Lenny Raymond's Blog

Reuben Steiger on The Internet as a Storytelling Medium

On AdAge, with a long-winded reply from me.

Peer39 - The First Semantic Web Company That Makes Sense

There's a post on TechCrunch today on Peer39.  Worth reading.

Peer39 is a semantic analysis-enabled ad network.  The company's approach to information retrieval, their market focus, and their understanding the limits of their tech are what makes this company the first viable semantic web company.  While the company does all the usual "natural language processing" heuristic stuff which has come to be synonymous with Web 3.0 / "The Semantic Web," they also do what appears to be collaborative filtering and machine learning. In other words, they are at least partly making up for the shortcomings of heuristic approaches to information extraction with statistical analysis. 

As I've remarked before, it is impossible, given the current (and reasonably foreseeable) state of computer science for IE to work well enough to bring about the vision of the Semantic Web in the oft-cited travel agent example.  You can do NLP query parsing, define microformats, come up with better and better ontologies, and so forth all you like, and you will never solve the problem of incompletely, inconsistently, and poorly tagged source data.  Machines are too stupid and people are too lazy for all that data to ever get tagged right.  These things will not change in our lifetimes.

What makes Peer39 a sensible company is that they understand this and their goal is not to create a domain non-specific, highly accurate, robust information extraction service that enables the Semantic Web.  They just want to analyze content somewhat less inaccurately in order to enable ads to be served that will get a somewhat better clickthrough rate.  Improving CTRs is highly measurable and gets you paid; online ad serving is one area where having a better mousetrap really will get the world beating a path to your door.

My guess as to why this company is doing it right is because the founders and key technical leaders come out of online advertising and intelligence services. The ad people know where the pain points are and what level of "better" is enough to get market traction; the ex-spies know the limits of semantic tech and information extraction because intelligence services have been using that tech in production longer than anyone - those guys know what level of "better" is truly achievable, and how.  This team contrasts with most semantic web startups which are long on "visionaries" and researchers, and short on people who have had to use this tech with money (or lives, or national security) on the line.

This will be an interesting company to watch.

Suckerz

$100MM +

Evri - A New Semantic Search Service in Beta

TechCrunch notes the private beta launch of Evri, a service that sounds like it creates a semantically enhanced version of a web index, and helps users find topically related information.  Sounds cool.

Topically related information navigation is a great way to find stuff, speaking intuitively.  However, making it work and actually useful is extremely hard.  To make it work means you need good metadata that describes those concepts.  Good metadata means either humans have to enter it rigorously, comprehensively, and consistently, or machines have to interpret unstructured text highly reliably.  Neither of these things have ever happened in the history of the world, except in small datasets in very narrow knowledge domains.  Doing this at web scale has been a holy grail of IR.

Evri's screenshots look great.  Pretty, and an intuitively obvious navigation scheme.  There are companies that do a pretty good job at guided navigation already (e.g. Endeca).  For the most part, they wisely concentrate on doing the topical browsing using well structured data (e.g. shopping sites, intelligence datasets).  Still, Evri's UI looks like a step forward.  However, for Evri to be live up to its promise it must do a whole lot more than put a pretty front-end on current state of the art (i.e. so crappy it isn't worthwhile) semantically enhanced web index. Evri really needs to have a general solution to do information extraction at web scale.

When I read the company's blog and see phrases like "natural language-derived grammatical data" and "it’s all about the UI" I start to think that maybe the company is falling down the natural language / semantic web rathole.  It's not about the UI.  Doing the UI is trivial compared to the problem of the creating / acquiring / wrangling the metadata.  "Natural language" and "grammatical" are codewords for heuristics, and given the current state of computing and human knowledge, heuristics cannot produce general case useful results at web scale, relatively speaking.  That "relatively speaking" qualifier is an important one.  The "relatively" is relative to statistical analysis and full-text indexing.  Properly done, this approach actually does produce  "related concepts" search results.  Related concepts will tend to cluster  when one  performs data reduction on the index entries' vectors.  If one chooses well (and the choice can reasonably be left to machines in web-scale search engines, particularly learning algorithms), collapsing vector dimensions does produce meaningful clusters of related concepts. When you enhance that data reduction with algorithms like PageRank, you actually get pretty good related-document retrieval.  So, long winded way of saying it, but Google already does what Evri does.  Just without making you use a tree-walking UI.  Of course, if you really pine for the days of walking a tree in an rdbms, you can.

Anyway, I signed up for the beta, and hope to have my skepticism proven unfounded.

Update: I've been playing with the beta a little.  It's nice.  It's too limited to tell what's going on under the hood, but it's still early days so that can be overlooked.  Using Evri is a different experience from using search, even search with tree-walking.  People will need to get used to it, and the company will have to get very good at anticipating how users will want to navigate, but if they can, they might have a pretty cool service.

