InsightNG

I like this article. It is forward thinking and visionary.

Call a friend in another city or a foreign country, and ask them to Google something at the same time as you. The results will be different... "The result is a "filter bubble", which he defines as "a unique universe of information for each of us", meaning that we are less likely to encounter information online that challenges our existing views or sparks serendipitous connections. "

A big problem with contextualizing information is that machines still cannot think. They are only able to do calculations, so everything we do to contextualize data in a software system must be "reduced" to statistics and mathematics. When a certain problem cannot be solved using mathematics (and there are many of them!) then the user must jump in.

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.

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't? The biggest cost - assuming you don't crash - is to your productivity. In part, that's a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you're partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it's because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you're increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

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.

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.

I've had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I've encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas.

I've had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I've encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas.

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms," poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them to a point where we no longer see their storiness - they become not one of many lenses on reality, but reality itself.

Our company is a science-oriented company, and the core belief is that behavior - human or otherwise - can be mathematically expressed. Yes, people make irrational value judgments, but they are driven by common motivation factors, and the math expresses that. I look at the so-called "big data phenomenon" as the instantiation of human experience. Previously, we could not quantitatively measure human experience, because the data wasn't being captured. But Twitter recently announced that they now serve 350 billion tweets a day. What we say and what we do has a physical manifestation now. Once there is a physical manifestation of a phenomenon, then it can be mathematically expressed. And if you can express it, then you can shape business ideas around it, whether that's in government or health care or business.

Forget coffee and crosswords. If you want to supercharge your brain, you have to change your lifestyle. But only a few things about it. Here, we lay to rest some of the well-worn myths of power thinking, and give you the facts on what you can do to actually improve mental performance.

Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration meets this challenge head on with a systemic, human-network approach to managing business operations and ecosystems.

Hi, I'm just starting to research semantic web, web 3.0 and RDF…  that post was building a repository of data that pointed to some good content on Semantic Web Learning. 

According to the W3C, "The Media Annotations Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation Ontology for Media Resources 1.0.

You may know Wordnik from subscribing to its Word of the Day service... Now comes something new on the API front: Word Graph is the latest result of some three years of algorithm development around analyzing the digital text that Wordnik has collected from partners, to understand the relationship between words in order to derive meaning. 

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. 

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.

A question for you: How does discovering and sharing online information make you feel? [I'd bet a good number of you are frustrated, feeling the negative effects of what Eli Pariser calls the "filter bubble"...] Well, here's something else to consider: discovering and sharing information - and the means for curating it - should be serendipitous. Really, it should. A Form of Collective Intelligence I had the fortunate pleasure of meeting up with my friend Jarno Koponen while in Helsinki this past week. Jarno and his founding partner, Marko Anderson, have spent the last two plus years building a predictive discovery engine, called Futureful.

A new search engine allows users to search for good news. According to the article, "Jurriaan Kamp editor of Ode Magazine in San Francisco has created a new search engine. Ode Wire, available here in its beta form uses semantic search technology to spot optimism on the web, and delivers users news stories from an 'uplifting' angle.

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.