open sourcing – mepath

The code that is used to operate mepath.com was open sourced last week.  It is called the lifestylelinking – open source project.

mepath labs/developers

A blog post from mepath, apologies for the intermission in posts.  We have been busy coding for the new mepath website.  Some of the ideas are taking shape, you can see what we have been up to at mepath labs/developers section.

Continuing the whisky theme we have a lifestyle linking whisky product example, here type in a word  e.g. Islay . This a famous Scottish Island for distilling whisky, we do a good job of listing the products made there, Bowmore tops the list.  What is the magic?  We did not query any whisky product database of whiskies for these results, but instead we used the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ of 120 bloggers that authored posts on Scotland.

We have use this same method for lifestyle linking amazon.com

Lifestyle linking Whisky & Food

Or should I say more accurately, lifestyle linking whisky with foods and other drinks. The question behind this is straight forward: When the online community tell their stories about whisky what other foods and drinks are also mentioned?

The Lifestyle linking Whisky and Food chart shows WINE, tops the list. With beer following on, two intuitive placings given the area of conversations is alcohol.

What about the foods? Bread comes in at no.3. Given the Scottish nature of the product (whisky), Haggis lists high. January is the month of Burns Night after all.

The scoring of the foods are based solely on frequency of appearance in whisky conversations. We can score there occurrence in context but for this introductory chart we have just charted based on frequency of mentions.

Lifestyle linking Vodka: The Party Crowd

What are the online drinking community saying in their stories about vodka? Partying.

It is the clear lifestyle high scorer in terms of frequency and positive vocabulary used. See the full Lifestyle linking Vodka chart.

lifestyle linking whisky BETA

Lifestyle linking is the vision behind mepath.com. What is lifestyle linking whisky BETA? The chart scores what lifestyles are being lived while individuals are telling their stories about whisky. Our BETA index does not contain all lifestyles, but we selected a list of social, sporting and past-times to illustrate.

Headlines:

Festival goers top the lifestyle list with music at no.3

There is lots to read on the Internet and reading completes the top three, coming in a no.2

The full Lifestyle Linking Whisky is still in BETA and is based upon 2007 online conversations.

A couple of surprises, Football and Rugby do not make the top 10. This could be that football conversations take place in specialist forums. We shall see if that is the case as we expand the volume of conversations analysed.

Listening to individuals, the new market research

Traditional market research asks questions of individuals. We get stopped on the street, the telephone rings and a delivery of post/mail at your door will know doubt include a survey. But what topic is the survey on? It’s not going to be of our choosing, and the questions asked on the survey are asked to serve the needs of the business issuing the survey. We may have some feedback we would like to express, if that random topic that crosses our path is of interest but this current market research medium fails to allow us to express our thoughts.

Online market research has started by enabling those surveys to be popped up, to our surprise at best or usually annoyance. The placing of the surveys and questions may be more in context, so we could call that progress. However, market researching online can be done in a different way: listening to individuals.

Large numbers of us individuals are using a range of authoring tools to express our thoughts, feedback, view, opinions: blogging, socialnetworks, pictures, tagging etc. All this information will relate to people, services, products, business and organisations. We author this information free, no questions ask of us, the topic chosen by us and the format free to be expressed in text, images, video or voice. Businesses now need the ability to listen and individual the ability to channel there stories to relevant businesses or to find peers (know and unknown) to share with.

Creation conversations

The whole economy is about creating stuff, goods and services for people to use, consume, experience etc. The industrial revolution heralding in the economic term, economies of scale based on the mass production of products. At the start society required this injection of volume of production, there were shortages of pretty much all the basics for an individual and their home. However, today for some economies the opposite is now true but the production base keeps pumping out exponentially more volume of products and success is priced in selling all that you can produce. This has created new industries, retailing to on-line ad’s in all their shapes and forms to help in that new game. These are one way conversations bar in large: Production has been made and needs to be sold.

Conversations can be much richer. Products are created because of the demand from one individual, the person with the idea to a person experiencing a negative with an existing product to a new scientific break through that makes new things possible. The internet allows for rich and meaningful conversations to occur through the whole process of creating a product, brand new to evolving an existing one. The mepath marketplace we are working on is focused on creating a supportive environment for such conversations to take place.

democratising the creation of products

Most of the products and service that we consume have already been made.  If we want to personalize a product or service then by definition we need to be able to tell the manufacturer of that before the product is made.  As individuals we have that personal information, we just want to express that to the manufacturers that we want to service our demands.  From the manufacturers point of view, they do not want to make products that will not sell.  There seems to be a clear win for both sides to allow personalization conversations to happen.  Democratising these conversations is what mepath.com is working on.

An introduction to alpha, mepath.com

In preparation for the beta sign-up opening of mepath.com I have made this introductory video to explain the mepath basics.  I hope you find it useful.

CookCamp ‘Prevention is better than cure’

For those of you that are un-conference fans or even if you are looking to make your un-conference debut, CookCamp, is coming up. See the wiki for all the info. on the event.