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If you’re Welsh, on the Internet, and know what an airplane is, have we got a naming contest for you:
Air Southwest is offering one lucky person the chance to win a trip from Newquay Airport for them and up to three friends or family with the launch of its ‘Name that Plane’ competition.
The airline will take delivery in February of the latest Dash 8-300 aircraft to join the Air Southwest fleet and the people of Cornwall are being asked to give it a name.
Whoever comes up with the winning name, which will be chosen by Air Southwest, will win four return tickets to any destination of their choice served by Air Southwest from Newquay.
The airline currently flies from Newquay to London Gatwick, Leeds Bradford, Manchester, Dublin and Bristol, and from April 10 will start a twice daily service to Cardiff.
So summon the likes of Dafydd ap Gwilym, William Williams Pantycelyn and Hedd Wyn and get…ooh, wait a minute, “Hedd Wynd”, that’s a winner! Quick, submit it here!
Ei aberth nid a heibio - ei wyneb Annwyl nid a’n ango Er i’r Almaen ystaenio Ei dwrn dur yn ei waed o.
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Have you ever seen an online ad appear for “Discount Airline Fares” while reading an article about a plane crash? How about an ad for scuba lessons served up next to a news account of a shark attack? It’s because ad placement software works solely on keyword recognition. Or that’s the way it has worked until now.
There’s a new online ad technology in town that can actually tell the difference between good and bad contextual matches.
It’s called Shinola, and yes, it was named by Igor.
From the company’s website:
Shinola is a contextual ad placement solution that automatically matches highly relevant advertisements (product descriptions) to web content generated from Trainable Semantic Vectors (TSVs). Trainable Semantic Vectors are a major breakthrough in representing and analyzing textual information.
Until now, reliable semantic analysis always came at the expense of scalability. Shinola is the first and only product placement technology that is accurate enough to capture semantic meaning, fast enough to power real-time applications, automated enough to maintain in dynamic environments, and scalable enough to handle web-sized problems.
TextWise’s proprietary technology coupled with its intellectual property protection gives us a uniquely powerful capability to enable the next generation of contextual ad placement.
Shinola offers a unique combination of advantages over other approaches:
* Understands the meaning of webpages. It expresses the world by combining over 2000 semantic dimensions that are directly derived from Internet taxonomies.
* Provides a unique signature for every webpage and every advertisement. E-retailers are no longer trapped with 500 other competitor ads that look exactly the same to the placement engine just because they have the same keyword or are dumped into the same category.
* Highlights the topic strengths and subtle interactions of meaning within each document that make that document unique. Since Shinola identifies both focused topic areas and rich sub-contexts, it can find the best match between a webpage and an ad.
* Handles both keyword lists and full text. It can immediately import an existing database of ad keywords and calculate new signatures to get accurate matches against incoming webpages. But it can also leverage additional text (marketing collateral, ad copy, product literature, customer descriptions, etc) to create even better experience with Shinola.
* Bypasses the computational complexity of deep natural language understanding. Full natural language processing is practical only for relatively small amounts of text, not for real-time systems that need to handle millions of webpages a day. Shinola uses just the right amount of scalable semantics and linguistic knowledge to capture the meaning and content of documents.
* Avoids the classification failures associated with categories that do not align with customer needs and ontologies that rapidly become obsolete. Although Shinola’s semantic dimensions are derived from a broad Internet taxonomy, we do not actually classify webpages or ads into that taxonomy. Because signatures are formed by combining the strengths of hundreds of topic areas, they are immune to minor changes in the underlying taxonomy.
* Overcomes the failure of keyword matching and classification. The failure of contextual advertising to date can be traced directly to the inability of keyword matching and classification techniques to deliver highly accurate, highly focused ad placement. Shinola can find the most appropriate ad for a webpage even if the two use completely different vocabulary.
Quite simple, really. [Read Igor’s Shinola case study for more.]
The sideshow is in town. The Carnival of the Capitalists is being hosted this week by the inimitable, inevitable, ubiquitous and ever undulating Abnu, just around the corner at Wordlab.
