AXONomics

In the context of marketing and advertising, we’ve heard more during the last year or so, in reference to the semantic web and semantic technology.  What does Semantic Advertising really mean?  One interpretation - the one we’re not talking about here - is the selling of something by calling it semantic, which some have done in order to ride momentum (which I call “meme-entum”) of the space to sell something based on a loose association with the concept of “meaning” or “intent”.  So what are we talking about?

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The strategy in the space has long been driven by word association, and more and more-so on an automated basis.  At a time, placement was done on an entirely manual basis - and automation of keyword matching increasingly became the basis for new business models.  That is, after all, the basis of what we now think of as contextual advertising - the alignment of what the user is looking for with the other things they encounter on the page.

So to put it simply:  What is it that is new and different?  What is it about the inner workings of an advertising mechanism that makes an offering semantic or not.  What are the drivers and opportunities around these differences?  What is real?  These are some of the things we’re looking to learn about in detail at the panel discussion that I’ve been helping to organize for Internet Week in New York - the title of which is Semantic Advertising.We’ll leave it to our moderators to dig into the nuts and bolts of the subject with the experts that have been gathered.  Going into the discussion though, here are some of the questions I’m thinking about:

• Since keyword matching is, well,  keyword matching: what are the main differences between straight-up contextual advertising that uses keyword lookups relative to its semantic brethren?
• Does the addition of keyword frequency, and therefore the statistical analysis of the text, make the matching on a ranking basis qualify as semantic?
• Going beyond simply enhancing alignment, predicated upon statistical assumptions, is it the further use of NLP to not just extract concepts to be matched, but to determine the intent by the terms used - to better tune matches when words have multiple potential meanings?  Many of us have encountered the unintentionally matched ads - which can be disastrous for a brand.  What can really be done now, and how?
• Further on the NLP side, there is the potential for sentiment detection - so even when the correct meaning of a term is understood, determining whether its use is appropriate for matching would be based on the positive or negative connotation of its use (think here in terms of whether you would want your airline advertised next to a story about an aviation mishap, for example).
• Going at the question from the “semantic-web” side, is embedding (and detection of) metadata on the page just a different flavor of Semantic Advertising - or should we be calling that Semantic Web Advertising instead?  This seems less prone to interpretation errors, but the approach relies upon metadata which is largely not yet there.  (Because of the markup related aspects of this point, I wanted to call this post “Mark(up)eting and (RDF)ertising”, but was talked out of doing so).
• Is there a difference in strategy and/or scalability when considering whether a semantic approach is more viable when done within the search process, as opposed to on the content of the page being viewed?
• If ads to be served are stored in semantically compliant architecture, does that itself provide any advantages for the service provider?  And would doing so give rise to the service being referred to as Semantic Advertising?  Does this even enter into the eqaution at this point?
• Would increases in the amount of embedded metadata shift the balance of systematically enhanced ad selection and presentation of sponsored content - from one web-interaction phase to another?

I’m looking forward to the panel - to open my mind regarding these and other factors that come into play - and what elements and trends will be necessary for the viability of the various possible directions here.

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The potential impact on the economy from removing burdens around health care should not be underestimated as a means of stimulus.  For many, fixing the system could mean enormous savings, if not just improved quality of life and perhaps care.

The solution to our health care situation goes beyond regulation; it lies in changing the focus.  The intention should be about “well-being”, and all measurement and compensation for parties to system of “well being” should be driven by the success of the program.  The parties include not just the doctors, but all those engaged in the health care processes: the medical insurance companies, malpractice insurers, the pharma and device companies, and extending all the way to those providing therapy and fitness services.

Differing time horizons need to be aligned.  Insurers may currently find it beneficial to make decisions based on short-term exposure, regardless of potential longer-term costs that could result from those decisions.  After all, it isn’t likely the patient will still be with the same insurer when the longer-term result is encountered.  The relationship (or at least the impact of it) needs to be made permanent.

Medical and life insurance should be integrated so that the insurers’ interest in sustaining you is aligned with their interest in maintaining you.  The medical portion of premiums should be driven in part by your relative wellness (not just relative to where you should be, but to where you’ve been) and in part by the risks you take and the choices you make about your wellness.  Participation in activities that are shown to improve health and reduce risks should be rewarded, while costs should be attached to lack of participation and to risky activity.

Doctors who participate in this wellness driven system would benefit from streamlined  administrative processes, not having to process and re-process while fighting for payment.  For their participation, they will also have access to more reasonable malpractice coverage.  Beyond the direct impact on the medical process, these changes alone should make it attractive again to pursue careers in medicine.

