Group items tagged

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month. Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

You know how our social graphs are creeping into every aspect of our web lives, from search results to coupons? Well, get ready for something a lot more personal, a lot more targeted and, perhaps, a lot more creepy. Much as social graphs are maps of our social media connections that follow us across the web, interest graphs are maps of our interests. Some companies want them to follow us across the web, too, meaning that wherever we go, there we are. There'll be no more need to search through news sites for the stories we want, or shopping sites for the products we want, because the site will know as soon as we hit its system who we are and what we like. Whether you're fascinated or appalled by the idea of interest graphs, here's a taste of how they might work.

In any industry, the need to manage your brand's community is pressing. Companies have invested significant resources into building community on social networks, but as Facebook and other social media sites continue to block access to your user data, smart marketers and business leaders are realizing that the real value of social engagement is found on their own web properties and applications. Gamification offers a means of applying the benefits of social engagement directly to your properties. It is a proven business strategy that enables businesses to influence the behaviors of your entire community, and exceed your user-driven business objectives.

A great deal has changed since the term eLearning first entered the vocabulary in 1999 and since web-based courses and modules started appearing in volume in the early 2000s. We need to rethink eLearning in light of these changes and other changes (like Social Learning) that are only now starting to impact the world of work. I'm sure most of us are aware that the major challenge for learning is no longer about 'content' or 'knowledge' (if it ever were).

Social, although hot right now, is not the only technology transforming the web today. Location-based social search applications are bridging the gap between our online and offline worlds - and in doing so creating a whole new way for people to find and use information.

My latest book "Welcome to the Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy," discusses influencer theory in detail, including a section on the history of influencer theory on the social Web.

The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved.

While there may not be a semantic application that can go to work on every issue that requires grappling with Big Data, it certainly has a role to play in many of them. Throw out outliers such as using power grid data to optimize power distribution, and "the lion's share of big data problems are semantic problems," says Dachis Group CTO Erik Huddleston.

The web is a blessing and a curse: there is simply too much information. And it's coming at us too quickly. Meanwhile, the tools we have to process the data flow are failing miserably, and yet, very few people are building us better ones. Instead, these days, it's far easier to build the next great photo-sharing app than it is a better Gmail. It's more fun to build a new social network for taking pictures of food than it is a tool that tells us exactly what we missed when we went offline for an hour. And no one, and I mean no one, is building a better RSS reader for a niche audience of serious news consumers. Where are the magical email auto-responders that answer, tag and organize emails for us? Where are the intelligent calendars that integrate with messaging systems (social, email and otherwise), capable of reading text-based communications and turning them into appointments and meetings? Where are the automaters, the filters, the noise reducers? Where's the Siri for everything?

"There are many explanations for today's uncertain economy. But Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University has advanced an analysis that's starting to resonate. In a recent article, Stiglitz says that our problem is "rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we're losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want, and the kind we don't know what to do with." To advance our economy, Stiglitz believes that wrenching, fundamental change is required - no less dramatic than the shifts experienced by an earlier generation during the Great Depression. While Stiglitz and I work in different worlds, I see evidence in all types of organizations that we need to better prepare, train, and inspire successful self-directed learners to meet today's challenges. As I see it, there are two big questions to consider. First, what are the critical 21st century skills that the workforce of tomorrow needs to develop and master today? Secondly, how can we improve our learning methods to enable the self-directed learner to thrive in this new environment?"

"Virtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases - married to their near cousin Big Data - are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history. There is a shared structure across all of these developments - the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links - both physical and informational - grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments. Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs."

Marketers will spend over $350 billion advertising on the web this year "betting" that they will reach the intended market of buyers. Advertisers create slick campaigns "betting" that they will get the markets attention to their offering. Betting is a game, sometimes you win and most of the time you lose.

Steve wheeler 2012 learning 3.0 and the smart extended web

"The ability to distribute real-time information through social networks like Twitter is a powerful thing, but a new study points out that one of the downsides of this phenomenon is the fact that much of the content that gets linked to eventually disappears."

What do Color, Quora, Hunch, Blippy, and StockTwits have in common? They are examples of companies that generate value for their users by leveraging the concept of the Interest Graph. The list also features some of the most promising startups right now, having raised close to $100 million in venture funding. Pure coincidence?

Gamification, the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications, is transforming online news into an engaging, social and fun activity. It's quickly becoming the next frontier in web and mobile technology.

The PANDA Project, a winner of this year's Knight News Challenge, is what developer Brian Boyer calls a "newsroom data application," a tool that helps find context and relationships on the fly. Boyer, the news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, will lead the project, which plans to create a set of web-based open source tools that will allow any newsroom to set up their own PANDA to analyze data whenever the need arises.