01.20.09
Jan. 20th, 2009
43rd peaceful transfer of power. 44th president. democracy in action.
09.02.08
Boulder NewTech Demo
I’m going to be up in Boulder Colorado tonight demoing a preview of my company’s new AlchemyGrid service. The demo will be at the monthly Boulder / Dever New Technology Meetup event.
Be sure and say hello if you’re at the meetup!
08.29.08
Farewell DNC
What a week this has been for Denver. Farewell Democratic National Convention, it’s been fun!
The DNC has been a great opportunity to shine the national spotlight on Denver and the greater Rocky Mountain West. The city did a fantastic job as host, and the exposure for Colorado has been great!
06.16.08
Gettin’ Hitched
OK folks, going to be out of pocket for the next two weeks. I’m getting married, and going on a honeymoon:
Those who need to get in contact with me while away, know how to do so. To everyone else: See you in two weeks! Bula Bula
05.15.08
New Sidebar Widget
I’ve just added a new sidebar widget to my blog: “Related Content”.
This is a demonstration of “contextual widgets” from my company’s AlchemyGrid service.
Contextual widgets utilize a custom-engineered “statistical topic keyword extraction from Natural Language Text” facility we’ve recently integrated into our products. If you’re familiar with the “Yahoo Term Extraction” API, our system is essentially doing the same sort of stuff. Natural language processing is fun (and challenging) stuff. Here’s a few notes regarding our implementation:
1. AlchemyGrid’s Term Extraction facility supports multiple languages (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian!). This was an important requirement for us, to enable contextual content generation for non-English websites/blogs. There are significant differences between languages in terms of punctuation rules, word stemming, and other details. Hats off to our Term Extraction developers, you’ve done a great job ensuring good initial language coverage.
2. Our Term Extraction facility is entirely statistical in its basis, not using a hard-coded lexicon, etc. This enables it to extract contextually-relevant topic keywords even when they’re (a) new topics, (b) rarely used common nouns/people-names, or (c) misspelled.
We’ve just integrated Term Extraction into our Grid service, so there may be a few minor kinks to work out in the coming weeks — but overall we’re happy with the initial results. Contextual capability vastly expands the utility of AlchemyGrid widgets, as their content can now be automatically customized to relate to your content. This applies to *any* input-enabled widget in the grid (ALL widgets are contextual). Here’s another contextual example (a related Amazon book):
We’ll be enabling the other supported languages in coming weeks, as well as rolling out some additional enhancements to our text processing algorithms (for the geeks in the audience, enhancements to our sentence boundaries detector, inline punctuation processor, etc.).
06.13.07
Clickstreams & the Implicit Web
There’s been a lot of buzz recently surrounding the “Implicit Web” concept, something I’ve blogged about in the past.
ReadWriteWeb has a great write-up on the subject, with case studies focusing on several popular websites that incorporate implicit data collection techniques (Last.fm, etc.).
Even more interesting is a “live attention-stream” viewer created by Stan James of Lijit. This neat little webapp utilizes clickstream data gathered by the Cluztr social browsing plugin, allowing Internet users to “follow along” with another user’s web browsing session.
This and other recent work on leveraging implicit data-flows is pretty exciting stuff, and we’re really only starting to scratch the surface as to what’s possible.
I’ve been toying around with implicit data gathering techniques for the last six months or so, using my company’s AlchemyPoint platform to gain access to clickstreams and other information. Because the AlchemyPoint system operates as a transparent proxy-server, it makes it easy to build simple analysis/data-mining applications that “jack in” to web browsing, email, and instant messaging activity.
So what’s possible if you’re “jacked in”? Let’s start with something very basic: gathering statistics on the usage of various web sites.
Above is a snippit from something I’ve been calling a dash-up. So what’s a dash-up?
Think dashboard + mash-up.
Essentially, a dash-up is a presentation-level mashup that collects data from multiple sources and presents it in a useful graphical dashboard view (in this case, dynamically updating activity charts). The above screenshot is showing both a general web traffic history, and more detailed statistics on my music-listening activity on the popular Internet Radio web site, Pandora.com.
OK, statistics-gathering is kinda neat, but what about something more useful? One of my favorites is passive tagging or implicit blogging activity. Stay tuned for my next post, which will detail some of the ways passive/implicit data collection enhances (through filtering, tagging, etc.) the Internet sites I use on a daily basis.
05.30.07
Planet Earth Series
Anyone who hasn’t caught this show already should definitely check it out. It’s a great nature series done by the same folks who brought us “Blue Planet”. Some absolutely amazing camera work.
Here’s a trailer, showing some select bits of footage (music by Sigur Ros):
11.08.06
Hello world!
Hi, I’m Elliot. This is my blog. I’ll be discussing web integration technology (Mashups, SOA, WOA), start-up companies (including mine), the Colorado entrepreneurial community, and other topics of interest.