of the platform, itself.

Web Journal

• Was surprised to hear that Allen Stern, a blogger who I occasionally saw at events in NYC died last week.  He was very overweight when I saw him (the last time was about 3 years ago).  It’s sad that he was actually getting his life in order, and his health, when he passed away.  Perhaps the causes go beyond exercise and diet, but also about what bacteria is in our gut.  A new study found that L-carnitine, a popular additive to energy drinks and supplements that claim to boost energy levels, along with  red meat (where the concentrations of the L-carnitine are naturally occurring in  the highest amounts), also fuels the harmful bacteria that convert L-carnitine to TMAO (a substance called trimethylamine N-oxide and seems to correlate with future heart disease risk and cause heart disease when fed to mice). TMAO is created when intestinal bacteria break down certain compounds in foods., which, in turn, could put the heart at risk.    So the answer as to what is healthy or not, might now be in our regime or our diet, but also what’s in our intestinal tract.  Substances, in and of themselves, might not be good or bad for us, but in combination with our own internal gut microbes, can go one way or the other.  For example, vegetarians who eat Red Meat occasionally might not have the bacteria built up to transform L-carnitine to TMAO, but regular meat eater does (have that bacteria).   It gives a whole new model for how to look at one’s health, or the lack of it. 
• Here’s a lady who successfully figured out how to monetize her music - she (Amanda Palmer) let people pay for it. Sounds strange, but the video looks good and it’s a TED talk.
• Big Data can also be a Big Problem – I think that people still don’t understand the data and a disconnect is present – the data has evolved beyond many people’s ability to work with it.
• Really liking a platform called SimilarWeb.com, which largely replaces Compete.com Pro, Alexa and the like.
• I was at Foursquare’s headquarters last week and went to an interesting semantic meetup about how they do sentiment analysis – I also saw they updated the application too.
• The promise of Google Universal Analytics begins to be apparent, including such things as tracking your dog.  According to Julian  you’ll need the following:

You’re probably going to need the following items:

• One of our trusty Raspberry Pi mini-computers. Use a Model B for improved USB ports. Don’t forget the power supply.
• A 3G USB dongle – won’t work on Raspberry Pi A according to this post
• A working SIM card with a standing subscription with your favorite ISP
• A GPS chip – complete instructions and buying guide

You’ll need the GPS chip to gather your dog’s location and the 3G dongle to communicate with the Google Analytics mothership. On the software side of things, you will need a GPS server and client (gpsd).

Hack this all together. Your turn to be creative. Now hang this to your dog’s collar on in one of those fancy doggie backpacks. Sparky should be ready to be released into the wild (your backyard) to measure and report his position.

Well, that’s it for today – I’m on my way over to Newport Rhode Island to attend a Meetup just now - and if I like what I hear, I’ll post about it.

The only problem is most conferences and people I meet aren’t  something  tools pick up very well,  and maybe they can’t.  Perhaps they’re just a starting point, and at that, it’s all about workflow and surfacing the information that you can do something with, in a form you can act on it.   Speaking of action-ability and Netbase, I liked the article in SocialMediaToday on HR.933 which used Netbase to analyze why Obama signed a bill the other day that absolves Monsanto of all future liability for genetically modified food.

I’m all for “modernist” interpretations of the news using the tools for the purposes they were, more or less, built for, though I’d probably want to see the actual configuration the author set up – because I didn’t get quite the same information out of what was shared in the article on HR.933 (but maybe that’s just my own way of looking at it).

First, the trip to London was pretty intense.

I spoke at #Measure13 on March 26th and 27th and got to see old and new friends (such as Katie Paine and a few others I don’t see that often.  I also spent a bit of time with my friends Adi and Hitomi Andrei in Crouch End, where I also saw wild foxes (which are common in London) as well as some snow (which is rare).  Turns out the foxes of London are all over the place, and most of them, quite friendly.

Anyway, after #measure13 there was also a nice dinner afterwards, preceded by a comedy show (that’s a whole different story) where I actually got to catch-up with the friends (old and new).  I won’t go into the details who sponsored this or that show or event, I really don’t care that much about those things, perhaps my readers don’t, either.

