EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

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.

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.

"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

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)

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

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

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!