archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Thanks to Datamining, for posting a writeup and screenshot of a prototype of Community Buzz, which features a text cloud. Community Buzz is a Microsoft Research project, and this is a perfect use of a text cloud to visualize concepts and further comprehension in a body of text.

More interesting than the text cloud is the space in the screenshot that looks like a placeholder for advertising driven by the contents of the text cloud. The annotation reads “Contextual ads based on the Buzz cloud keywords”, implying an advertising based revenue mechanism driven by creation and analysis of a text cloud.

Community Buzz Screenshot

The description of Community Buzz posted on the TechFest 2007 page, includes the following, making the connection to an advertising model explicit:

Community Buzz combines text mining, social accounting (Netscan/MSR-Halo), and new visualization techniques to study and present the content of communication threads in online discussion groups. The merging of these research technologies results in a system that gives great value to community participants, enables highly directed advertising, and supplies rich metrics to product managers.

Assuming it’s possible to provide highly directed advertising and rich metrics based on text clouds, I can see the benefits of for advertisers and product managers, and researchers of many kinds. Yet I’m not convinced of the benefits for community participants. Where will the text clouds come from, and how will their content reflect the needs of the community? How will social dynamics shape or affect these text clouds, to make it possible for them to leverage network effects, differential participation, and the scale benefits of connected social systems?

Text clouds – at least at this stage of development – support rapid but shallow comprehension: maybe this is perfect for advertising purposes…

Like a pile of dry bones that used to make up a skeleton, text clouds lack the specific structure and context of their source, and so cannot replace comprehension. Text clouds deconstruct the word elements that make up a body of text the same way spectrum analysis identifies the different wavelengths of light from a distant star. It’s a bit like using statistical analysis to read King Lear, instead of using a variety of tools to learn more about what Lear might have to say.

A better use of text clouds, or any other type of deconstructive method (a variant of semiotics) is as a tool for enhancing comprehension. Text clouds seem to bypass distinctions between high context and low context that present barriers to understanding deep context, by focusing on the raw content of the source, on the level of it’s constituent elements.

The goal of examining the fundamental or essential makeup of something we’re exploring – as a way of better understanding that thing overall – is an epistemological method pursued by Plato and a host of other Western philosophers and natural scientists. We should be cautious with new tools, however, as the urge to illuminate and dissect the fundamental makeup of that which is complex and nuanced can go too far, crossing from the insightful to the sterile domain of soulless reductivism. Witness the responses of corrupt officials to Javier Bardem’s character Agustín, in John Malkovich’s directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs.
Agustín is a police hero who saves his country from a criminal and oppressive government, social disintegration, and guerilla takeover. He then surrenders all prospects of winning the presidency and leading his struggling nation to prosperity for the unrequited love of a woman who aided the same guerilla leader he helped capture. Agustín strikes a secret bargain to secure her freedom with the corrupt powers that be, on condition that he withdraw from public life. His choice is incomprehensible to the soulless officials in power. To these people, who buy, sell, and execute hundreds without a thought, Agustín’s lover “…is just a girl – 70% water.”

For reference, the overview of Community Buzz:

• Community Buzz combines analysis of the content of online discussions and social structure of the communities to identify hot topics and visualize how they evolve over time.
• Through search and Buzz cloud users can access relevant discussion threads and adverts linked to the search results and Buzz keywords.
• Visualization of keyword trends enables the users to monitor the popularity of selected topics. Mesasages can be filtered based on the ‘social status’ of the author in the community.

And the complete description of the demo mentioned by Datamining:

Community Buzz is a new window into online communities! Interesting and useful conversations, authors, and groups are discovered easily using this tool, jointly developed by Microsoft Research Redmond’s Community Technologies group and Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Integrated Systems team, with sponsorship from Live Labs. Community Buzz combines text mining, social accounting (Netscan/MSR-Halo), and new visualization techniques to study and present the content of communication threads in online discussion groups. The merging of these research technologies results in a system that gives great value to community participants, enables highly directed advertising, and supplies rich metrics to product managers.

