Hey You Guys! – A chat with David Sztypuljak about film blogging

January 22nd, 2010, By talk

This week’s guest blogger is a child of the 80′s, self proclaimed geek, and avid Goonies fan. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Dave Sztypuljak – founder and editor extraordinaire of HeyUGuys.co.uk – England’s most popular independent resource for all things film

Mike:

Hi Dave – it’s marvelous speaking to you.

Dave:

Hi Mike!

Mike:

Dave who are the guys at HeyUGuys?

Dave:

The blog was founded by Jon Lyus and myself in November 2008 and is now entering its 2nd year. The name is a reference to “The Goonies” because we both love the film and originally thought we’d be posting only about 80′s movies. About two days after we started I think we realized the scope was too narrow and we wanted to write about film in general. BTW we nearly called the blog 88MPH – probably a less esoteric reference…

Mike:

I’ll admit the “Hey you guys!” eluded me but I’d have caught on to the 88MPH. How did Jon and you connect?

Dave:

We worked at the same investment house. He was in HR and I was in IT.
Jon would send out film quizzes routinely to everyone. I always aced them…
We soon became close friends and a while later, when I decided I’d like to start a film blog, I emailed him and asked him if he wanted to team up. The rest is history…

Mike:

You know Dave, in preparation for this interview I spent a fair amount of time researching film blogs.
It seems to me as if there are very few serious film blogs outside the US. Am I wrong?

Dave:

Actually, Mike you’re absolutely right. We’re pretty unique insofar as we’re a non-American, English language, film blog. Honestly I think it’s given us an advantage in terms of exclusive content and audience.

Mike:

Do you feel cutoff?

Dave:

On the contrary! I feel unique…
Seriously though, being situated in England as we are, has provided us with some amazing opportunities that were very important for building HeyUGuys as a brand.

Mike:

Do tell…

Dave:

About seven months ago we realized Ridley Scott was filming the new Robin Hood movie, with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, in a wood near Farnham in Surrey. Farnham is only about 20 minutes drive from where I live, so one day we headed down there to visit and film the set. We didn’t quite realize it at the time but we’d created an amazing asset for ourselves – original and exclusive content that none of the “big” channels had. The post achieved popularity quickly and was linked to from everywhere.

The Tron poster we posted before anyone else is another example of a scoop that got us a fair deal of attention:

Dave Sztypuljak posted this Tron poster originally on December 9, 2009

Dave Sztypuljak posted this Tron poster originally on December 9, 2009

Mike:

How has the success of HeyUguys affected your lives?

Dave:

Its funny really. The first time we received validation we were being picked up by the mainstream media it was such a surprise I thought it was a hoax!

We got invited to the Star Trek premier by Sky News. One day I opened my inbox and the invitation was just waiting there for me. We got full VIP treatment. Throughout the premier I was waiting for someone to grab me, tell me the whole thing was a mistake, and kick me out the door.

Mike:

From my experience as long as you keep a smooth face and act as if you belong these things go smoothly. Seems you can even gate crash the Whitehouse nowadays as long as you keep your cool.

Dave:

Believe me, when the second premier invitation came in both Jon and I were already far more suave about the whole thing, although we still get very excited!

Mike:

So now that you’re all cool with being a film blogger what are the plans for the future?

Dave:

I’ve recently quit my “day job” to work for HeyUguys full time. The plan for 2010 is to make the blog profitable enough to sustain itself and us. I’d be happy to live my life watching films, mingling with celebrities and writing about it.

Mike:

Sounds like a plan to me. Good luck Dave and thanks for talking to me and for supporting Headup!

Dave:

It’s my pleasure. I actually like what Headup is doing quite a bit, so much so that I’ve been chatting to some blogger friends getting them to try it out.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Fun Stuff, Wordpress, feedback, plugin | 1 Comment »

Why we understand you

January 18th, 2010, By talk

Apples, Yoda and NLP – introducing how we understand Language

One of our missions as a company has always been providing our users with the most useful, accurate and interesting content the web has to offer.
Early on in our existence we realized that in order to do this we’d need the ability to understand the web in a way that closely mimics the way humans do. In techno-babble this is often referred to as NLP, which stands for “Natural Language Processing“, and even more specifically as NLU, which stands for “Natural Language Understanding”
As trivial as this may, it’s far from being a simple task.

