Primal is a semantic engine

Blog: Ideas

September 14, 2010
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Primal Launches Automated Publishing and Community Engagement Solution

Derrick Cho

New Primal Pages for Publishers leverages advanced semantic technology to make Web publishing and community engagement easier than ever

DEMO Fall 2010 – SANTA CLARA, CA, September 14, 2010 — Live today from the 2010 DEMO Fall Conference, Primal, a pioneer of Internet automation technology, officially launched an exciting new product.  Primal Pages for Publishers provides a simpler, more convenient way to assemble and publish Web content. With just a few clicks, Pages for Publishers automatically generates unique web pages based on the interests of individual people in the publisher’s audience. Following the launch of its semantic technology platform and thought networking products for consumers in June, Primal presents the company’s latest innovation at the world-renowned DEMO conference, taking place this week at the Silicon Valley Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara September 13 – 15, 2010.

Primal Pages for Publishers automates the entire publishing process, from identifying topics to provisioning content to organizing information. It also provides a dynamic and vibrant medium for engaging readers directly in the process. This not only saves publishers valuable time and money but also providers their audience with a more personalized and engaging online experience. For innovative publishers large and small, Primal Pages delivers increased revenue opportunities, more reader engagement, and reduced costs via a scalable, customizable platform.

“We recognized that individuals and organizations were really struggling to create online content, so we decided to provide people with a dead-simple way to get that job done,” said Primal’s Founder and Co-President Peter Sweeney. “We’re streamlining the management of even the broadest subject matter and tailoring the user experience to markets of one. With Primal Pages, the audience effortlessly personalizes their online experience, under the editorial guidance of the publisher, leading to a much richer experience for all.”

Pages for Publishers enables media outlets, independent publishers, and individuals to augment their online presence with fresh content from around the Web, driven by the specific interests of each individual reader. Pages can incorporate a range of content sources based on the requirements of the publisher, such as blogs, book recommendations, images, news and other reference material.

Primal technology allows their readers to imagine and architect content in real-time rather than placing the burden on the publishers to build it in advance. Further, by drawing upon information from the entire Web, Pages for Publishers offers the publisher’s audience a compelling reason to stay engaged.  By providing a scalable, customizable platform, Primal dramatically reduces the costs of maintaining large websites and communities. Primal plans to offer ad-supported and transactional pricing models to support publishers of all sizes.

“Consumers are looking for instant gratification.  Primal now offers Web publishers a way to leverage the mass amount of content on the Web to provide a seamless, complete experience in one simple view.  We feel that this implementation of semantic technology will be a game changer for the industry,” said Matt Marshall, executive producer of DEMO.

Primal Pages is different from traditional approaches that utilize teams of people to search and seek out information on a specific topic. Primal applies a unique and patented semantic synthesis technology to completely automate the process, saving publishers significant time and money. Today, valuable pieces of information are scattered across the Internet requiring publishers to troll the Web, visiting various destinations to find the information they need. Now, with Primal Pages for Publishers, publishers can painlessly supplement their original content with dynamic, relevant, and valuable content from across the Internet.

Peter Sweeney, along with Robert Barlow-Busch, will be presenting Primal’s Pages for Publishers live from the DEMO stage on Wednesday, September 15 and will be located at Station #13 in the Pavilion.

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September 12, 2010
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Why the Web Needs Automating

Tom Levesque

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Technology was supposed to revolutionize our lives. There were promises of 20-hour work weeks, robotic servants to do our bidding, and leisurely weekday afternoons in the sun. That was a fantastic dream. So what happened along the way?

Today, we face the grim reality that most of the technology we build simply enables people to do more work.

Your PC is perhaps the best example of this. Sure, it’s a powerful tool. But it’s one that can do almost nothing without a human driving it. You respond to your emails. You browse the Web. You write that report. And you fix it when it breaks.

Could a computer do some of that work for you?

The promise of automation

Automation is the missing link that’s needed to make technology work for us. When a technology automates something, it completes a task that’s valuable to us, but in a manner that doesn’t require our personal oversight.

There’s evidence of automation in our lives today. We have simple assistants that can finish tasks like “wash and dry these dishes” (your dishwasher) or “vacuum this carpet” (a Roomba). Even your PC, problem-generating nightmare that it is, can handle a command to “find and correct the obvious typos in this document” (a spell checker).

But “write my science paper for me” is not a task your computer is prepared to handle. Neither is “buy an attractive couch for my living room” or “think of a good topic for my next blog post.”

