darrenherman’s posterous

I'm not even sure that this is the right title or name for the term but let's go with it anyway.

 I've seen quite a few companies create social media monitoring services and some of the monitoring includes rudimentary sentiment analysis. This form of analysis allows for the machine to tell us if a particular article is positive, negative, or neutral based off keyword and keyword group triggers.

 Imagine putting that to use with a business case of scanning the press release wires for company earnings releases and other similar news, and instantly taking a securities position (buy) and to limit exposure, sell 5 minutes later. 5 being a number I put in because I don't have a better number.

 The thesis to this is that one could digest a whole lot more information in a very quick time frame and beat the majority of the market in terms of acting quickly.

 There are stat arb houses like DE Shaw and other types of Hedge Funds but I don't know enough about the intricacies of each.

 Thoughts?

Since Craigslist collapsed a multibillion dollar classified advertising business into a fabulously profitable $100,000,000 business, perhaps we should be talking about the potential deflationary impact of more "zero billion dollar" businesses. As the radical efficiencies of the web seep into more sectors of the economy, and participants in social networks exchange attention instead of dollars, will governments at all levels need to make do with less tax revenue?

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2009/08/chris_and_malco.html

We put through the inaugural advertiser...

Jacobs also writes about the sterility of large organizations — their inability to come up with new goods and services. On the face of it, large organizations, such as large companies, are powerful. Yes, they can be efficient but they can’t be creative, due to what Jacobs calls “the infertility of captive divisions of labor.” In a large organization, you get paid for doing X. You can’t start doing X+Y, where Y is helpful to another part of the company, because you don’t get paid for doing Y. A nutrition professor might become aware of the anti-inflammatory effects of flaxseed oil but wouldn’t study its effects on gum health. That’s not what nutrition professors do. So neither dentists nor dental-school professors nor nutrition professors could discover the effects I discovered. They were trapped by organizational lines, by divisions of labor, that I was free of.

Fascinating.

Ive been sitting on this for a while now but think it's time to go public with it. I propose that the NY Times should open up the ground floor of it's Time Square location to be a citizen journalism center. There should be a key and integrated portion of the NY Times online that includes the stories of what's been written by people that participate. NY Times has the distribution, and would make a lot of sense.
 
The one argument I get pushback on is journalism quality, and I say- you might as well go down trying/fighting.
 
Thoughts?