Here’s a few examples of how Gmail has fared at matching the content of email messages to my Gmail address with advertising content.
A forwarded review of King Arthur gives me “King Arthur Competition” and “King Arthur – Was He Real?” For something this easy and contemporary, I would have expected to see suggestions about movie times and locations, offers to publish my screenplay, and collections of King Arthur collectibles.
An anecdote about Eamon de Valera delivers Shillelagh (sic.), “Irish Clan Aran Sweaters”, and “Classic Irish Imports”. This truly an easy one, since it’s a small pool of similar source terms to sort through. “No, I meant Eamon de Valera, the famous Irish ballet dancer…” Will Gmail suggest links with correct spellings at some future date, or offer correct links to things that you’ve mis-spelled?
A message about another forwarded email sent a few moments before brings “Groupwise email”, “Ecarboncopy.com”, and “Track Email Reading Time”. These are accurate by topic, but not interesting.
A recent email exchange on how to use an excel spreadsheet template card sorting analysis offers four links. Three are sponsored, the other is ‘related’. The sponsored links include “OLAP Excel Browser”, “Microsoft Excel Templates”, and “Analysis Services Guide”. A related link is, “Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR”. These are simple word matches – none of them really approached the central issue of the conversation, which concerned how to best use automated tools for card sorting.
Last month, in the midst of an exchange about making vacation plans for the 4th of July with family, Gmail offered “Free 4th of July Clip Art”, “Fireworks Weather Forecasts”, and “U.S. Flags and patriotic items for sale”. Given the obvious 4th of July theme, this performance is less impressive, but still solid, offering me a convenience-based service in a timely and topical fashion.
Most interesting of all, a message mentioning a relative of mine named Arena yields links for “Organic Pastas” and “Fine Italian Pasta Makers”. Someone’s doing something right with controlled vocabularies and synonym rings, since it’s clear that Google knows Arena is an Italian surname in this instance and not a large structure for performances: even though it only appeared in the text of the email once, and there was no context to indicate which meaning it carried.
Beyond the obvious – you send me a message, Gmail parses it for terms and phrases that match a list of sponsored links, and I see the message and the links side-by-side – what’s happening here?
Three things:
1. Gmail is product placement for your email. In the same way that the Coke can visible on the kitchen table during a passing shot in the latest romantic comedy from Touchstone pictures is more an advertising message than part of the overall mise en scene, those sponsored links are a commercially driven element of the experience of Gmail that serves a specific agenda exterior to your own.
2. Gmail converts advertisements (sponsored links) into a form of hypertext that should be called advertext. Gmail is creating a new advertext network composed of Google’s sponsored links in companion to your correspondence. Before Gmail, the sponsored links that Google returned in accompaniment to search queries were part of an information space outside your immediate personal universe,
3. Gmail connects vastly different information spaces and realms of thinking. Google’s sponsored links bridge any remaining gap between personal, private, individual conversations, and the commercialized subset of cyberspace that is Google’s ad-verse. You will inevitably come to understand the meaning and content of your messages differently as a result of seeing them presented in a context informed by and composed of advertising.
The implications of the third point are the most dramatic. When all of our personal spaces are fully subject to colonization by the ad-verse, what communication is left that isn’t an act of marketing or advertisement?

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Five minutes after logging into my shiny new gmail account today and sending out a hello message toa few friends, I got a taste of new technology pranksterism: an old friend sent a reply to my hello loaded with keywords for everyone’s favorite flavors of spam. Naturally, my friend had read the Gmail intro that outlines their keyword targeted ad policy, stating that one of the conditions of participating in the beta was that Google would serve up ads related to the content of my messages within the new UI.
I don’t know how aggressively Google will match ads to content, but I haven’t seen anything tied to Scranton, PA on my screen yet. As a riposte, my friend should soon see plenty of discount remedies for embarrassing medical conditions, debilitating psychological illnesses, and other matters of questionable taste.
Funny or not, I find it a bit spooky that my mail is being parsed in order to drive advertising. Yes, un-encrypted email is basically as private as a post-card – but it’s highly unlikely that the local post office is going to slip a brochure for travel agencies and package vacations into friends’ mailboxes to accompany the post-cards I send them while I’m visiting Barcelona or Tenerife.
And then there are the inevitable followup questions: what kinds of patterns is Google building on top of this? Are they using geomatching to ID clusters of themes within zip codes? Maybe creating a history of my searching behavior and the number of times I follow the links placed by the engine, to establish a baseline for how susceptible I am to advertising? Or how often people in certain networks read and reply to messages with certain kinds of content?
I don’t think paranoia is appropriate, but there is a double-edged sword in every technology – especially one like this that combines accumulating personal data with tremendous interpretive power.
And even if I did sign up for the free account knowing that Gmail use implied acceptance of this practice, privacy remains a fundamental right. You can’t create valid and binding contracts that require or permit illegal activity.
Look out for travel guides to Scranton…

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Seen a lot of movie trail­ers? Always been curi­ous about who owns the voice?
Thanks to JV for the answer:
”…Don LaFontaine, who is lov­ingly referred to in trailer cir­cles as the ‘Voice of God.’ A vet­eran of 40 years and more than 4,000 trail­ers, his rum­bling basso has enticed mil­lions with dra­matic into­na­tions like “In a world where …’”
Here’s the full arti­cle, from the WSJ.