I also got to spend some quality time at the British Museum where I got to see the opening of the the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition, which was packed and all the tickets were sold out, but I got one anyway.  I also got to see the stuff the British brought back from Athens about 200+ years ago – you know, that stuff, again.

I was thinking of sharing some pictures of it all but realize none of that really mattered or was important.

In fact, the most important thing I accomplished in London was the beginnings of a new visual language (we think) to represent change(s) and a conversation on Complex Systems I had on the way back from London on the Virgin Atlantic flight I was on.

“a crude” interpretation of an idea that is evolving – it will probably take me a few years to figure it out

I’m not sure what to call this “map” – perhaps it turns into a histogram as people progress, then their change can be mapped (or they can see they are “stuck” when nothing moves at all).  I suppose Tankas could be considered maps of consciousness as well – but I doubt most Tankas could be fed into an equation, the kind Adi could run, in theory.   Of course, we don’t know where this all goes, only that it’s probably something that has been done before, but not quite in this way, and perhaps, for different reasons.

I would postulate, and got Adi on board with me, that through a series of exercises, one’s current position on a matter or subject could be charted, and then later, re charted, with some predictive Analytics coming into play down the line to show the likely trajectory give enough data being collected – all of this runs in a set of equations in X, Y and Z coordinates.

The idea grew out of my desire to solve a problem a student had last semester when he complained (not about my class, btw) that his instructors at MGSA weren’t providing him with enough guidance and structure – it was all subjective.  There’s a part of me that wants to solve that problem – its’ the same problem I had (if we call it a problem at all) when I went to Art School way back.  I reasoned that if only we could see a “map” of where we were, with our location in it, we’d know where we want to go.

Curiously, most “influencer” maps from platforms I’ve seen don’t include the viewer, subject or company that the whole bloody study is for – it’s as if most semantic maps lack “perspective”.  How can we possibly use maps to navigate our position in space and time, if we can’t see where we are in the first place.

No doubt, the influence and network mapping software was not designed to place the person who is running the query in the map, because that would be too real, too arguable and disputable.   I believe almost all influence mapping platforms are epic failure because they have no “perspective”, and fail to place the view in the picture.  I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but I’m certain, in this case I’m right.   The main reason for a map is for navigation.  Google Maps would not be very useful for navigation if it didn’t show the viewer (or handheld owner) where they were.   So it is with relationships of any kind.

And, in fact, my course at Rutgers is designed to help students develop their POV (Point of View), because without that (even if the POV changes) they would unable to “navigate”, to evaluate alternatives and chose the right for them (that is my contention).  BTW, even people who are not at Rutgers can take the course by going to this link and signing up.

Maybe, the last thing I brought back from my trip was this chart that I found out about while on the flight back.

The value of “data” would now be “0” and the value of extracted information to be very high.   Data is easy to get (though it’s debatable who possesses and owns the data at any single moment in time) but difficult to extract meaning from – that is, unstructured data.

And to top off the London trip I synthesised what I learnt at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference a few weeks ago to get an idea of just what is “unstructured data” and how does it get generated, etc (see below).

Essentially, the bulk of “unstructured data” is the very data we generate in modern communications with our digital devices, most of that data is of questionable value for analysis – and there’s is so much of it that one has to make a decision to fish for answers in the data in the first place and if it’s worth it.  Perhaps it is worth it, and perhaps not – it all depends on the questions that need to be answered and the tools/workflow available to do it.  Google Project Glass, will, no doubt, only make the data problems much worse.

#umsldigital

I visited St. Louis for the first time this week when I attended the State of Digital conference at the University of Michigan – St. Louis and spoke in front of roughly 300 people – I was one of several speakers – and here’s the Storify Link.

Also got to have dinner, thanks to thef my hosts, Perry and Rhonda Drake, at BlueBerry Hill, in downtown St. Louis Monday night.

Web Journal

• Friend Dennis Mortensen sells his company, Visual Revenue to OutBrain. Dennis is also quite proud of how Visual Revenue got funded in the first place.  I remember seeing Dennis start his 5th company from it’s very earliest days.
• Cruxlight looks pretty interesting, just installed it on my laptop – Chrome, that is.
• Whole Foods is building the First Greenhouse over it’s store in Brooklyn – I think this is the wave of the future – and I predict that in 10 years, such installations will be quite common.
• Death of the Social Media Strategist - going, going ….. gone!I
• Impressed that the SEC is finally issuing guidance to financial institutions about what they can say in Social Media – that should be a clue about the role of government in regulated industries.
• Did you know 20% of your Facebook friends are jealous of you? Really?

