The first article discusses how the Web collective–the user commons if you will–is benefiting from individual efforts at curating content, done largely as a free service driven by a spirit to share.

Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.

I think anyone engaged in the social Web would readily agree with this sentiment. It’s what makes participating in this distributed forum so fun. The article also points out, however, that the vast content mines that exist can be somewhat difficult to navigate to find true gems. Thus, the implication is that content providers need to step up to the plate and deliver content systems that make it easier on Web “content curators”.

The research paper referenced above describes how the BBC used a concept called Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract concepts from textual input. This allowed for more efficient human editorial input to ensure that these concepts were accurate. Once approved these “concepts” were transformed into links appearing on a Web page. This process then allowed the BBC to use the “concept links” to create user journeys through their site. All this is based on semantic web principles. The future looks bright, indeed, for those of us who constantly scour the Web for salient content.

Information Week covered text analytics, describing how JetBlue uses text analytics to understand customer sentiment from email messages, which informed the airline how to draft its customer bill of rights. And KMWorld discusses how the burgeoning field of “customer experience analysis” uses text analytics to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Customers today aren’t just customers–they’re influencers and social networkers. Across the Web at any hour, they’re sharing observations about your company’s products and services, and those of your competitors…These new modes of customer behavior make it essential for companies to move beyond traditional ways of gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer information - Information Week

For a long time, text analytics was a technology in search of a business need. Now, thanks to social media, the need is there; the question is whether the technology can ramp up fast enough to be commercial – KMWorld

Where social media in real estate sometimes has the floor manners of a dog’s breakfast, it’ll become increasingly important for real estate firms to engage in text-sentiment analysis as part of their overall CRM and customer experience efforts. Here’s a list of companies that offer text-sentiment analysis services:

• Ata Plana
• Jodange
• Radian6
• Attensity
• Clarabridge

Photo credit: mnapoleon

• It’s still unresolved whether vertical search will significantly impact general search
• The nexus between real-time search, consumer intent, and semantic search is where the search gold resides
• Hurricane Katrina taught Google a lesson about relevance and real time results
• Opportunities to compete with Google and Bing exist, but only on the edge or fringe such as applications that bypass search engines, employ automated content discovery mechanisms, use semantic search, or perfect mobile geo-search

Interesting quotes:

Google is like smoking cigarettes, it’s a habit that’s going to be difficult to give up. So what can you do? You have to think about the problem space. Google’s approach is to get people in and out of search engine quickly with their result. Not the right way to think about it. Right way to think about it is to think about minimizing time of completing a task, not minimize the amount of time to match a query with a url.

[O]rganize the information in a way that synthesizes the task that you want to accomplish.

Mobile is huge. Apple is the big fish at the moment. Android coming on strong. Won’t hold my breath on Microsoft.

Two things which potentially threaten us. [1] As we become bigger and older, it could become more difficult for Google to innovate…[2] Also worry about diminishment of sense of entrepreneurship.

Chris Brogan interview
Excellent interview with Chris Brogan on how he’d run an airline and implement some social web karma; great insights, well worth the 9:58 investment of your time. The interviewer, Shashank Nigam, CEO, SimpliFlying, asks some really good questions. My comment after listening to the interview: That was seriously cool.

Semantic Web
This post re-confirms to me that the semantic web (i.e., Web 3.0) is still a ways out from being widely deployed, yet absolutely filled with so much promise and visionary thinking.

Dunkin’ Donuts
Insightful post on how Dunkin’ Donuts uses the social web to extend its brand engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts’ recently released Dunkin’ Run app is a nice, simple deployment of a social app that has a built-in ROI component: buying doughnuts.

Vyoom
Interesting TechCrunch profile of Vyoom, which is a social networking site that gives you redeemable points for your participation. The more points you accumulate, the more stuff you can buy. Not sure whether this will work as a stand-alone application/concept, but could certainly see this applied in a rewards program under a major brand (e.g., Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program).

Twitter
Interesting ideas on why Gen Y may not “get” Twitter.

Public relations social web tactics
Long list of new products and services pitched to a Kentucky-based director of social media (two of the brands he reps: Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek bourbons). Very interesting list of social media “newness” and implicit insight into public relations 2.0 tactics.

Interviews with semantic search pioneers
Summary of interviews with key semantic web players from Google, Ask, Hakia, Microsoft, Yahoo, and True Knowledge. Some topics: shift from “popularity” based search results to “credibility” based search results.