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

Day 5 Semantic analysis of UK general election

This is the fifth daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like.


The semantic values most prevalent about Gordon Brown in the most relevant web sites (including news and social media)

The semantic values most prevalent about Nick Clegg in the most relevant web sites (including news and social media)

The semantic values most prevalent about David Cameron in the most relevant web sites (including news and social media)

Day 4 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the fourth daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)




The nature of the results for Gordon Brown have been very different to the other candidates. To begin with, the online community is not presenting a strong showing for Gordon Brown. It is therefore not a greate suprise to learn of a tactical change in today's press http://bit.ly/9kEInZ. 

Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

Day 3 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)


Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

Day 2 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)


Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic representation for Nick Clegg

Semantic representation for David Cameron

Day 1 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)
This is not a full 24 hours so we can expect the returns to vary over a few days.

Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

What is most interesting is that this is already showing major differences. I am curious to know what happened to Gordon Brown in his own analysis?

Semantic Public Relations - a future PR discipline or just future PR?

Over the last week, a number of people have asked me to explain what I mean by Semantic Public Relations.

I could spend a lot of time writing a definition of semantics  or the semantic web.  I could show how the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee finds it all absorbing, why Google thinks its is essential to its future survival, and how some serious thinkers see how it is important for the future of society.

It's a much more fun to put on a practical demonstration. That is what I am going to do.

The demonstration will seek to show that it is possible to identify as a moment in time the key semantic notions that define a genre and individuals in the genre.

The methodology I shall apply is listed in this post but I shall also provide the practitioner with the tools that allow practitioners and researchers to replicate  the findings.

To ensure that this is a relevant case study, I shall take an example of major competitive public relations campaigns, the UK General Election. Specifically I shall look at the semantic similarities and differences of the three leaders: David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.

This is a big project and we are limited (by the technological challenge I face) to sampling the corpus. In the future we do not have to be limited by such constraints.

The methodology I am able to use is as follows.

• Every 40 minutes I shall use and automated bot to interrogate the internet to identify new web pages published in a day which mention each of the three major party leaders. I anticipate this will be of the order of 200,000/300,000 every day (or more). Of these I will select 1000 pages (citations) on the basis of number of views and mentions of the leaders in headlines and first paragraph. This content will include publicly available items of:  news media pages in online newspapers, magazines and other news outlets (offering news that is not hidden behind robot blocks and paywalls); blog posts, Twitter tweets, Social Network contributions, wiki pages, Bulletin Boards, discussion lists, List Serve, Sidewikis, comments about photographs and videos, slideshows and other web based pages.
• Each of these selected citations will be parsed (software available here) to extract the the contiguous text which will be retained for further analysis together with an audit trail giving date found and URL.
• Each citation will then be parsed using latent semantic indexing software which will identify the semantic concepts in each citation (here is software that you can use to extract concepts from web pages).
• I will then rank the concepts in order of frequency of use in the citations for each day. This will provide a rather boring list of words and their daily count.
• To make it easy to see the result and to compare the three Party Leaders, I will use a wordwall for visualisation purposes so that you can compare the most significant semantic concepts for each of the three selected leaders.
• These will be posted on this blog every day until polling day.

What do we anticipate this is going to show?

1. This is a proof of concept demonstration showing the semantic differences between the three competitors. 
2. This will show how using a sample of online content selected for its reach and readership the web reports the three campaigns.
3. The analysis will show how these citations represent an online view of the competitors' similarities and differences.
4. It shows how all manner of online influences can represent the three candidates.

As the evidence appears day by day, it will be interested if there is any advice that a PR professional would propose to a candidate based on what the online community is 'thinking'.

Of course some of the PR response will be based on the relationships at play; values that attach to the candidates and the extent to which these responses are driven by people who are motivated to do thinks (like post comments or vote?) and other factors.

Then, we have Semantic Public Relations.

I suspect that what I will be showing in this demonstration is that the online community is driving the agenda and what I think we will find is that the competitors are ignoring a large part of that agenda.

I suspect that the PR response that I hope you will provide will be in near real time and will interpret the results as part of a process in working out what future, internet mediated, ubiquitous interactive communication will look like for effective PR practice.

Enjoy.

It should be remembered that the methodology has not been fully tested (mostly so that it can be available quickly for the CIPR SM committee to see how the internet is moving on and in support of Philip Sheldrake's work). If this was to be a research project to provide a research base for PR practice, it would be conducted differently But this is a nice demo (and, of course, I am very happy to help anyone who wants to do this work for the PR sector).

