digital living

by: Will Lion

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users. An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

Over the last 18 months, I have had the great honor of serving as a Commissioner on the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. Today, it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have released our report:

For the most part, I'm a fuzzy lovable energetic creature (or at least I like to think so). But new technologies combined with information overload sometimes bring out the inner bitch in me. And then I feel guilty.

Mitch Joel shouldn't need an introduction, but in the event that you haven't heard of him, he founded a successful Canadian based agency called Twist Image, is a well known participant at the intersection of business, social media and marketing and speaks on these topics often. When Mitch reached out to me, I promised no softballs, and his thoughtful replies make a great case for why you might want to investigate his new book, Six Pixels of Separation.

It WAS bold of marketing directors to invest in digital and social media campaigns a year ago. In revisionist marketing thinking, if you hadn’t done it, you’d be crazy. If you’re the least bit curious about how digital and social media is impacting your brand, I’ll call your attention to a weeklong series about media growth in the F.T. (see link below).

Posted via email from johnwinsor's posterous

At Blogher yesterday, the issue of "addiction" emerged in the keynote. A woman in the audience noted that she twitched for the first day of vacation because she desperately wanted to tweet the things she was seeing and witnessing, like the bald eagle flying by. On stage, the conversation turned so that we talked more generally about being able to take a technology free vacation, but I want to address the tendency to tweet the things we see directly for a moment.

by: Dick Stroud

There is a plethora of research being published that compares the digital habits of Gen Y and Baby Boomers. It all shows the same thing, plateauing of uptake by the young, rapid rate of uptake by the oldies.

For the last few years, I've been spoiled. I've been surrounded by people who, when asked a question, immediately bring out a digital device and look it up. The conferences that I've attended have backchannels as a given. Tweeting, blogging, Wikipedia-ing... these are all just what we do. It's not all there - it's still broken. My cohort is still always in search of a power plug and there's a lag between the time a question is asked and the point at which the iPhone's slow browser is loaded, the query is entered, and the answer is given. Still, we're getting there. Or so I thought.