Group items tagged

This year's technology is Internet video, which protesters have leveraged to self-report their protests. The Drudge Report had at least four links to such videos yesterday, and Instapundit, which has reported on continuing "tea parties" since they started, has more.

the rate at which the connection can increase actually decreases. Did that make sense? Unless your friends are constantly questioning you or keeping tabs on you, it’s going to take a lot longer to make deeper connections the more your network grows.

Soon after President Obama’s inauguration a word cloud with a graphical-semiotic representation of his 21-minute speech appeared on the web. The three most common words were nation, America and people. His predecessor’s had been freedom, America and liberty. Abraham Lincoln had majored on war, God and offence. The technique has a utility beyond identifying themes. Social-networking sites let users “tag” pages and images with words describing the content. The terms displayed in a “tag cloud” are links that will bring up a list of the related content.

A CUSTOM NEWS FEED By the time Bridget Baker, who works in public relations in Seattle, checks Google Reader while eating lunch at her desk, she has already read most of the articles in her feed because she saw them on Twitter.

People with shared interests become your editor and Twitter becomes an alternative RSS feed.

One-fifth of posts and 57 percent of repeat messages contain a link, proving that this is an increasingly popular way to spread news, said Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist who works at a software company called HubSpot.

Web-connected grocery store “VIP” cards may track customer spending as they do today: every time you scan your customer card, your purchases are added to a massive database that grocery stores use to guide their stocking choices. In exchange for your data, the stores offer you discounts on selected products. Soon with Web-enhanced shopping, stores will be able to offer you specific promotions based on your particular purchasing history, and in real time (as illustrated above). This will give shoppers more incentive to sign up for VIP programs and give retailers more flexibility and variety with discounts, sales and other promotions.

Search engines—and the whole concept of search itself—will remain in flux as personalization becomes more commonplace. Currently, the major search engines are adapting to this by offering different takes on personalized search results, based on user-specific browsing history.

Google also hopes to leverage your social network connections to deliver results from people you already know.