Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 25 of 71)

Notes from the AI frontier: Applications and value of deep learning

In 2011 as the excitement about Big Data was becoming mainstream, McKinsey published what was the most useful early report for executives. Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, took a smart and measured look at use cases and value across industries. Given the symbiotic relationship between data and AI / machine learning, companies who were paying attention and invested in Big Data then are likely positioned well ahead of others to benefit from today’s advances in machine learning technologies and techniques.

McKinsey’s new report provides a knowledgeable overview using accurate terminology in their “… analysis of more than 400 use cases across 19 industries and nine business functions highlights the broad use and significant economic potential of advanced AI techniques.” Highly recommended. Read More

A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook’s new GDPR privacy changes

Josh Constine provides a useful take on the changes rolling out now to European users illustrated with screen shots. But I think it’s safe to say that whether they are meeting the “letter of the GDPR law” is still a matter for debate.

Overall, it seems like Facebook is complying with the letter of GDPR law, but with questionable spirit…Facebook struck the right balance in some places here. But the subtly pushy designs seem intended to steer people away from changing their defaults. Read More

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2018)

Scott Brinker has just released the latest update to his famous “Supergraphic”. The number of marketing technology vendors continues to grow. As Scott puts it, “Water continues to flow into the martech tub faster than it’s draining out.” Check out his post on what it all means and to see/download the graphic and a spreadsheet. Read More

Uh oh, click counts count less

Click quality and measurement has always been a bit iffy. But the biggest challenge to click value yet may come from a combination of mobile trends and Google’s strategy of reducing the need to click away from the search results page. Rand Fishkin’s post, New Data: How Google’s Organic & Paid CTRs Have Changed 2015-2018, looks at some interesting numbers. Back to brand marketing banners?

Ultimately, I think this data shows us that the future of SEO will have to account for influencing searchers without earning a click, or even knowing that a search happened. That’s going to be very frustrating for a lot of organizations. Read More

Also…

• Ignoring ads is a learned behavior… Banner Blindness Revisited: Users Dodge Ads on Mobile and Desktop via Nielsen Norman Group
• 25 years ago the Mosaic Browser Lights Up Web With Color, Creativity via Wired
• Disturbing… “I Just Google It”: Folk Theories of Distributed Discovery via Oxford University Press
• Basic, but good… A glossary of blockchain jargon via Technology Review

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

GDPR – a big deal for small publishers

“… think about this in relation to a new visitor. Someone that you have no prior relationship with… What data can you actually collect and use for that person? The answer is … nothing! … a first time visitor hasn’t done anything that could be considered consent, so you have nothing to work with.”

And you can’t use third-party plugins like ad partner scripts or social widgets that collect data. GDPR is complicated and how much of it will be interpreted is unknown.

Thomas Baekdal explains why, and how, all publishers need to get started. Read More

The top 25 AI use cases for content management

What we used to call “unstructured data” is the raw material of content management, and this same raw material is where machine learning will have the largest impact. Kashyap Kompella has put together a list of use cases you’ll want to look at. Read More

Chrome’s Articles for You a major new referral source

Google Chrome’s Articles for You is an under-publicized feature of Chrome on both Android and iOS that is now the fourth most prominent referrer in the Chartbeat network (behind Google Search, Facebook, and Twitter). Even though Chartbeat is currently only tracking Articles for You referrals from Android and not from iOS, its Android referrals alone are now about two-thirds the size of all of Twitter (desktop, Android, iOS) in terms of the volume of traffic sent… Articles for You traffic grew a shocking 2,100 percent in 2017 — from driving 15 million visits per month to publishers using Chartbeat to 341 million visits per month.

There are lots of questions about how this works. Josh Schwartz reports on what he’s been able to find out. Read More

It’s time to rebuild the web

Most of what is written about this topic assumes radical decentralization and blockchain. But this won’t happen quickly even though there are lots of blockchain applications already popping up. The general problem is just too big, the user experience changes alone are daunting, and there are still technical challenges. Mike Loukides takes a thoughtful look at a simpler path. Read More

Also…

• You probably didn’t see this coming… Chrome and Firefox will support a new standard for password-free logins via The Verge
• Progressive Web Apps on iOS are here with iOS 11. 3 – what does it mean? via Medium
• Beyond PWAs, there’s WebAssembly and Houdini… Web apps are only getting better via The Verge
• Enough With the Trolley Problem. Yes. It’s not sufficient – ethics is more complicated… via The Atlantic

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

This is so much bigger than Facebook

The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal is Facebook’s most serious crisis so far because it exposes the particular weakness of their business model at a time, and in a way, that can no longer be ignored by those who understood it, namely, investors and paying customers. There is no obvious fix that does not reduce Facebook’s value. And then there are the Facebook users paying with ‘only’ personal data – how many of these will now become woke? And what will they do? As Ethan Zuckerman, points out though, and the reason I singled out his excellent article, the problem is much bigger.