Combining automation with the Web

The web is a lot of work.Image source: Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/epac_island/391204177/

To accomplish these kinds of tasks, most people use the Web.

Unfortunately, the Web today is a lot of work. It’s full of repetitive chores like entering keyword variations, experimenting with different services, paging through search results, and patching together information from many sources.

To accomplish a simple task, you might find yourself with 10 browser tabs open, each with a mile-long history of different services and search terms you’ve explored. Quite likely, you’ve also patched together an email to your colleagues, with notes you’ve hastily copied and pasted.

Using semantic technology to enable new kinds of automation

Before a computer assistant could write a document or go shopping for you, you would need a way to communicate your requirements to it. Your assistant needs a sense of the boundaries it has to work within.

Semantic technology provides a way to draw those boundaries. It provides a formal way for humans to tell computers what it is they need. Without semantics, a computer assistant tasked with writing a paper about “Tesla” couldn’t perceive the topic as anything more than a string of letters. It could do nothing more than patch together every paragraph it finds containing the word “Tesla”.

With semantic technology, “Tesla” becomes a concept rich with meaning. Suddenly, your assistant can understand that you were referring to Tesla the scientist and not Tesla Motors. Even more, if this knowledge model represents your specific ideas and perspectives, as opposed to some universal worldview, your assistant could perform highly personalized work.

With this knowledge model, your computer assistant can perform more complex automation. In fact, it could create a whole website for you about your personal perspective on Tesla.

After all, shopping assistants aren’t much helped by knowing couches are pieces of furniture. To fulfill the promise of true automation, they need to be driven by your particular thoughts and intentions.  The shopping assistant needs to know where you plan to put the couch, why you want it, and what your budget is.

Conclusion: The Web as your personal assistant

The Web experience of the future will feel more like interacting with a personal assistant and less like doing a bunch of chores. By providing software agents that understand your thoughts and intentions, the Web will begin to relieve your burdens rather than add to them.

Maybe there’s still a fighting chance for those leisurely weekday afternoons in the sun.

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September 9, 2010
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Primal’s Vision for Thought Networking

Robert Barlow-Busch

To help illustrate Primal’s vision for what the future holds, we’ve decided to tell a story about thought networking: comic-style! Click below to read the comic, or download a PDF version to read offline.



















We believe managing and consuming information online these days is simply too much work. Computers should be able to help us better, by understanding what we’re thinking about and automating a bunch of the tedious, repetitive tasks we’re forced to perform. That’s the vision driving Primal’s Internet automation products.

Check out the comic, then leave a comment to let us know what you think.

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August 10, 2010
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Content Farms Are Not A Disruptive Innovation

Derrick Cho

By Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)

Beginning last year, Michael Arrington and many others identified content farms as the great disruptor, an innovation that will eventually eclipse traditional and social media. With their vast pools of cheap distributed labor, farms would glut the market with low quality content, overwhelming older approaches.

Demand Media is the lightning rod for content farming. But with the information disclosed in their recent IPO filing, it’s clear that content farms are not the great disruptive innovation that people fear.

Demand Media

Figure 1: Demand Media is the lightning rod for content farming
(Image source: Demand Media)

To declare an innovation truly disruptive, it needs to embody some rare qualities. High on the list are productivity and cost advantages. Disruptive innovations bring massive improvements in productivity. The cost advantages allow the innovation to permeate to entirely new markets and usage scenarios, profoundly shaking the incumbents and delighting new customers.

Content farms don’t exhibit these productivity advantages. Demand Media, purportedly among the most sophisticated farms in terms of their operational processes, are reporting underwhelming results. While farms are automating aspects of the content manufacturing process, they remain labor intensive, hand rolled operations. When compared against older models, farms are not demonstrating the productivity advantages that would be needed to qualify as a disruptive innovation.

Content Farms

Figure 2: Content farms employ large numbers of writers, often freelancers, to create content
(Image source: Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcostin/366629702)

Another crucial aspect of disruptive innovations is the element of surprise. Disruptive innovations are disruptive because incumbents often deny or ignore them until it’s too late. These innovations challenge our fundamental assumptions about what’s possible. As such, it’s difficult for those outside the innovators’ circle to appreciate the impact.

Consider social media, exhibited in projects like Wikipedia, as truly disruptive. When Wikipedia began, even those close to the project didn’t think it was possible to build a world class encyclopedia through a massive collaboration of strangers and amateurs. It was only through these types of grand experiments that the disruptive implications of Web 2.0 and social media became widely understood.