Excellent! At last the CIPR puts together a powerful digital team

"The CIPR has gathered together some of the UK’s foremost social media thinkers and contributors to provide input into the Institute’s policy guidance, education and training,"  says the Institute.

Headed by CIPR board member and Author of  "Public Relations and the Social Web" Rob Brown, the panel will look at issues including online reputation development, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement.

This is an excellent initiative and more about it is available at Profile Extra.

Some panellists stand out. For my money these folk will be interesting contributors:

• Simon Collister - Head of Non-Profit and Public Sector, We Are Social (@simoncollister) 
• Katy Howell – Managing Director, Immediate Future (@katyhowell)
• Stephen Waddington MCIPR – Managing Director, Speed Communications (@wadds)

The make-weights are headed by Danny Rogers – Editor, PR Week, who leads in the 'I don't understand'  brigade and who hopefully will get a quick education to the extent of their abilities.

Whether Wadds and Simon are able to move this group out of the 'social media' rut is a mute point. We have to remember that social media is 28 years old this year and is only a tiny component in the effects of ubiquitous interactive communication. It is worth noting that the President of the Institute limits the remit of the panel to  “A core theme in our three-year strategic plan ... social media and the impact on the public relations profession."

This may be because she wants the Institute to look at the internet effect more fundamentally elsewhere. I hope so. Certainly it was a core part of  the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission almost exactly 10 years ago which is recorded in  the Journal of Communication Management - vol 6 No 1.

Only this week, we have seen just one example of the extent of these influences. Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, dpa, the Press Association, and Thomson Reuters will support standards that will provide news agencies, PR agencies, CIPR, PRCA , IABC and  other vendors (and a minority of PR teachers in universities) with a uniform method of exchanging multimedia news content. Of course, under the old regime, the PR initiative that was part of this development, XPRL, died for lack of sympathy for anything more technical than closing an envelope with its invitation to another CIPR award party.

The alternative view is that the CIPR has mandated this committee to do no more than work out a recommendation for the application of Facebook for selling chocolate Easter eggs - and monitoring the number of 'fans'. My  issue is not that media channels do not affect behaviours as well as attitudes, emotions and more. They do. It is not that we do not need excellent technicians in media relations and notably beyond the press,radio, TV,  blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We do. We also need strategist who can work on the effective and affective application of these techniques. The solution is simple: get the craft teaching universities to turn out 22 year olds who can do that.

Much more significant for grown up Public Relations is the significance of the internet on communication; its influence in relationships and its capability to change reputation, which affects the value of what organisations are and do. For those who have read Shirky and Benkler there are the other issues about how quickly the nature of IP and corporate structure will morph into different forms of relationship dependent wealth development.

This does mean that XML, semantic web, values management, transparency, porosity and internet agency and other 21st century developments are core issues (not wholly ignored by many senior practitioners or all academics in the past, it should be noted) . However, it may be this is: too big for the CIPR; it wants to ignore past attempts to add some sense of digital influences or that it, in really, or wantonly, wants to cede the real issues to others.

Rob Brown's committee has to draw the line in the sand. Where might this be, I wonder.

As a CIPR Fellow, I am  agog.

What is the right balance between using a pen and a keyboard - a CIPR breakfast meeting

Yeasterday, I received an invitation to a CIPR breakfast meeting proffering advice on 'Digital & traditional: The right balance"

I am amazed that anyone in communication can even think such a thought in 2010. Perhaps I am missing something. Is it just me?

This is the full description of the event:

Digital & traditional: The right balance – book now
Tuesday 25 May

Digital communications must be aligned alongside traditional channels for maximum results. Engaging with audiences via social platforms is an essential part of communications and is no longer the responsibility of another person or team. During this session you will look at the current digital media landscape, why some of the more traditional channels are here to stay and how best to combine both new and old channels to connect with your stakeholders.

To be sure everyone understands where I come from. I am a Fellow of the Institute and co-author of its PR in practice book 'Online Public Relations'.

Now for the subject matter in hand.

To my mind, there can be no balance between digital and traditional. Everything that is 'traditional' is mediated by the internet. Can there be a divide? Is media not media regardless of its description?

Is today's issue not about the the role of media in discourse and how an organisation might be involved in the values and with values that are relevant and affective in the in such exchanges?

