Overview: Science&Technology

"These APIs will usually take text in the form of a file or URL, and ... identifies the topic of the text you submit, and/or finds “named entities” in the text.... include people, places, organizations, nations... Given that there are several APIs that offer similar services, how can we (and you) choose between them?" - Semantic APIs, what to co…

"There's no clickbait, there's no fluff, no listicles... just articles." Apparently the new app "scours the Internet for content published by both news outlets and writers..." - but until they launch the Android & Web app (underway) I won't know if it involves semantic analysis... But: "the [article] publishers ... will get pageviews, as art…

"The Guardian released a beta version of its new website to get reader feedback as it continues to tweak its design.... Content discovery is a major focus ... “container model” allows the paper to implement a responsive design while also retaining a story hierarchy, user experience director... Each item contains a story, which are put together…

"Since it launched in March 2012, I F*cking Love Science has attracted more than 17.9 million Facebook followers—more than Popular Science (2.7 million), Discover (2.7 million), Scientific American (1.9 million), and The New York Times (8 million) combined. ... Her empire has since expanded to include a website, IFLscience.com, which has a staff a…

Sounds encouraging, but what would "a leading scholar of labor markets" really know about where IT's headed? "Autor argues that even as computers have gotten better at rote tasks, they have progressed far less in applying common sense... this weakness leaves plenty of opportunities for humans to serve as intermediaries of sorts between incre…

Seeing more stuff on robots & AI this year than in previous 3. "In many cases, their algorithm clearly identifies influences that art experts have already found. For example, ... Klimt is close to Picasso and Braque ... the influence of Delacroix on Bazille, ... Munch’s influence on Beckmann and Degas’ influence on Caillebotte. The algorithm is …

“Horses aren’t unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they’re unemployable. There’s little work a horse can do that do that pays for its housing and hay.” Are you next? Probably. - Humans need not apply

"... envisions a Yahoo that’s as ubiquitous as computers seem destined to be. Phones, watches, public terminals, brain implants — Yahoo wants to be able to deliver content to all of them... Yahoo Labs’ biggest focus appears to be on machine learning... a dedicated machine learning group based in New York; ... “hardcore science and some theory,…

A story in two parts? I'd like to think this is a story about agility-oriented web guys winning the argument with politicians and their unrealistic deadlines and steamroller tactics: "NHS England has abandoned its plan to fully roll out the controversial Care.data patient records sharing scheme in the Autumn. Instead, a trial with up to 500 GP p…

Altimiter study finds that while 80% of companeis surveyed said they were "undergoing digital transformation": "... only 25% had actually mapped out the digital customer journey. It’s unfortunate that so much time and resources are going toward programs that may or may not hit the mark." That's a lot of money being wasted. "While the word “digi…

" the 4 key layers of a big data system - i.e. the different stages the data itself has to pass through on its journey from raw statistic or snippet of unstructured data (for example, social media post) to actionable insight. The whole point of a big data strategy is to develop a system which moves data along this path. In this post, I will attem…

"The parliamentary process is indeed so similar to a collaborative software development workflow that it is only natural to try and use a version control tool such as Git to track individual legislative changes." - OpenGov Voices: How GitLaw turns the French parliamentary process into open data - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Fascinating article in Issue 14 (theme: Evolution): "It is a case of convergent evolution—where different species separately developed similar biological adaptations when faced with the same environmental pressures. Salamanders are Wake’s go-to example when asked a decades-old question in evolutionary biology: If you could replay the “tape of lif…

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

"an interesting glimpse at the technology responsible for publishing 700 articles, 600 images, 14 slideshows, and 50 videos on a daily basis." I find the article fascinating because of what the CMS is not - it: "does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing d…

One for @richardmedic ... "Smydra ... he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms.... He'd love your thoughts" - Can you turn future news events into structured data? » Nieman Journalism Lab

"marketers need to shift their SEO strategies to focus on user intent rather than keywords ... will have to consider their information architecture and the relationship between sections of their websites in relation to the intent of web users (i.e. is the search navigational, informational or transactional?) in order to deliver the most valuable c…

Aug(De)Mented Reality- deliriously wonderful!

Useful trick to document your website's evolution: "Head on over to the Wayback machine and choose the Save Page Now option. It doesn't work on all sites, but if you want to capture content that might change, you can add a page directly to the archive and get a custom URL for it. If the link is a PDF, it will capture that as well." I just archiv…

"technology is the easy part ... cultural and political—those are your two big barriers. And they’re sort of tied together.... ... a lot of people go off the rails ... dictate solutions without any understanding of the on-the-ground realities of the agencies doing the work. " - Learning from New York City’s open-data effort | McKinsey & Company

The Horror! The Horror! - Enquête de la Commission européenne Survey

More titbits from that internal NYT digital report: "There are about 14.7 million articles in the Times’ archives back to 1851 ... We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.” " - The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key d…

Start preparing your content now... "Context-aware software for smartphones is all the rage ... Twitter bought Android home screen startup Cover, Apple bought smart assistant Cue, Yahoo bought Cover competitor Aviate, and of course Google pioneered the field ... with its Google Now service." - This is what comes after search – Quartz Combined w…

"you could call this a “decision engine” ... Vurb’s goal is to dig actionable information out and present it all on the same page. " - Vurb’s Contextual Search Engine Blows Away Those Stupid Lists Of Links | TechCrunch I wrote years ago of the power the semantic web offers EC programmes, who should be able to get their beneficiaries to publish t…

The mind boggles ... "perhaps the creepiest outgrowth of cryptocurrency 2.0: distributed autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Based on charters taking the form of code on a peer-to-peer network, these are entities that could automate many of the tasks of a conventional organization with varying levels of human input. For instance, a DAO could act d…

"Triplify tackles the chicken-and-egg problem of the Semantic Web by providing a building block for the “semantification” of Web applications. Triplify provides small, light-weight plugins for database-backed Web applications and exposes semantics as RDF, Linked Data and JSON"

experimenting with this for the bloggingportal reboot

"...is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; extending it with web services; and linking it to databases like Freebase."

" If we wanted more email subscribers, we’d have to make it easier for people to subscribe." Quartz's new approach to enewslettre subscription, which has seen daily subscriber rates double since February, is like the 'Quick Subscribe' feature I always propose for online community sites: - some users may create an account to subscribe, but most wo…

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…