Automated Content Curation Your Readers Will Love: A WordPress Plugin That Uses Your Interest Graph Jun 14, 2013
Mike Rolfe
Do you want to provide highly relevant content from around the Web and engage your readership on a whole new level?
In honour of the tenth anniversary of WordPress, we’re celebrating here at Primal with an open source WordPress plugin.
Primal for WordPress will allow you to unlock the power of your WordPress site’s interest graph to supply your readers with relevant, dynamic and daily updated content that is tailored to each individual page.
This first revision of our plugin has all of the functionality necessary to speak to Primal’s data service directly, however we’d love to hear from WordPress publishers and developers on exactly how else you would like to leverage the power of the interest graph within WordPress environment as we consider where to take the plugin next.
The Myth Behind Personalization and Privacy Jun 11, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
We know what personalization means and the compromises it imposes on our individual privacy.
Or do we?
This is perhaps the most insidious myth among the technorati: In order for people to benefit from advanced and personalized technologies, they need to compromise their individual privacy.
This idea is remarkably pervasive and damaging, driving both consumers and businesses away from the opportunities of personalization and next-generation information services.
In this post, I’m going to introduce you to the myth and the underlying villain, Big Data. I’m also going to argue that innovation is a much better path forward than evil, or doing nothing at all.
Read more…
New and Improved Primal API Developer Site Jun 10, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
Our newly redesigned developer site makes it easier than ever to explore the Primal data service and harness the power of Primal in your own applications.
In minutes, you can be up and running, trying out the standard HTTP calls that you use to talk to the Primal data service. Soon you’ll be building your users’ interest graphs, retrieving information from them, and filtering content that matters to you and them through their interest graphs.
Read more…
Primal Updates: May 2013 Jun 4, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
Primal and the world of interest networking, for the month of May. Product updates, highlights from our blog, and industry news.
Using Scala Implicits to Implement a Messaging Protocol Jun 3, 2013
Derek Wyatt
We’re building some cool new stuff at Primal. Awesome ideas and talented people are a must have in order to build successful and exciting products, but we also need our tools to step up to the challenge. This is why we’ve started adopting Scala and Akka. In this post, I’m going to describe how we’re using Scala’s implicits in order to implement a very important part of our internal messaging fabric, without having to over-burden the business logic.
For some background, see Introducing Primal Assistants: A framework for software agents.
(For the impatient, you can find all of this working code in our Github repository.)
Read more…
How to Make Content Curation Awesome by Adding a Smart Machine as an Editor May 31, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
“Innovation will disrupt many areas of skilled work that have so far had it easy. But if we manage them well, smart machines will free us, not enslave us.”
- The Economist (May 25 2013)
The moral of the story: Either you use smart machines to your competitive advantage, or you concede that advantage to your competitors.
Primal is one such smart machine. It’s intended to empower small- and medium-sized businesses by being simple to use and affordable.
In this post, we’ll show you how to add Primal’s data service to your content curation solutions, as a fully automated, machine-editor.
We’ll also highlight the practical applications, concrete benefits and costs of using a smart machine as a complement to your manual and crowdsourcing strategies. Specifically:
1. How to filter out irrelevant content from your content supply.
2. How to provide personalized collections of content.
For our demo, we’ll use a content aggregator called Alltop, and show you how to recreate these examples and build a similar solution yourself!
Trixie’s Story: The Experience of Interest Networking May 27, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
I was meeting with two guys, one a technologist, one a business advisor.
The discussion was focused on Primal’s technology: semantic user models, knowledge representation, yada, yada…
The business advisor, having listened patiently for some time, finally interjects, “Tell me what this means to Trixie!”
“Trixie?”
“Yes, the everyday person. Tell me a story of why Trixie would care about any of this?”
Read more…
Introducing Primal Assistants: A framework for software agents May 27, 2013
Derek Wyatt
Primal does a lot of heavy lifting in knowledge representation and content filtering. If you ask it to grab you some relevant content around your interests, it will do precisely that.
But what if you don’t want to have to ask? Search engines are fantastic, but they still require that you go to them and then try to figure out how to formulate your query in a way that gets you decent results.
Primal already has the ability to understand what you want, and we’re now working on some technology that will let Primal deliver you the content that you truly care about before you know you want it.
Read on to learn more about Primal’s new software agent and content streaming framework.
Read more…
Why The “Star Trek Computer” Needs Open Data…And Scotty, Too May 24, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
I love this post from Fogbeam Labs. Here’s a bit:
So given that, what can we say about the eventual development of something we can call “The Star Trek Computer”? Right now, I’d say that we can say at least two things: It will be Open Source , and licensed under the Apache Software License v2. There’s a good chance it will also be a project hosted by the Apache Software Foundation.
Their rationale? ASF provides an awesome array of advanced technologies, in everything ranging from NLP, information extraction and retrieval, machine learning, Semantic Web, and on and on. It’s like a free, all-you-can-eat buffet! (er, Star Trek food synthesizer?)
I share their enthusiasm. We use many of these technologies at Primal.
But this is where their science fiction story starts to lose me:
Of course, you don’t necessarily need a full-fledged “Star Trek Computer” to derive value from these technologies. You can begin utilizing Semantic Web tech, Natural Language Processing, scalable machine Learning, and other advanced computing techniques to derive business value today.
We often meet product developers and entrepreneurs looking to build next-generation intelligent solutions.
If these advanced technologies are available for free, why not just jump in and start building?
Read more…
What Tumblr Would Look Like Within Yahoo’s Content (and Why It’s So Tough to Do It Right) May 22, 2013
Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)
Everyone’s talking about the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition, specifically, whether Yahoo will “mess up” Tumblr.
Here’s what Mayer said about it, as reported by TechCrunch:
“Our strategy is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” said Mayer. “There are some who will always prefer Tumblr and will never come to Yahoo. [But] as we pull Tumblr content into our news feed and media experiences it will cause them to become that much more interesting and richer and will cause more to come to Yahoo.”
I think the much more interesting question is, How will Yahoo integrate Tumblr content? It’s a massive technical undertaking.
At Primal, we love working on interesting problems, so here’s a peek into what a Yahoo-Tumblr experience might look like, and why it’s such a daunting technical challenge.