Again, content farms fail to exhibit this quality of disruptive innovation. Even in the earliest days, few were denying that content farming is possible. When you parse the attributes of content farms, they are understood by all as incremental innovations. Their main differentiation is in the commercial aspects: applying distributed and collaborative approaches to content manufacturing is old news; marrying those aspects to a sophisticated commercial enterprise is the incremental innovation.

Demand Media may disagree. In their SEC filing, Demand describes their differentiation as follows:

While traditional media companies create content based on anticipated consumer interest, we create content that responds to actual consumer demand. Our approach is driven by consumers’ desire to search for and discover increasingly specific information across the Internet. By listening to consumers, we are able to create and deliver accurate and precise content that fulfills their needs.

A fine purpose, but again, on closer examination, it’s hardly disruptive. The difference between anticipated consumer interest and actual consumer demand even sounds incremental, graduating along the same axis of consumer demand. There’s certainly no aspect of fundamentally challenging our assumptions of what’s possible. Publishers have been eking out incremental improvements in market segmentation forever. Even the specific approaches of Demand Media are exhibited across the activities of domainers and arbitrageurs, even reverse engineered in the patents of the most powerful search company in the world.

Content farms like Demand Media are important. They’ve demonstrated the scale under which social media projects can be conducted as commercial publishing ventures. They’re important, but in a very incremental way. Unlike truly disruptive innovations, they won’t put content industries on a new growth trajectory.

None of this is to suggest that the content industries should rest easy. There’s certainly a fundamental disruption in content on the horizon, but you won’t find it on the farm. Rather, the magnitude of productivity advantages and assumption-challenging capabilities needed are found only in factories, in far more industrialized and automated approaches. And although most will deny or ignore their presence until it’s too late, content factories will make farming seem quaint in comparison.

We’ll look at content factories in more detail in a future post. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Industrial Internet

Figure 3: Content factories create machines that automate content manufacturing
(Image source: Primal, http://about.primal.com/2009/11/are-web-factories-stealing-your-job/)

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July 21, 2010
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Finding the Humanity in Content Farms and Factories

Peter Sweeney (@petersweeney)

News flash: Content farms and factories continue their explosive growth, while traditional publishers and newspapers free fall.

Machines and godless industrialists are running amok, polluting the Web with low rent content. Oh the humanity! Where will we find a little human redemption in this scourge of machine generated content?

Why, “News For You!” say some industrialists. Farms and factories may find redemption by adding social and personalization enhancements. Recently Google News, that granddaddy of content factories, unveiled its most significant overhaul since its launch in 2002. Features such as a personal news stream, where consumers can edit categories and content sources to suit their needs, bring that human touch to machine automation.

Google News: News For You

Google News: News for you

“We’ll save you!” say some experts. Farms and factories may redeem themselves through partnerships with legitimate organizations. Begrudgingly, traditional news organizations are partnering with farms like Demand Media, AOL Seed, and the Examiner.com. Even Google News is bringing in a select group of human editors as partners.

While all interesting developments, this reporter remains unconvinced. Such discussions and industry moves are suspiciously old school, overwhelmingly focused on the quality of content produced. Content farms and factories are often written off as sub-human attempts at journalism. It echoes earlier criticisms of blogging and citizen journalism.

Then as now, market disruptions cannot be evaluated against old standards. Content farms and factories need a new value assessment, one that has nothing to do with journalistic quality (or the lack thereof). Quality has already grossly overshot the expectations of many consumers, which is precisely why the industry is so ripe for disruption. And however glamorous it may seem to incumbents, most consumers don’t want to edit and curate the news any more than they want to report and write it. This self-absorbed supply-side perspective is leaving traditional journalists ill equipped to adjust to these changes.

Maybe there is a deeper, more pervasive humanity supporting the rise of content farms and factories. Consumers want content that is supportive of their immediate needs. They want convenience and simplicity, to be treated as markets of one. Content farms and factories succeed in this fine grained segmentation. Any perceived shortcomings in quality are more than overcome by the convenience benefits: content that is more individually task-oriented and crafted to the readers’ unique requirements.

