Suddenly, Three Innovations Turn Up!
The last few weeks have seen some fascinating innovations. Google’s Wave shows one view of what email (or more widely, electronic communication) would look like if it was invented now. Wolfram Research’s Alpha shows just how powerful applied computation can be at answering questions, and gives a glimpse of a very intriguing future for knowledge-based computing. Now these things tend to come in threes, and up until now, I was waiting for the third…
So I was not entirely surprised to read Steve Smith’s excellent blog post in MediaPost’s Behavioural Insider, where he talks about something that I can only inadequately describe as an ‘opinion collator,’ from New York-based start-up company Jodange. You can try out the basic idea in three iGoogle Gadgets that track opinons on Energy, The Economic Recovery, and the S&P 500, but the really interesting bit is the ‘Top of Mind’ service, which applies linguistic analysis and collation capability to topics that you choose, rather than presets. You can think of the service as a summary of the collective online opinions, sentiments and feelings of a large number of people – the sort of thing that it would take a lot of effort to determine by reading very widely. And note those words: opinion, sentiment, feeling – these are difficult things to measure reliably.
Written opinions are interesting because they are the carefully crafted and considered result of people thinking, in contrast to the more visceral and immediate behaviors that are what people do, often without thinking too deeply. Online advertising is always looking for ways to infer opinion from behavior, and whilst there is plenty of technology to determine online behavior, opinion has, until now, been a much more intangible metric. Combining what we know about measuring the behaviors of people with metrics for opinions could be a very interesting approach, and one that I’m sure we will see in the future.
Tags: Innovation, Measurement, MediaPost, Research
Filed under Link Love |
