Fluffy Clouds and a PR Ontology

Girish Lakshminarayana is something of a coding wizard. He takes my half-formed ideas and turns them into code, adds insights of his own and comes up with astonishing results.


It is his genius that is taking me to to an RDFa description of text (I know about the semantic web reservations about this)  and other data that will describe the requirements for Semantic Public Relations.

Soon the PR practitioner will have programmes that are a knowledge representation of the client landscape showing a cloudscape of  people, their interests and view, ideas, products, interactions and commitment. We will be able to project into the future with known degrees of accuracy and much much more. These insights will be dimensions richer than modern PR research. We will use the internet to give us insights and solutions.

Into this changing view to an endless horizon, the practitioner will be able to inject ideas to test what outcomes may be.

Not all the advantages are far into the future. many of them are already available.

Today, we are able to identify the semantic concepts embedded in individual page citations; automatically describe the type of web page (descriptors range from link farm to blog), add the date/time of publication (with some accuracy), identify names, titles and even email addresses in text and pick up some other fun attributes. We can do this in a scalable computing environment to allow a very big corpus to be examined. In a word, we know who people are, what, where and when they find things interesting and how relevant they are to the corporate drivers of our employers and clients (which we can also gain from online insights). We know what is available to influence them and the values available they hold dear.


Using interesting  mathematical models, and we use Bayesian and Boolean logic a lot (this is fuzzy logic used to ensure that, for example, aircraft systems keep planes in the air),  we can do some very deep analytical modelling. This means that we can look at word concepts that competitors have in common, the types of media that they have in common, the dates when these were common between them and much more and from these we the triplets that take us to insights as opposed to answers. We can then create documents accompanied by semantic markup (and some of these apparently structural components can be - in my view - much more organic and identified on the fly).

Over the years, as more corporate activity has been mediated by the internet, it has become possible to be more and more accurate in the information we can glean and process to good effect. Over the years we have published these findings by showing some of the outcomes.


Because of cloud computing the size and range of these data is no longer constrained, which means we can cover much more ground than ever before.

The PR industry is already beginning to gain advantageous from the evolution of the semantic web. Here are some examples of benefits that have already emerged:

• First, monitoring is really easy (dead tree clips are even possible). 
• Being able to compare different forms of outputs, out-takes and outcomes is much simpler. 
• Media, audience and message analysis is simple and the nature of the networks is revealed (a simple practical example is being able to find subject related bloggers  by national audience penetration, level of interest and engagement).
• Influential statements and responses can be synthesised, weighted and viewed in daily, weekly or progressive monthly time frames and by audience demographic. 
• We took a look at a comment by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to see if it was possible to create a newspaper from existing content online. It is. It can be very very specific. It is the kind of content that would be regarded as a manifestation of 'thought leadership' in the parlance of todays PR industry. It is striking, always on, brings news, thinking and research from great minds worldwide in minutes (well in seconds if you are a stock market trader) and it is an amazing by-product of semantic PR research.

So much for the present and a lot of this should be accompanied by a big dose of 'so what' if practitioners don't or won't use this intelligence. 

Soon we will be able to answer much more profound questions not with facts but with insights. Questions like: Will the PR industry engage with the semantic web and the insights it can bring to bear.

A small contribution for the Stockholm Accords

I am delighted at what I have seen of the Stockholm Accords

The dynamism of Toni Muzi Falconi is breathtaking and I am full of admiration for the efforts of Ronél Rensburg and Anne Gregory in their explication of the change that is taking place in the world today.

But I am not without concerns.

Perhaps, as we look to the next two or three years of PR practice it gives us a clue as to the life of the Acccord. It is a bold effort but, in my experience, will have a struggle to survive or have any impact.

My interest is in how the internet affects the world and PR in particular. I did predict its significance to the CIPR in 1995 and was involved in some of the papers for the now long forgotten 1999 CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (some of the papers are here and some are here Journal of Communication Management; Volume: 5; Issue: 2; 2000 ).

I am a practitioner, researcher and teacher and so am part of this industry. Part of me is agast at how little we regard the future. Students leave university with scant understanding of internet implications for their future work. At best they are told about something called 'Social Media' (a module that could equally be called etiquette). I see some agencies 'sliming down' because of the 'recession'.  They don't recognise that they are being by-passed. There is some form of belief in this industry of ours that the internet is, progresively, having a greater effect on our lives and has effects that mediate everyone's life. The big thinking concerns online reputation developments, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement. This is a linear view, a straight line graph of change.

