Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Dr. Rost--A Maven?

I've been called many things, but I think this is the first time I've been called a "Maven."

Here's the explanation, from CollectiveIntellect:

Someone pointed out the following post to me from a Dr Peter Rost today. Evidently, Dr. Rost, who is an ex exec at Pfizer, was recently contacted by a hedge fund who had found his blog via our Maven identification service. Dr Rost is one of the thousands of amazing individuals Collective Intellect has identified as a "Maven", and as such is helping to provide one more facet of transparency into subjects material to publicly traded companies.

Mavens are typically thought of as experts at some particular subject. We use the term a little loosely in the Malcom Gladwell Tipping Point sense. Mavens are people who have had unique and interesting insights in the past around a topic in which our customers have expressed interest, have a high probability of doing so in the future, and are connected to a network of people that will listen.

Finding these authorities can be a rather daunting programmatic exercise. After quite a bit of experimentation we've strung together a number of technologies including graph analysis, artificial intelligence, statistical language processing, and crowd sourcing to find the most likely credible sources. The artificial intelligence component uses the feedback loop to continuously refine that elite membership for our customers.

To put this into some perspective, about 8 out of every 100,000 posts that we pull in, pass the test of being a Collective Intellect Maven. However, of the group of sites and authors that make it to Maven status about 16 out of every 100 posts are categorized as Maven quality.
Thanks Dr. Rost for mentioning us.

No comments: