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Overcoming Real-Time Web Challenges

Abby Johnson — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:00:28 +0000

As social media and mobile have exploded, real-time Web content has also experienced an explosion. Content ranging from current events to personal information that is put on the social Web is being aggregated in real-time. Although this content is growing in value, Erik Lumer of Cascaad tells WebProNews that technology is still behind in its ability to process all this information and eliminate the noise.

Up to this point, real-time has primarily been focused around search, but Lumer believes there is a lot more to it. As he explains, search doesn’t fit with real-time since users cannot search for things they don’t know exist. For this reason, he calls real-time a “push” medium and not a “pull” medium.

“The issue is discovery and with discovery comes relevance,” says Lumer.

Over the past year, the ability to measure relevance has improved as a result of two reasons. The first is due to the knowledge and algorithms that are currently building around relevance. The second is due to the ability to better understand what real-time messages are about.

Once these factors have been determined, personal interest is also easier to determine. In addition, it enables technologists to build better filtering services and measures of relevance.

Cascaad is one technology company that is taking on this challenge. It helps users discover and filter relevant conversations in the real-time Web. Although it began as an iPhone app, it is also available as a Web service. To learn more about the service, visit their site.

Cable Networks Ban eBay Auctions

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:49:44 +0000

Although many consumers love the auctions on eBay, large cable television networks have decided to avoid them. According to the New York Times, cable networks such as Turner Networks, Discovery, Lifetime, and ESPN have all made the move to ban online trading by eBay. As a result of this move, eBay trading will essentially have no airtime to sell to advertisers. This whole idea of computerized buying and selling has raised several issues even from the beginning: such as taking the creativity out of advertising and reducing overall prices.

This disinterest of online auctions by the cable companies not only affects eBay, but also largely impacts companies like Google since they are endeavoring to bring advertising auctions to television and newspapers.

Chief Executive John Muszynski of ad agency Starcom U-S-A says, “By going to this online bidding system that eBay was sharing with us, we’d be taking a step backwards.”

He reiterated that business has progressed over the years and the buying process is now a part of the marketing and promotions processes. This new integration process has allowed many television networks to sell 30-second spots as well as promotions… all in one package. Usually a very small number of television commercials are sold alone and geared at only one demographic. The eBay design does not coincide with that process.

Despite the dilemma this has raised for eBay, reports say they still will attempt to get other media companies to use auctions with the hope this will encourage the cable networks to change their minds.