Here’s why:

Language is deceptive, especially if you’re an Apple

Ambiguous Apple

Language, as we encounter it on the web and use it in our daily exchanges, is often ambiguous, and therefore deceptive, tricky and difficult to understand. So much so that often enough understanding it is challenging even for a human.
Consider for example the following sentence:

“Apple, answered Steve, is my favorite”

The possibilities for interpreting it vary widely depending on which “Apple” and which “Steve” we’re talking about.

If you happen to follow technology news, you’re likely to infer that the “Apple” in question is in fact the company, and therefore “Steve”, is in fact Steve Jobs, its founder.

If however you lack this knowledge your interpretation of the sentence must be limited to the understanding that someone named Steve is making commentary about his preferences in fruits.

Understanding language – How do we humans do it?

Humans, even very young ones, understand ambiguous usage of language almost effortlessly thanks to an innate ability to infer an ambiguous term’s context by using a wide range of cues and clues:

  • We refer to the identity of the person speaking – And therefore don’t necessarily treat every person who calls us “Bro” like family.
  • We take cues from the intonation used - It helps us differentiate between “what?” and “WHAT?!”
  • We depend on sentences’ grammatical structure - Now you know why Master Yoda is so hard to understand (and annoying – or is that just me?)
  • We refer to our knowledge of the world – As in the example above – knowing a certain “Steve” is closely related to a company called “Apple” allows us to infer that this is a possible meaning for the sentence.
  • We refer to the context in which an ambiguous term is used - In the example above it’s precisely the lack of context that leaves the ambiguity unresolved.

“Ok”, you might say, “People can understand the languages they use. So what?”.

The answer is that understanding how people understand language provides the clues necessary to teach computers to do the same.

Understanding how people do stuff is the key to teaching machines to do it too

Once we’d analyzed in depth the various cues humans utilize to understand language we examined which of them could be accomplished in real-time by using an affordably scalable system. The cues we chose to use are the bottom three from the list above: grammatical structure, knowledge of the world and context.

How do you teach a computer about the world?

In order to grant our platform the ability to understand language we set out to teach it about the world. We accomplished this by equipping it with a graph mapping out the billions of connections that exist between over 30 million nouns, topics, terms and things.

One might well ask: “What do you define as a connection?”

The answer is we defined any possible relationship between two things as a “connection”. For example:

The person “Steve” is connected to the company “Apple” because he “founded” it.

As I showed above, merely knowing that a possible connection may exist between two things goes a long way to assisting one in understanding the context in which they’re mentioned.
The more one’s aware of possible connections between the things mentioned in any given text the greater one’s confidence in selecting the correct context for each.

Returning to the example above, had the sentence been:

“Apple’s iPhone, answered Steve, is my favorite accomplishment”

We’d have little doubt as to which “Steve” and which “Apple” the sentence refers to. The mention of the iPhone grants the context we were missing before.

One of our platform’s greatest assets is that it approaches text holistically.

Rather than examine every word or sentence separately, we look at much larger segments of text in order to search for the clues that will enable us to find the correct context for all the ambiguous terms encountered.

Grammar is a powerful tool for understanding meaning

“Grammar, Yoda teaches, a powerful tool for obscuring meaning is.”

Conversely, when used correctly (i.e. not in Star Wars), it’s a very helpful tool in helping us understand context and meaning.

By incorporating a model of the English language’s grammar into our platform we were able to improve its understanding of context even further.

Content matching

We use our ability to accurately understand what a “thing”, not only to choose its appropriate meaning in the context of the text in which it’s mentioned but also, to help us retrieve matching and useful content accurately. To date we’ve already mapped hundreds of sources for:

  • News
  • Articles
  • Images
  • Videos
  • Realtime data
  • Facts
  • Events
  • Geo-data
  • Product specs

We use all these sources to retrieve the content we match for every entity. Our platform enables to extend this content repository easily, and we continue to add more data to it on a regular basis. We’re even capable of utilizing content provided by our publishers as a source (see the screenshot below for an example of how this is implemented on film review blog HeyUGuys).

