Latest Whistleblower Slaps at Lockheed Martin via YouTube

Michael De Kort, a former Lockheed Martin engineer becomes the latest YouTuber to make waves on the Web. He airs charges of corruption in a military contract he apparently worked on.

56% of Active English Blogs are Spam -- Wired

An article on splogs in Wired's Sept '06 issue quotes Timm Finin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and two of his students as saying 56% of active English blogs are spam. "The Blogosphere is growing fast," but "the Splogosphere is now growing faster."

The article goes on to say that splogs contribute about 75% of all pings from English-language blogs. About 300,000 legit posts a day and about 900,000 bogus ones.

Factiva New Leader in News and Research Market

The latest from electronic information industry watcher Simba Information shows that Factiva is now No. 1 in the Current Awareness News & Research market . I've been working at Factiva and previously at joint-venture parent Dow Jones for 13 years now and when I started we were a distant third in the market. Lexis Nexis was the giant that we really couldn't hope to slay but it always was the goal our leaders set for us. Since Factiva was formed 7 years ago (with joint-venture partners Dow Jones and Reuters) we've been inching our way closer and now we can officially say we've passed Nexis.

We had a bit of a celebration here in Princeton's HQ. Certainly wasn't a barn burner. Not sure if it was subdued because we kinda knew about the announcement or if it's because Factiva people are basically down-to-earth types.

But woo-hoo. We're number 1.

Media Measurement Users Wanted for Market Research

We're looking for a few people who have media measurement responsibilities for participation in a paid market research study. Read on and if you're interested email me: glenn dot fannick at factiva dot com

Research Plan: A Factiva product-development or user-interface-design professional will conduct the one-on-one sessions, which may include an opportunity for the participants to try one or more Factiva products or prototypes, give comments on their experiences and answer a few questions. Each participant will be asked to attend one session, which will last from 1 to 2 hours and be conducted at the participant’s work place or via web conference.

User Description: A typical participant will be a professional who actively conducts some form of media measurement, using online tools to monitor his or her company, brands, issues or competitors in the mainstream media and/or on consumer-generated Web sites, such as blogs.

Compensation: At the completion of the session, the participant will receive a thank-you gift worth $100US / £60UK. The gift can we waived if the participant wishes.

Technorati's Active Blogs -- Perhaps 1.4 Million?

Another observation about Technorati's claim of 50 million blogs:

I recently created a new blog as an experiment. It only has two posts and as far as I can tell no one has linked to it. It's only be read by one or two people. Technorati's rank has it at somewhere around 1.4 million. So if a new blog that has virtually no exposure or usage is #1.4 million, one could conclude there are about this many active blogs in Technorati's logs. Further underscoring my point that most of its "50 million" are inactive (or splogs).

Cliche Index report

Here's a link to the full Cliche report.

Ongoing cliche research

The Factiva Cliche Index continues to roll, based on research from Factiva Insight. And now, son-of-cliche-index is born. Sunday marked the launch of The Vocabula Review's top twenty Dimwitticisms.

Basically, we hope this will be an awesome ongoing feature -- one of the highest priority -- in terms of the input needed over a period of time to move forward. But, first and foremost, that does remain to be seen because it might all be out the window at the end of the day.

'At The End Of The Day', love for Factiva's index of clichés

More coverage of Factiva's Cliché Index. This one from mediabistro.com.

Is there a cliche the press loves that we're missing that you think can make it into the Top 20? Let me know and we'll add it to the next survey.

2.27 gigabytes of AOL data provides treasure trove of data mining

A Lee Gomes article in the WSJ.com (sub.) demonstrates a fun use of data mining, sources from recently released AOL search files, to show what people are searching for on the Web.

"... excepting prepositions and conjunctions, the most commonly used word in the 17.15 million separate searches was 'free.' If something isn't free,
it better at least be 'new,' as that was the next-most common word. Excluding proper nouns, the next most popular words were 'lyrics,' 'county,' 'school,' 'city,' 'home,' 'state,' 'pictures,' 'music,' 'sale,' 'beach,' 'high,' 'map,' 'center' and 'sex.' "

50 Million Blogging Fans Can't be Wrong

OK. It seems like most people who've taken the time to post about David Sifry's latest "optimistic" look at the size of the Blogosphere have roundly rejected his "50 million" number.

Let's see whether the MSM has lapped it up? (What do you think?) ---

Actually, I'm impressed that so far not to many have picked up the item at all.

Of those that did, some just accepted it, without challenge. One said "according to a new study" (A "study"? More like a number Technorati's marketing department agreed it would release.)

Those that got it wrong:
-- Agence France Presse said the 50 million "were tracked on the Internet last month"
-- The Oakland Tribune: 50 million bloggers "now grace the world with their musings"
-- Editor and Publisher for some reason downgraded the number to 40 million. Typo, perhaps.

Others don't even say where the number comes from:
-- Ottawa Citizen: "...for those who consistently read any of the 50 million-odd blogs..."
-- Technology Daily PM: "... that with 50 million blogs and video production getting cheaper..."

Confusingly a press release from Informative in July 2006 mentions: "According to Technorati, an estimated 30 percent of all 50 million internet users are blog readers. There are currently 14 million blogs, and since bloggers update their blogs regularly, there are about 1.2 million new posts daily."

Product News Network says Windows Live Spaces alone has more than 50 million spaces.

CMP TechWeb (and a few others like National Post and Silicon.com) is the most accurate, in my mind, saying Technorati is "tracking its 50 millionth blog," which is correctly akin to "99 billion served" at McDonalds. Not very useful, but accurate.

Fun with text mining

The Factiva Insight cliche tracker strikes again.