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Blawg Review is an interesting blog carnival of some of the best law blog posts selected by a different host each week, often presented with a creative theme. This week's
Blawg Review #42 is an homage to
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by the late great neologist Douglas Adams. The theme is inspired by the issue number 42, which is the answer to life, the universe and everything!
Wordlab readers might also be familiar with the lesser known work of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd,
The Meaning of Liff.
One of the posts selected for this week's Blawg Review #42,
I, Sandwich Dominatrix, is by Denise Howell, the lawyer who is credited with coining the word "blawg" in 2002, when she was among the first lawyers to blog. Her post includes links to recent discussions of the word "blawg" on
Language Log by
Mark Liberman and
Benjamin Zimmer concerning the use and phonology of her neologism, the "portmanteau" or "sandwich word" for law blog.
Commenting on the
brouhaha in the
blawgosphere over whether the word
blawg should now be
made obsolete, as some lawyers argue, Denise Howell concludes:
If you are among the folks — linguists excluded; it's their job — who might be spending a little too much thought and energy on this borderline microbial issue, please consider channeling your efforts toward something of more tangible benefit to mankind. (Doorknob spam, anyone?)
Douglas Adams, were he still with us, might question whether these froods know where their towels are.
If you’re Welsh, on the Internet, and know what an airplane is, have we got a naming contest for you:
Air Southwest is offering one lucky person the chance to win a trip from Newquay Airport for them and up to three friends or family with the launch of its ‘Name that Plane’ competition.
The airline will take delivery in February of the latest Dash 8-300 aircraft to join the Air Southwest fleet and the people of Cornwall are being asked to give it a name.
Whoever comes up with the winning name, which will be chosen by Air Southwest, will win four return tickets to any destination of their choice served by Air Southwest from Newquay.
The airline currently flies from Newquay to London Gatwick, Leeds Bradford, Manchester, Dublin and Bristol, and from April 10 will start a twice daily service to Cardiff.
So summon the likes of Dafydd ap Gwilym, William Williams Pantycelyn and Hedd Wyn and get…ooh, wait a minute, “Hedd Wynd”, that’s a winner! Quick, submit it here!
Ei aberth nid a heibio - ei wyneb Annwyl nid a’n ango Er i’r Almaen ystaenio Ei dwrn dur yn ei waed o!
Have you ever seen an online ad appear for “Discount Airline Fares” while reading an article about a plane crash? How about an ad for scuba lessons served up next to a news account of a shark attack? It’s because ad placement software works solely on keyword recognition. Or that’s the way it has worked until now.
There’s a new online ad technology in town that can actually tell the difference between good and bad contextual matches.
It’s called Shinola, and yes, it was named by Igor.
From the company’s website:
Shinola is a contextual ad placement solution that automatically matches highly relevant advertisements (product descriptions) to web content generated from Trainable Semantic Vectors (TSVs). Trainable Semantic Vectors are a major breakthrough in representing and analyzing textual information.
Until now, reliable semantic analysis always came at the expense of scalability. Shinola is the first and only product placement technology that is accurate enough to capture semantic meaning, fast enough to power real-time applications, automated enough to maintain in dynamic environments, and scalable enough to handle web-sized problems.
TextWise’s proprietary technology coupled with its intellectual property protection gives us a uniquely powerful capability to enable the next generation of contextual ad placement.
Shinola offers a unique combination of advantages over other approaches:
* Understands the meaning of webpages. It expresses the world by combining over 2000 semantic dimensions that are directly derived from Internet taxonomies.
* Provides a unique signature for every webpage and every advertisement. E-retailers are no longer trapped with 500 other competitor ads that look exactly the same to the placement engine just because they have the same keyword or are dumped into the same category.
* Highlights the topic strengths and subtle interactions of meaning within each document that make that document unique. Since Shinola identifies both focused topic areas and rich sub-contexts, it can find the best match between a webpage and an ad.
