A Sentiment Detector That Reads the Social Web For You | Fast Company

A Sentiment Detector That Reads the Social Web For You | Fast Company

Visible Technologies, a service that helps companies track what's said about them on the Web, unveiled a major upgrade today. Its new Google-inspired architecture better distinguishes the relevance and the sentiment of the mountains of social media conversations. It aims to help businesses make sense out of the cacophony of the social Web, and clients Microsoft, FedEx, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and others are all clients of the service.

Visible has been around for a while, and has plenty of competition (we recently wrote about Trendrr, for instance). But the latest iteration of Visible's platform, called Visible Intelligence, has been built from the ground up. It has a scalable, Google-like architecture that can render tens of millions of blog posts, tweets, and forum entries within seconds.

To follow up on what we were talking about last time, here is an article on a company that helps other companies understand what is being said about them.

Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie

Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie:

"it’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur. How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today? In what ways would it be better? In what ways would it be worse, or just different?"

What happens after the PC? Will the complexity of PC technology, i.e. the complexity of Microsoft Windows, essentially doom it? Is the answer a number of smaller connected services, like apps, each carrying out small tasks that together cover our information processing needs?

The Yale Digital Commons

The Yale Digital Commons
One of the possible topics for your longer final research projects is or could be an analysis of networking technologies or tools that could be useful to university students at Dal or elsewhere. I came across this page -- the Yale Digital Commons page http://commons.yale.edu/ which describes the tools available to students at Yale. Here is the description from their page:

The Yale Digital Commons is a collection of online tools for students and faculty in Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The tools can be used to create things such as websites, blogs, wikis and databases for teaching and learning.

The Way We Live Now - Little Brother is Watching - NYTimes.com

The Way We Live Now - Little Brother is Watching - NYTimes.com:

Clementi, unlike Orwell’s Winston Smith, who hid from the telescreens whenever possible and understood that the price of personhood was ceaseless self-censorship and vigilance, had no way of knowing that the walls had eyes. Nor did his unseen observer anticipate the ultimate consequences of his intrusion.
In “1984,” the abolition of personal space was part of an overarching government policy, but nowadays it’s often nothing more than a side effect of wired high spirits.

Ours is a fragmentarian society, infinitely divided against itself and endlessly disrupted from within by much the same technologies that, in Orwell’s somber novel, assured a dull and deadening stability. In some ways, his nightmare vision of state control is cozy and reassuring by comparison. Big Brother may have stifled dissent by forcing conformity on his frightened subjects, but his trespasses were predictable and manageable. What’s more, his assaults on citizens’ privacy left the concept of privacy intact, allowing the possibility that with his overthrow people might live again as they once had.

Perhaps. Perhaps the technology that has dictated that this is "the way we live now" is a prison we choose to live inside. It is the technology which forces us to be in the spotlight, and forces us to be individuals.

MPAA Copy-Protected DRM Site Hacked By Anonymous | TorrentFreak

MPAA Copy-Protected DRM Site Hacked By Anonymous | TorrentFreak:

"A site run by the MPAA has become the most recent victim of cyber attacks being carried out by Anonymous. CopyProtected.com, a site used to inform on copy protection and DRM on DVD and Blu-ray movie discs, now displays a missive from the anarchic group . After a few seconds it redirects visitors to the homepage of The Pirate Bay."

Perhaps it is a war after all.
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The ‘Legal Blackmail’ Business: Inside a P2P-Settlement Factory | Epicenter | Wired.com

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Elevator Pitch: BraveNewTalent does recruitment - Generation-Y style | Media | guardian.co.uk

Elevator Pitch: BraveNewTalent does recruitment - Generation-Y style | Media | guardian.co.uk:
"Lucian Tarnowski has a big idea - he thinks recruitment is a sector ripe for disruption and is reinventing it for Generation Y through BraveNewTalent.com. Next on his hitlist is education, which he thinks is 'no longer fit for purpose'."
Interesting interview with someone who thinks he can use social networking to change the way people look for work and the way companies look for employees.
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Can copyright bill survive with all its kinks? - The Globe and Mail

Can copyright bill survive with all its kinks? - The Globe and Mail:

"Don’t hold your breath. The good news is that Bill C-32, the government’s proposed copyright reform, should go to second reading and a parliamentary committee this fall to get the kinks ironed out before it becomes law. The bad news is that the kinks are complicated and pessimists wonder how this will ever get to third reading before an election is called and it dies on the order paper."

