Est'd players need not apply – nor humans either
Jinfo Blog

3rd July 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

It was only ever going to be a matter of time before social networking started seeking out the big money. So here’s an application that claims to replace expensive analysts such as Forrester or JupiterResearch with a lower cost collective alternative. Describing itself as ‘the insight company for the information age’, California-based Techdirt has launched the Techdirt Insight Community – http://www.techdirt.com/insightcommunity.php – an association of expert bloggers which aims to take the established research analysts head on. In the Techdirt model, potential clients submit their issue for analysis and set their own price (Techdirt accepts all major credit cards) effectively competing for the attention of multiple expert bloggers in the appropriate field. If there are no such bloggers on Techdirt’s books, its staff of special ‘blogfinders’ will comb the web seeking them out and vetting them for quality. Outsell is no doubt one of the analysts Techdirt has in its sights. But Outsell itself has been predicting a similarly cataclysmic fate for the conventional news and publishing industry, to be brought on who knows when by the simple ‘flip of a switch’ at Google. According to Outsell, the company has been assembling a comprehensive set of publishing-related patents, plus technologies that extend along the entire spectrum of publishing’s core functions, from content acquisition to e-commerce and royalty payments, all apparently under the radar of most Wall Street analysts and publishers. Outsell’s report, ‘Google as Publisher: is Google poised for a new push into the information industry?’ (http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/506?refid=home - $1,295), highlights the cost and automation advantages of Google’s ‘intelligent’ publishing system over a traditional publisher’s operation, which presents formidable barriers to entry. Combined with its Checkout payment system, Google’s model is ready to ‘disintermediate anyone between the author or content creator and the buyer’, Outsell believes. At least you’ll still need people to analyse all this content. Or will you? Reuters announced recently that it had taken delivery of a new linguistics application to process not only the facts but also the sentiments behind news stories. Using a linguistics application from Corpora PLC, Reuters will read news articles and score how positive or negative they are by assigning ‘sentiment scores’ to words or phrases to give an overall positive, neutral or negative score to the company featured in the story. (More details at http://about.reuters.com/pressoffice/pressreleases/index.asp?pressid=2878.) Connected to Reuters’ Market Data System platform, the product will be capable of supporting algorithmic trading – automated buy/sell instructions that exploit tiny momentary share price movements to execute trades faster than humans can see them. For a view of what the algorithmic future may hold for humans, try ‘Ahead of the tape’ in the ‘Economist’ of 21 June 2007 – http://www.economist.co.uk/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9370718.

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