… Zuck didn’t mention that Facebook’s business model is based on collecting this demographic and psychographic information and selling the ability to target ads to people using this data about them… This is a known bug not just for Facebook and other social networks, but for the vast majority of the contemporary web. Read More

Duopoly not all-powerful?

eMarketer estimates that the combined Google and Facebook share of the digital ad market will shrink from last year’s 58.5% to 56.8% in 2018 “as smaller players such as Amazon and Snapchat are experiencing faster-than-expected growth.” Also, Google and Facebook’s share of new digital ad dollars is declining… This year, they will garner nearly 48% of new expenditures.” Down from almost 73% in 2016. Read More

Google News Initiative

Google has been more successful than Facebook in working with publishers. And of course they need to be, for all the same reasons they need to support the Open Web. This week they launched the Google News Initiative to pull together all the relevant projects and partnerships into a coordinated effort and are committing $300m to fund the activity over the next three years. Self-interested of course, but lots to applaud here. Read More

Eager to sell your personal data?

Should marketers pay consumers directly to access their personal data? The idea isn’t new but it’s become more popular as people see the huge profits that Google, Facebook, and others make from using that data, as consumers become more aware of the data trade, and as blockchain technology makes low cost micro-payments a possibility.

David Raab takes a look at the current vendor marketplace, and reaches the realistic conclusion that “You’ll have to wait”. Good advice. Read More

Why the IAB GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework is a non-starter for publishers

The IAB and IAB Europe, which are charged with representing a much broader set of stakeholders including hundreds of ad tech companies, Google, Facebook, Oath, and many others with significant intermediary interests, has released its plan to handle the GDPR roll-out. The IAB framework, which was submitted for industry commenting, was clearly designed by ad tech companies and included endorsement from 23 ad tech companies and, most notably, zero publishers. Read More

Also…

• Tools matter. To improve open data, help publishers via The Open Data Institute
• The game is more complicated than Will the tracker always get through? via Digital Content Next
• It’s not as simple as tracking source code changes… The Machine Learning Reproducibility Crisis via Pete Warden’s Blog
• If you want to understand Blockchain, try to understand Switzerland More informative than the obvious high level high level title. via Never Stop Marketing

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

Why decentralization matters

Chris Dixon has a really useful post explaining the intense interest in decentralized cryptonetworks and why he thinks they will drive a return to a more open internet less dominated by the major platforms. His post is short, clear, accessible, and a great starting point for strategic discussions.

The 140+ comments are useful as well but keep in mind there is a natural tension between centralized and decentralized networks in the same way there is between all proprietary and open architectures — there is a role for each and a tendency for one or the other to dominate at different points in time and usefulness. There are also different types of decentralization which can too easily be conflated. Read More

The meaning of open

Google’s Alex Komoroske digs into the tension and interplay between open and closed systems in a thoughtful piece that is a good companion read (not a response) to Dixon’s piece on decentralization. In the context of what it means to be open in general, you’ll get some insight into Google’s thinking about the balance between their own platform components and being part of the open web. Read More

The next platform for media and makers

Jarrod Dicker, who you may know from the Washington Post, Time, Huffington, and The RebelMouse content management system, believes it’s time for a blockchain-based platform for content creators and publishers. Dicker just left the Post to be CEO of Blockchain startup Po.et. This will be interesting to watch. Read More

10 breakthrough technologies 2018

MIT Technology Review’s annual list is always worth reading. It comes as close to a carefully curated and neutral list as you’ll find. And while their broad coverage means not all the technologies will have a near term impact on your business decisions, they are likely to be “technologies that will have a profound effect on our lives.” Read More

Also…

• • After years of testing, The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader via Nieman Lab
  • Just a matter of time before something clicks… publishers (again) turn to micropayments via DigiDay
  • More than an Apple Watch market? Yes, but their watch may rule the ecosystem… The Evolution of the Wearables Market via Tech.pinions

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

How is AI disrupting marketing?

An excellent summary from Scott Brinker on the current/near-term reality of “AI” marketing applications. “…here’s the irony: as much as the hype has overstated what AI

might do formarketing in the next 12-24 months, the reality of how AI is already working in marketing today is often under-recognized.” Tis true. Read More

The NYT is boarding the AR train — here’s what that means for storytelling

One of the areas we’re paying attention to this year is the use of AR content for serious enterprise applications and truly useful consumer use cases. In the case of publishing, The New York Times, Quartz, Axel Springer, and others, are experimenting with how the unique characteristics of AR content can enhance customer experiences rather than distract. As powerful as the AR promise is we don’t know how news consumers will react to the extra, more active, effort involved. But it’s time to find out. Read More

How blockchain could kill both cable and Netflix

Not this week, but there is keen interest in using blockchain technology to build decentralized peer-to-peer content management and distribution applications. There are a number of these kinds of projects planning to go live this year. Rizwan Virk describes much of the collective vision and potential disruption. A good place to start learning more. Read More

