I attended the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) in Boulder, CO this week. It was a great conference presenting insights and research on the blogosphere and social media in general. If you like scatter plots, power law charts, text scraping, summations, summarizations and graph charts then this was the place to be!

Of particular note was a presentation by Sam Gosling, the lone psychologist amid the gaggle of computer scientists. Sam’s presentation “Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles” was a highly entertaining and fascinating look at how people who participate in social media express personality traits via their profiles. This work is related to another paper he authored “A Room With a Cue: Personality Judgments Based on Offices and Bedrooms.” . In this paper he looks at the cues observers can get about a subject’s personality by looking at the personal environments people create, such as in their bedrooms or offices. This particular paper was referenced in the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. In chapter one Malcolm talks about “The Theory of Thin Slices” which is the ability of an observer to identify traits of a person’s personality by picking up on simple clues from observing them for a very short amount of time. The whole theory of “Thin Slicing” is fascinating to me and now that we are moving some of our “space” to the internet via Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife and other social media outlets it will be interesting to see how much of ourselves can truly be “Thin Sliced” online.

Tags: Uncategorized by John DiVirgilio
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I presented at the OpenData conference last week in New York. The event was sponsored by Reuters and organized by Seth Goldstein. This was one of the better events I have ever attended in terms of two way communication and idea generation. In attendance where a veritable who’s who in the attention economy space including the seminal author, Michael Goldhaber.

The immense amount of exhaust information generated by the creation and consumption of social media offers big opportunities for companies capable of mining that information for commercial purposes.

The mining of clickstream data provided for some fairly contentious conversations. The data is mostly gathered clandestinely through browser widgets or purchasing clickstream data from ISP’s. I say clandestinely because even though disclosure is probably provided in the EULAs from the service or widget vendors, these are rarely read through (For instance, I sample, reading through probably 1/100). This data is then mined for a variety of purposes, some innocuous, others could be considered invasive. There is actually an organization set up that describes sort of a bill of rights for the end user called Attention Trust. I particularly liked the quote in Wandering Stan’s blog from the conference:

Chris Law (Aggregate Knowledge): I wish AttentionTrust compliance was widespread…we don’t want to surprise people.
Steve Gilmore: This is bullshit. Have you signed/endorsed the AttentionTrust principles?
Chris Law: No, we’re looking into it.

There were a few companies mining media (social or otherwise) as well as closed data (proprietary data sets) and delivering this information to the financial service sector. This was labeled “Information Arbitrage”. Other companies in this space (besides Collective Intellect) at the conference included Majestic Research, Gerson Lehrman Group, and Monitor110

A lot of innovation is going on in this area, bringing together the fields of text analytics, data mining, social psychology, and finance. The sleeping giants of media are beginning to awake. It should be an interesting few years.

Tags: Uncategorized by Tim Wolters
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Savvy Services: Collective Intellect (CI) has launched a new version of its Media Intelligence service, a media research solution targeted to institutional investors, hedge fund traders and the broader financial community.

Tags: Uncategorized by Robin Seidner
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I’ll be part of a roundtable discussion next Tuesday, March 20, as part of Financial Market World’s Research Management Conference, at Bayards in New York.

The conference theme is all about sorting through the confusion of sell-side and buy-side research in a changing environment, both on the regulatory side as well as operations.

I’m looking forward to an interesting discussion on the morning roundtable, titled “What are the latest developments in research management and what are the challenges for the sell-side and buy-side?’ with fellow panelists Tim Gavin from Code Red, Steve Marascia from Anderson & Strudwick and Rob Alvarado from 10-K Wizard Technology LLC.

Come and see me if you’re planning on going to the conference. Or, contact me in advance if you want to meet up at the conference.

Tags: Uncategorized by Darren Kelly
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It is a “Big Day” for anyone who makes investment decisions for a living. Why? As of today there is a service available that will allow traders, PM’s and researchers to efficiently search ALL media. Not just news stories. Not just press releases. Not just websites.

