Using the Crimson Hexagon to Unlock the Web’s Tower of Babel

Many people have written about the explosion of information through web 2.0 and the need to provide better ways to understand it. Let me start with a fable I have mentioned before in connection with the web. Here is a summary of Borges Library of Babel from the wikipedia:

"...his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite number of different contents. Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the "Crimson Hexagon", containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

Well, the Crimson Hexagon has arrived and it came from Harvard. Now this one is a bit more focused than Borges version. Crimson Hexagon, the software service, provides brand monitoring that takes analytics beyond counting mentions or positive / negative / neutral ratings to focus on finding and understanding relevant opinion. It enables marketing professionals to measure and understand opinion according to their own business criteria. Crimson Hexagon is currently available via consulting services and will be available via Software as a Service (SaaS) in 2009. The technology within Crimson Hexagon was developed under the direction of Gary King, a Government professor at Harvard and director of its Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Crimson Hexagon has an exclusive licensing agreement with Harvard University's Office of Technology Development.

I spoke with Perry Hewitt, their VP of Marketing. Perry said that in the old world, information was expensive to acquire. Now it is free or almost free but it is expensive to make sense of it. This is especially true for brand related information. Some companies have a person, often an intern or new hire, sit in a back room and go through Google Alerts or some other tool. However, the information glut will soon drown this strategy. Crimson Hexagon is designed to let the computer manage the analytics, after a person teaches it what to look for. This education occurs by providing the system with a sampling of 10 to 20 instances of specific types of opinion, either positive or negative, you would like the algorithm to be able to recognize. Then it can cover millions of new content examples looking for what is said and when the opinions reflected in this content.

For example, looking at comments about wait time at a help desk can help a consumer electronic firm understand if there is positive or negative climate and what are the causal factors. You can track these opinions over time to see the effects of new events or programs. Do you see lasting effects, positive or negative, or do the effects fade over time.

In another example, I saw the tracking on public web content about the iPhone and you could see the range of opinion on: Apple apps, web access, third party apps, app store, interface, and other positive. You can also see temporal events such as favorable reviews or announcements and see if there are correlated changes in opinions in any of the categories.

There used to be a saying that any publicity was good as long as they got the spelling correct. Perry said that Crimson Hexagon lets you go beyond the buzz to understand the nature of this buzz. They have a saying, stop counting and start learning. The Tower of Babel is built on numbers. Crimson Hexagon plans to go beyond this. I am going to learn more in the coming months about how this will work and will do a more detailed post on the AppGap. In the meanwhile, they have a Crimson Hexagon blog where you can follow the story.