What’s next?

It’s our intention to develop our content syndication abilities further in future so as to assist our bloggers and publishers in achieving distribution and getting more traffic to their sites.

As more sites and blogs install our widget we believe that the content they hold will gradually become one of the most interesting content assets we have access to, but that’s already material for another post…

The editors of the HeyUGuys blog use Headup as a "related post" widget to drive traffic internally to other posts on their blog

The editors of the HeyUGuys blog use Headup as a "related post" widget to drive traffic internally to other posts on their blog

Image Credits: Spencer E Holtaway, johannes pape

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Semantic Web, web 3.0 | 2 Comments »

A chat with Dennis Amith – The J-ent blogger who's career precedes the web

January 14th, 2010, By talk
A chat with Dennis Amith - The J-ent blogger who's career precedes the web

A chat with Dennis Amith - The J-ent blogger who's career precedes the web

With all the excitement involved in ensuring our new platform support was working ok, I hardly noticed how quickly this week went by.

Anyway…

It’s Thursday again and I’m still committed to my New Year’s resolution to interview one cool blogger using our widget every week.

This week’s guest is one of the greatest experts on Japanese and Asian entertainment online today and his involvement with the web dates back to 1993 and the pioneering days of BBS.

It is my great pleasure to have as our guest on the Headup blog today Mr. Dennis Amith – founder and Editor-in-Chief of
J-Entonline.com

|
|
|

Mike:
 Hi Dennis, it’s an honor having you as our guest.

Dennis:
 It’s my pleasure.

Mike:
 While preparing for this interview I learned that J-Ent refers to:

“…popular forms of Japanese entertainment but more specifically a shortened term to encompass popular Japanese television dramas, variety shows and music shows from Japan”

Wikipedia

I’m curious as to your initial attraction to the field and how you got involved in it.

Dennis:
As I was finishing my high school education in the early 90’s, I was really into videogames and comics.
A friend introduced me to Anime (Japanese animation) and from there on I was hooked.

I first became proactive when I created the nt2099 BBS back in 1993, which was basically dedicated to featuring the things I was interested in at the time. It was mainly about Japanese animation, entertainment, pop culture and Euro Demos. Because there were so few of us at the time, it was amazing to see the demand for our content.

In 1996, J!-ENT went online. Since then we’ve been focused on covering entertainment and pop culture worldwide.

Mike:
I was wondering about that. I know the NT2099 comes from “Neo-Tokyo” but I have no clue as to what the name refers to.

Dennis:
“Neo-Tokyo” is a reference to the classic Japanese animation film “Akira”. I added the “2099” because I wanted the name of my BBS to pop out from the crowd of sci-fi and tech BBSs that existed at the time.
I guess it just stuck and eventually it became the name of my business.

Mike:
You’ve been at the online content game pretty much from the very beginning. What got you started way back then?

Dennis:
For me it was the need to find and spread information.
Back in the BBS years, getting information wasn’t easy, especially on a 2400-baud modem. When I think back at how we did things then, it’s hard to believe that obtaining information was so difficult. Especially when I think how easy it’s all become now.
I remember scanning magazine pages from Japan, waiting forever for files to upload and delete. My phone was constantly busy with people looking for data. I imagine the phone bills for those people who were calling me long distance were probably sky high.

Obtaining information today is much easier in comparison. All the exclusive content we were busy chasing back then is easily accessible from YouTube, Wikipedia and other sites and applications as well.

It’s an exciting time as more and more people are exposed to entertainment and pop culture from countries outside their own.

Mike:
How did you get into publishing and blogging?

Dennis:
 I think it all began with my college experience as editor-in-chief for the Asian newspaper. That position was my first serious experience at managing a publication. It helped me focus and hone my professional skills and turned out to be a great opportunity for expanding my network.

I figured, since I already had entertainment contacts on the Asian side, that by focusing on developing my US contacts I’d be in a position to make connections between both communities. That’s how I began interviewing celebrities.

