data mining

Long term trends: The Ngrams Viewer

“A database of intentions” is how John Battelle described Google. It is a thrilling concept, at times unsettling, that you can see into the searching soul of the connected populace by seeing the words they use t find things.Google Trends is one of those miraculous tools of the web that has quickly become commonplace. With…… Continue reading Long term trends: The Ngrams Viewer

Facebook planet

This image has been on my computer desktop and on my mind since I saw it in December. High time I shared it here, really. It’s a data visualisation of 10 million pairs of friends on Facebook and where they live in relationship to one another, created by an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering…… Continue reading Facebook planet

Mining the where: CIA-funded start-up says 80% of online content contains location information

Last week at Local Social Summit I talked about some of the issues around location and privacy. Especially problematic is people’s inadvertent tagging of their photos with location information – something potentially of interest to crooks, stalkers and others you might not want to know everything about you. Open-source spying is a term which has…… Continue reading Mining the where: CIA-funded start-up says 80% of online content contains location information

Mining the now: Real time sense making

Here’s an emerging idea about how we can and will make sense of the vast amounts of data becoming available about what is happening right now… Juliana Rotich (whose work at Ushahidi I’ve discussed on this blog about a year ago) writes on her Afromusing blog about pulling together the ability to crowdsource the gathering…… Continue reading Mining the now: Real time sense making

Web shadows: Looking after ourselves online

I’ve been reading and therefore thinking a fair bit about privacy and personal online reputation. It’s something I’ve touched on in the past and the posts Managing your online reputation will be a core life skill and Online overshare: the personal rep pitfalls have had a small but steady trickle of traffic ever since. I tend…… Continue reading Web shadows: Looking after ourselves online