Overview: Science&Technology

" "It takes courage to talk to customers but you have to do it,” Ritson would say. “First the qualitative, then the quantitative," he repeated. Interview customers (qualitative) before you create surveys (quantitative)."

As I've mentioned now and then (e.g., BloggingPortal's 3rd birthday, 2012), a desultory conversation amongst Bloggingportal editors dragged on for several years, before dying after it became clear that the lack of decision-making process made it impossible to move forward.

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

"The entwined rise of Big Data and predictive analytics virtually guarantees that — just as structured and semi-structured data are being fused — informal gossip and formal ratings systems will be collected, correlated, and converted into business rules designed to make badly-behaved customers pay more or go away." Interesting insight into an upc…

"The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an in-depth tutorial designed to help you convert more passive website visitors into active users that engage with your content or purchase your products."

"Beacons are a small wireless sensors placed inside any physical space that transmit data to your iPhone using Bluetooth Low Energy (aka Bluetooth 4.0, Bluetooth Smart). ... Smartphones that are in an iBeacon zone will benefit from personalized microlocation-based notification and actions." - huge potential for conferences, exhibitions, network…

The first site launched (in 2011-2012) on the EC's Multisite Drupal7 Platform, thus pioneering EC Drupal Platforms in terms of technology, user requirement defitinition and governance.

Migrating and relaunching the ACP Courier magazine website using semantic analysis and launching two community-oriented Programme websites for the ACP Secretariat.

I've finally gotten around to updating my avatars here and there to show my support to Benoit Poelevoorde's call earlier this year to stop shaving. Why? And why won't it help solve Belgium's political crisis? And what's this got to do with Europe? I don't tend to write much about Belgian affairs ...

A few weeks before the Hungarian media storm broke late last year, the BloggingPortal editors were contacted by the (then upcoming) Hungarian Presidency team, seeking ideas for how they could cooperate with the Euroblogosphere. Being a loosely-at-best organised gang of volunteers, it took us a while to respond. To their immense credit...

When I came to Brussels in 1991 it was as a science writer. It remained my profession for many years, so when scienceblogs.com was launched in 2006 I checked it out ... but never really had the time to follow it. Now via another (ex?)science writer, I hear news of scienceblog's sudden implosion following a tragic loss of ethical compass.

I stumbled upon a short video on the BBC of Tim Berners-Lee trying to explain the importance of the data web, aka semantic web, again. He himself says that he can't say where it will lead us, as it is paradigm changing. True - but I can think of a few applications that anyone interested in the EU should know about. I can't embed the vide…

When you want to create a community, asking uses what they need is the best way to start. We launched the 1-page website, with user survey, newsletter signup and social, inside two weeks of winning the project. Everything we developed the following year (2010) was based on the results.

Of course, when we launched the first interactive website for the IST Event (IST 2002) we didn’t know it was a Web2.0 site. That term only appeared two years later

At one point I was editing something like 200 research project profiles, 4 editions of EUREKA News (5 languages), 7 editions of Innovation & Technology Transfer (5 languages), several annual reports and brochures, on paper and online, as well as (from 1995) designing, creating and managing their websites.Not that this was all single-handed. In…

EUREKA's website was the first database-driven website by any European public organisation, and could do things other sites took over a decade to manage, such as integrating project database with journalistic content my editorial team had been producing for years.

The chatbot you can find on my example Hub is a pale imitation of what Beta users should get.

MyHub’s AI engine automatically tags any content you put in your Inbox, Queue or Hub, in the process learning from you and your visitors.