Disqus - Latest Comments for alexiskold

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

alexiskold — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:25:21 -0000

I am glad we are at least willing to re-visit paid content, I think this is the simplest model, that has worked for a century.

We all pay for quality stuff and quality content is still scarce, it's the subpar content that is abundand.

I hope we converge on the world where major newspapers are syndicating best relevant bloggers and have a model where they are able to pay them and at the same time, they pay their own journalists.

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

alexiskold — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:20:45 -0000

Jeff,

my take is that the only way local papers can compete is by generating highly relevant, high quality local content. This content is as scarce as any other content (I am not talking about crap, but quality content).

Why wouldn't you want to pay for that?

I think the model holds, what does not hold is scale, but really the scale was never the same for local newspapers.

I think Fred is right, and at the very least, this model needs to be explored.

Re: louisgray.com: There Are Two Phones In this World: iPhone and Not iPhone

alexiskold — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:05:11 -0000

So true. iPhone is the best gadget I've ever used. I love it in an unhealthy way. And I am not a gadget person.

Re: The need for an open library of semantic terms

alexiskold — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:42:16 -0000

Hi Charlie,

This is good conversation on important topic. A couple of things:

- There is a question of what exactly is being annotated. Several formats address the issue in a different way. AB Meta is focused only pages that are about things. RDFa and other semantic standards offer a way to embed semantic meta data into pages. So do microformats but in a more limiting way using CSS classes. Andraz from Zemanta and a few other folks have been working on semantic tagging.

All of the above refers to publisher annotating the pages.

At AdaptiveBlue we believe that getting publishers to annotate is not easy, because of the lack of direct benefit to them. This is why we developed technology that recognizes stuff in pages in a top-down (algorithmic) way.

Regardless, whether the page is annotated by the publisher or content is recognized the next question is what do tools do with this information?

StockTweets wants to link to their site, but another stock service might want to link elsewhere. The point is that given the reconized context there is a set of actions that makes sense. Further, different actions are interesting to different users. For example, you might want to go to Yahoo! Finance for Stocks and I might want to go to Google Finance.

Tools like Glue and now Ubiquity from Firefox address this problem, by offering a set of contextual links based on the content that the user is interacting with.

To sum up, we need to have a common way of annotating different types information in pages or extracting existing infiormation out of the pages and then providing a set of contextual behaviors based on that content.

At AdaptiveBlue we have a framework, which is extensible and flexible and supports the following:
- Defining types of concepts (for example, you could define a Job Posting)
- Ability to recognize these concepts around the web
- Ability to define a set of contextual actions around these concepts.

We would be very happy to kick off the conversation about opening up all of these and incorporating things like Ubiquity.

Alex

Re: A Time Without Exits

alexiskold — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:09:20 -0000

Yeah, its def not simple. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure that was solid in the past is now in question. I am hoping that we are evolved and smart enough to quickly adapt new laws and regulations that makes sense and actually in modern times.

Re: A much happier half-marathon

alexiskold — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:43:20 -0000

Thats awesome, you rock! :)

Re: Contextual Browsing: Music

alexiskold — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:51:03 -0000

Fraser,

I do not remember when was the last time that I was so excited about discovering new music. I buy a lot of it via iTunes at least once in a couple of weeks and I pick stuff that I really like from the stream of NEW.

But the 4 songs that I bought from the last album I listen to over and over again. There are magical bits about them that I can't pin point, but I love them.

Re: A Conversation About Context

alexiskold — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:24:42 -0000

Good thoughts, as always, Fraser :)

I have two distinct points about this

1) Its not really about what is the right way. Increasingly it is more about what makes people happy. People are going to consume information in heterogenous, odd ways that make them happy.

2) The idea of pulling different conversations into 1 place is a solid one. In programming there is a concept of Model-View pattern, where a model is an underlying data set and the view is one way for looking at the data. We have evolved to the point where distributed conversation on the web is the model, and each of us is looking for an individual view - a lens, or perspective through which to view it.