Compensation under this plan would be based, in part, on relative wellness achieved – the wellness performance of those under their care.  This is in contrast to payment based on Relative Value Units, which is similar to the way your auto mechanic gets paid.  Objectives of insurers too need to be redefined to be driven by wellness in this way too – particularly at the outset of the plan.  Over time, as the balance of costs shift as a result of preventive care generating longer term savings, artificial incentives should become less economically important for proper motivation.  Treatments will be driven toward solving problems rather than addressing symptoms, and away from allowing perpetual treatment and profit from such.

There are many aspects beyond these to be considered, but only through  review of the full spectrum of the roles in this dynamic, with consideration as to how to achieve some of the objectives for each - and with agreement as to what problem(s) we’re trying to solve, can interests be aligned - not just on a particular purpose, but with a long view.

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Image via WikipediaAs an update related to my earlier post on the Oregon idea for a mileage tax in place of the gasoline tax:  Here’s a case where the model of cost-per-mile could actually make sense - but not as a road-maintenance related tax.  Instead, this furthers the green and energy independence aspects that the mileage tax would discourage.  In this case, the cost per-mile concept underlies a quicker shift by consumers to electric vehicles.  Better Place is working on transforming the auto market to work more like the communications industry, where the consumer pays for service/minutes - in this case miles.  In doing so, it looks to shift a major expense factor of EVs to being acquired over time - not altogether different from the way we buy fuel for our gas powered cars over time - not all at once.  (I’m calling the auto industry under this scenario the “commutications industry.”)

In addition to looking to make charging ports ubiquitous, for topping-off the battery whenever parked, the concept  involves battery swapping stations, whereby drivers would pull in when they need a fill-up, and rather than charging the battery that is in their car, a hot one would be swapped in on the fly - in the time that it would take for an ordinary gas fill-up.  The batteries in this case would not be owned by the consumer, but would be part of the subscription or service plan.

Circling back to a point that I made in the earlier post - different cars have different levels of economy/efficiency - so owners of lower economy cars should bear some added cost, beyond just per-mile.  This can’t just be a matter of how much juice is used, since some batteries will have better retention / performance - and these being the property of the company… (well, you get the point).

Service can manifest in a range of ways - from people getting the service for a car they themselves purchase, to cars being provided as part of the service (much like a free phone provided under a phone service plan).  Interestingly, Better Place is also pushing governments to require participants in this market to comply with standards - so from the beginning, there won’t be competing standards (e.g. HD vs Blu-ray) which could delay our reaching energy independence by slowing adoption while people wait to see which standard would take.

None of this solves Oregon’s road maintenance revenue issue.  In fact it underscores the problem.  Increasing the gas tax, though, would keep the pedal to the metal (so to speak) in driving (pun intended) out gas engines there.  If the Better Place service providers do master mileage metering however,  that could address the technical issues behind the proposed tax, and serve as a substitute once the gas guzzlers are all gone.

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I’m not generally one to comment on political matters (ok, I never do, other than this this month, for some reason) at least not for political purposes.  The linkage here to my typical areas of discussion should soon be readily aparrent.  Feel free to comment or email me if not, and I’d be glad to elaborate.

We are at an amazing point in history - and not just because Barack Obama is about to become the first African American president.  He is, thanks to his charisma, drive, eloquence, perspective… representative of the transition point we’ve reached.  This period of change has been brewing since 2000, and was set in motion in earnest in 2004.  His success in getting to this point has been both a catalyst for, and the result of, Americans being ready for what Obama has called “The Change We Need”.

This change is about transcendence, repair, and to borrow from the technical lexicon - interoperability - domestically and internationally, philosophically, infrastructurally.  Not to imply that there aren’t still dark days ahead, but we’ve already seen movement across party and racial lines, and participation, if not enthusiasm among the previously non-voting or heretofore politically and/or socially indifferent (- the numb or perhaps even the resigned or capitulated).

In these economic times, and while the world’s perception of the U.S. is at a low, we could ask for nothing greater than the combination of an energized and informed nation with an administration tuned to leveraging and guiding this  enthusiasm - to rebuild.  Interoperability - between the government and the people, between departments, programs, institutions - connecting the moving parts necessary - is the technology of this new era, to make this change work.

Image via WikipediaLast week, I read a story about an idea being considered in Oregon — to move from a gas tax to a mileage tax, to offset losses in road repair revenue as a result of there being more cars with better fuel economy.  As Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, put it:   As cars burn less fuel, “the gas tax isn’t going to fill the bill“.

Many may think this seems like an interesting idea, and that even if I did live in Oregon, it wouldn’t impact me very much.    Those of you who are of the value network persuasion will likely recognize, right away, the counterproductivity this move would represent.  For me, this idea makes little “cents” (pun intended).

Here we are pushing “green”, and acting as if we recognize the impact we’ve had on our environment.  And along comes a complicated and expensive approach that seems to perpetuate what I call “long-term short-sightedness”.