I think that’s enough for tonight!

Meanwhile, my presentations are up on Slideshare.

• Presentation on March 27th
• Workshop on March 26th

 

Of the sessions I plan to attend here’s what most interests me, and hopefully, if I have my hands of the pulse of what interests the readership here, us.

Wednesday, March 20th

• AUGMENTING ALGORITHMS WITH HUMAN INPUT so as to attack complex problems in a shorter time frame  (9:30 AM)
• WHAT DOES COLLABORATION AMONG HUMANS AND MACHINES REALLY LOOK LIKE? Purpose is to explore what the impacts will be for the workplace and those implementing systems to aid human decision making (9:50 AM)
• WHERE IS THE BIG DATA INDUSTRY GOING? – I have my own guesses on what will be said here, but I’d like to hear more about it.  Personally, I think “Big Data” has been hyped, and the real problem isn’t getting Big Data to work in your organization, but rather, to learn how to effectively use the data you already have.
• BIG DATA IS BROKEN WITHOUT INTEGRATION (11:30 AM). This need for data integration seems obvious, but I think the real issues aren’t so much “integration” but a redefinition of what a business really is for 2013 and beyond.  The Data Integration problem, along with the classic silo issues that plague many organizations are the result of old ways of thinking that no longer serve us as well.  Typically, 15 years ago businesses were getting into eCommerce and thought of their web data as a channel, where as now the website and the processes behind it, often ARE THE BUSINESS.   So the idea of fixing “Big Data” by integrating in the organization, without fixing what the organization thinks of itself – I personally think is doomed to fail. Lets see what SnapLogic has to say about it.  Of course they will be looking at technology as the solution, but I think it will not be the solution, ultimately.
•  THE CIA’S “GRAND CHALLENGES” WITH BIG DATA (12:30) – I’m not expecting any state secrets to be revealed here but rather, a re-confirmation of the public monitoring projects that the CIA is clearly involved with.  No doubt, semantics will play a role here – and of course – as the world has 7 Billion people in it, and about 2 Billion are online now – and the CIA wants to monitor much of it – that’s a “Big Data” problem, the big daddy of Big Data issues, I think.
• MU SIGMA SPONSOR WORKSHOP – AQUITANIA EAST SUITE (1:05 PM -Leveraging big data to drive customer acquisition and loyalty).  I’ve been curious to see what credit card companies are doing with third party data – I think it’s something we should all be very curious about – so I’ll attend this workshop which focuses on MasterCard and it’s use of Big Data business decisions such as location expansion, bench-marking to competitors, and defining “best” customers.
• ACTIVE NETWORKS: THINKING BEYOND JUST ADVERTISING FOR MACHINE LEARNING (3:10 PM)
•  RECOMMIND SPONSOR WORKSHOP – AQUITANIA WEST SUITE Rise of the machines: machine learning and unstructured data.  This subject is right out of Chapter 3 of my book on Social Media Analytics, so of course, I want to attend and hear what is being done to turn unstructured data into structured data (which is the focus of this conference, after all – ha!).
• ADDRESSING THE TENSION BETWEEN PERSONALIZATION AND PRIVACY (4:30)  - I think this is a “big brother” type of session – collecting the data on everything vs. respecting our privacy (if it still even exists).

If I make it to Structure:Data Thursday it’ll only be for the first few hours.  Overall, as I did last year, I’ll write a review of the conference before I head off to London later on this week (or maybe I’ll do it on the way over the Atlantic).

Social Media for the Arts Summer Session

Right now I have a sponsored post running in Facebook for the summer session of my online course at Rutgers University – Social Media for the Arts.  This semester (Spring 2013) I have 97 students in two sections, 46 in section 90 and 51 in section 91.   You also don’t have to be a Rutgers student to take my course, it’s also offered by the Business School and anyone can sign up (if they can pay $3500.00 for registration).  The Mini-MBA version of the course is identical to the Undergraduate / Graduate sessions and in fact, are merged, you get equivalency credit for the course.