No related posts.

It’s my plea­sure to announce the recent appear­ance of Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture in two very dif­fer­ent and most unex­pected places.
The first is in lead­ing pol­icy jour­nal For­eign Affairs, where the term is men­tioned in a let­ter to the Edi­tor by David Hoff­man, Pres­i­dent of Internews in the July / August 2003 issue. Why is it impor­tant that IA appear in a pol­icy jour­nal? For­eign Affairs is legit­i­mately one of the most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions in the world, in that it con­sti­tutes a (nom­i­nally — decide for your­self as always) non-partisan and pub­lic forum for cur­rent and for­mer world lead­ers, lead­ing polit­i­cal the­o­rists, and active mem­bers of major gov­ern­ment and non-government orga­ni­za­tions to dis­cuss, debate, and decide national and inter­na­tional pol­icy. Fro exam­ple, while many peo­ple both in Amer­ica and abroad were taken by sur­prise when Pres­i­dent Bush announced his administration’s doc­trine of pre-emptive strikes against poten­tially threat­en­ing coun­tries, read­ers of For­eign Affairs would have seen Con­doleeza Rice out­line her vision of the new Amer­i­can world order in some detail dur­ing the cam­paign — before Bush was elected, and she assumed the role of National Secu­rity Advi­sor. Hoffman’s use of the term infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture (pg. 210) is broadly inclu­sive — he says, “Iraq now faces many chal­lenges, among them to rebuild a cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and to train a new gen­er­a­tion of jour­nal­ists who can report fairly, objec­tively, and inde­pen­dently on that soci­ety.” — and the nature of his orga­ni­za­tion as in Internet-based free media project means it is less remark­able that he would employ the term than some­one out­side the Inter­net com­mu­nity like Made­line Albright, but it is nonethe­less sig­nif­i­cant that IA is now seen as crit­i­cal in a polit­i­cal con­text. Too often we focus on the busi­ness, aca­d­e­mic, or even aes­thetic con­texts of IA. Yet if Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture is to be as gen­uinely rel­e­vant a field as I sus­pect a major­ity of we who are its prac­ti­tion­ers believe it capa­ble of being in the very near future, then we must adov­cate for it’s vis­i­bil­ity and effi­cacy on the polit­i­cal level.

The sec­ond note­wor­thy appear­ance is in my home town of Can­ton, Ohio, in the form of a list­ing on Monster.com seek­ing can­di­dates for a full time job open­ing inside a local adver­tis­ing agency. Can­ton is a medium-sized (pop­u­la­tion 90k) pre­dom­i­nantly blue-collar for­mer heavy man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ter known for two things; the Pro­fes­sional Foot­ball Hall of Fame, and a remark­ably low cost of liv­ing (for exam­ple, a full 62% lower than New­ton, MA, where I’m rent­ing at the moment, accord­ing to the salary cal­cu­la­tor avail­able on Monster.com). The for­mer means that for the one week each year pre­ced­ing the induc­tion of new mem­bers into the Hall of Fame, Can­ton becomes the cap­i­tal of the pro­fes­sional foot­ball uni­verse. The lat­ter means that the sub­urbs north of Can­ton have become a rapidly grown­ing bed­room com­mu­nity for upper mid­dle class com­muters work­ing in the Akron and even Cleve­land metro areas. By indus­try base, demo­graph­ics, geog­ra­phy, and cul­ture, Can­ton is quite lit­er­ally the last place that I ever expected see a post­ing for an Infor­ma­tion Architect’s posi­tion. And yet there it is: the agency in ques­tion (Innis Mag­giore) hap­pens to be one of the fastest grow­ing adver­tis­ing firms in Ohio, and a large pro­por­tion of those involved in the cre­ation and man­age­ment of infor­ma­tion spaces now rec­og­nize the indis­pens­able nature of IA.

I called Innis Mag­giore to ask them about the open­ing, but haven’t been able to speak with them yet to find out how they iden­ti­fied the need, how many appli­cants they’ve had, and what level of qual­ity the appli­cants demon­strate. I’ll post any­thing I learn further.