The reality is much more potent.The influences brought about by the internet are not straight line, they are exponential. According to an IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will now be doubling every 11 hours. Some years ago Kevin Kelly explained the effects of exponential growth of hyperlinks in network rather well when he told of the prior and future 5000 days.

Some clue to this change can be seen in the consumer/tech cell phone in our pocket or handbag. The move from phone/text to email to hand held mobile computer has been quite quick and as quickly has become passe. Another clue may be found in changed consumer habits and annual growth of online retail sales of 25% plus every year. The biggest development is from, effectively, no cloud computing four years ago to common place corporate application with, in the UK, companies like Rentokil Initial replacing all their email into the cloud in two years, Insurance giant Aviva, Logistics firm Pall-Ex and Universal Music already implementing mass internal and extrernal communication in the cloud and tiny tiny organisations like mine with mega computing power for pennies.

Should it care to use it, the Centre for PR Studies at Leeds Met now has unlimited computing power available without making the lights dim. In the last month, the capability for my research into semantic public relations has moved from being stalled by the high levels of media coverage for the general election to being able to provide both semantic analysis of text and an automated taxonomy to find infered links. This is not a mega university reserach institute it is, literally, in a shed at the end of my garden.

In three years we will have both inference of relationships and predictability of discourse at very high levels of accuracy routinely using massive cloud computing power.

These capabilities will change how governments and societies operate because they will provide near complete radical transparency of every organisation. You and I will be able to find out the precise nature of the common values that hold disperate organisations, their financial backers, customers and other stakeholder in thier networks.

As for companies, so too for terrorists, wayward governments and so forth.

As the leading thinkers in the world explain in this video, we very nearly have the knowlege and we do have the computing power.

It may possibly be that it is the PR industry that benefits from these developments but linear thinking however ambitious the growth projection may be, is not enough.

From the values lecture, I gave in Lincoln four years ago to Bruno Amaral's Euprera discourse this year to cloud capacity for semantic PR development in the last month is pretty impressive.

But this thinking has drawbacks. It is not a conversation one can have with practitioners. They both could not understand nor have the inclination to want to stare so much change in the face. Equally, I know of only one Masters course world wide which is prepared to entertain such radical thought (I don't know of a PhD doing such work - but would be thrilled to find one).

It is for these reasons that I think the Accord, like the CIPR Internet Commission will need re-thinking from scratch in three years.

But it is a great start that can be developed in June.

Copyright law keeps getting in the way of profit

Yahoo! , IAC/InterActive, EBay  and Facebook urged a judge to dismiss Viacom Inc.’s copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube.

The four Internet companies filed 'friend-of-the-court' briefs on behalf of YouTube at the Manhattan federal court.

“Plaintiffs’ legal arguments, if accepted, would retard the development of the Internet and electronic commerce,” Asim Bhansali, an attorney representing the four companies, said in the brief.

Viacom, which owns MTV Networks and the Paramount film studio, claimed YouTube displayed 63,000 copyrighted works on its video-sharing website without authorisation. In March, New York-based Viacom asked U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton for a summary judgment ruling in its favor.


“The courts have been clear that creating and building a web-based business on the intellectual property of others is illegal. That is exactly what YouTube did in its formative years,” Kelly McAndrew, a Viacom spokeswoman, said in an e- mailed statement. “Nothing in this case threatens the principles of the DMCA or the ability of legitimate Internet- based businesses to flourish.”

This would seem to be not much more than the mumbo jumbo of an obscure American court.

It goes much further than that.

As most will now know we have the most confused set of rules affecting the downloading of music ever. Now downloading films is easy, cheap and getting faster, the same old nonsense is being trotted out.

We have to come to  grips with the whole idea of value and copyright.

I am a right holder of lots of stuff. It is stuff I| have worked on, invented, re arranged from other more intelligent people and sometimes just fun. As far as possible I make it freely available. That is, I do not ask for payment in money.

The value I get from it is huge. I have never been so busy in my life (writing this on a Bank Holiday Saturday in between work for one of my day jobs and a new book). I am busy because I have a lot of IP out there.