If your interested in taking my course over the summer here’s what you can do:

- For information about my course click here

- If you are a Rutgers student (Grad or Undergrad) you can register for my course with this link

- To register for the Mini-MBA for Social Media for the Arts as a Non-Rutgers student go to this link

- To see student testimonials for Social Media for the Arts Fall 2012 semester - then view this document.

- To view the RuTV PSA spot for Social Media for the Arts – go to this link -

Feel free to share this information with your friends and friends of friends.

Here’s the RuTV Spot that is also on YouTube.

I wish I had the energy to write up the Web Journal part of my post but I’m too tired tonight – just wanted to get this post out and also encourage anyone that wants to know more about my course to contact me at @webmetricsguru  and we’ll take it from there.

But I think the Cambridge Study on what Facebook Likes reveal is more interesting and has the potential to act as as a “Rosetta Stone”, for this kind of work.  I read the  study a few times already (Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior) and have begun to integrate it (but I’m not done yet) with my own research.

Can’t speak to the math and regressions used, but I was able to visualize all the sub-dimensions and came up with over 400 Likes that can be used to chart your personality and behavior (I’ll leave it at that).   I left out a few sub dimensions but here’s most of them.

Indicator

High IQ

Low IQ

Satisfied with Life

Dissatisfied with Life

Liberal and Open

Conservative and Closed

Well Organized and planned

Spontaneous

Extrovert

Introvert

Agreeable (cooperative)

Competitive (disagreeable)

Female

Male

Older (Baby Boomer?)

Millennial

Have many friends

Have few friends

Catholic

Muslim

Republican

Democrat

Male – Gay

Male - Straight

Lesbians

Straight woman

Afro-American

Caucasian

In a relationship

Single

Alcohol Use (Alcoholic?)

Not an Alcoholic

Uses Drugs

Does not abuse Drugs

Smoker

Not a smoker

Some of the Facebook Likes seem obvious makers for say, “Democrat” vs. “Republican” or “Male” vs. “Female”, while others are not so obvious.   The Washington Post article points out “Curly Fries” as something that more intelligent people like – I don’t think that’s too obvious to anyone but seems to come up in the research which covered the detailed likes and testing of over 58,000 Facebook profiles later last year.

I think the “Likes” as charted, could be used now with Facebook Graph Search to a limited extent (you probably would not find anyone who fits the exact description of High IQ, for example, by liking all these things (see below).

Likes	Indicator
The Godfather	High IQ
Mozart	High IQ
Thunderstorms	High IQ
The Colbert Report	High IQ
Morgan Freemans Voice	High IQ
The Daily Show	High IQ
Lord Of The Rings	High IQ
To Kill A Mockingbird	High IQ
Science	High IQ
Curly Fries	High IQ
Jason Aldean	Low IQ
Tyler Perry	Low IQ
Sephora	Low IQ
Chiq	Low IQ
Bret Michaels	Low IQ
Clark Griswold	Low IQ
Bebe	Low IQ
I Love Being A Mom	Low IQ
Harley Davidson	Low IQ
Lady Antebellum	Low IQ

But you could find a lot of people who Liked 4 or 5 of those things and come up with interesting lists.   I have no way of determining accuracy of my results, but the authors of the study said they think their results are fairly accurate (see below).

So this study claims to be able to predict 85% of the time your real political affiliations and up to 88% of the time your sexual orientation and 93% of the time your gender.    Those are high claims.  My guess is with more “Data” the results might be yet better – we’ll have to see about that as more people get into this space.

People who like Mozart and Science and The Lord of the Rings (Lord of The Rings) and To Kill A Mocking Bird and The Godfather and Thunderstorms and The Colbert Report   has fewer than 100 results, but you can pick the top 3 or 4 and get thousands of results.

Link (if you have access to Graph Search).

My latest thinking it to try to link Graph Search with why people choose certain types of platforms (say “Social Intelligence” vs “Social Marketing Management” (this comes mostly from the platforms listed in the Social Lumascape) but I probably didn’t go deep enough.  In any case, what I can say is that ….

People who “Liked” these companies also Liked most commonly The Beatles and Pink Floyd whereas those people who liked platforms in another section of the chart liked Pink Floyd and Radiohead just a little bit more than they like The Beatles (which everybody in marketing seems to like – ha)!