Sure, such a tax could serve to counter the revenues being lost as a result of cars having better fuel economy - but at the cost of creating a disincentive to  progress and participation we’ve made on the environmental front?

Perhaps not the best alternative, but simply increasing the overall fuel tax, rather than a system that offsets an incentive to “do your part” (at least the part of increased economy), seems a better way to attack the problem - assuming that the problem is simply the reduced revenue.

Another alternative, related to suggestions that the real tartet here is congestion, or at least congestion at certain times of the day, would be to implement tolls - or an EZPass type system for an automated approach.  This would “tax” the road use at issue and could be a more efficient approach from an infrastructure standpoint - and one that doesn’t deter what some people are doing to reduce costs/emissions.

Sure, I’m an outsider in this particular case (by about 2,750 miles), and yes, I’ve likely oversimplified the situation, but in addressing new problems, doesn’t it make the most sense to consider all the moving parts and various objectives that we’re trying to satisfy with our actions?

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Image by buschap via FlickrEvery now and again, you find yourself doing something that, when considered in the context of other parts of your life, can reveal interesting things about yourself or people in general.  I drew one such parallel after spending a weekend with my family hurtling through the air at Hershey Park.

For those of you who have never been there, it has 11 roller coasters - and if you’re not into them, well, you’re going to be standing around a lot waiting for your kids to come back saying “that was great”, “let’s do it again”, or something about a snack.  I’ve done lots of things that some would consider daring - including rock and ice climbing, and flying in a glider, sea kayaking, whitewater rafting… but I’ve just never been one for rides that are supposed to give you near-death experiences, because frankly, I don’t generally like feeling that close to “the edge”.

Since my wife and kids were so gleeful following each of their wild rides - especially Farenheight (pictured above) and Storm Runner, with their loops, corkscrews, and in the case of the latter, acceleration from 0 to 70 in 2 seconds - I was compelled to understand their sense of the differences from one ride to another - and how each impacted their senses.

In the back of my mind, I think I was secretly trying to ascertain which of the elements I could personally have handled - given that each person has a different sense of what “scary” is, and you cannot just rely on someone saying “it wasn’t so bad” or “you could handle that”.  Key factors which weigh differently by individual include: height, speed, drops (number, length, steepness), banks, roughness, re-direction and mis-direction… (among surely many more categorizations of the coaster-phile).

On the “handle-it” scale, I had already managed Lightning Racer, Wildcat, and Comet, and had dipped my toe into the “beyond” with SuperDooperLooper (and a few others) - and their death defying drops and loops.  To “push my research”, I finally succumbed to the pleas of my family, and (somehow) joined them on Great Bear, which added “hanging from the rail”, and “corkscrews” to my repertoire.

At the end of Great Bear though - which, by the way, I survived - I realized that I had only managed to do so by staring at a bolt - which attached the seat in front of me to the chassis holding the seats on the rails, from which we were hanging.below - for the entire ride.  A friend commented days later that the only way to do a ride like that is to give yourself over to the ride.  I fear (among obvious other things) that I did not do this.  While I can say to my 10-year-old, who finally stopped calling me a sissy,  that “I did it”, I cannot say that I experienced all it had to offer - but I survived.

The parallel I alluded to above is not related to the two tracks on each coaster - but to life in general - work, activities, people, relationships…  If you give yourself over to these experiences, you can get out of them all they have to offer, and help others do the same.   This too reminds me of the same parallel that went on in the back of my mind following a whitewater kayaking trip in the winter of 1978-79, during which a professor said to me “we need to make sure we’re moving faster than the water if we have any intentions about steering”.

If you hang on, fixing your gaze on a bolt to simply survive, you’re going to get tossed around and may not enjoy the “ride”.  In the case of the Great Bear, the truth is that the ride may never get another chance to show me its stuff.

Afterthoughts: How does this relate to some of the other things I’ve written about here?  On one hand, it isn’t supposed to.  On the other hand, it informally dives into the formalization of experience - the elements of things - in this case, the taxonomy of thrill.  I appear to have stumbled into an area known as thrill research - but I think I may leave well enough alone.

Coinage du jour: “parallel-0-gram” - a message in which a comparison or parallel is drawn or relayed.

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As a guy who loves to do things in spreadsheets, often using lookup-functions, pivot-tables and auto-filter to integrate data and get to what I need, I still don’t consider myself to be particularly high on the technical curve.  By this, I mean that I’m comfortable working up to my elbows in the data - but I leave abstracting it out into enterprise systems to the “IT folks”.

Considering the semantic spreadsheet capabilities described here on this ReadWriteWeb post, and the related comments, I think the real value lies not so much with the spreadsheet user (which seem to be the assumed target), but with the enterprises for which the spreadsheet-ers (if that’s a word) are working.