Over the years I gradually became known in this respect and started getting requests from individuals and media companies all over the world. Gradually the range of topics I was covering expanded from my original Asian niche into global entertainment and pop culture.

As far as the blogging itself is concerned my motivation was efficiency driven. You simply can’t meet peoples’ expectations any other way in terms of the content they’re looking for. The restrictions we had on how much content we could provide via print no longer apply to our online articles. The evolution of SEO and RSS subscriptions have had a crucial impact as well.

Mike:
Do you feel you’ve contributed to the growing awareness of Japanese and Asian entertainment?

Dennis:
 Absolutely, but it’s not just me. It’s a global collaboration of a community of people that brought it about. Personally, it’s gratifying to see how our work on J!-ENT has been acknowledged at music conferences, as well as in books and publications.

Today Anime, Manga and other forms of Japanese entertainment are considered a part of mainstream culture all over the world. Our focus has shifted to showcasing entertainment and pop culture from other countries.

Mike:
 As a veteran you have a truly unique perspective. What insight can you share with novice bloggers?

Dennis:
If there’s one tip I can give it’s that if you’re passionate about something…do it. It’s all about being proactive and persistent.

Mike:
You’ve been doing this for a long time. Do you know if you’ll keep it up?

Dennis:
Tomorrow never knows. We’ll see (laughing).

Mike:
I’m curious as to how you found us

Dennis:
I saw your website while looking for ways to further syndicate the public information featured on J-entonline. Since your widget compliments what we have on J!-ENT, I decided it would make a nice addition.

Mike:
What’s your prime motivation for using Headup widgets?

Dennis:
I like your widgets because they enable my readers to familiarize themselves with the entertainers I write about and their work. People might not know who a specific talent is but thanks to Headup they can read the information, catch a video, hear a song and tweet about it all at once without ever leaving my site.

Mike:
What features do you feel are missing from the widget?

Dennis:
I guess I’d like to have control over the color of the markings. Access to stats would be nice too.

Mike:
I think you’ll be pleased to hear that both your requests are scheduled for release in the next few weeks.

Dennis:
Cool!

Mike:
Thanks for everything Dennis.
It’s been a pleasure speaking to you. For what it’s worth, insofar as promoting awareness to global entertainment is one of your goals, I’m glad to confess I definitely feel I’ve been enlightened.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Wordpress, community, feedback, plugin | 1 Comment »

5 reasons why your Headup experience just improved

January 13th, 2010, By talk

2009 becomes 2010: Happy New Year!

A new Year – A new Headup

If you’ve been using our widget for a while, or if you frequent our website regularly, you may have noticed that recently we’ve been making quite a few changes.

These first two weeks of 2010 mark the culmination of a series of developments we’ve been working on under wraps for quite some time in response to the feedback we got from you. Thankfully these developments have finally reached a level of maturity we feel comfortable with and we’re making  more and more of them accessible to you almost daily.

Before I proceed to tell y’all what’s new I’d first like to take the opportunity and say THANK YOU to all the great people* who’ve been supportive of our efforts all this time and gave us the feedback we needed in order to improve.

5 reasons why your Headup experience just improved:

  1. The quality of our markings has improved significantly due a massive overhaul the system underwent. I’ll be writing more about our new marking system in the days ahead so if you’re into Semantic Web, NLP and all that jazz stay tuned…
  2. We’ve added new types of content to the mix of complementary content we provide and the quality of the existing ones has been improved.
  3. Widgets now display a feedback button that enables users to report whether the widget is useful in their opinion. The feedback gathered this way helps us improve the quality of our markings.
  4. Access to the publisher dashboard allows registered users to customize and tweak their widgets’ performance.
  5. Support for all major platforms is now available. Regardless of what platform you’re using you can now add Headup to your site easily and quickly.

*  Thanks great people for all your support:
AreYouScreening.com
JeffPulver.com
Jewlicious.com
InsideGossip.co.uk
RuhaniRabin.com
OfficialTwitters.com
OffTrackPlanet.com
EarthyReport.com
FamilyInsights.net
HeyUGuys.co.uk
J-Entonline.com

Image credit: Optical illusion

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Wordpress, feedback, plugin | No Comments »
Older Posts »