lenges, with disambiguation being required at the artist, band, track, and album levels.

Determining the entity being referred to in a particular text is akin to a classification problem, whereby content (“comment” in our case) must be assigned to a specific bucket, or category (artist, band, and/or track). Ellen Riloff13 highlighted domain-cognizant techniques for text classification; reflecting the need to focus on local linguistic context for classification and retrieval.

In terms of engineering, the world of mashups mirrors the music data requirements of Sound Index—a robust, reliable, repeatable means of gathering data from multiple, diverse online sources. ScrAPIs (Screen-scraper + API) were proposed by John Musser in 2006 as a means of mitigating the problem of unreliable or unavailable APIs from multiple content providers, 11 though they, too, suffer from the issues facing traditional screen-scrapers (such as breaking down when site changes are made).

 

Pilot

The BBC ran the Sound Index pilot from March to August 2008. Its measures for success included feedback from its editorial team, Web-use statistics, and general feedback from the online community. Despite a complete lack of marketing and promotion budget and effort, Sound Index went from a standing start as public beta in April 2008 to attract 43,469 visits from 37,900 unique users in June 2008 when it attracted 140,383 page views at an average of 3. 67 per user, each spending an average of three minutes and 40 seconds on the site, or 53 seconds per page. In August 2008, it attracted more than 772,000 Web-page references.

The Sound Index team monitored the online feedback by setting up Google Alerts on all possible permutations of the project name, manually evaluating each link. There was a lot of positive comment from the Web and from the traditional business and technology press. It was named “Web 2.0 technology of the week” by the U.K. Observer ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/ music) for several consecutive weeks (during April to August 2008), as well

as “the hottest thing in music” (in March 2008) by the U.K.’s Guardian Music Monthly ( http://www.guardian. co.uk/music). It also generated much debate in European music circles about what constitutes music popularity and what the results mean. The pilot closed August 2008, with the BBC planning for its future.

 

conclusion

Called the “first definitive music chart for the Internet age,” 14 Sound Index is a novel demonstration of research into processing, analyzing, collating, ranking, and presenting large quantities of unstructured and structured multimodal information in response to a change in the behavior of key demographic groups and a pressing industry need to innovate or risk being irrelevant. It is a model for demonstrating a new approach to service and product delivery, integrating (in real time) multiple, relevant online information with one’s own data to drive new and significant value for, reinvigorate connection to, and strengthen brand affinity to one’s customer base.

Here, we’ve described the system’s technical underpinnings, highlighted some of the technical challenges already addressed, and showcased the engineering and research themes that require further investigation. The underlying concepts and processes are also applicable to myriad other fields that depend on the capture of Internet buzz. We hope it inspires future software products and research projects to harness the wisdom of the crowds.

 

acknowledgments

We would like to thank the BBC, specifically Geoff Goodwin, Head of BBC Switch, for its vision, support, and encouragement, as well as Alfredo Alba (IBM Almaden Research Center), Jan Pieper (IBM Almaden Research Center), Anna Liu (IBM Almaden Research Center), Bill J. Scott (formerly IBM Global Business Services), Aidan Toase (IBM Global Business Services), and IBM’s partners at NovaRising, who helped make the Sound Index system a reality.

 

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Varun Bhagwan ( [e-mail]) is an advisory software engineer in the Computer science Department of IBM Almaden Research Center, san jose, CA. Tyrone Grandison ( [e-mail]) is a manager in the Computer science Department of IBM Almaden Research Center, san jose, CA. Daniel Gruhl ( [e-mail]) is a senior software engineer in the Computer science Department of IBM Almaden Research Center, san jose, CA.