From Stalking to Talking: A Beginner’s Top Ten Twitter Tips

I’ve been using Twitter for the guts of a hundred days now. In that time, I’ve added about 1 new connection per day and posted about 10 status updates a week. So I’m probably going to have to graduate from beginner to low intermediate status pretty soon, as far as Twitter is concerned. Before I [...]

So long recession (for a day at least): Streamgraphing Ireland’s Twitter-news!

Another month, another visualization method! This time it’s Twitter StreamGraph, which tries to show a river of topics related to a keyword over time. It’s early days for this particular method, I think – having a range of options, such as number of tweets, or a particular time period, etc., would be very handy, but [...]

Guess the Index: The Daft Report turns fun!

Following on from my recent post about Web2.0, hubdub and guessing Irish unemployment, I think it’s only right that I turn this future prediction market technology on myself. Well, on the Daft Report at any rate. At this link, you’ll find a market on how much lower rents in Ireland will be in January 2009, [...]

Wisdom of the crowds? Web2.0, hubdub & guessing Ireland’s unemployment

I had the rather pleasant task today of going through a range of Web 2.0 / social networking tools and establishing the potential in their application to primary research. Some key things that the new generation of web tools can give include: Using something like digg or scribd to find key themes and recent developments [...]

The world in 2100

Lots of people are probably familiar with the TED.com videos and podcasts. For those that are not, check out ted.com – it’s got a category called Most Jaw-dropping for a reason! Through work, I was sent this link for a talk by Dr Janine Benyus, given all the way back in early 2005. It’s about [...]

Firefox 3 and the many add-ons

Yesterday, I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 (having been on 2.x before that). Firefox 3 has the apt motto one size doesn’t fit all. And I have to say, this is the life, eh? Apparently, some people still use Internet Explorer. Apart from sticky-user syndrome – where people are scared of change and don’t really [...]

Growth, inflation and investment: hot topics in emerging markets

Having recently discovered the fantastic word-cloud abilities of wordle.net, I decided to play around with it. I took the top 500 stories on Google News, for the term ‘Emerging Markets’, from June 2008. I had to make quite a few adjustments to take out names of newspapers etc., and the cleaning still isn’t complete, but [...]