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If you’ve ever ridden a bike, you would know what the title of this post means. If you haven’t it is about that slight movement of your right wrist around the throttle of a motorcycle that sends you shooting through time and space with a mighty roar. If there was ever a reason to smile, that is probably one of the top three.
Taking Beeline to phase two is not like riding a bike, but it sure feels close. But what is phase two you must be wondering? Phase two is of course the one that naturally follows phase one, and phase one was all about putting Beeline in the wild, and letting it survive. It did. Beautifully. Beeline’s stability, engagement data, time on site, relevance, bounce rate, are all pretty darn great. So great we are still looking for the bug in our analytics.
Phase two is another big step forward. We are directly approaching larger blogs and publishers offering them the Beeline service free of charge, while continuously and diligently improving Beeline’s relevance and adding new features (can’t tell you yet). I’ll keep you posted.
Happy Beelining.
Doron.
For the last two weeks we have absorbed tons of feedback from you, our first bloggers, both technical, user experience oriented and commercial. I am happy to tell you that we have improved our semantic engine even further (and are doing so further along as we speak).
There is a new release, and it’s running. There is nothing you need to do. It will refresh and re-index all pages enrolled into Beeline in the next 24 hours. It has better textual understanding, it has better image filtering, it detects products and people and places even better and it has only begun to improve. We have lots of future features on our lists, and it’s only the limited 24 hours per day that slows us down. Having said that, I will now go to sleep.
Signing off,
Doron.
There’s nothing like the smell of Napalm in the morning. Always wanted to say that. Now that I have let’s move on.
Last week testing-Beeline-in-the-wild provided great data on the strengths and some of the weaknesses of the Semantic Engine. We noticed some texts just won’t yield to Beeline, which obviously required Beeline to just get better. It did. We have taken the engine abilities another significant notch up the relevance scale.
The bit about The Simpsons episode about Israel published in TheWadi.com was a tough nut to crack. At first it may seem that this is just an article about the Simpson family, which leads one to expect Beeline to just-figure-that-out and get some more Simpsons episodes. But(!) reading the piece it becomes apparent the Simspons are just a loose cover story to Israel technology companies’ name-dropping (Checkpoint, Scentcom, My6Sense, etc.).
This kind of topic-less (or indirect writing) puts even the human reader at a loss. What are the main ideas of this bit. The Simpsons? My6Sense? TheWadi’s company index? or Sasha Baron Cohen (narrating the Simpsons episode).
The older Beeline got these results:
 Before Now that is the obivous thing, right? No. It sucks. It may be “OK” but Beeline is not in the business of being OK. It’s in the business of being interesting.
So we burned some midnight oil (horrible smell, trust me), and we gave Beeline some additional brains to help it get interesting stuff out of seemingly topic-less, or at least highly loose content. And this is what the new Beeline (soon to be released) had to say:
 After See?
When coming to choose between the obvious (yet another bunch of Simpsons’ episodes) and the interesting, Beeline selected the non-obvious. Now that may not appeal to all of the readers (that might want information about Checkpoint, or TheWadi’s company index), but for those it will, it would be much more interesting. At least that is what we think.
What do you think?
It seems we are getting there. As you may have noticed (at least those of you that scour WordPress.org for new plugins), Beeline BETA has been soft launched about a week ago. Actually, we planned on adding 1-5 first blogs to allow testing the system, ironing out the initial problems, and then reaching to a larger community of WordPress bloggers and publishers. However, once out we have received a steady stream of requests to join the service, ranging from small unique blogs, up to larger ones that have millions of unique visitors per month (sometimes when we get a breather we’ll even setup a hall of fame on our website).
Beeline is behaving great, adapting itself to each blog content and topics even beyond our expectations, and it’s only in BETA for 5 days! We would continue improving it as we go along.
Thanks to all the bloggers and publishers that joined us. It has been a great week, and is improving as we speak.
Signing off, Doron.
Finally, after weeks of preparations, testing, and testing again, we are on the air. Beeline public BETA is out there, and so is our new website. So without further ado, go play with it.
We love it, you may too.
Signing off, probably going to sleep. Will update when recovered.
We are working diligently to get our public beta out the door during April 2010. Programmers, graphic designers, animators, social media people, and a lot of others are putting their collective heads (and hands) to the task.It’s going to be tough, but that’s when we get going.
There are a lot of goodies under the hood. A completely redesigned user interface, a beautiful new website, and of course this blog (that is going to get a new snazzy face very soon). But it’s not all about looks (even though looks are important). Our underlying semantic engine has been greatly improved through meticulous testing, and now provides even better, more accurate, results.
