When we wrote our year end posts for 2009, we should’ve added patent trolling to our

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Software Patents: Should the Burden of Proof Be on the Accuser?

In the first generation of the social Web, the marketing groups and public relations teams would develop reports to provide metrics for a particular campaign. They were pretty much the sole users of “social media,” technologies. That’s a problem as far as WiseWindow is concerned. Social media is a poor label for describing how comments, blog posts, updates and other opinions can be leveraged to gauge views across social networks and thousands of Web sites. “Labeling of it as social media has limited its potential up to now,” said Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow. “That is why we are calling it mass opinion business intelligence and not social media analytics.” Sponsor Now, the social Web is a real-time engine. Cloud computing is a reality and a new era is upon us that allows the enterprise to mine the vast sea of comments, reviews, updates and blog posts from millions of people. We’re entering an era where the social Web will serve as the main territory for performing predictive analytics. WiseWindow is using artificial intelligence technology, web crawlers and the processing power of the cloud to get real-time results for enterprise customers. For example, this means that companies may leverage the social Web to make sales forecasts and gauge the opinions of mass society to immediately understand the current opinions about its brand or those of competitors. WiseWindow calls the product Mass Opinion Business Intelligence, describing it as a service that goes beyond keyword search and click-throughs to predict market movement. According to WiseWindow, sentiment analysis has failed as a strategic research tool. When matching words, the context is lost. People use words differently to describe their sentiments. The mass amount of data available makes the process overwhelming. Instead, the WiseWindow web crawler will search for comments and other opinions across thousands of sites that are not blocked by privacy restrictions. The artificial intelligence trains itself to look for a particular topic. It brings back all related opinions. The information is then distilled for the client or made available through a web portal where the data can be analyzed. Recently, WiseWindow worked with a client from the film industry. WiseWindow used its technology to research 400 films, generating 4.5 million comments from 70,000 sites. They distilled the data to lean what is hot and what is not. As another example, , WiseWindow did research for the film, Marley and Me , starring Jennifer Anniston and Luke Wilson. The pre-release promotions featured Luke Wilson. But the comments from the Web demonstrated that Anniston had greater appeal than Wilson. As a result, the trailers were changed to feature Anniston more than Wilson. WiseWindow was founded in 2007 by Rajiv Dulepet. He has an impressive background. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford’s School of Management and Engineering, spearheading the development of presidential prediction projects for both the 2004 and 2008 elections. WiseWindow started developing its technology in 2007 and began working with clients last year. The company has four patents for its web crawling, auto-classifications of opinions, relevance recognition and in statistical language applications. Discuss

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Gauging Mass Opinion: Don’t Label it Social Media

A few months ago Google rolled out Place Pages with the lofty vision of creating a webpage for every place in the world. In addition to a map-view of local businesses, users can access hours, transit stops, reviews and geo-tagged photos. As of today the company is offering a color-coded ranking system for specific aspects of a businesses’ services. The question is, does the new feature mark the beginning of the end for restaurant review sites? Sponsor While Yelp gives reviewers a chance to rank a business on a scale of 1-5 stars and Foodspotting ranks individual dishes, Google’s new ranking system aggregates comments from across the web based on specific keywords. At a moments glance, users can quickly view a restaurant’s food and service in relation to its ambiance and atmosphere. Even the smallest business with little to no web presence can produce useful results. For example, the comments at San Francisco’s El Metate Taqueria was enough to produce a ranking on salsa alone. In late November, ReadWriteWeb covered the launch of Google’s map-based coupon program where mobile users can access deals through Place Pages. Coupled with the fact that you can save your search results to your favorite maps, users may find less and less reason to visit location-based review sites. In your opinion can Google oust Yelp and Citysearch as the leader in business reviews? Let us know in the comments below. Discuss

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Google Adds Place-Ranking System, Should Yelp Be Afraid?

Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos – yes, there are more than one – feature a lowercase “aol” on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL’s “running man” or “triangle with swoosh” logos of years past – logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it’s not becoming? Sponsor In order for AOL to survive, they’ve had to focus on becoming a content business instead of an internet provider and that’s exactly what the new branding is designed to reflect. Gone are the all-capital letters (“AOL”) which remind people of what they stand for (“American Online”). Now, there’s an uppercase “A” followed by lowercase letters and a period. This is meant to remind people that “there’s always something behind AOL,” says CEO Tim Armstrong in an interview with PaidContent . “The AOL brand is composed of many different things. The nomenclature of the dot is what comes after the dot.” In other words, AOL no longer stands alone. It’s Aol.music, Aol.Mapquest, Aol.Shopping, etc. The new logos are just a preview of AOL’s revamped look and are meant to replace AOL’s swoosh triangle for good. The AOL “running man,” however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn’t saying exactly where he will show up. But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as “lame,” “ambiguous at best,” and “as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E.” Ouch! But it’s easy to see where he’s coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers’ notebooks – like the hand doing the ” sign of the horns” hand gesture . Really. “Rock on!,” shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become. Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours. CNET calls the goldfish logo “cute” (sarcastically?), but AOL isn’t trying to build the next LOLcats empire , so maybe they should have forgone “cute” for something a little more meaningful and modern. But that’s just our opinion. What’s yours? Let us know in the poll below. What do you think of AOL’s new branding? ( survey ) Discuss

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Love it or Loathe It? AOL Reveals New Branding (POLL)

A backlash against anonymous commenters and trolls seems to be underway. Only last month, a court case was settled where anonymous commenters ended up having to pay big fines to the women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on a internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now the latest scandal in this new trend of “giving the trolls what they deserve” is causing a controversy all of its own. And this time, the nasty comment didn’t just lead to an embarrassing reveal or a heavy fine, it cost someone their job. Sponsor A One-Word Comment Cost a School Employee His Job A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you’ve ever eaten . The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that’s exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman’s anatomy. Of course, the site’s moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared – obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say. But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site’s director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter’s IP address was coming from a local school…and that’s where this story starts to get interesting. Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week’s detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job. Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn’t a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned. Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served? The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved? Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto’s The Globe and Mail , writes on his personal blog that his paper’s site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never – and has never – contacted someone’s workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum’s actions “over-the-top” and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com’s website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident. And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: “Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com’s Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the ‘submit’ key.” Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn’t like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job. Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say! We can’t blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit – any blogger will tell you they’ve been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone’s work? That’s just wrong. Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There’s no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered . In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their “real” name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome . “With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior,” he writes. That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation – it’s just part of the job. Regardless of the site’s policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that’s just our opinion. What do you think? Discuss

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Leaving a Vulgar Comment Online Might Cost You Your Job