Artiklz Blog

What is Artiklz Doing…

Well here it is … we’ve made a few tweaks to the platform that have resulted in a performance boost to how our User Generated Content and Conversaton (UGC2) search engine will now return its search and display of the results. First, our indexing of the millions of near-time UGC2 that is acquired by our webcrawlers and scripts is immediately available for searching. This ensures that your search results are as current as machine-possible. While the default timeline search parameter is set to a 90 day look-back period, the user can always go into the advance search and set this parameter to as far back as 4 years into history or any date range as desired.

Second, we’ve implemented a standard form factor to the Artiklz search results. Rather than presenting the voluminuous amount of content that is available with each article of UGC2, our users wanted more of a snapshot of the returned data. There’s also the Tag Cloud to help “filter” through all the noise so play with it and shoot us your thoughts. So, there it is on-demand by demand. For added measure here’s a quick run I did for one of our favorite tech blogs. Feel free to change the sorting based on your preference for the result display.

Enjoy!

John

UGC Search Engine Refinement

Well, it’s been almost 45 days since our initial launch out of private beta.  While the road to this point has been a bit rocky, Team Artiklz has learned a lot and have been working aggressively to resolve some of the usability challenges identified over the past few months from private to public beta.

Some of our users shared with us that the response times for presenting the search results were very slow. We certainly understand the reasons behind our users bringing this to our attention. However, what isn’t known to the typical user of a search platform such as Artiklz is that we’ve amassed such a significant amount of rich data and diverse content in our database for users to access, which in turn creates a large challenge with respect to the indexing of this data due to the heterogeneous sources of content and the nonstandard formats in which they are published.

Unlike most blog or social media search engines, Artiklz applies a highly sophisticated algorithm to create threaded comment or conversation structures. This helps users to better conceptualize what is happening in a conversation string as opposed to the more typical fragmented results that are returned by other “mashup”-based search platforms.

In comparison to a Google or Ask.com type of search, where these traditional search engines are designed to index reference links to particular websites that they have crawled, hence, the data and content is not as intensive to analyze nor return to the user’s screen. Because of this more limited type of indexing, these engines are capable of returning results in milli-seconds, a feat nearly impossible for true UGC-based search engines that provide internal support for threaded comments and/or create algorithms to generate a threaded conversation structure when one doesn’t exist (note: these tasks require millions of computuations to occur).

Having said all that, Team Artiklz nonetheless continues to strive for a better user experience regardless of the technical challenges. We’ve been toiling with a number of solutions to address the problem and feel highly confident with what we will be introducing in a few short days.

John

Artiklz Goes Public with Beta

Greetings everyone,

After many months of hard work by the team, we have finally made it out of the starting gates. It’s been an exciting process observing and participating in the development of the many facets that went into the construction of the Artiklz service. The team spent a significant amount of time on the road meeting and greeting with folks from all walks of life to share the Artiklz story. All this led to the culmination of our launch this past week.

Bear in mind, this is our initial beta and we will be working very aggressively over the next several weeks and months to incorporate the feedback and suggestions of the many users of the private beta into features and functions that we can roll out ASAP!

Please visit the Artiklz conversation search engine and give it a spin. And let us know what else we can do to improve your user experience — we’re always interested in hearing what we can do better for our users!

Platform Personalization: Video and Audio Preferences, Widgets, Search, Information & Commerce

I was recently invited to participate on a panel to share my insights and perspective on the topic above. With me were some very experienced folks that covered a wide cross-section of the Web 2.0 space. I’ve included their names below for reference.

Kristin McDonnell, CEO, LimeLife Inc.
Sudhin Shahani, CEO, Musicane
Terence Swee, founder & Chief Executive Officer, muvee
Patrick Koppula, CEO, ffwd
Ivan Todorov, CEO, CTO and co-founder, BLITZ
Mark Shedletsky, Founder & CEO, BlueHaze
Sarah Szalavitz, co-founder, 7 Robot, Moderator

Some of the interesting areas that ended up being heavily discussed centered around (1) introducing scalability on the delivery side of a platform versus creating uniqueness or a custom experience for each user, (2) monetizing traffic on the social networks, and (3) cross-cultural referencing when building out Web 2.0 business models.

