EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

WHAT IS A WIKI?

2008-12-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.
Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.
The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.
Wikis are used in business to provide intranet (click here to read a very interesting case study of a wiki used as intranet and realise all the advantages it has) and Knowledge Management systems.
Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work".

If you feel curious try to design your own wiki on any the following sites:

After watching this funny introductory video!

SOCIAL NETWORKING IN PLAIN ENGLISH

2008-12-12T15:22:00.001-08:00

Following the IN PLAIN ENGLISH post I include here another video which explain in a very easy way the SOCIAL NETWORKING concept. This is the topic for my assignment so this video represents the starting point to get into the Social Networking field.
Enjoy it!

Social Networking in Plain English

THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY

2008-12-11T11:30:00.000-08:00

This website gathers over 30 articles about the technologies organizations are exploring to manage their operations in a better way and innovations to make business more competitive.

A wide range of topics converge here from facebook's redesign to the pursuit of faster wireless networks, from self surveillance to cell phones recycling, ... all of those articles treat the technological issue from a business approach.

Have a nice reading!

10 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES 2008

2008-12-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

I thought I had run out of ideas to update my blog when I found this interesting website which presents every year the 10 technologies its research team think are most likely to change the way humans live. Here you are the 2008 proposal:

1) Modeling Surprise: 'Combining massive quantities of data, insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage surprising events.' (Horvitz, 2008)

2) Probabilistic Chips: 'A little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.' (Palem, 2008)

3) NanoRadio: Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics. (Service, 2008)

4) Wireless Power: Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity. (Chu, 2008)

5) Atomic Magnetometers: John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before. (Bourzac, 2008)

6) Offline Web Applications: 'Computing applications will become more powerful when they take advantage of the browser and the desktop.' (Lynch, 2008)

7) Graphene Transistors: A new form of carbon being pioneered by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact computer processors. (Bullis, 2008)

8) Connectomics: Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits. (Singer, 2008)

9) Reality Mining: Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior. (Greene, 2008)

10) Cellullolityc Enzimes: Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose. (Goho, 2008)

Read those that sound interesting to you, but, if you would take my advise, read them all because they are all exciting topics and each one of them represents a new trend in the research to find a revolutionary emerging technology.

WORDLE

2008-12-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

I really like this web
'Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.' (Jonathan Feinberg, 2008).

Try and create your own word cloud from a bunch of text, from an url and from your delicious tags. You will get surprised on the one hand because the design is beautiful and on the other hand because you will be able to realize which are the words you use the most. Have fun!!

DIGG

2008-11-28T08:19:00.000-08:00

Another experience with an emerging technology: The DIGG community! I have been reading a bit about it and found it really interesting that is why I decided to join in myself and to submit my blog as an experiment to check if anybody out there finds it interesting.

This is the Wikipedia definition for the Digg project:

Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.
Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems.

Try and join in, it is brilliant as you can see the stories or videos or pictures or projects people are digging. Those with more duggs would be the more interesting stories, and from my little experience, they are! You can also sumit your stories to check what people think or add your friends to your account to track what they are reading and digging and so many other things to be updated and know the stories people consider the best. Enjoy it!

A SMALL ERROR

2008-11-28T07:50:00.000-08:00

Hey!
I write this post just to notify I have found a small error in the Keyboardr Home site.
The fact is that if you copy a keyword or a sentence or whatever and paste it in the keyboardr engine to make the search, IT does not recognize it, you have to delete any character and type it again to relaunch the search process.
I know it is not very important but it means the engine is not perfect, although it is really useful and I have to admit I have already set it as my home web site.
I hope the developers are dealing with it.
See you!

KEYBOARDR

2008-11-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

Another tool I heard about on the lecture: Keyboardr!!
I think it is a really useful homepage that will make the internet navigation faster and easier. It also will allow users to keep with their hands on the keyboard during the search which is a really cool concept of usability.
Keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia and Youtube altogether and select the link is as easy as using the arrow keys and press enter. Sounds like a game.
It also develops the concept of instant search, while you are typing your search the related web sites are instantly displayed so you can see every related topic.

Watching this video you will be able to figure out how interesting this project is.

keyboardr.com from Julius Eckert on Vimeo.

LINKEDIN: THE FACEBOOK FOR PROFESSIONALS

2008-11-26T15:28:00.000-08:00

Today I heard for the first time about this LINKEDIN stuff and it sounded quite interesting so I did a small review about what it is exactly about and how does it work.
This is what I found out:

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking . As for December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, up 485% from the end of 2006. As of October 2008, it had more than 30 million registered users, spanning 150 industries.
In summer of 2008, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn DirectAds as a form of sponsored advertising.

The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.

This list of connections can then be used in a number of ways:

A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed second degree connections) and also the connections of second degree connections (termed third degree connections). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone you wish to know through a mutual, trusted contact.
It can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one's contact network.
Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.
Job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.

Source (Wikipedia)

And here and explanatory video about how it works. Enjoy it!!

VISUAL COMPLEXITY

2008-11-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans."

Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics

I find this website just great.
It happens to me so many times that I can not completely understand a topic because it has a complex visualization, I mean, because it is not easy for myself to view or represent it phisically in my mind.
This web deals exactly with this issue:
Filtered by subjects, it shows a visual representation of a lot of complex networks. Having a look at them it is really easier to figure out how the relationship works.
I think that the information, to really exists, needs to be watched, has to get to the end of the chain, to the user, and information managers/professionals are the mean to make any kind of information available to any kind of user. However, there is some information, because of its complexity, which is still very hard to represent in an easy understandable way for non expert users. This web site, in my opinion, is achieving this goal. It is giving a new, attractive and well based and original shape to the visualization of quite a lot of networks and relationships.
The topic of the represented networks are very linked to IT, so that is another bonus to this site.
Lets have a look!

NEWSMAP!!

2008-11-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

Another interesting website!
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
(Source: http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/index.cfm)

IN PLAIN ENGLISH

2008-11-20T13:17:00.001-08:00

Are you fed up with dull explanations?
Here come some useful videos dealing with interesting topics for the IT community.

Blogs in Plain English

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

RSS in Plain English

MY DEL.ICIO.US BOOKMARKS

2008-11-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

Here you are my Delicious Bookmarks !!!!
Have a look at them to know which are my favourite sites related to IT and other issues.

HOW DO WE FEEL??

2008-11-18T12:01:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this website, I find it awesome.
My sister told me about it, how many things she knows! xD
I think it compiles some of the main topics of web 2.0, such as interaction, interconnection, ... anyway, you will know what I mean, just read the text and have a look at the page.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

- Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006

Click HERE to enter this fabulous site!

WEB 2.0

2008-11-12T06:52:00.000-08:00

Hi,
I know I am not being original but it is mandatory to start this blog with this video.
It really helped me to figure out what the IT crew is dealing with.
Hope you like it!

HELLO EVERYBODY

2008-11-12T06:35:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my brand new blog!
Time has come to start one of those blogs I have always refused to carry on.
This one is going to be related to the web 2.0 but it will be developed from my very personal perspective.
I hope you enjoy it.