Netvibes Daily Hot Topics Module Released

The Daily Hot Topics Module for Netvibes is released. Click here to add this module to your Netvibes Start page

By adding this module in your Netvibes start page, you can see in one glance the daily Hot Topics in the blogosphere, and get to what you want to read faster.

Each day, the Wizag Topic Discovery Engine reads hundreds of thounsands of posts and categorizes them into emerging topics in near real time. You can personalize it using the feeds you want to read.

Intelligence Amplification for Individuals and Groups

Ryan McIntyre and Brad Feld came up with the term Intelligence Amplification, which I found to be a very good term to describe what we do at Wizag.

We use machine intelligence (semantic processing, learning of user’s interests) and human intelligence (what users do with the contents collectively and individually) to discover and amplify Hot Topics out of hundreds of thousands of news and blog posts. The objective is to bring to a user’s attention emerging topics that the user wants to pay attention to. So these Hot Topics are “intelligently amplified”.

We do this for individual users and for groups. The group version is like an AI-enhanced and private version of Digg for groups. In a Wizag group, which can be private or public, users not only have editorial power, but can also manage the membership and have a reputation system , and are supported by Intelligence Amplification functions.

Here are some other posts that talk about information overload (or RSS overload) and thus the need of Intelligence Amplification:

Ben Miller has a post listing some related blogs on Intelligence Amplification here.

Khoi Vinh talks about All Feeded Up

P.S. The Wizag group functions are in alpha testing now. Feedback will be appreciated. We are hitting hardware and bandwidth limit, so the site may be a little slow sometimes, but it should be a lot faster and more stable than before. We will have to move on to a higher end hosting platform to improve the speed.

Wizag Discoverer vs. Readers and Aggregators

Google released a new version of Google Reader, and the reactions are very positive, see TechCrunch post. It has a nice UI. There are many readers and aggregators that are as good or even better as Google reader, however, since it is Google, many people may use it simply for the reason of having most of their services with one provider.

While reading comments on TechCrunch, it surprised me that some people even use Netvibes as a feed reader. I subscribe to about 100 feeds. I know many people who subscribe to a lot more. Netvibes gives you these small boxes, one box per feed. I find scanning hundreds of headlines in tens or even hundreads of tiny boxes gets blurry very quickly.

In my opinion (biased, of course), all these readers and aggregators lack an important function: auto-scan the feeds and identify the emerging topics that match the user’s interest. That is what I call topic discovery and it is what Wizag’s personalized topic discovery engine does. With Wizag’s Discoverer, a user can quickly see what topics are being talked about in the feeds he subscribe, and get to the posts that cover a topic of interest with one click.

This is in contrast to all the readers and aggregators which simply pile the posts up in your inbox, and you would have to read hundreds and hundreds of headlines to know what are being talked about and find the ones of interest to you.

This is different from a “smart folder” that filters out posts containing pre-defined keywords. That is easy to do. What is hard is to find the emerging topics (thus, you do not know what they are beforehand), and ranked them according to a user’s attention.

Update: Wizag Site Live Now, But Needs More Work

We put the Wizag site back online today. It has a new look now. The Hot Topics are divided into four tiers, each represented by a color bar from left to right. This way, only 15 topics are displayed each time and they are all in one color. It is easier to see.

The site is faster and more stable. We are working on optimizing the pages (combining scripts and css, optimizing graphics, etc). In addition, we need to move to a new hosting company that provides better SQL database support since our database (feeds, semantic rules, and learning data) has grown substabtially.

Last time I mentioned that we will be releasing a new function. We have not finished testing and debugging the new function yet so that part is not live yet. There are some hints on the site that give clues as to what the new function is about. However, it may be very different from what you think. Please stay tuned. We will email all existing users to announce the new service.

Doing Internet business in China and Asia

TechCrunch reported today that ebay is bailing out of China. This is after Yahoo sold Yahoo China to Alibaba. ebay’s Whitmen set herself up for failure when she said “Whoever wins China, will win the world.”

I had always maintained that it is very difficult for US based Internet companies to succeed in China, and many other Asian countries.  People are speculating political and many other reasons, but I contend that this is mainly a culture issue and it is not just China.  An example is Yahoo sold majority of its Yahoo Japan to Softbank long time ago.