Today, journalism is thriving as never before. More journalists with more content exposed to a more relevant and even more devoted readership. Publishing, as The Time is about to show us is in a mess.

There is more music, better music, bigger audiences and a wider range of genre exposed to more people that ever. Music, composers, musicians and musical markets are flourishing. Yet the music publishing industry is in a mess.

And so the story goes on and now has hit YouTube.

The law is a complete mess and the reasons for having protected IP was usurped long ago.

It is time we re-thought all this. The music, news and film industries are not national defence, education, health care and other important parts of society and we should not encourage them to be a great big part of the nanny state. It is time, as companies, that they stopped bleating and got stuck into creating wealth for their shareholders. The lack of creative management in  Viacom is a matter for its shareholders. They should have the guts to fire Philippe Dauman and replace him with a tough operator who will drop the court case and get on with extracting value from the Viacom IP.

Talking of Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for  non geeks the Real Time Web has very recently become fashionable. It fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction and then, of course, we no have real time search available fro Google which shows every new page it indexes almost as it happens.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance. This is a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November  noting that:

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. 

Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by  Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch.

There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. 

Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

A number of services are now being introduces. S typical solution is  Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media. Very few services are really real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves, feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot  to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services.  Topsy (http://topsy.com)  is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content.   So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web.  You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month.  

Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot.  OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/)  offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results. 

Meantime, people like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the 

Real Time Web.

 What does all this mean to practitioners.

The key issues for the PR profession are not as easy. The need to be able to monitor the web real time is hard.

There are a lot of tools for monitoring the Fortunately, Publicasity has partnered with companies that have the necessary technology.

Being able to identify opportunities and dissonance between brands and the brand values held by consumers is the next big challenge.

The Publicasity digital team is already working on this with Lisbon University and Klea Global. Early examples of the Real Time technology research are available and Klea Global is closely associated with developments of the Real Time Reputation Wall.

We are now able to discover the way online communities understand corporate and consumer brands both when the brands are top of mind and in lifestyle situations.

This is a big advantage for Real Time Web interactions where marketers can respond to the changing consumer landscape as they evolve.

This is ground breaking capability that the account teams can bring to meet Real Time Web success.

What is Real Time Web really like?

I thought that it would be interesting to see what level of coverage has been attributed to the election in the last 40 minutes to give some idea of how fast you would have to be over a big issue?


Real Time Citation Alert for UK Elections

UK elections (5:47) | Breaking & Daily News, Sport & Weather | TV
33 minutes ago
- Just a week out from polling day, the British election is shaping as one of the most unpredictable in decades. For the very latest, Breakfast is joined from ...
http://tvnz.co.nz/breakfast-news/uk-elections-5-47-video-3502359

GameSpot Forums - Off-Topic Discussion - UK Elections: Who are you
39 minutes ago
- Labour's hopes of recapturing the marginal constituency of Rochdale have been dealt a serious blow by Gordon Brown's insult to a local voter.
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=27303841

Liverpool Daily Post.co.uk - News - Liverpool News - Election 2010
28 minutes ago
- OF COURSE, there was only story on anyone's lips – “Bigotgate”, Gordon Brown's potentially career-destroying comments on the Rochdale widow he met on the ...
http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2010/04/29/election-2010-rob-merrick-on-gordon-brown-and-bigot-gate-92534-26339671/

Polls give UK election debate win to Cameron – This Just In - CNN
15 minutes ago
- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown fought to hold on to his job Thursday in a debate against the two men who hope to replace him, David Cameron of the ...
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/29/polls-give-uk-election-debate-win-to-cameron/

Hanging in the balance: how Cleggmania shook the UK's elections
32 minutes ago
- The world This year's UK general election was meant to be a predictable contest – until the first-ever television debates gave rise to 'Cleggmania'.
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100429/REVIEW/704299992/1008/rss

BBC Election Debate: live - General Election News
45 minutes ago
- Yesterday might go down in the UK election history books as The Big Cringe " the moment when Incumbent Prime Minister Brown leveled a heavy blow to his ...
http://politifi.com/news/BBC-Election-Debate-live-542841.html

