For the last few days I’ve found myself employed on a freelance basis for a large (and arguably faceless) multinational company looking into methods of using data and information gathered from social networks in their Business Intelligence (BI) Decision Support Systems (DSS). Having looked into the data types available the most important pearl of wisdom I can pass on is that you Facebook/Bebo/MySpace page is telling the world a lot more about you than you might like.

I’ve been writing the specification of some tools for data mining social networks and automatically determining the value of the data collected. Probably the easiest to explain implementation of the mining technology is to assess the links between ‘friends’ on these networks by measuring interactions and the quality of said interactions. Using ideas from the semantic web, the tools being designed attempt to understand the public messages you send to your online friends. (more…)

Cisco has been running a series of really cool television adverts globally focusing on ‘the human network’. Unlike many advertisements these days, Cisco is selling a brand not a product and I like that.

(more…)

A while ago I wrote about a few problems I was having with OpenDNS.  Not because OpenDNS are in anyway a bad operation, to the contrary they are ‘law abiding’ eCitizens - that was the problem.

(more…)