On scalability versus personalization, Mark Shedletsky provided examples of how various platforms address this by offering massive amounts of “classes” or “categories” of user types which in turn get clustered into category groups. This then helps the platform operator to provide or deliver a unique user experience at the group level and thereby scaling. Other examples offered by Patrick Koppula focused on how to create a highly configurable offering that ultimately, would enable n-permutations on a group of ‘uniques’ and from there being able to more massively scale the platform to deliver that personalized experience.

The group then transitioned into the issues around why social networks weren’t generating the levels of revenue penetration that was earlier anticipated. The so-called “build it and they will come” philosophy. One of the key areas identified by myself and shared with the panel and the audience was the absence or lack of micro-payment services. This hit a cord with the audience as many didn’t quite comprehend the crux of the issue of where the friction has been. It was almost like someone opened the windows to the conference room and a fresh breeze blew in. The audience engaged and we explored the issues surrounding micro-payments and what was needed vis-à-vis infrastructure to enable it and what it meant to the industry once available. I cited examples of what micropayments has done for Europe and Asian Web 2.0 operators. The consensus, there was still a lot of work to be done in this area for North America to realize the full potential.

Interestingly, the panel was made up of a very diverse group of executives, from company business models, to gender, to geography, which brings me to the next area of discussion – cross cultural referencing. I had brought up that in my travels to Asia I had been very fortunate to sit and meet with many CEOs of the leading internet businesses in that region. We shared many things, but the one that resonated most was the value in understanding the cultural differences that underlie the business models of these Asian companies. They had their Facebook and Myspace equivalents, they had their Googles and Ebays, and so on and so on. But what made these businesses more successful than their global juggernaut competitors from the west was that they knew their local markets and what was needing to be tweaked in the offerings to make them acceptable and thereby successful in their respective markets. Likewise, the same can be said for North America. There are significant opportunities for US-based companies to borrow ideas in practice today in Asia and Europe and see how they can be tweaked for a stateside offering. This sentiment was echoed by Terence Swee who came all the way from Singapore to explore this business case further. We wish him the best of luck with his venture.

ZDNet Covers Artiklz at Mashable Monthly

Our friend Andrew Mager “League” covers the Mashable Monthly event… Here he is with his first write-up on Artiklz and a few of the other participants. Thanks Andrew and we look forward to future reviews from you and the folks over at CBS Interactive!

Vator.tv On Aggregated Perspectives…

“There’s no question about it. Comments do more to enhance than take away from an article” as excerpted from VatorNews’ Bambi Francisco’s interview with Mike Marquez and Ezra Roizen (A look at aggregated perspectives) on June 1, 2008. This interview hits home for the folks at Artiklz as comments in the blogging and social media space converge to become one stream of conversation across the extended Internet. Since the introduction of commenting capabilities to blogging platforms and websites, there has been much dislocation and fragmentation of comments on the web. This has resulted in the lack of dynamic conversations from igniting into full-fledged conversations, where ideas and views are exchanged. My personal take on a good blogging platform is one where the publisher’s post act as a moderator or catalyst and the readers of the blog or website are participants in a panel. The real value of the blog or website then becomes how effective the moderator or the platform is at creating an environment where they promote these exchanges and hence the continuity of conversations. Unfortunately, this is where the current breakdown occurs. Enter Artiklz, a platform to “disaggregate” (to borrow Mike Marquez’ buzz word) and bring relevance and context to the comments being made and thereby creating a catalyst to drive conversation. I’ve provided a demo link to our initial alpha widget for publishers/bloggers to try out. Give it a whirl and let us know your feedback.

