InsightNG

One thing about information - there's a lot of it out there, but the good news is, most of it, you will never need.

Amazon and Apple are massively successful retailers, the envy of digital and brick-and-mortar businesses alike. Currently, the two tech retailers enjoy a place among the biggest, most successful companies in the world. But they have a blind spot. The premises on which they've built their market advantage are now no longer the most important things in digital. They're missing a data asset that would allow them to understand their customers better: the interest graph.

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook. In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

But the second thing he explained to me was more subtle and way more powerful. He explained that I should start working on a project as soon as it was assigned. An hour or so would do fine, he told me. He told me to come back to the project every day for at least a little bit and make progress on it slowly over time. I asked him why that was better than cramming at the very end (as I was doing during the conversation). He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn't stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you'll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.

Here Be Dragons is a free 40 minute video introduction to critical thinking. It is suitable for general audiences and is licensed for free distribution and public display.

Social technologies and collaboration tools start to find broad acceptance in the enterprise domain. As well, semantic technologies have been around for a while, offering a range of benefits in the handling of information, including the pervasive linking of content, fostering new forms of content discovery and navigation, and improving content metadata and information retrieval.

Our panel of social media experts carefully reviewed the nominees and finalists, analyzing the quality of their content, the frequency of posts and reader involvement (among other things). With that in mind, here are ten blogs that need to be at the top of your reading list.

Businesses are using collective intelligence to speed up company growth, improve efficiency, enhance products and services, and strengthen the employee environment, according to new research from IBM.

Here are three of the developing topics that combine social with learning - and should be worth integrating in your business during this year.

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.

We live in a connected society, where devices and data are being pulled together to profoundly change business, our personal lives, society and even nations. In this introduction to this PublicTechnology.net Agenda, I want to try to outline, in non-technical terms, some of the benefits to the sector (and ultimately the taxpayer) of extracting and linking data.

We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective. Like many other biologists, Seeley sees a bee colony as not just a collection of individuals but as a sort of super-organism. Thus the brain analogy above.

2011 was the year of information. It seeped into our consciousness over the year, this idea that the volume of information now available in the world truly was overwhelming. 2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It's not that we won't use the Internet, it's not that Google will disappear - of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement amongst connected people. It's also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

One of our most important living philosophers, Dan Dennett is best known for his provocative and controversial arguments that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes in the brain. He argues that the brain's computational circuitry fools us into thinking we know more than we do, and that what we call consciousness - isn't. This mind-shifting perspective on the mind itself has distinguished Dennett's career as a philosopher and cognitive scientist. And while the philosophy community has never quite known what to make of Dennett (he defies easy categorization, and refuses to affiliate himself with accepted schools of thought), his computational approach to understanding the brain has made him, as Edge's John Brockman writes, "the philosopher of choice of the AI community."

How you react to people and events can tell us a lot about the way you process information. The brain runs our lives. It processes and creates different emotions in us everyday. We have a choice of either letting it run its course or guiding it the way we want to run our lives. Our brain has 61 patterns that drive our behaviour. So here is a quiz that will provide you awareness and insights into how your brain processes any information. 

"In the FastCoDesign article, How do you create a culture of innovation? the authors note four skills that most successful innovators exhibit: 1) Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer? 2) Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking. 3) Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli. 4) Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places."

"Social business. A term that's been steadily gaining traction at the intersection of social media's rise and the current shift in the business world. But what does it mean? "

Engagement is a good thing, of course. The preference to be not bored is pretty universal. But with time constraints and information overload, getting and maintaining people's already short attention spans is harder than ever. So, marketers and content specialists are turning to gamification as the latest Holy Grail. Too bad they don't know what they're doing. Gamification without solid core ideas to communicate, and a clear, concise method of doing so, is doomed to fail. It's about as effective as taking a PowerPoint deck and just changing every fifth slide to read "REMEMBER TO HAVE FUN!" Attention getting? Maybe. More effective communication? No. Just lipstick on a pig.

"In this new age of networked intelligence, collaborative communities are enhancing and even bypassing crumbling institutions. We are innovating the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; how the healthcare, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers; how we care for our neighbourhoods; and even how we solve global problems. "