Automated Content Generation

While there are still plenty of social media skeptics out there, one group of hardnosed pragmatists -- the U.S. military -- appears to be convinced that social media has considerable potential for organizing popular movements. And it makes them nervous.

Data sources will include "linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, narrative structure analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining," as well as "pattern detection and cultural narratives" and "inducing identities" (a vague but creepy-sounding maneuver). On the active side, the array of tools for responding and shaping sentiment will include "modeling communities," "automated content generation," "bots in social media," and crowd-sourcing.

It sounds like the DARPA project's writ is pretty wide-ranging: I'm guessing it would include not just psychological warfare initiatives mounted by hostile regimes, but also protest movements of the sort which brought down Hosni Mubarak's government in Egypt. In fact, social media has already played a role in actual armed conflict, for example as a recruiting platform for insurgents in Iraq, who have posted numerous videos of operations against American, British, and native troops. In 2006 Audrey Kurth Kronin, a scholar with the U.S. War College, wrote an essay titled "Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levee en Masse," warning that terrorists and other hostile groups were adopting social media to organize armed resistance.

Pentagon Will Track Social Media Movements, Memes - Mediapost.com

U.S. Sen. John McCain doesn't find the taxpayer-financed research funny for another reason. The Arizona Republican put the so-called "machine-generated humor" project at No. 36 on his list of the top 100 Most Wasteful Stimulus Projects.

Hammond says the project's title, "Computational Creativity: Building a Model of Machine-Generated Humor," gave the the artificial intelligence research effort a bad rap.

They're working to create programs that mimic how people think when searching for information to create original, sometimes funny, content. The goal is to teach a computer to find information based on what you are working on, where you are located and what you're reading, among other things, without even having to ask for it. And one day, Hammond says, that type of automated content generation will replace modern search engines.

Hammond made the research proposal about humor because it's an "interesting human dynamic" that's attractive to very smart students who otherwise might not consider being involved in an artificial intelligence programming research project.

NU prof: Computer research no joke - Chicago Sun-Times

In the “risk factors” section of its IPO filing on Friday , content-creation company Demand Media raises an interesting possibility: that Google — which Demand said it relies on for about a quarter of its revenue, via cost-per-click keyword advertising — could decide to use its own expertise in keyword search trends to compete with the algorithm-driven content company, whose initial public offering is planned for later this year. Specifically, Demand says that the search giant’s access to the data from billions of searches could give it a “significant competitive advantage” over the soon-to-be-public startup.

Google’s access to more comprehensive data regarding user search queries through its search algorithms would give it a significant competitive advantage over everyone in the industry, including us. If this data is used competitively by Google, sold to online publishers or given away for free, our business may face increased competition from companies, including Google, with substantially greater resources, brand recognition and established market presence.

The patent — whose listed inventors include Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian and the head of Google’s Webspam Team, Matt Cutts — describes using a search engine’s statistics about search queries and the relevance and quality of the pages that show up in response to detect when there are “underserved” topics, i.e. topics where there aren’t many good search results. Google then describes how this information could be passed on to publishers and content creators as a suggestion for what content they might want to create in order to show up in Google’s results.

This could be done either for free, the patent says, or publishers could be charged a fee for the information or be required to show related ads (two options that are specifically referred to in Demand’s regulatory filing), or Google could create a topic marketplace, where publishers could see what topics were underserved. Andm the patent describes how a search engine with such information could provide an “automated content-generation system” that aggregates information related to queries and topics that have inadequate results, or could even be used to create “stub” articles on wiki sites such as Wikipedia.

Demand Media Is Afraid That Google is Going to Compete With It - GigaOm (blog)

Jun 28, 2010 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- InfoMentis, a global consulting and performance improvement company, announced the launch of Dealmaker Pulse, a solution that provides intelligent social networking for sales, with instant objective deal alerts.

According to InfoMentis, Pulse lets users keep their finger on the pulse of critical sales events and customer sentiment by following sales opportunities and accounts, and integrating social network feeds from Twitter and LinkedIn. Pulse is available as part of the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform.

Dealmaker Pulse improves knowledge and collaboration across sales teams. With permission, anyone can follow any sales opportunity, account or user and Pulse advises them, in real-time, of what's changing. Pulse allows sales people and management to interact with each other around deals and accounts.

Additionally, since Pulse is based on the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform, it benefits from the InfoMentis sales methodology, and the automated sales process coaching that Dealmaker provides. For the first time, business-to-business sales organizations are provided with informed, instant, objective deal alerts as part of their social networking conversations. This automated content generation ensures that these notifications are relevant, timely, and benefit from sales best practices.

Read full article here

As someone who’s always understood the power of the narrative for attracting audiences, I believe Demand Media has discovered a new and largely untapped story telling platform on the web. As part of its Board, I look forward to helping unlock this value and drive innovation online, using the insight and experience I bring from the entertainment industry.

But as paidContent noticed , the connection with Guber goes a little further than just a seat on the board: Rosenblatt also mentions on Twitter that he and Guber had breakfast on Sunday, followed by a tennis game with the Hollywood mogul, as well as someone named Semel — likely former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, also a Hollywood studio veteran.

Rosenblatt also mentions in recent tweets that he had dinner with film producer Brian Grazer and comedy legend Rob Reiner at Nobu the night before (Nobu is a famous Hollywood hangout), and promises to “get Brian on Twitter tomorrow.” The Demand CEO also apparently spent at least part of the evening debating the value of the iPad with former supermodel Cindy Crawford (he adds later that “cindy did not like the iPAD and i did; she thought just a big iphone with no service; i think convenient and travelable”). The socializing may not be all that surprising, considering Demand is based in Los Angeles, but it still seems like an odd pairing, that of the company that’s commoditizing media from all angles and the old media veterans whose margins are rapidly dwindling as a result of that same process.

Full Story: Follow Tech & Biz: - Salon