Technology rules ... information. Technological pizza

    All the best often happens suddenly. It is rare that a carefully planned party can be compared to a sudden visit of friends, and a dish prepared exactly according to the recipe, with the improvisation of the master. This phenomenon also has a place in our team: we did not think about “recipes” when in a couple of weeks we implemented Media Monitor, which, as sometimes happens in the development of niche B2B products, was surprisingly in demand.




    MeMo (Media Monitor) turned out to be so useful for the “victims of the information society” that several colleagues from the team now use it for “personal selfish” information purposes, and all the information workers, media professionals and (often forced) consumers of large information flows are convincingly asking for take advantage of.



    But we will talk about MeMo not as a product, but as an example of the eternal dialectic of materialism. In particular, the law of the transition of quantity into quality: the information revolution, the explosive growth of generated content inevitably should lead to a change in the paradigm of managing (personal, corporate) information flows.
    15 years ago, “Internet users” had enough of the catalog “Au!” and the "Yellow Pages of the Internet", and now the help of Google / Yandex, with the result "there were 10 million documents", not always help.

    Having realized the demand for the information specialists of the product, which was initially perceived by us as “secondary,” we began to look for the reasons for the cumulative positive effect of the addition of several technologies.
    What conclusion so far (everything is changing in dynamics, maybe something else will appear tomorrow) we have come from the point of view of the needs of the “information consumer”:

    1. New information is needed right now;
    2. Sources must be trustworthy (authoritative);
    3. There should be many sources (hundreds, thousands);
    4. There should be few materials (only the most relevant / relevant);
    5. Have their own corporate information flows;
    6. Multilingual information (different countries);
    7. Personal selection of sources (we are all human beings, “to taste and color ...”);
    8. Automatic analysis of materials on thematic "shelves";
    9. Easily customizable story / situational / event toolkit (the ability to create your own info-shelf in a couple of minutes, for example, for reading materials on Formula 1 in Monaco - we create the necessary settings once and read while the event is ongoing).

    Agree - nothing extraordinary, everything is clear for so long. In fact, we are talking about a personal “stall with the press” (by the way, our team has “dinosaurs” that implemented projects like “Personal newspaper” back in the last millennium).

    So, if we did everything originally planned, we would set the task in the following way - at the entrance:

    • There is a lot of information in the world;
    • A small set of filtering parameters is required;
    • A limited set of subject headings (the law of sustainability of any corporate information structure);
    • You need to be able to organize an endless set of stories, including new ones (such as the Chelyabinsk meteorite);
    • And be sure to consider ... the human factor in the perception of information flows.

    In realities, everything was not built at all like that, and rather it was like making pizza for a party suddenly organized: we throw everything that is in the refrigerator onto the dough:

    • The test (from the word “dough”, not “test”) is our favorite Platform, which we already wrote about on the blog;
    • For trust in the products we take only large media, agencies and government agencies sites;
    • Foreigners will be chopped by the module for determining languages;
    • Add home-made corporate-made cheese;
    • pepper the express and expert accounts of social media;
    • Put on fast fire a distributed data acquisition system;
    • We decompose thematic plates by auto-classification;
    • And the choice of butter and grated cheese is left to the discretion of the consumer.

    Bottom line: everyone is happy - information hunger is suppressed by rich modern technological OBD solutions.

    Could it have been possible to prepare an “information pizza” on the technological possibilities available then, say, a year or two ago? - Theoretically, “yes”, practically - it would not be the product that would fit in 2013, when information flows grew 1.5 times (further - more), and information “wars” now only last a few minutes (remember, for example , A 3-minute “Obama wound” that brought down stock markets, or a 4-minute military coup in Qatar).

    Several ingredients from our grocery refrigerator were not included in the recipe for MeMo (at least for now), but we hope that they will definitely be included in Recipe 2014 - since high-speed automatic tone detection, NER, and geolocation and trends are already successfully used in various projects.

    PS:We love our friends and partners and are pleased to give them their due: Pavel Ch., Who has worked for many years at large information publishing houses and agencies, can be considered MeMo's inspirational father.
    Of course, we already had backlogs for sample subscriptions of sources for the Personal Media (Info) Center, we expanded the number of defined languages ​​to 30, our AK (AutoClassifier of texts) already separated Sport from Show business, but it’s Pavel, having absorbed into his open the mind has many different components, clearly outlined the need for its colleagues in a particular product. Then it was a matter of technology (and technology, and linguistics, and highload), and this is our hobby.

    Come up with new recipes to be not only nutritious and healthy, but also nice :)

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