We have a new twitter account for questions, rapid support, and … well fun, so join @the_beeline.
We will be launching as a WordPress plugin (and regular JavaScript snippet for those of you who really want to get Beeline into regular HTML) during April 2010.
Stay tuned!
Doron.
 Doggy Style? AP Photo/Andre Penner. Is your dog single? Lonely? Having a hard time meeting other dogs? Having no luck with the whole online thing?
One enterprising company has devised a gadget to fulfill his doggie needs. Brazil’s Petsmiling thinks its cornered the market with the DoggieLoveDoll, the world’s first dog sex toy.
Teddy will not be getting one.
Wow. Visitors look at a prototype sex doll for dogs during the Pet South America fair.
Humpty Dumpty once told Alice: `They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs, they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’
And he (assuming he was a “he”, cause I have my doubts but never mind) is quite correct. Verbs and adjectives and all those language creatures have a life of their own. In fact they are quite complex. Not to you of course since you are, you know, human, but those machines that quietly hum on your desk, and around the web have a bit of a problem getting it. So we thought we may try to teach them a trick or two and if it happens to help us humans, that’s ok.
Since machines are kind of stupid, we thought we may start with the basics. Allow them to make baby steps towards language understanding. However, being the impatient guys we are, we didn’t want to go through all the really really basic stuff like words and such, so we started by teaching our machines how to recognize concepts. Turned out they did quite well. Once they mastered concepts it was a short path for them to get what we really wanted them to get: ideas.
Beeline is an ideas machine. It reads texts. It grasps the main ideas that are interwoven into them, and then it does one more thing. It searches. It looks around the web for other stuff that talks about those ideas, and drags it (on it’s little bee back) home, to you. Where you need it. When you need it.
Try it.
Everyone’s taking the piss out of Tiger Woods lately, but I feel sympathetic after seeing these text messages he exchanged with a lover. He sounds as ridiculous as anyone else would in lusty, loverly, silly, and random text messages.
The NY Post somehow got their hands on these text messages which were exchanged by Tiger Woods and Jaimee Grubbs. Reading them almost feels like an invasion of privacy, but at the same time I can’t stop thinking that Tiger sounds like a fourteen year old boy who finally found a girl who won’t slap him for being a bit cheeky on occasion. Basically, he sounds like many of us do in text message conversations with a lover.
He gets lusty:
Tiger: I need you
Jaimee: then get your tight ass over here and visit me! I need u
Tiger: I will wear you out soon
He ignores the dangers of sexting:
Tiger: send me something very naughty
Jaimee: some things are worth waiting for lol … besides im at work
Tiger: go to the bathroom and take it
Jaimee: haha ur too much
He gets jealous:
Jaimee: I drove out for the night to surprise a friend with a present for there birthday
Tiger: what kind of present your naked body
Jaimee: haha no a watch I slept alone
Tiger: alone with him that is
Jaimee: haha I wish
Jaimee: miss u
Tiger: now that’s hot so who is your new boy toy
He gets tortured:
Jaimee: if we hang out on a Sundway we can watch desperate houswives again haha
Tiger: oh god
Jaimee: take a break from watching boring old golf
Jaimee: I mean the amazing sport of golf 
Jaimee: [more than an hour later] babe I was kidding
And he fails to give the sweet and tender response that’s expected:
Jaimee: I have fun with u, you always make me smile and I am not afraid to be myself or say anything to u … the day I met u I thought u were going to kick me out a few times but for someone reason you didn’t and u have told me numerous times I talk to much but slowly as I get to know u iI think your absolutely amazing
Tiger: you are wrong I’m bone thugs in harmon
You can check out the rest of the text messages over at the NY Post, but come back after you do and tell me if I’m just imaging the normality or if maybe Tiger really is just like any other texter, all ridiculous and prone to lousy grammar.
(c) 2009 Gizmodo Magazine
Bending a bee is not easy. A bee, being a small thing, does not easily lend itself to such deformations. However we have not gathered here to do bees harm, we are more into Semantics.
Now you say: “Oh no, not another semantic company”, cause you’ve been around and you know most of them are clueless. Sadly you are right. Since the coming of Web 3.0 there has been much yammer in the geek-shick circles but no regular person (that’s me and you) has ever gotten what those people are talking about. Well, enough with that!
We want something useful, something fun, something every Tom, Joe, and Harry (and their girlfriends) can use. And we want them to like it, and use it without a degree in mathematics, and tell about it to their moms which would then go: “Oh Harry, you and your crazy Internet things …”, just to get hooked too.
So we did Beeline. And we are going to tell you all about it.
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