This article from the Globe gives a good account of the various sides in the current debate over the proposed copyright law. It makes clear the difficulty of arriving at a law that will please everyone.

Twitter and Facebook cannot change the real world, says Malcolm Gladwell | Books | The Observer

Twitter and Facebook cannot change the real world, says Malcolm Gladwell | Books | The Observer:

"Gladwell is a spirited contrarian. His argument in the New Yorker was an attack on the prevalent idea that online social networks represent the future of campaigning and protest, and perhaps – in totalitarian states – of revolution. The bestselling author of The Tipping Point unpicked this notion with typical chutzpah, moving quickly from emotive and carefully selected individual case studies to sweeping universal principles.

Gladwell examined the most effective mass protest of modern times – the American civil rights movement. Using an account of the courageous coffee bar sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, he argued that such activism was based on the strength of intimate friendships and shared experience, and directed by hierarchical power, could never have arisen from the 'weak ties' and 'horizontal' associations that characterise the campaigning of online 'friends' and 'followers'."

A piece from the Guardian discussing Malcolm Gladwell's article in the New Yorker: "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted". Gladwell makes the distinction between social movements held together by "strong ties," that is a close friendship between participants, and online social networks which tend to be comprised by "weak ties." In many ways Gladwell is rehearsing the type of argument he made in The Tipping Point, for example, the crucial influence key connecting people had in creating a tipping point in the world. Gladwell's ultimate point is that there is a difference between a weak-tie Facebook friend and a strong-tie close personal friend. While he acknowledges that remarkable things can be done by tapping into the latent power of weak-tie relationships, he keeps his focus on the failure of incapacity of social networks to be effective in practice. Interestingly, Gladwell argues that social movements are most effective when they are organized as a hierarchy. He argues that "Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective." As we talked about in class, the effectiveness of a network is determined by how effectively it works together to achieve the program that holds together the various nodes. It seems to me that Gladwell is saying that networks are inherently comprised of weak ties where individual nodes have only a weak connection to the central program. This seems to be a weakness in the argument--something where other evidence may cast a different light on the ideas.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all#ixzz11UMVhwOR

Mobile internet will outstrip 'desktop' use by 2014, says ex-Obama adviser | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Mobile internet will outstrip 'desktop' use by 2014, says ex-Obama adviser | Technology | guardian.co.uk:
While the headline is about the growth of the mobile internet, Castells also comments about social networks and the impact they have had:

"Speaking about the 'phenomenal' societal impact of the emergence of social networks, Castells said the number of users – 500m on Facebook alone – is only at 'the tip of the iceberg'. 'The deepest social transformation of the internet came in the last decade with social networks,' he said, adding:

'Increasing sociability, increasing happiness, an increasing feeling of being autonomous – all this relates to use of internet. The most important thing in this is that it's not anonymous – this is real people doing real things, sharing things. They're not just friends, they're contacts also. They're doing things together, they're not just chatting.

'Social networks are living spaces. People share with limited emotional effort. This is a constantly networked world that evolves with human experience, and individuals choose the terms of their co-evolution. Entrepreneurs build these sites, not corporations. The important thing is that even if people go into these sites, they can't do whatever they want. People will create another and take all their friends with them. The entry barriers are so low, the capital [outlay is] almost nothing, and [the barriers to entry are] so diffused.

'If Facebook becomes nasty people disappear. This is constructed by individuals who organise, and their companies are in the business of selling freedom – if they don't give it people go away. This is transforming social movements and politics,' Castells said.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Stuxnet worm heralds new era of global cyberwar | Technology | The Guardian

Stuxnet worm heralds new era of global cyberwar | Technology | The Guardian:

"In recent testimony to Congress, Alexander underlined how the cyber war threat had rapidly evolved in the past three years, describing two of the most high-profile attacks on countries: a 2007 assault on Estonia, and a 2008 attack on Georgia during its war with Russia, both blamed on Moscow.
Those were 'denial of service' attacks that disabled computer networks. But it is destructive attacks such as Stuxnet that frighten Alexander the most."

The Guardian has this detailed story on the whole issue of cyber war which we suddenly think of in a different way this week.

Charles Arthur posted this video of a "generator tearing itself apart after a cyberattack, in this case part of a test.

Is cyberwarfare a genuine threat?
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