As was noted in the post and comments, people who aren’t capable of leveraging the serious capabilities of Excel itself won’t likely be able to navigate the system described here.  At the same time, those who can could likely achieve what they need through Excel functionality.  More skill than that, and you’re talking about “real IT people” who could perform the work in databases.

The value proposition seems more centered around enterprises being able to allow their “non-technical” people to work in environments they can easily handle (i.e. spreadsheets), while the enterprise can reap the benefit of the collective work of the spreadsheet-ers by using the semantic capabilities to integrate the disparate datasets of their forces.

Perhaps there are other, stronger methods to accomplish this without requiring work forces to swim in less friendly waters than spreadsheets, but I leave that to the “more technically inclined”.

Image via WikipediaWacky looking title.  Not perfect - but the point is to do a little analysis of Value Network Analysis.  There’s a good Aleksola post up, relating to the topic - which VN Group(ie) John Maloney shared with the list today.

The post explains VNA as social and technical resources being used together (in relation to one another) to create value - whether intellectual, physical, or otherwise.  It distinguishes between in- and out-facing networks, but emphasizes that “Value is created through exchange and the relationships between roles”, over systems in place to enable those interactions.

While it may seem that VNA is about mapping the pathways of social or organizational interaction, such mapping only provides a framework for analysis and discovery - revealing pathways for value.

The actual value created is through the meeting of needs of various parties to transactions or engagement situations.  In this way, I think of VNA is a way to consider how the system dynamics of engagement between parties facilitates a kind of currency translation and barter - enabling each to bring to the table something that may (perhaps in combination with something brought by someone else) satisfy the needs of another - and similarly may have their own needs indirectly met.

via Flickr

UPDATE to my 7/29 post on the use of semantic technology in finance:

Talis has posted issue 3 of Nodalities, which contains the full full article on the subject.

Image by matsugoro via FlickrI talk a lot about the most interesting parts of life being where things connect - where seemingly distinct topics run into each other.  Not so much that they abut, but in their doing so, they reveal or allow tendrils of overlapping elements to lap out to one another.

This past weekend, I filled-in on a team that was running 92 miles across the state of New Jersey, in the 13th annual River to Sea Relay.  The day was the embodiment of connecting:

• Each 7-person team came together through any number of connective threads - around family, work, geography, life, death, marriage… (one team was called “Runaway Bride” - I guess this was their idea of a bachelorette party).  We were the “Village Idiots”, and while we could easily have passed for the sister team to one called “Beauty and the Beasts” (we had plural of the former and singular of the latter) I think our name served us well.
• Each team handed off to their next runner with a swipe of the hand or high five (or waive across a busy road) - connecting step-by-step, and hand-off by hand-off from the western border of the state, on the Delaware river - to the beach on the eastern side of the state.
• Every runner ran two of the 14 legs that comprised the course - getting back out there after having a few hours to stiffen up on their way to their second leg, while chasing and supporting their teammates.  Since most of us don’t run twice in one day, each person connecting their two runs provided a unique opportunity to see how it feels and to realize that you can in fact do it.
• A hundred separate teams came together around one “basic” objective (and many unique ones), and greeted each other with competitive spirit and supportive friendliness.
• At interchanges, people from different teams discovered they knew each other through someone else, had gone to college together, had worked at the same place, that their daughters are in the same singing group at college - that they share another common element (and a swig of water, thank you, or directions at a turn…) besides just being a nutty runner/adventure seeker.

When you take a trip like this, as I did with these six women (yes, my wife knew - in fact she was one of them) who made up the rest of my team - a 29 hour adventure, including a road-trip, hotel stay, dinner out, sleepless night coupled with a really early morning, countless switching back and forth between chase cars, 14 back-to-back legs of running with all the interchanges and support encounters, a finish at the beach, something to re-nourish yourself at the end, and the trip home - you discover you’ve gained, (groaned), learned, (ached), enjoyed (maybe griped).  I won’t repeat what I heard one runner say, because you get to say things out there knowing that they won’t be repeated - “honor among nut-jobs” and all.

Everyone worked hard - really hard, dealing with the heat, sun, each other, silence (course rules prohibited use of music players), rain (on two legs, the sky opened up), lightning…  As the race director summarized, “Despite a short howling storm that raced through central Jersey at around 12:30pm ( thunder, lightning and ferocious rain ) for about 20 minutes,100 stalwart teams-of-seven successfully navigated [the] 92 mile course from Milford on the Delaware River to Manasquan at the Atlantic Ocean. Teams started [on a staggered basis] from 6:00am to 10:15am…”.  The fastest team (not ours) was going at a clip of 5:18 per mile!  Teams took anywhere from eight- to fifteen hours to finish the course.

People connected - with each other, with each others’ ideals, with group and individual goals, one border to another - town-by-town and county-to-county - even connecting with elements of yourself along the way.