* Handles both keyword lists and full text. It can immediately import an existing database of ad keywords and calculate new signatures to get accurate matches against incoming webpages. But it can also leverage additional text (marketing collateral, ad copy, product literature, customer descriptions, etc) to create even better experience with Shinola.
* Bypasses the computational complexity of deep natural language understanding. Full natural language processing is practical only for relatively small amounts of text, not for real-time systems that need to handle millions of webpages a day. Shinola uses just the right amount of scalable semantics and linguistic knowledge to capture the meaning and content of documents.
* Avoids the classification failures associated with categories that do not align with customer needs and ontologies that rapidly become obsolete. Although Shinola’s semantic dimensions are derived from a broad Internet taxonomy, we do not actually classify webpages or ads into that taxonomy. Because signatures are formed by combining the strengths of hundreds of topic areas, they are immune to minor changes in the underlying taxonomy.
* Overcomes the failure of keyword matching and classification. The failure of contextual advertising to date can be traced directly to the inability of keyword matching and classification techniques to deliver highly accurate, highly focused ad placement. Shinola can find the most appropriate ad for a webpage even if the two use completely different vocabulary.
Quite simple, really. [Read Igor's Shinola case study for more.]
If you're interested in reading
Patently Absurd: The Most Ridiculous Devices Ever Invented,
Amazon recommends The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information, as well. And this is
thumbthing.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the snark was a boojum,
you see.
Google's unofficial corporate motto is "
Don't be evil."
Is Google
evil or not? The votes are in, and the ubiquitous Google has been recognized globally as
the brand that had the most impact on our lives in 2005. The survey isn't clear about whether the reported brand impact is positive or negative, so the winners are not necessarily good or evil.
Google went public in the summer of 2004, and the hype hasn't died yet. Notable milestones in 2005 included the launch of Google Mini (around the same time that Apple unveiled its own mini product) and Desktop Search, which, like most Google product, falls under the "descriptive" school of naming. The quirky brand also treated us to Google Earth, arguably the greatest thing to hit the Internet since porn.
Speaking of porn, the United States Department of
Justice is taking the world's most popular search engine to court for resisting the government's demand to turn over search records as part of the ongoing
War on Porn.
Forbes magazine recently published an article about
why Google won't give in to the government's demands without a court order.
People who don't trust Google to keep search queries private, or to be able to withstand government demands, might prefer to search
Scroogle. But, anyone who is charged with a sexual offence, whose computer records show that Scroogle has been used, will be presumed guilty of something.
Patriotic citizens, who understand that the
USA PATRIOT Act is as important to
life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, think Google is evil and are using
Patriot Search.
Ford Motor Company has actually named its initiative to halt the hemorrhaging of its market share, taking a que from Alice Walker and naming it “The Way Forward”. Cold comfort to the 30,000 workers who will be left behind.
Rumor has it that Ford was considering holding meetings to discuss the possibility of manufacturing products that people actually want to buy, and even resurrecting their old chestnut, “Quality is job one”, but all of the meeting rooms were booked.
Still, it could happen. The automotive branding world has been full of resurrections in the past four years. Buick’s dead man designer Harely Earl was dug up back in late 2002, while in the same month Chevrolet turned to Jesus for inspiration, and an odd coalition of lefties and righties launched “What would Jesus Drive?”. Just last November Audi began playing God, with talk of “Inteligent Design”.
Clearly, Ford’s “The Way Forward” has missed the Ark.
Except for this, this and this.
Here’s the best investing advice you will ever receive, and it’s so simple an advertising executive could have an assistant do it for them. Just follow our name announcements and client acquisition news. When you spot a public company hiring Igor, short that stock! Why? It’s indicative of systemically flawed judgment.
In the past 12 months this would include MTV (Viacom), Hasbro, Dupont, Boston Beer, MGM, Palm, Gap, Hitachi, etc. Full list here.
Get creative with
Pornokrates, next time you want to dress down your employee, your boss, or yourself in the morning mirror. An invaluable resource. Valuable too.
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