How does the world feel right now? In 2005 wefeelfine.org scoured the world’s blogs for the keyword ‘feel’ and, via an artful and compelling interface, presented each author’s snippets of text and images as a beautiful representation of the mood of the world. Jump forwards to April 2010 when 50,000 websites integrated Facebook ‘Like’ buttons in the first week of its availability. Now with the growth of Twitter, that flow of micro-opinions and feelings has become a torrent. Social media clearly likes to express personal opinion.

Mid way between the pure art of wefeelfine.org, and the visceral grunt of Facebook’s ‘Like’ is a grey area of mostly unquantified social thought. That’s where sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) resides. As its tools and techniques become more sophisticated it will reap valuable insights from the cacophony – for brands, governments and researchers to understand the feelings of the masses, and then respond to them – without the need for surveys, polling call centres, or focus groups.

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The internet is changing. It’s becoming driven by structured data, and as the databases connect, computers will be able to make rule-based assumptions and take action on our behalf, as individuals, and businesses. This interconnection is often referred to as ‘the semantic web’, and one of the features of it is a seeming ability for the web to use our information and draw in other relevant connections. I’m calling this phenomenon The thinking web.

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From tweeting dairy cows to RFID tags on white goods, our increasing capacity to transfer smart data makes for less wastage, faster service and better business. This article was originally written for Business21C with my colleague Mike Hanley.

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In February 2010 my colleague Mike Hanley and I interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts. It was one of a number of fascinating interviews arranged for us by Google Australia with their key engineers in the Googleplex in California, which had included Google Fellow Amit Singhal. Our thanks to Annie Baxter and Nate.

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In February 2010 I had the pleasure of interviewing Google Fellow Amit Singhal, possibly the premier search engineer in the world today, with my colleague Mike Hanley, by video conference from Google Australia to the Googleplex in California. The article on The Future of Search was published in The Australian Financial Review’s BOSS magazine in April 2010. Our hour long interview was fascinating, so I’m posting the transcript here. My thanks to Annie Baxter, Public Relations Manager, Australia and New Zealand, for setting the interview up.

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Following four extraordinarily compelling hours of interviews to the Googleplex, with Google Fellows and lead engineers Amit Singhal, Matt Cutts, Ben Gomes and Trystan Upstill – covering the emotional through to the arcane facets of the future of search – I wrote the following article with my colleague Mike Hanley. It was published in the April 2010 edition of The Australian Financial Review’s Boss Magazine.

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Information Graphics are increasingly visible, not just because they can be appealing to look at, but because we’re reading less and flitting more. Information needs to be engaging, pithily informative, and able to catch a reader’s attention within a few (fractions of) seconds. The internet belongs to the instant gratification generation, and to reach them, it’s necessary to provide information in a way that can be absorbed quickly. Beyond that, a bit of hands-on (or eyes-on) learning can absorb a few key ideas or politically focussed facts more readily than from reading any amount of dry paragraphs.

Hands up who just clicked those links.

Squeezing meaning and messages into ever smaller spaces is creating a need to classify types of interface, data representation and other criteria.

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This evening was Google Sydney’s holiday party – a get together for the journalists to glean a few stories, or at least grab some business cards for future interviews. Both Google Maps and Google Wave have their primary developer base here, amongst 350 staff. And it’s clear that Google will have a huge 2010.

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The article I wrote for Business21C on Google Wave is now online. You can read my article on Google Wave here. Whilst putting it together, I decided that an important focus had to go on the collaborative work practices it will help evolve.

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On July 14th 2009, Mike Hanley, the editor of Business21C, and I went to hear Roy Green speak at UTS’s Business School. Ultimately, our resulting conversations led to an agenda for our information graphics and a mind mapping of that evening’s Powerpoint presentation.

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