Using the results of the Cambridge Study I mentioned above I as able to find a few correlations, but honestly, I think I’d need to dig much, much deeper to find much more than this and I don’t yet have the tools or time for it just now. If we use the maker of liking “Jesus Christ” as an example of “being satisfied with Life” then a few of the areas of the Lumascape have people who are that (because they liked Jesus Christ).  

The funny thing is that the people who I segmented on above that are of High IQ, don’t seem to highly Like “Jesus Christ” – but instead, seem to like things like Philosophy.

That’s enough for now – I hoped to add the Web Journal part but am running out of time to do it.  Next time.

Perhaps the move on Google’s part to define it’s own search engine process is in response to Facebook’s Graph Search that I wrote about last week.

Or perhaps Google is in the process of destroying the search engine industry (which can be debated), conferences and gurus all,  that was spawned around it.  Now, if someone wants to know about Google Search, they won’t need to ask anyone else, they can just go to Google.  I won’t bother to paste all the infographic sections here, they’re interactive and easier to see on Google’s Inside Search site.

Instead, I’ll talk about what it means (after all, I think that’s why people read my blog in the first place).

First, if we look at the Inside Search site there’s an interesting statement that comes up at the end of the video featuring Ben Gomes in the “algorithms” section of the site.  Ben Gomes says…

“… [5:29 in the video embedded above] The truth is our users need much more complex answers.

My dream has always been to build the “Star Trek Computer” and in my ideal world I would be able to walk up to a computer and say “hey, what is the best time for me to sow seeds in India as Monsoon was early this year“.

Once we can answer THAT question, which we don’t today, people will be looking for answers to even more complex questions. These are all genuine information needs, genuine questions that, if we “Google” can answer, our users would become more knowledgeable and they would be more satisfied in their quest for knowledge”.

The gets to the point of my post – “can Google answer these more complex questions” that searchers have evolved to want?

I don’t think so, and neither does Ben Gomes (based on the video, above).  People are evolving along with the search and social media sites and services and have outpaced them.   Google might be the “God of Search” as I wrote about in 2007 in a post about “Google Truth“, but Search is not everything that people want, and has an obvious problem, a blind spot that many at Google don’t appear to see or acknowledge.

“People often don’t say what they mean and often, they don’t know what they want or why they want it”.

There’s only so far you can go with textual and back-link analysis no matter how sophisticated it has become – until the Singularity is a full reality (and even then) you are dealing with people who often have needs they can’t quite define – and even if they could, the documents that Google’s crawled might not have enough signal in them to be matched up with people’s newly realized intent.

Source:  http://io9.com/5534848/what-is-the-singularity-and-will-you-live-to-see-it

By the way, Google is focusing on the Singularity too, by hiring Ray Kurzweil as a new director of engineering for creating the Positronic brain, and trying to get there first.  Naturally, they have to, or Google will become IBM.  They see the writing on the wall.

That’s right – Google will become, in the future as IBM is today – an important player, but not the main player.  

They know search as evolved to it’s limit, that no matter what they do and how many scientists they throw at the problem, they can only go so far until they invent the Positronic Brain and bring about the Singularity (with is also dreaded, because with the Singularity people envision Terminator realities).   If they don’t succeed, they become an IBM or eventually, an HP, much respected, still a big player - but also a “has been”, Google Project Glass and all.

What Google accomplished 15 years ago was much easier (though at the time it was a great achievement)  using back-links to quickly evaluate the worthiness of a page for a particular question or query.   After all, Matt Cutts say it so clearly, the Google crawler (or any search engine crawler) uses links to transverse the web (see the video of Matt Cutts explaining the whole thing, below).

Matt explains what we all know, that a crawler uses links to crawl Google’s index of  the web (as much of the web as they can find), link by link by link [0:42 in video above].  The crawling works fairly well to get the documents into the index and not so well to rank them, so they rely on other signals, 200+, but not matter how much they rank, they can’t keep up - they simply can’t.

A real time example of Spam that Google is fighting – it’s popping up faster than they can eradicate it.  You could

almost substitute the word “spam” from “vermin” or “cockroaches” – that’s what Google is fighting, a world that is engulfing

their search engine with more and more spam.