Smart homes and vegetable peelers

Andreessen Horowitz’s Benedict Evans doesn’t have a unified vision of the future of smart homes, but he does have some ideas and lots of enlightening questions. In this post he looks at smart home ecosystems and questions smart thing use cases, market dynamics, platform roles, integrations, and how we’ll interface with them. He remains “extremely skeptical” of voice as a new major platform, and rightfully so. This a must read for anyone building or investing in products or businesses around smart things – not just for the home. Read More

Also…

• • The retina is the next screen to deal with, and… Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses actually look good via The Verge
  • Interesting analysis… 8 Lessons from 20 years of Gartner Hype Cycles via Michael Mullany
  • As they say at Axios “Be smart”… Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Trouble with ICOs via Wired 
  • Think the future of things should be more like the Open Web? See… “Project Things” – An open framework for connecting your devices to the web via the Mozilla Blog

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

Molecular content & the separation of concerns

The creation and management of content continues to increase in complexity as we need to design for nmachines in addition to n screens. Content Strategist Michael Andrews lays out why we need to move beyond, single sourcing and modular content.

Michael proposes an approach based on “molecular content” combined with the concept of the “separation of concerns”. A good read for anyone involved in content strategy. Read More

Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

As most of you know, the really interesting thing about Bitcoin is not the actual currency but the Blockchain architecture it is built on. And while we don’t cover financial technology, Blockchain is very much applicable to the information management technologies and applications we do focus on, for example in publishing or marketing. On a grander scale, a trustable distributed ledger of X that competes with or complements a trusted (or not) central authority of X has broad societal implications. One of these is the walled garden threat to the Open Web. And sure enough, there are serious efforts underway to build /rebuild a sustainable Open Web using Blockchain technology. Steven Johnson has written a non-technical article that provides an excellent explanation of what you need to know and why. Read More

Is your company’s data actually valuable in the AI era?

In the AI economy, the value of your accumulated data is limited to a one-time benefit from training your AI model. And the value of training data is, like oil or any other input, influenced by the overall supply — it’s less valuable when more people have it. In contrast, the value of your ongoing operational data is not limited to a one-time benefit, but rather provides a perpetual benefit for operating and further enhancing your prediction machine. Read More

Maybe Facebook should abandon the news feed altogether

Facebook has almost always wanted to be a platform, if not The Platform. Their recent shift away from news in their news feed back to mostly social interactions raises questions about their long-term future and what kind of platform they will be. John Battelle has an interesting suggestion. He admits it is a long shot, but his thoughts aren’t as crazy as he suggests his solution might sound…

What if Facebook *really* pivoted, and became a … truly neutral platform — an AWS for attention and identity, if you will. What if the company dedicated itself to a set of stable policies that encouraged other companies to tap into its social graph, its vast identity database, its remarkable engagement machinery? Read More

Also…

• There are logical limits… Something doesn’t ad up about America’s advertising market via the Economist
• Very funny… Burger King explains net neutrality via Fight for the Future
• Great reporting on buying followers… The Follower Factory via New York Times
• A bit of catching up to do, but why not?… Apple’s Getting Back Into the E-Books Fight Against Amazon via Bloomberg

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

Scoring news stories is hard​

Frederic Filloux dives into some research and unique challenges the News Quality Scoring project faces. A worthy project to benefit producers and consumers, the NQS “is aimed at assessing the value-added deployed by a media for a given news coverage in terms of resources, expertise, thoroughness of the process, and ethical guarantees.” Read More

True AI is both logically possible and utterly implausible

Wonderful and witty example of a philosopher rescuing us from a current confusion.

… It is like a two-knife system that can sharpen itself. What’s the difference? The same as between you and the dishwasher when washing the dishes. What’s the consequence? That any apocalyptic vision of AI can be disregarded. We are and shall remain, for any foreseeable future, the problem, not our technology. So we should concentrate on the real challenges. By way of conclusion, let me list five of them… Read More

1 million software companies by 2027?

Consolidation does not necessarily mean shrinkage ― the CMS market is a perfect example of one just kind of software company. The idea is not as crazy as it may sound. Read More

Software 2.0

This is a bit technical but will help you understand the types of applications where you’ll need machine learning to be competitive, which “at the very least involve anything to do with images/video, sound/speech, and text” (managing unstructured data or CMS 2.0!) and what kinds of developer skills are required.

I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they work here or there, and sometimes you can use them to win Kaggle competitions. Unfortunately, this interpretation completely misses the forest for the trees. Neural networks are not just another classifier, they represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in how we write software. They are Software 2.0. Read More

Also…

Thankfully still plugging along… HTML 5.2 is a W3C proposed recommendation via W3C

Since we are waxing philosophical this issue… On software development, language games, tech adoption and the death of the author via RedMonk

Yay! Millennials flocking to pay for trusted news sources via Politico

The prediction season starts…Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Conference: November 28–29 ● Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month. See all issues