“Create by consuming”, says Primal. Last week, our factory took another step towards our vision of consumer-directed content manufacturing, with the release of Primal Pages. We don’t expect consumers to act like journalists, but we do want to empower them as the ultimate architects of the content they consume. Under our model, consumers direct the automated content manufacturing in real-time — as they’re consuming it — through the topics they specify and their unique click-paths.

Primal Pages

Primal Pages: Create content by browsing

By journalistic standards, this may be publishing at its most basic. But that’s the entire point: a drive towards ultimate simplicity and convenience for consumers as consumers.

The sad truth is that most incumbents are failing to examine the true humanity in content farms and factories in the motivations of the consumers. Eric Schmidt, describing the “cultural phenomenon” that is Google, captures it succinctly: “It’s a way in which consumers consume information.”

First and foremost, consumers consume information, preferring the most tailored and convenient information possible.

Posted by Peter Sweeney

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December 21, 2009
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Intelligent Designers and Evolutionists Battle for the Web

Peter Sweeney @petersweeney

The current friction between people who create content and those who create content factories evokes the evolution versus intelligent design debate. Why do the intelligent designers of content feel under siege as content factories create ever more gluttonous methods for manufacturing it? What does each side have to teach the other? Here are the arguments. Read more…

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November 18, 2009
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Are Web Factories Stealing Your Job?

Peter Sweeney @petersweeney

Industrialization is transforming our information economy, destroying old business models and creating new opportunities. The impact it will have on new media will make Web 2.0 seem tame in comparison. To understand this transformation and leverage it effectively, you need to parse the myths from reality.

Back in May 2009, I argued that industrialization is the most transformative force on the Internet. Human tasks are rapidly being displaced by machines. Factories of advanced technologies are being constructed to automate the manufacture of information and content. Predictably, there is much hand-wringing and righteous indignation expressed about this economic sea change. Read more…

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October 4, 2009
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Want to Build a Better Internet? Stop Searching for Solutions

Peter Sweeney @petersweeney

In a recent article in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow called for search reform. “Search is the beginning and the end of the internet,” he wrote. While I agree things need to change, a reformed Internet built around search is like a reformed energy policy built around oil. If we only look for solutions through the narrow lens of search, we’re unlikely to solve these problems at all.

Cory’s article is a tight encapsulation of widely held concerns over search. We share too much private information with search engines. They hold too much power over what is relevant and important. And there is a troubling lack of transparency and accountability into how search engines weigh these decisions.

His bottom line: Vesting this kind of power with a handful of companies is a “terrible idea”.

Fair enough, but when he ventures into possible solutions, Cory, like so many other Internet watchers, makes a serious wrong turn. “Put that way, it’s obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public.”
Read more…

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September 1, 2009
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Consumer-First to Build the Semantic Web

Peter Sweeney @petersweeney

How Do We Roll Out The Semantic Web? Paradoxically, the fast track may involve getting help from billions of people who know nothing about the Semantic Web and have no interest in it.

Challenges with current approaches

Most of the current approaches to building the Semantic Web focus on content. We create semantic representations of existing assets such as databases, documents, and social media. Machines “read” this knowledge and execute tasks on behalf of consumers. In the Semantic Web world, the approach is content first, consumers second.

Unfortunately, semantifying content is proving to be an extraordinarily daunting task. When we expand the scope of the problem beyond our existing content assets to include knowledge generally, in all its subjective and boundless glory, the challenges of a content-first approach becomes clear. We need alternative strategies, and more importantly, many hands on the problem. Read more…

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May 7, 2009
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Web 3.0: The Web Goes Industrial

Peter Sweeney @petersweeney

Web 2.0 is social: many hands make light work. In stark contrast, Web 3.0 is industrial: the automation of tasks displaces human work. But trite definitions won’t prepare us for change. Whatever you call it, our information economy is in the midst of an Industrial Revolution. And if you don’t place the Web within the frame of industrial manufacturing, you won’t see the real disruptive change coming.

This story reads much like the first Industrial Revolution. Artisans and skilled tradesman used to create everything by hand. Then, through the emergence of a handful of technical innovations, came the age of mass production. It was a profound turning point in human history, affecting every aspect of daily life.

Today, most content is still created by hand, the best of it by highly skilled artisans drawing on centuries of scholarship and experience. Recently, we’ve seen significant innovations in social approaches to content creation. But Web 3.0 industrialization takes content manufacturing to an entirely different level. Instead of users manually creating content, machines automate the heavy lifting. Consumers simply push the buttons and get stuff done. Think spinning wheels versus textile mills.

Read more…

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