I am not sure that I can think of anything that is done in the realm of Public Relations that is not mediated by the Internet.  Every face to face meeting has an internet trail and that means this most basic tactic of 'traditional PR' is mediated by the internet. Remembering that everything you do online is there for ever, that trail surrounding the one-on-one meeting is now part of the values and reputation of the organisation. Perhaps part of the breakfast session will be about the durability of the printed media. The answer is, of course, a long time. Equally, today the media is mediated by Twitter and the PR needs skills needed have to be good at transformative interactions in such an environment. This is post 'degree' skills training. Surely not for practitioners of more than five years standing.

Can one now ask, what the meeting should really be about?  Should it really be:

How does the profession deals with members who believe that it is possible to implement PR strategies and tactics without a range of internet elements? 

For senior practitioners, that is a real problem.

There are all sorts of things that make me cringe. For example, I watched a team planning a conference recently. It took an hour to realise that it needed a web site to offer (more) information and the means to sign-up and pay online. Look at how many press conferences do not have a such facilities. It is quite bizarre.

I think, however, I will go. If only to find out the answer to my question.

Semantic Public Relations

I am taking the first steps in developing a Semantic Public Relations theory. At a recent celebration of the 21st year of the Bournemouth PR BA course, I bent Tom Watson's ear about how narrow I though PR research was. He was polite as I ranted away and my lurid arm waving did not help the furtherance of the idea on the British South Coast.

The trouble is, they have lots of students and enough to help in the development of, as Kevin Kelly puts it, connecting all the nouns.

Underneath all this is a thought that there is a way to demonstrate that reputation is able to turn intellectual properties, intangible and tangible assets into tradeable value in a relationship (and only in a relationship).

It is a nice thought because it is good for PR and very good for the evolution of Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web.

My question is: Using online discourse and automated semantic analysis, can elements of platform, channel and values be identified to show attributes of reputation that affect the value of people, products, services and organisations.

This is how the scenario goes:

You have a pretty looking (intangible) car (tangible) and you know how to make it (know how) and you know what you need by way of components and logistics (know what) and now you want to sell it.

But until you tell people about it, you cant't sell it. 

So advertise.  You have reach - hooray!  But you did not sell anything. So now you start to tell people about how pretty, how well made, how you acquire components and deliver it to customers.  You make your organisation more transparent.  This transparency means you expose the values that are so important to you. 

There are people out there who find these values coincide with their own and they want to know more about your organisations. They check up by searching for you on Google. If they find nothing, they do not think you have much of a reputation and so don't buy your car.

You do lots of online work and get more of a presence talking about  your values and more people now find you and like your values and the values that make the car pretty. They also can see your online presence and like what they see. 

Here is the catch point. At this stage have you done enough to share your values and build enough reputation for people to trust you and take that extra step and buy your car.

Reputation turns your car from a bunch of tangible and intangible liabilities into an asset.

If we only knew what values comprise reputation so that we can build reputation, then people will pay to acquire those values.

In the scenario above we have a number of clues.

• We need reach. Lots of coverage. 
• We need to be transparent and expose values in value rich posts and web pages. 
• We also need that gossip by third parties about us.The sort of insider endorsement. The stuff of porous corporate walls. 
• We need richness. Richness which exposes our values. Not just a few brand values but values about the way we work and interact across a wide range of activities.
• We need to use a lot of online channels where people can find out about our values and use the networks, in and outlinks and search engines to seek out the source of these much loved values. The internet acting as an agent brings the public to us and us to them.

For the last ten years we have known that transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach are important. They were elements that came out of the work of the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission.

We have very powerful evidence from the work of Bruno Amaral that the words found using latent semantic indexing act like (and are) semantic values. We also know from his work presented at Bled last July that these semantic values work in networks to draw people under their influence into relationships (we live in an era of near Ubiquitous Interactive Communication which makes the internet network very powerful).

The new element I want to put in the Amaral equation is trust and I am not sure how to identify what it is that engenders trust in internet mediated relationships.

I guess, I am looking for people who would be interested in taking this thinking further.

We are fortunate to have access to Girish Lakshminarayana's LSI software which has the ability to identify semantic values in discourse, we can begin the research on what components are involved in the development of reputation in internet communication.

What is so cool about this is that we already have the corpus (its in the Google cashe), already have the automated semantic tools to identify values and we can create relationship models on pre-existing online discourse to test and evaluate in weeks not months or years.

In a few months, a dedicated research team would have a more than a working hypothesis to change the value of organisations through enhanced reputation management.

In this research we would get tantalisingly close to a new type of value (probably more than one) to compete with money but which also could be exchanged for money in an open market.

Hello Semantic Public Relations. You are very exciting.