As you might have heard, there is this thing called “New Media” out there. The blogosphere is a big part of it. But there are hundreds of message boards that are an important component of it as well. These new information sources (labeled “user-generated content” by the traditional journalists who are rightfully scared as Hell about the whole genre) contain a treasure-trove of information that traders-of-old only dreamed about. Patients discussing their drug therapies. Regional newspapers interviewing local executives. Former executives airing dirty corporate laundry. Industry pundits breaking news long before the Wall Street Journal starts running the presses. Sure it is noisy, but now with a bit of fancy technology all this content is filtered, categorized and ranked for relevance. And best of all, the technology “learns” what you consider relevant over time, so the filtering gets better and better and better. No more page-forward-page-forward-page-forward on Bloomberg. No more endless searching throught the big search-engines, hoping to find a nugget.

Media Intelligence, truly, is here. Email your friends at Collective Intellect and join the trading revolution.

Tags: Uncategorized by cimovable
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Collective Intellect Launches Next Generation of Media Intelligence,
a Comprehensive Media Research Tool Targeted to Financial Community

BOULDER, Colo., March 12, 2007 – Collective Intellect, Inc., (CI) an innovative provider of solutions enabling executives to obtain highly-relevant and critical pieces of information from unstructured online data sources, announced today the availability of the next generation of its Media Intelligence service, a comprehensive media research solution targeted to institutional investors, hedge fund traders and the broader financial community.

“We have added many important features to our solution, based on feedback from traders and analysts who are eager to refine their research strategies by receiving more targeted and relevant information quickly,” said Don Springer, chief executive officer of Collective Intellect. “Collective Intellect’s ability to take unstructured data, filter it and deliver only the most relevant information makes it a ‘must have’ research tool to complement other services used by the investment community, such as Bloomberg.”

CI’s filtering approach includes three phases. First, CI creates TopicNets for all content areas that are of interest to institutional investors. A TopicNet is a collection of content sources which are related to a single topic. With its TopicNet algorithm, CI can identify and rank the most credible sources of information, which is a critical part of CI’s differentiation from other tools that attempt to filter unstructured data. Second, CI’s technology eliminates irrelevant, duplicate, or splog-sourced information. Finally, each individual posting is ranked for relevancy using an adaptive, multi-factor algorithm which incorporates feedback from end-users through a content voting system. This approach ensures that individual users receive content that is most relevant for their own investment research requirements.

“There is a great deal of highly relevant, and often untapped, information about companies, products, consumer trends and hot button issues to be found in the unstructured text in blogs, message boards and other types of new media”, said Fern Halper, Partner at analyst firm Hurwitz & Associates. “Solutions such as those offered by Collective Intellect cull this unstructured text and can provide traders, analysts and others with targeted and relevant information that they can use in their decision making process

Principal features of Collective Intellect’s new solution include:

- Real-time feeds of blogs, message boards and other types of unstructured data, combined with traditional news media
- Simple, easy-to-read user interface that gives traders an immediate view into what’s happening now with the stocks, sectors and industries they track
- Minute-by-minute refreshes of content
- Intuitive methods for refining searches about tickers and themes
- Hosted desktop and email delivery

About Collective Intellect

Collective Intellect, Inc. specializes in comprehensively tracking, filtering and ranking media content for the largest Wall Street trading firms and the Fortune 500. The company’s management team has worked in business intelligence for a combined 50+ years, creating tools to solve the challenge of filtering unstructured information. The company’s breakthrough technology helps analysts and portfolio managers in financial services, and a wide range of executives within enterprises uncover valuable, relevant nuggets of information that reside in the vast amount of unstructured data available today, including blogs, message boards and chat rooms as well as traditional media.

Customers include some of the largest trading desks on Wall Street, Fortune 100 consumer goods manufacturers and Fortune 100 pharmaceutical companies. Collective Intellect is headquartered in Boulder, Colorodo, and is funded by Appian Ventures and other investors.

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Tags: Uncategorized by cimovable
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