sensemaking

Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured data representation format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time to enable powerful new kinds of applications to be built on the Twitter platform.

Recently twitterdata.org introduced a format for sending semantic triplets through Twitter. An alternative format is, of course, our RoboCrunch Action Protocol.

Seth Grimes is a business intelligence expert with a special interest in text analytics. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses how a new breed of tools is enabling companies to build "voice of the customer" applications that extract useful signals from the noisy chatter that's erupting everywhere online.

I've set up this site to provide space for me to share ideas with a "Board of Directors", so I can get feedback on refining the ideas, and advice on how and when to share these ideas. Bootstrapping Collective Intelligence: This represents my response to Christina Engelbart's challenge during her presentation, and the Program For The Future challenge. GTD.brain. This is my entry to the contest for how people are using the PersonalBrain to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done methods: RESOLVING: This is a 3-D framework I've been developing, most influenced by Bill's Appreciation-Influence-Control philosophy. Combinatorial Modeling: applying combinatorial theory to assigning values based on models of N-node systems

KenYersel is a community organisation which promotes informed and high quality discussions of critical issues. We combine argument visualisation and web-based technology with established participatory discussion techniques. These are used to facilitate discussions, providing a rich understanding as the basis for rational and accountable decision making. Central to the effectiveness of this process is the building of community. Our unique methodology comes from many years experience working with a wide variety of community groups, businesses and universities. The results have considerable authority as they come from the concerted effort of real critical thinking by large number of people.

A tag cloud is a list of words in different sizes and colors, with or without a sense of depth (3D), meant to represent the statistical importance of keywords mentioned in a particular document base (a blog, a website, twitter,…). It serves as an indicator of the relative importance of the use of certain ideas in the document base at hand. It is a bottom-up, very fuzzy method for the synthesis of knowledge from an arbitrarily big aggregate of (text) data. Because it rests entirely on statistics, very often there is absolutely no relationships between the keywords of a tag cloud. Worse even, if they existed (by pure chance), there is absolutely no way of finding out about the meaning of those relationships.

While dialog and deliberation techniques (America Speaks, Deliberative Juries, Open Space, World Café, etc) all have important roles to play in increasing public participation, their proponents may benefit from considering some additional working assumptions and principles.

Carneades is an argument mapping application, with a graphical user interface, and a software library for building applications supporting various argumentation tasks.

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web.

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.

Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is "participating in the conversation" or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.

Yes, good money can actually be made in the rapidly-growing world of free-to-play massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), but just how much can micro-transactions actually generate?

Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp'd--resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly. Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.

A software engine that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages has been developed by researchers at the University of Washington. The tool extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

RDFa ("Resource Description Framework in attributes") is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with "rich snippets." Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been processing RDFa for about a year. With these two giants of search on the same trajectory, a new kind of web is closer than ever before.

The "Open Stack" refers to a set of technologies that work together to make it easier for web developers and users to manage access to user data across the Web.