I believe that most if not all western Internet businesses will have a lot of difficulty to gain or maintain market share in Asian countries, unless the country’s cluture is totally westernized. Internet portals are not like cars and Gucci bags. Mercedes and Gucci are things, they are not part of your inner cultrue. Internet portals are words, images, and interact with the core of your senses and inner culture. A western company may hire local managers, but these local managers are bound by western corporate culture and are often too westernized. They just won’t totally “get it.” I believe that it is because these reasons that it is extremely difficult, if not impposible, for western companies whose businesses deeply involve with culture to be successful in China and in other Asian countries that have a long history and strong culture identity. This applies to Google (Google losing market share in China) and many others, and it is not something one can fix by throwing hundreds of millions at it.

An analogy is that Shakira, Beyonce, or whoever the current pop stars are will never be as popular as the Chinese pop stars, the Korean pop stars or the Japanese pop stars in their own country. Another is none of the NYT best sellers (of course translated into the local language) will ever outsell the popular books in these Asian countries. These inner culture values are subtle, difficult to describe, and deeply engrained with thousands of years of history and hundreds of thounsands of years of evolution.

Then how do you succeed in China in the Internet market? My advice is to make people think you are a Chinese company; align with the interest of the local stakeholders; be more like a shareholder in the background rather than in the forefront; let its local management give it its own corporate culture and really run the show.

Online Storages, what do you put there?

Lots of online storage companies offering more and more GBs of free space, see TechCrunch reports.

My question is what do you put there? Unless it is pictures, videos or stuff you want lots of people to look at, why do you want to put your files on a server that everyone has access to?

I would not put any of my personal or business data in any place that I do not have physical control and cannot control who may connect to it. I would like to be able to unplug the cable when I need to.

Plus, it takes a long time to upload a few gigs of data, and once uploaded, it is not really available everywhere, at least not yet, e.g., when you are in a plane or on the road in most places.

So I see the free online storages mainly limited to audio, photo and video sharing, and to spammers who want their contents everywhere. Am I missing anything?

Update

Since the TechCrunch post, a lot have happened.

I was delighted to read what Matt McAlister (Senior Product Manager of RSS and Social Media at Yahoo) said of us yesterday:
“Wizag is one of the most promising start pages I’ve seen yet with its learning and categorization concepts. The design is awful and the speed is unusable, but those problems are easier to solve than developing really new and interesting algorithms. I’m hoping they figure these things out, because I would love to use it more.”

Matt summarized it really well and we are working on it. We are doing an overhaul of the database and a new graphic design.

Microsoft’s leading blogger Alex Barnett saw what we did and offered to help on the SQL database performance. He solicited help from the SQL performance group in Microsoft (Umachandar Jayachandran, Gaurav Bindlish). They provided proactive technical support, helped us with several questions and the turnaround was very fast. Thanks a lot guys!

We are getting close to finishing the new database design. When it is done, the speed should be a lot faster. Also, most of the new graphic design is up on the site. Please let us know what you think this time.

WizAg on TechCrunch

We are covered by TechCrunch today. Marshall had pointed out to us that the UI was ugly. Except the topic discovery part which is solid beta, the UI (ugly, we admit), opml uploading etc are still at alpha stage. We will get a graphic designer to re-do the UI soon. What we think is the most important feature is the automatic Topic Discovery Engine, which filters through a large number of posts and discovers what are considered the current important topics based on

1. what are talked about in the posts

2. where the posts come from

3. how they are related to other posts (both by contents and by hyperlinks) and the importance of these related posts

4. the community of users’ attention data (what topics they track and how they interact with the posts)

5. your attention data (what topics you track and how you interact with the posts, weighted very heavily once you log in)

All attention data are time-decayed to reflect the current attention.

Our main motivation is to help users find out quickly what is happening and quickly get to what they are interested in. If you subscribe to a lot of feeds, there will be hundreds of posts per day and it will be very difficult for you to read them all. If you subscribe to tens or hundreds of feeds, you know what I am talking about. The Topic Discovery Engine discovers the topics that match your attention data and sort the posts into the topics.

For example, the topics that are discovered today include “fidel castro”, “minimum wage”, “google talk”, “british prime minister tony blair”, etc. These topics are more informative and objective than tags.

P.S. if anyone has trouble uploading your opml file, would you please email it to us at info@wizag.com so that we can find out what is wrong? Thanks.