One of the biggest problems that confronts anyone who wants to understand the meaning of UGC, especially for the purpose of targeted online ads, is Synonymy.  There are many ways to express the same idea and you can always count on the millions of social network users to use them all!  The incredible array of variant forms of words that all express the same underlying idea does make language very rich, but it creates further challenges for machine analysis of the interests and opinions of social network users.  For example, "The Stones", "The Rolling Stones"

One of the main challenges for those who are working with User Generated Content on the social web is its incredible malleability, variety and idiosyncratic nature.  In other words, UGC is a muddled up mess that rivals the Tower of Babel.  You all know what I am talking about.  Just look at a random MySpace profile and try to figure out what exactly is being expressed there.

Welcome back to what we hope to be a regular cycle of blog postings.  We have a great team here at Peerset with a variety of fields of expertise ranging from online advertising to cognitive science, logic, linguistics, and of course systems design, programming and marketing.

We hope that this will be a forum for conversations about the incredible opportunities and challenges of Social Psychographic Targeting for advertisers and publishers on the Social Web.   We welcome your feedback and comments – after all, we believe so much in the power of the social features of the Internet such as blogging, social networks and interactive discussion forums just like this one that we have built our company around better understanding the data presented in these arenas.  One of the great things about User-Generated Content is that it allows p