Here my shortlist of the sessions at GigaOm Structure:Data that I am most excited about. The fact that they are clustered together at the beginning of Wednesday, March 21 is purely coincidental. For the curious, here is the full lineup of speakers. STRUCTURING DECISIONS FROM UNSTRUCTURED DATA (8:40 AM), with Seth Grimes, Ron Avnur, Paul Speciale and...

[The following post is my submission to the Knight-Mozilla “Beyond Comment Threads” challenge.] The following are the core problems with current discussion systems: Trolls, acrimonious people, and low quality commentary can drown out thoughtful discussion and destroy a good community. Bias towards seniority: Deep insight is penalized if it comes from...

Would you like to get Fat Free CRM up-and-running, but spend only five minutes on deployment? I am not a Rails hacker, so getting Fat Free CRM installed and running is non-trivial for me. fatfreecrm-ec2 will automatically deploy Fat Free CRM on a fresh Amazon EC2 micro instance. I have also tested it on a fresh Ubuntu Linode slice. Caveat: The five...

Summary In the spirit of shared tasks and NLP “bake offs”, I hereby announce the first MetaOptimize Challenge. It’s an open problem, and I am interested in involving practitioners who want to demo their style, as well as people who want to learn some large-scale IR/NLP. Hopefully, we’ll all learn something about various real-world approaches. Join the...

Summary I introduce “information organization”, an approach which I have been exploring for several years. As a case study, music recommendations should be organized, but existing applications currently organize music recommendations poorly. I discuss issues with current applications, and discuss features that address these issues. Background Information...

Summary Email me your pitch and how you need help monetizing data. If I like your pitch, I’ll give you a free consultation on data strategy (NLP, ML, business intelligence, etc.) Afterwards, if we both think that I can add value to your business, we can talk about a longer-term relationship. You should forward this blog post to any friend who could...