AndyHickl.com

Why you should think Positively

Lots of people want to know more about project Positively, so I thought I’d follow up on Friday’s post with a few more details about what Positively’s all about.

For the uninitiated, Positively is the codename for a new sentiment tracking app that Swingly has built for the 80Legs web spidering platform.  We’re still in a private beta, but we’re showing what our brand of sentiment tracking can do for interested 80Legs customers.

The concept is simple:  we use the power of 80Legs to simultaneously get tons of fresh content and to run Swingly’s entire natural language processing pipeline.  Swingly searches through the docs spidered by 80Legs as they’re downloaded — if we find the droids content you’re looking for, it gets extracted, saved as easy-to-use XML, and streamed to your app.

How easy is it to set up?  Here’s a fancy graphic that spells out all the steps:

Step 1.  Select a Target. Users start working with Positively by telling the app what they’re most interested in tracking. Want to track a specific product or brand name?  Just give us its name (or what you think its name is) — and Positively will figure out all the different ways it can be referred to.  Want to track a product category (something like shoes or digital cameras or luxury cars)?  Positively currently knows about 50 different product categories.  Want to learn everything about a specific type of thing?   Positively’s up to the challenge:  right now, we know about more than 2200 different types of things, from priests to coffee shops to computer magazines to relief pitchers.

Step 2.  Pick some docs. Since Positively uses 80Legs to track down docs for you, it needs to know what kinds of docs it should focus on spidering.  Want only what’s been said in the mainstream media?  Tell Positively to stick to the news.  Want to know what’s in the blogosphere?  Tell Positively to check out only what bloggers are saying.  You’re the boss.

Step 3.  Pick some starting links. Since 80Legs is a spidering service, it needs to know where to start looking.  Just a few links will do.  (Don’t have a clue?  Positively can help you out here, too.)

Step 4.  What do you want to know? As I mentioned on Friday, one of the coolest things about Positively is that it intelligently figures out what are the most interesting attributes for each name, product, or service you’re tracking.  It also accepts tips, too.  If you’re interested in a certain set of features (say, the sound quality of high-end headphones), we’ll make sure we find all the ways that attribute’s expressed out there on the Web — and bring all that data back to you.  Here’s where the power of Swingly really comes in:  instead of just searching for your keywords, Positively tries to find all of the expressions that mean the same thing as your seed link.  It’s semantic search, and its time has come.

Step 5.  How much data is enough? How much data is too much data?  Positively lets you control the depth and breadth 80Legs crawl — and to set an upper bound on how many docs (or sentiments) it should get.

Step 6.  Output? Last but not least, Positively lets you output data in a variety of formats.  We like XML, but we can envision you wanting other formats, too.

So, that’s it. Consider yourselves initiated.  If you’re interested in a sneak peek, contact me at andy@swingly.com, and we’ll show you what sentiment tracking-plus-web crawling is all about.

Yes, there are lots of great companies who are heavily invested in sentiment analysis.  But we’re thinking positively — and we think you should, too.