The human mind is evolving faster than what they can anticipate given the technology that exists right now – that’s why Google would bring in a “quasi New Age guru” like Ray Kurzweil in the first place.   And Google’s attempt to own it’s own search process and take it away from the quasi search gurus that make a living off of Google, could be looked at two ways.

1. Either Google is “coming of age” and realizes it should own the conversation and take it away from the search gurus and affiliate marketers.
2. Or, Google is desperate, it realizes it must revitalize the awareness of search  as “their IP” as they are attacked on one side from Facebook and from the other, by their own sagging AdWords service.

Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.

As Google is tightening up it’s TOS, it’s becoming harder to get the “wiggle room” that marketers used to have, to game the search engine – they had to that as the results were getting worse and worse, and they were looking not much better than Yahoo or Bing, though much bigger and more dominant.   The Google Project Glass and Google Car are just diversions – worthy projects, no doubt – but they can’t change the fact that people are simply evolving past Google’s main value proposition, so they must try very hard to invent new ones.

That’s what I think.

Web Journal

• Interesting page to keep track of for week 6 of #mgartr13.
• So, behind data predictive analytic lies intuition – see .. I told you so… artists – we have the intuition – that’s what it’s all about – data, is just to confirm our hunches, more often, than not, or give us something new to think about and explore. 
• 3D Printing promises to change everything - funny, you’d think Google would want to go after this as well, while they’re evolving the Google Glasses – why not attack the problem from both angles?
• The other Shoe drops off with Facebook buying Atlas from Microsoft.

Well, that’s it.  The cafe I’m in is closing up and I’ve written enough for tonight.

Here’s a couple of visualizations I created lately – these come out of my work at Rutgers University – but they go beyond it , even.

I was able to use the Facebook Graph Search and find the Brand pages that were most liked by Painters vs. Musicians vs. Actors and then Dancers who are studying at MGSA.  Graph search made it easy to do this, and I could have gone much, much deeper than I went (and maybe I will sometime soon, stay tuned).

It was all fine to create a map of 4 communities, but what about the sub-communities of say … musicians that study classical instruments at Mason Gross?  What might I come up with?  The Graph Search came up with something that Google search, in a million years, could never produce, though if we all went over to Google Plus, as they hope, they could come up with some nice circles visualizations, but they would not be the same thing as what Facebook produced for me .

I went a little further and did some profiling – here’s an example of what that looks like for the Pianist sub community at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts.

What John Mayer and The Beatles have in common with a person’s disposition to risk taking is the subject of much philosophical discussion (ha), but once the cultural signals connected to the Brands (that spend so much money crafting them in the first place), a student of human psychology can connect the dots together and uncover the psychological drives that distinguish how people behave and why.

And the Graph Search will get better and better, while Google Search algorithm is about as mature as it’s ever going to get (that’s why they are pushing so hard to move into Social with Google Plus – perhaps they will succeed only because Google is too big to fail, but they may not succeed as much as they won’t fail).

You can read the whole presentation here but I decided not to allow it to be downloaded.

Web Journal

• One of the most useful posts I’ve read in a long time - I have to try these apps out, maybe one at a time.
• Software eating jobs – and insightful post at Tech Crunch - the  idea of “software eating the world and its jobs” is something I, and many others have thought about for a while. A interesting and sobering read that I largely agree with. The middle class is being “hollowed out”, and we need to broaden our horizons to figure out how live and thrive in the new economies that being created out of technologies rather than scarcity – which is no longer the main drivers of pricing.
• The Real Battle of Dell - Dell is going obsolete. Interesting that innovation and R&D spending is pegged at 10% – 50% of all revenue spent for Start-ups - and Dell is anything but a start-up.  The writer compares Dell to the “Invisible Man” – or would that be Michael Dell and the Dell computers no one gives a damn about anymore.
• A look inside Obama’s White House – I had this as a promoted post on Facebook for about 3 days  - I think the White House interview is telling in that social media has evolved and now people need deeper engagement – creative + storytelling that I alluded to at the Socialbakers event 2 weeks ago.
• Social Media as Modern Sorcery - The title pulled me in – the writer claims that Social media in developing countries today provides some of the soothing elements of Sinhalese sorcery. When products the consumer has paid for do not work, frustration is a likely result.

What do you think?