Alpha News Release

Hot off the PRWeb press machine…

PRWeb is pleased to report your press release titled, Artiklz Announces Alpha Launch, was successfully distributed via our Online Visibility Engine on September 23, 2008 and is now available at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1369024.htm. Feel free to share this link with others who may be interested in your news announcement.

Subscribe to our Artiklz feed and we’ll keep you posted on all of our activities.

Artiklz @ BlogWorld 2008

Greetings to our partners and friends in the blogspace. This past week me and our platform architect, Nikolay, flew out to Las Vegas to attend our first BlogWorld conference. Being new to this particular space we didn’t really have much in the way of expectations. What we wanted to do was to meet and greet with prospective partners, and most importantly, our valued blogger constituents.

BlogWorld Sponsors

Being Artiklz’s greatest fan and evangelist, I quickly met with as many bloggers as possible to share the exciting story of Artiklz and its value proposition. Well, not to my surprise, it didn’t take much for people to quickly start nodding their heads up and down. The feeling was phenomenal. It became pretty unequivocal that the audience clearly understood what Artiklz was all about and how it would bring value to their individual blogs — both as a blog owner and for the blog’s readership.

We met with very specialized blog networks spanning from military, religion, to sports and have developed what looks to be the impetus for a very bright and strong relationship. One that will incorporate and utilize our conversation and comment aggregation widget to bring their readership 360 degree visibility of conversations around a posting or article. We look forward to working with these networks to further their respective members’ relationship with the blog network and continue to drive further readership and greater stickiness to their blogs.

Pre-alpha Debut of Artiklz Widget

Well, folks my last posting was on the tulip craze that took Europe by storm during the 16th century and the more recent dotcom bust/boom cycle. Now, it would appear that the next market craze is the Web 2.0 space and although my earlier piece sounded rather pessimistic on the market in reality if we took a moment to reflect on the subsequent events that followed these crazes we would note that they resulted in some positive outcomes. For example, if we look at the legacy of the dotcom era and the number of major internet properties that are now thriving in the marketplace — leaders like Google, Expedia, and Amazon just to name a few, have redefined the old markets with new business models that leverage the efficiencies and distribution capabilities of the internet. These companies have managed to integrate themselves seamlessly into our daily lives.

This leads me to the Web 2.0 posting from earlier this week. Yes, the market is flooded with companies founded on shoestring budgets all purportedly looking to solve a problem in a rapidly growing, yet not quite defined space. At the end of the day, when we fast forward several years from now there will emerge several players who have helped to usher in new markets and new business models that are not so clear to the masses today. They will have seamlessly integrated their services into our contemporary lifestyles — whether that’s on our social networks or our local bar…

Artiklz is focused on being one of those players… with the emergence of so much dynamic User Generated Content (UGC) on the internet today the market is becoming very dislocated with respect to tracking and monitoring UGCs. Artiklz is making its foray into this emerging demand space with the introduction of its pre-alpha widget. Our product management team is clearly focused on the end game so over the course of the next few months we’ll be introducing many new features to the platform which we believe will be of great interest to the Web 2.0 community and beyond!

Stay tuned.

Ciao

The Tulip Craze of Web 2.0

Remember when the Dutch and the rest of the European markets went stir crazy over those wonderful looking petal of the multi-color variety?

Many items of popular culture follow the same trajectory as the tulip craze, although on a smaller scale. Baseball cards, for example, went through a period in which they could fetch great sums — mostly due to speculation on the part of people who saw the potential for great profit — and ultimately crashed such that cards once worth thousands of dollars became worth little more than the paper they were printed on. Beanie Babies, Elmo toys, and innumerable other children’s toys and collectibles also serve as recent examples of modern tulip crazes.

Then there was dotcom frenzy of the late 90’s early 2000. Every idea that floated across on a napkin was worth at least $5M to start and ultimately would be worth Google-sized dollars, and here we are again… Web 2.0 frenzy… what is driving this mad rush to mine the market for the next social media darling? And is this really a sustainable market model or are we just too busy smelling the tulips again…?