Games that Persuade

I'm going to contradict myself again.  Not really, but after a great conversation with my buddy Christophe this morning, I feel I should expand on my advergames post of a few days ago.  Christophe recently attended the Games for Change conference, and we talked about that and some social-good -minded games projects he has in mind.  I modify what I said before - great games can have an axe to grind.  That axe will just probably never be Axe Body Spray.

While I believe that games need to be about fun first and foremost, great games, like all great art, are fueled by passion.  Most of the time, the passion that drives a great game is that of a designer to find expression for a brilliant game mechanic and/or a revolutionary aesthetic (e.g. The  Sims, Starcraft, M:TG, GTA).  Sometimes the passion that drives a great game is a love of history, or the expression of a certain set of values (e.g. Medal of Honor / Call of Duty).  There's no reason that this kind of passion in combination with brilliant game design can't come from the desire to achieve some social or cultural goal - we just haven't seen it yet.

Normally, I hate it when people compare games to movies, for reasons too numerous to list in this post.  However, I think that we are at an inflection point in games where the sources of inspiration are going to start changing, and the history of movies is illustrative.  When making movies became less about the technology of getting images on film, and when the audience's familiarity with a rich and established idiom became something a director could count on, more complex ideas could be conveyed.  It isn't unusual for very commercially successful movies and tv shows to have messages, be they overt or subtle.  In fact, it's unusual for successful and sustainable franchises to not have something to say.  Game production tech has evolved to the point where the means of production are within the reach of many, many more people (and different kinds of people), and the audience has matured in its understanding of the medium's grammar and vocabulary. 

At their core, I believe great games will always be about great game mechanics because mechanics are the fundamental source of player engagement and what makes games a unique medium. However, I think it will become normal for commercially successful games to make a point.

It Was Only A Matter of Time

I somehow feel a little bit soiled by doing two posts in one day related to Second Life, but this seems synchronistically appropriate.  Original story here.  Thanks, PSFK.

Hints, tips and cheats to better datamining

Great post on Lightspeed's blog here.  The gist is that more data generally beats better algorithms.  I'd generalize this to say that statistics generally beats heuristics, particularly with large data sets.

Oh No! Spore Isn't Even Out Yet and it's Looking Like Second Life!

More at Kotaku

I Have Newfound Respect for Powerset

The former CEO, or somebody that at least looks like him to the peeps at Valleywag, has made it onto HCWDB:

<Ali G Voice>  RESPECT </Ali G Voice>

Behavioral Segmentation /=/ Demographic Segmentation /=/ What Really Matters

Another eMarketer article that is illustrative of the primitive state of thinking that prevails in web marketing: Behavioral Targeting and Customer Segmentation .  It seems like people still are dazzled by the possibilities of having so much fine-grained data, not remembering that having lots of the wrong data is no better than having none, and maybe worse.

It would seem that few marketers are using behaviorally-based segmentation to do their ad buys because they do not believe it is effective.  No surprise there.  A quote from the article: " 'Despite the inherent logic of placing consumers in various affinity groups based on their actions rather than their demographics, testing which segments work best leads back to behavioral targeting's Achilles' heel: reduced reach,' said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. "  A more or less true statement, in and of itself, but it completely misses the point. 

In the first place, one does segmentation precisely because one wants to reduce reach.  It's more important, and generally more efficient, to reach a few of the right people than a lot of the wrong people.  That's what segmentation is for, at least as far as media planning goes.  However, saying that behavioral targeting is ineffective relative to demographic segmentation is like saying pigs are poor at flying compared to fish.  The right way to do segmentation (and yes, there is a right way) is to do it based on needs.  Demographics can be correlated with needs, so if all you can get are demos, then you may be better off than with nothing.  It is possible that behavioral patterns (meaning clickstreams in this context) correlate well with needs, but that is by no means demonstrated, and there is a penumbra of evidence to the contrary.

What the article gets 100% right is that segmentation is only useful if one picks the right segments.  A corollary to that is that to pick the right segments, one must pick the right basis for segmentation.  If you want to sell something to someone, it sure helps to know if they need it.  It helps to some degree if you know that person can afford it, lives where they can get it, consumes "X" media so you can tell them about it, etc, but those are all secondary.  Knowing some people have clicked here, there, and in that spot, in this sequence, within the narrow context of what you've provided them, are of tertiary significance at best.

Pick the right segmentation basis: needs.  Do a valuation on the resulting segments - serve the high value ones.  Make sure your segmentation solution includes major dimensions that show if/where those high value segments are accessible. If they turn out to not be accessible, tweak and rerun until you get accessible, high value, needs-driven segments. Then place ads.