We need aggregators that aggregate and let us seamlessly emit thoughts back that end up at the right places across the web. The problem? Its hard to do technically and there is little incentive because fundamentally every business wants to be the owner of the bits.

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:16:02 -0000

This is not a proprietary fork. Simply, this is light-weight format that has
a chance to be used by people.

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:13:43 -0000

Hi,

We said that either dc.creator or book.author is supported. Frankly, people find book.author much more simple and understandable compare to dc.creator when talking about books. The language matters. We already have specific semantics and instead of re-inventing it with commonly shared obscure terms, we should use concepts that we use in our everyday life. this will make publishers more amicable to publish meta data.

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:11:45 -0000

Hi there,

While meta tags are indeed 1-1 we have plans to expand this into microformats, and then you will be able to express more than one thing per page.

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:10:54 -0000

Hi Andy,

Can you please point out what specifically in Dublin Core exist to support basic everyday things? Also, the book.author or wine.winery format is meant to exactly extend things in the right way.

Re: The Week That Was

alexiskold — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:19:04 -0000

Wow, Ryan's widget rocks!!

Re: Thank You

alexiskold — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:33:55 -0000

Just want to add my 2cents on this - the party rocked in so many ways! There was this great vibe and smooth tune to the whole long evening. What a wonderful way to make us feel welcome as a company. We have so much good will and friends around us! Thank you, this helps us succeed.

Re: Party Pictures

alexiskold — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:32:07 -0000

Andy, wow! These are amazing. Thank you for taking them. My favorite view shot is the bottom one.

Re: What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

alexiskold — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:37:14 -0000

A momentum is the signal to buy or sell, but it is not an indicator of overall quality. Absolute standing is better at that.

Re: What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

alexiskold — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:26:32 -0000

Here is a simple one - make a decision for me, just tell me - watch this movie. And if you are right all the time, then I love ya. But you know how recommendation engines pan out...

Re: What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

alexiskold — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:19:20 -0000

Hey Fraser,

This is an awesome post! The relative number is certainly important - velocity. But you can't dismiss the absolute number. The question needs to be asked in the context of what you are trying to figure out? More useful to who?

What is interesting is that trend information is much more sophisticated than a lot of people would care about, cause it is a derivative. In your example, the whole card game was based on that and so it made sense, but for example in Netflix case, absolute place is simple info and the ones that you are mentioning are quite complex.

Note that in case of music charts for the example, there is that time information you are mentioning, but the trick is that Top of the chart - so absolute is fixed.

To me this is the key - there is only 1 metric that people can focus on, not many and sometimes it is relative, sometimes it is absolute.

Re: AB Meta

alexiskold — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:54:35 -0000

Hey Ewan,

As it turns out not a lot of people incentivised by these because you can't make a lot of money unless your blog is highly trafficed or unless you are on many blogs, like we are.

In terms of handling stuff via PayPal - that would be hard for us to do because then we need a lot of tracking infrastructure like LinkShare, etc. We are just a connector or a pipe right now.

Re: AB Meta

alexiskold — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:28:00 -0000

Hi Ewan, we already support a whole bunch of affiliate programs.

Re: AB Meta

alexiskold — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:04:13 -0000

How do you declare that a page contains a book using these two standard formats? Can you show us an example?

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:40:30 -0000

Our technologies already recognize content in many pages using various algorithms. We are planning plugins to make AB Meta easier, but we can't recognize content precisely in an arbitrary page.

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:42:01 -0000

Hi Andy,

We did leverage Dublin Core, did you have the chance to look at the actual spec? http://www.adaptiveblue.com/abmeta.html#ABMetaSpec

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:16:29 -0000

Hey Adam,

Lets not force things down people's throats - we are civilized here. Lets evolve the set of standards that works.

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

alexiskold — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:10:44 -0000

@Eippit lol, yes, it is quite different. The microformats are a) inside the page b) current do not have support for the same concepts as we specified in AB Meta.