Pollster.com: UK Projections from PoliticsHome
17 minutes ago
- For more discussion of the UK elections -- including the "uniform swing" issue, see also the two-part interview that Emily conducted with Anthony Wells, ...
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/uk_projections_from_politicsho.php

TPF: UK: General Election 2010 Final Debate (Video)
17 minutes ago
- Title: UK: General Election 2010 Final Debate (Video) Source: You Tube from itn news. URL Source: [None] Published: Apr 29, 2010. Author: itn news ...
http://www.the-peoples-forum.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=18284

Derryck - UK National Elections
45 minutes ago
- UK National Elections. Thursday, 29. April 2010, 21:44:03. The · http://mimbari. livejournal.com/April 29-2010: Is The UK's Third Political Party Ready To ...
http://my.opera.com/BringBaka/blog/2010/04/29/uk-national-elections

whoar.co.nz » Blog Archive » “..UK Election Debate Live Updates
36 minutes ago
- UK Election Debate Live Updates .. Video..” “..Today is the final of three televised debates in the UK in the lead up to the elections on May 6. ...
http://whoar.co.nz/2010/uk-election-debate-live-updates-video/

Angus Reid Public Opinion Post-Debate Analysis | Angus Reid Elections
20 minutes ago
- Each one of the graphs above contains the findings of questions made to debate watchers who are Springboard UK panel members. ...
http://www.angusreidelections.co.uk/2010/04/third-debate/

British Blogs
19 minutes ago
- Many realise that a hung parliament, after the UK general election, which is due in less than 2 weeks from now (6th May 2010), would be the. ...
http://www.britishblogs.co.uk/similar-to/cameron-comes-out-top-but-brown-battles-on/

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The post mortem - continued
8 minutes ago
- http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Newspaper-Front-Pages-Papers-On-Friday- April-30-2010/Media- .... Election Predictors. Anthony Wells Election Guide ...
http://politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2010/04/29/the-post-mortem-continued/

United Kingdom - Inform
11 minutes ago
- UK police: We had July 7 bomber's fingerprints AP News — 3 hours ago ... BRITAINELECTION. AP News — 9 hours ago. Labour Party followers display political ...
http://inform.com/world/europe/united-kingdom

Somalia24.com - Leader In News - News That Is Better Connected...
45 minutes ago
- Britain's party leaders have clashed over the economy in the final televised debate of the UK election campaign.(Celebrityzap.net) ...
http://www.somalia24.com/

The Economist backs Cameron in UK vote - iPRIME Newcastle
10 minutes ago
- The Economist backs Cameron in UK vote. 30/04/2010 | 07:39 AM ... "In this British election the overwhelming necessity of reforming the public sector stands ...
http://newcastle.iprime.com.au/index.php/news/national-news/the-economist-backs-cameron-in-uk-vote,19098841

Coming general elections - Page 11 - bit-tech.net Forums
40 minutes ago
- Search: UK General Election. David Cameron emerged victorious in the third and final prime ministerial debate, according to snap polls. ...
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=2289881

Britain's third party leader grabs spotlight - Worldnews.com
20 minutes ago
- Zeenews: UK election: David Cameron leads in polls but under pressure ... Yahoo Daily News:UK election debate gives third party a boost ...
http://article.wn.com/view/2010/04/29/Britains_third_party_leader_grabs_spotlight_4/

Keyword: elections
45 minutes ago
- In a historic first and obviously influenced by the 2008 United States election campaign and debates, the UK broadcasted their very first election debate ...
http://209.157.64.200/tag/elections/index?more=8178077

The Economist backs Cameron in UK vote - iGWN Kalgoorlie
15 minutes ago
- The Economist backs Cameron in UK vote. 30/04/2010 | 05:39 AM ... "In this British election the overwhelming necessity of reforming the public sector stands ...
http://kalgoorlie.igwn.com.au/index.php/news/national-news/the-economist-backs-cameron-in-uk-vote,19098841

3rd TV UK Parliamentary Debate – alright, who's it gonna be? - The
18 minutes ago
- I no longer have a vote in the UK election, which is fair enough as I don't live there. But then, I suppose one of the reasons I don't live there is that I ...
http://gliddofglood.typepad.com/the_glidd_of_glood_blog/2010/04/3rd-tv-uk-parliamentary-debate-alright-whos-it-gonna-be.html