Gamification -- the application of online game design techniques in non-game settings -- has been quickly gaining the attention of leaders in business, education, policy and even terrorist communities. But gamification also has plenty of critics, and the debate over its future could become an epic battle in the same vein of many online game favorites. This special report includes coverage of a recent Wharton conference titled, "For the Win: Serious Gamification," in addition to interviews with conference participants who discuss the use of gamification in business, government and other arenas. 

One of the biggest challenges these efforts face, whether they are internal or external, is that engagement via social media is generally perceived as a voluntary activity.

In short, software is eating the world.

 It's always surprising just how polarizing the idea of gamification is. Some people love the concept of adding game-like elements to all different types of social and commercial interactions, while others hate it with a seething vehemence, either because they're "gamers" who hate seeing their favorite art form debased, or because they're anti-gamers, who don't [...]

Simply put, our brain is inherently well suited for some tasks, but ill suited for others. Unfortunately, the brain's weaknesses include recognizing which tasks are which, so for the most part we remain ignorantly blissful of the extent to which our lives are governed by the brain's bugs.

Since the open data movement has shown no declining signals, several hubs, or data markets, have been released. This was a direct consequence of the need for ways to search all different data sets

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.

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.

Will the upsurge in activity around climate change and the food crisis repeat the cycle of the movement of movements over the past decade - momentary visibility then dissolution? Harry Halpin and Kay Summer say 'yes', unless different models of organising are embraced.

We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential. That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload.  In that kind of world, the ability to provide persistent context becomes paradoxically ever more valuable. Persistent context helps to orient us and connect us in ways that can accelerate our efforts to achieve our potential.

Another example of the increasing focus on content intelligence - salsaDev - http://bit.ly/riy5BV

One of the awards went to The Chicago Tribune's "PANDA," which aims to sew otherwise incompatible datasets together, allowing journalists to find unknown relationships from the archived data that normally sits dormant on individual hard drives.

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.

In 2008, the number of devices that connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people. That number continues to rise, thanks to a growing number of connected devices and gizmos, ranging from televisions to soda machines. Folks at Cisco have put together this infographic to showcase the growth of the Internet of things.

Tech predictions focusing only on technology miss a key component: people.

Alex Boyer recently shared his thoughts on why it's time to move past the file and how semantic technology can take us there. He writes, "Files are an outdated concept.

A new article reports that the British Library has announced "a significant contribution to the development, application, and sharing of bibliographic data using Linked Data techniques and technologies...