Adweek: 20% of Blogs are Spam

According to a blog research company, Adweek reports, about 20% of the reported 80,000 blogs created every day are fake. Sometimes it's hard to tell which 20%.

Next step in text mining

Earlier this week I spoke to a group of knowledge workers, called KM Chicago, about the subject of using text mining and visualization as a way to manage the vast amounts of content that business searchers need to wade through. President Jack Vinson kindly just posted about my presentation.

KM Chicago is "Factiva-friendly" but not necessarily made up exclusively of Factiva customers. I'd like to thank one of the directors of KM Chicago, Ann Lee, for inviting me to speak. Ann is a colleague of ours in Factiva's Chicago office.

Blogging and your Corporate Reputation

Factiva has published two white papers this week about how public relations and marketing professionals use blogs and how companies can contribute to this new global "conversation."

PRWeek UK Looks at the Best and Worst of Corporate Reputation in 2005

PR Week UK's annual piece on corporate reputation, titled: The Reputation Rollercoaster, written by Adam Hill, is a good overview of the year's winners and losers in corporate reputation.

Mr. Hill made use of some data our team in London extracted from Factiva Insight. Specifically he shows how Sainsbury's media coverage and its stock price "show remarkable symmetry" during 2005.

Text Mining Becomes Sexy

As if things were boring around here, I think Amazon just shook up the world of information retrieval. Its mostly quiet Web-search division, Alexa, is opening the doors to its huge trove of Web-crawled content, allowing text-mining access to the archive. It would seem to me this is text-mining for the little guys -- an affordable way to build applications without having to host billions of documents.

The company plans to make it available at a low price point so that just about any developer who wants to can "search and process billions of documents -- even create their own search engines -- using Alexa's search and publication tools. "

Oh my, GYM just got a wake-up call.

Can little Alexa (with big parent Amazon) do what Google hasn't gotten around to yet or that IBM's WebFountain project has been trying to do for years -- make the Internet one big text-minable database that's easy to use and can produce commerical-grade business information tools? It's too early to tell, but it's all very exciting and should be great watching it unfold.

IM2005? Maybe Next Year.

Last week, several of my colleagues from Factiva and I attended the IM2005 awards along with 1,300 of our closest business friends. The intimate affair, held at The Grosvenor House Hotel in London was one of the many awards ceremonies in the IT industry. If you've never been to such a black-tie industry event, picture the Oscars -- but without the celebrities, or the press, or the sexual energy, intrigue, anticipation, dynamism, humor, well you get the picture.

The IMmies (I just made that up) didn't have Billy Crystal, but it did have Barry Cryer, who was said to be back by popular demand. Uh, huh. The IM Web site says he's quite the go-to guy in British comedy, having written for "practically every top U.K. comedian". Maybe his humor just doesn't track well to an American's ears, but I'd have to say some of it sounded more like Borscht Belt, circa 1955, than something written for hip dotcom professionals.

And hip it was. When a project called "Mapping Access Land in England" sweeps the night, winning two awards, you know you're with the "in" crowd.

Oh, did our sleek, hip product, Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence win in its category "Product of the Year"? No, but we were up against 29 other products (none of which I'd ever heard of). Hats off to Njini. (Who?)

Well, it is an honor just to be nominated. And the spiced confit of Norfolk duck was good. And I'm usually more of a Long Island duck guy. We missed out on the dancing afterward, as we did split right after the awards portion (16 awards in 30 minutes! definitely not the Oscars) and high-tailed it to Factiva's holiday party. We arrived 4 hours into Factiva's 9-hour fete without a trophy but were welcomed back with glasses raised. We're all winners.