Generalizing Conversations

Jan

15

posted at: 8:21 AM

My coworker sent me a link today to an article from Wired regarding a coupon campaign created by Carl's Jr giving away free burgers from a Laker game that went too viral.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/online-burger-p.html

My inital thoughts were how this relates directly to Burger King's instant classic, "Sacrifice ten Friends on Facebook and get a free whopper," but this began to spark thoughts in the computational linguistics space that were in a totally separate direction.

I've realized that I've trained myself to gloss over articles and to quickly establish the subject and key message; to understand the point of the article with a minimal amount of reading and to disregard the rest. For people who work in the information industry, this skill is critical to digesting information quickly and rapidly, and adapting to whatever the objective is at hand.

I believe people must already be doing this in a way that's automated, and that this could be the next great frontier for those of us working in digital PR. There's just far too much information floating around out there to read everything. How can we create an automated mechanism that can help us generalize the subject matter from not only an individual article, but a collection of related articles to help us formulate an opinion and take action?

 

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    David Parsons says... Jan 18 | 12:30 PM

    Hi Tim. Somehow I stumbled on your site from Twitter and discovered you through "Happy Tweets". In reading your post here I became interested in your grasp of speech recognition. In this post you make references to generalizing the subject matter of articles. In Happy Tweets you seem interested in the level of human happiness. Added together your interest in these things makes you just what I'm looking for. I'm not a techie at all. I am of the generation born before the wide use of computers was even an idea so excuse me if I seem slow to comprehend the complexity of your endeavors. I'm not a professional researcher nor am I a psychologist but I did happen to develop something that has a lot to do with human happiness and success. Due to advances in the internet my project now has need of your experience in speech recognition. I won't go into all the details here just now but my "thing" has to with a systematic way of reverse-searching one's own past success history to locate the motivational energy behind personal success events. This has the result of altering one's outlook to be more positive despite external factors. In an oblique way this might relate to your interest in human happiness. I've been at this since the late 70's and participants who use my system gain instant benefits. This is presented as a journaling session and in the past I held sessions in offices and hotel meeting rooms. Now, with the web I can do the same thing through a chat window eliminating travel time and expense. But here's the thing: Someone has to monitor the client's progress in real time through the entire process. This can take up to 10 hours. Obviously automation would help here. Can you help us with this? You're the man Tim! David

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