Buzz Engine: Online Analysis

According to a Globe and Mail story, Buzz cuts through the on-line rumour mill, (Jerry Langton, August 4, 2005, Globetechnology Section) Accenture researchers have developed a technology called the Buzz Engine that tracks topics through lists and blogs. It looks like it does something like the culture tracker we developed, graphing the relative frequency of keywords – real-time text analysis.

Here is a quote from Gary Boone, PhD: Weblog:

At Accenture Technology Labs, we have developed the next generation of search engine. Itís a kind of summary engine that focuses on online buzz or discussion. Online Audience Analysis is a buzz engine that interactively shows how much buzz there is on a given topic. You can search for topics of interest and see how much public attention that topic receives. Is anyone talking about the new Xbox? Are more participants in technology discussion sites talking about iPods or about Creative Zen Micros? Online Audience Analysis can show you.

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Echelon doesn’t seem to work

A story about how the British intelligence services have been closing down al-Qaeda related web sites, Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out (from the The Sunday Times, July 31st, 2005), comments that automated electronic intelligence gathering systems like Echelon don’t seem to work. In other words text-analysis systems don’t work if people want to subvert them by using simple codes or spamming the net. See my previous posts on Carnivore Documents.
Does this mean it is unlikely to be helpful to students of textuality?

I’m Back

Well I’m back from vacation. We (the family) went to the South of France, Barcelona, and Italy. Lots of pictures – so many I may never download them 🙂

Blogging and the Chronicle

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal) is a response to a piece of tosh in the Chronicle for Higher Education. Matt follows up with a call for people to comment on how blogging has helped them. If you have reasons for academical blogging post a comment so that he can send a response to the Chronicle.

The Chronicle article “Bloggers Need Not Apply” describes how some people may not have got jobs because their blogs revealed too much. While this is a general problem I suspect it is more true about e-mail than blogging. There is an ethical issue here that needs to be teased out – why would it be best to hide ones thinking? Would you want to get a job for the wrong reasons?

Keats: To Autumn

Joanne Buckley drew my attention to the poem To Autumn by John Keats (from The Poetical Works of John Keats, 1884). I was telling her of a Fall in Tuscany when I watched the clouds and wasps wipe summer off the hills.

Kurzweil: Ramona and KurzweilAI.net

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KurzweilAI.net is a web site by Ray Kurzweil dedicated to Artificial Intelligence. From there you can launch an avatar “Ramona” with whom you can converse. (If you have Windows you can install the FX Player and see her move and speak.) If you click on “The Brain” there is a great visualization of the connections between people, concepts, implementations (like Eliza) and related things. Clicking on items shows the connections and brings up short defintions and links. This is implemented in Java. Thanks to Alexandre Sévigny for this.
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Applying to Game Companies

“a graduate program for the left and right brain”

Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center has a project based Masters of Entertainment Technology. Their program is aimed mostly at developing games, thugh they define “entertainment technology” widely to include augmented reality, telepresence, and entertainment robotics.
They have a neat page with information on how to prepare applications and demo reels for the entertainment industry, see How To Documents. This is thanks to Paola Borin.