magpie Archives - Philip Sheldrake

10 June 2008 / 1 Comment

Searching harder – search panel at Being Digital

Just watched Giles Palmer's presentation on search trends here at Being Digital. His company, Magpie, is one of those I'm including in my upcoming eBook on Social Web Analytics (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life... yes, I have one).

[Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation].

Currently Microsoft's Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO) is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world... 3D search if you like. He's showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can't see much search going on. Hang on, no, that's just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn't know if he's in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he's pointed out, we've had the panel on location today.

Jeff has also been keen to big up MIcrosoft's cashback search I posted about recently. Read more

20 September 2007 / 0 Comments

Mashup events

Attended the Mashup* event last night on "media and advertising agencies in a digital world". It was a wide ranging discussion, featuring Rod Banner from Banner Corporation, a presentation from AKQA's head of mobile, and moderated by Hamish Pringle, DG of the IPA.

Unfortunately, the questions from the audience were so diverse that there wasn't quite the usual cohesion found at a Mashup event, but nevertheless there were some real gems in there. Tony Fish's question on the attention economy put most people on the back foot, and I learned about Openads for the first time. Very interesting.

Coincidentally, I also met Giles Palmer for the first time, of Magpie Brandwatch fame that I posted about yesterday.

And lastly, here's a diary date for you. Mashup is running an event 26th November on Social Networking.

20 September 2007 / 2 Comments

Magpie Brandwatch

I've just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch. As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I'd like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me... How do they disambiguate brand names?

In other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap?

And if anyone has tried Magpie Brandwatch, it'd be good to hear what it's like.