I’m surprised at the responses I have had from my post yesterday about my trail of 118118’s new question answering service. Quite unusually for The Blog of Ross C Brown, the post received replies, most of which pointing to one of 118118’s competitors, Any Questions Answered (AQA). Read the rest of this entry »

118118 is one of the many (supposedly 200+) companies offering Directory Enquiries in the UK and is one of the top three 118 companies which together control 90% of the industry. More recently, 118118 has launched a services allowing you to text the company a question and receive a reply from a real person. Read the rest of this entry »

June 9th is rapidly approaching and our keynote coverage planning is well underway. I’ll be covering the Steve Jobs keynote here on The Blog of Ross C Brown, on Twitter (or here) and possibly on Ustream.tv (or here and here). In addition to the Ross C Brown Online coverage, I’ll also be providing coverage for a number of other sites both in and out of network. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who don’t know, I recently moved to Edinburgh for University and all that. As a result I use Google Maps all the time to find my way about. The other day I noticed the option to get directions using public transport.

Read the rest of this entry »