Infotention

"Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. The Internet immerses us in a milieu of information — not for almost 20 years has a Web user read every available page — and there's more each minute: Twitter alone processes hundreds of tweets every second, from all around the world, all visible for anyone, anywhere, who cares to see. Of course, the majority of this information is worthless to the majority of people. Yet anything we care to know — what's the function for opening files in Perl? how far is it from Hong Kong to London? what's a power law? — is out there somewhere."

"Percolate is the first content curation platform that works by bubbling up interesting content based on your network and presenting it back to you for reaction.
Percolate works by hooking up to streams of content (like RSS and Twitter, with more to come) and filtering down to the most interesting stuff for you (by way of a lot of math and technical wizardry). We then present that content back to you for you to react to, which is as easy as hitting an "awesome" button."

http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/Publications_files/DC_AS_SMUC_2011.pdf

"Automatic tag recommendation or annotation can help in
improving the eciency of text-based information retrieval
on online social media services like Blogger, Last.FM, Flickr
and YouTube. In this work, we investigate alternate solu-
tions for tag recommendations by employing a Wisdom of
Crowd approach in a mashup framework. In particular, we
mine tweets on Twitter and use their hashtag(s) and con-
tent to annotate videos on Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube,
Dailymotion and SoundCloud. We crawl Twitter to col-
lect a random sample of tweets containing Flickr, Photo-
bucket, YouTube, Dailymotion and SoundCloud URLs. We
then recommend tags for these services using hashtag(s) and
content present in tweets. We use a hybrid technique (auto-
mated and manual) to validate our results on dierent sub-
sets (presence / absence of hashtags, presence / absence of
media tags) of data. Experimental results demonstrate that
the proposed solution approach is eective and reliable."

Four strategies for maintaining your focus when faced with so many sources of information.

More on ifttt, with some practicale examples: "Ever wish you could get a text message every time someone tagged you in a Facebook photo? Or that you could record notes to yourself that are transcribed and sent to your e-mail account?

A nifty new Web service called ifttt (pronounced “lift” but minus the l) offers a way to automate tasks involving a bevy of services like Instagram, Craiglist, Dropbox and Instapaper, among others.

The basic premise of the service is simple. Users simply connect two services together to respond to triggers, under the construct that if this happens, then do that."

"What would be great, then, is if there were a publicly browsable collection of scripts that scrape APIs and websites, scripts that could easily be updated if something about the data changes.

Friends, let me commend to you ScraperWiki. ScraperWiki is a bit of a wonder, because it provides three different handy resources, any one of which would be worth some time:"

“Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized. Homophily can make you really, really dumb. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again.

“Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity — the sort of serendipity when you go to that shelf in the library and you think you know the book that you’re looking for, but you actually find the book you’re really looking for within 2-3 shelves of it. You think you’re looking for info on the US elections, but you end up finding info on how the Jamaicans are viewing the US elections. You think you’re looking for info on network security and you en d up finding information on why Pakistan is so afraid of YouTube.”

This is Ward Cunningham, who invented wikis: "Our new wiki innovates three ways. It shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization. Follow our open development on GitHub or just watch our work-in-progress videos here."

"Looks like litbots and databases will soon be providing routine updates of structured information to human readers via newspapers and news websites in the form of machine written articles. Narrative Science is the company behind it.

Pretty soon, such litbots will be conversing with my own personal litbots, and negotiating the purchase of routine items I need and can afford, according to the budget I set and the priorities I identify."