A little Paul Anka, just to get your week off on a sour note. This was used as Kodak’s song, if you remember. If only we could forget. We thought we had, until Unlawyer was callous enough to dig it up:
Good morning, yesterday
You wake up and time has slipped away
And suddenly it’s hard to find
The memories you left behind
Remember, do you remember?
The laughter and the tears
The shadows of misty yesteryears
The good times and the bad you’ve seen
And all the others in between
Remember, do you remember
The times of your life? (Do you remember?)
Reach out for the joy and the sorrow
Put them away in your mind
The mem’ries are times that you borrow
To spend when you get to tomorrow
Here comes the saddest part (Comes the saddest part)
The seasons are passing one by one
So gather moments while you may
Collect the dreams you dream today
Remember, will you remember
The times of your life?
Gather moments while you may
Collect the dreams you dream today
Remember, will you remember
The times of your life?
Of your life
Of your life
Do you remember, baby
Do you remember the times of your life?
Do you remember, baby
Do you remember the times of your life?
Agilent issused a press release today announcing the name of their to-be-spun-off semiconductor testing business as “Verigy”.
The Agilent / Verigy release demonstrates yet another case of reverse engineered rationale, created solely for an internal audience for the purpose of buy-in and sign-off on the name:
PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 12, 2006–Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) today announced it has selected a name for its upcoming semiconductor test spin-off company. The new name, Verigy, will be used when the new company separates from Agilent, which is expected to occur near mid-2006.
The name is built from the Latin prefix “veri-” (”true, genuine”), which is the root of “verification” (”to prove the truth of, substantiate”) and so ties the name to the test business. The “-gy” suffix comes from the combining form “-logy,” meaning the name of sciences or bodies of knowledge, as in biology and geology. Verigy describes a company dealing with the true nature of things. The sound of the name connotes energy.
Now that you’ve been schooled by Agilent in what Verigy communicates, will you ever forget? Of course you will, because it communicates nothing.
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And it looks like another backroom bathroom bacronym to us. The bathroom humor is spilling over the bowl on this one, as they are purveyors of fine bathroom tissue products and silly domains. Check them out at www.scatissue.com
While they’re at it, they may as well launch a co-branding effort with these people.
Via Gary Peare at Tesser
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A bacronym is a reverse engineered acronym. The idea is you find a name for something and to help sell it to the approval committee you create an acronym as an afterthought, buttressing your argument for the name. Nobody ever remembers what the bacronym stands for, but no matter. The audience it is created for is strictly internal and only for buy-in.
The most extreme example of this in recent memory is ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”, aka the USA PATRIOT act.
It’s true. Because Asinine Consultants Rely On Nattering YesManship.
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We at Snark Hunting have great respect for words and language. Indeed, we spend a lot of time in the safety of our offices writing and joking about the subjects.
Today though, we want to take a moment to shine the spotlight on Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter in Iraq, who is the latest journalist to be kidnapped there.
Unlike us, Jill does important work with words and language. Along with her family and colleagues, we hope for her safe return. Jill is someone doing vital and dangerous work, and she is also a friend.
Madman Elliot Back has beautifully quantified the words that most commonly appear in the names of blogs:
Wondering how people name their blogs is an old question, never answered to my satisfaction. Fortunately the Blogwise directory hosts a list of 33810 blogs. Extracting the names of each blog from the directory itself took some work, but the result is this text file of blog names, one per line. Now that I got the raw data, it’s time to go to work.
Quickly coding a solution in C#, I wrote a program to tokenize the blog names by whitespace and punctuation, and place the resulting words in a hashmap for counting purposes. This gives a tab-delimited (paste into Excel!) text file of words used in blog titles and their frequency…
…The top word, used in 9.986 percent of the blogs surveyed was “blog.” The next most popular, at 2.619 percent, is “life.” Here’s the top 10 words in a blog’s name:
1. blog - 9.986%
2. life - 2.619%
3. weblog - 1.841%
4. world - 1.296%
5. from - 1.226%
6. journal - 1.139%
7. news - 1.087%
8. thoughts - 1.039%
9. with - 0.670%
10. daily - 0.660%
Elliot goes much deeper into the mire here. It’s no surprise that most blog names are intuitively descriptive, for that is the norm across all product, service and company names. The result is a manky swirl of achromatic Gesso.
The key to powerful naming is finding the metaphor less traveled.
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