Overview: Science&Technology

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…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

Why does this brilliant video remind me of the preponderance of arts graduates in the #bxlsbbl?It’s really worth a look. And then another one. The acting here is actually superb. Watch the Expert’s expression run the gamut from shock to resignation in just a few minutes! (that one took me 20 years…)- via LaughingSquid: The Expert, A Hilarious Sket…

Perils and pitfalls of augmented reality …

Excellent tool for explaining "the difference between Adaptive, Responsive, Static and Liquid sites ..." - Liquidapsive (Liqui-dap-sive)

Surprised that after a week this only has about 500 views. Vox.com should be one of the top tech-first news innovators to watch this year

"The multiverse may even help explain one of the more vexing paradoxes about our world, sometimes called the "anthropic" principle: the fact that we are here to observe it." - Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the "Multiverse"

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

Interesting perspective on the rash of new tech-content hybrids emerging in the media space. Back in the day, companies could be either tech or content, but not both: "What were you going to be really good at? Engineering or “content”? You couldn’t do both, because that would mean that one would be subordinate to the other. And if you were going…

Nice animation about the uncertainty principle, although it’s not mentioned by name, confirmngi the theory that chemistry is what’s left when the physicists have figured everything interesting out ;)

Les Echos looks to be doing what I have long dreamed to do for the bloggingportal reboot - deploy semantic analysis to aid content discovery and to underpin a new wave of media and comment. But do we have to call it an 'aggrefilter'? "Les Echos launches its business news aggrefilter ... to gain critical working knowledge of the semantic web." …

Nice NYTimes tour of the current news startup wave: Key point: "quality, customized advertising on sites with good editorial content was actually a solid business with growing margins... Business Insider has had nine consecutive quarters where the revenue per page was rising.... “There are fundamental secular trends — ad growth, mobile growth, pa…

"the International Barcode of Life (iBOL), a consortium of universities, natural history museums and research institutes, are asking people around the world to gather samples. Then, back in their labs, scientists can identify the species by sequencing a section of its DNA" - IBM and SAP open up big data platforms for citizen science | Guardian Su…

Medium on how magazine editing is morphing as technology transforms online longform: "Online, each story is at best its own magazine, sent out to find its own temporary audience. One article may absorb people who subscribe, or would once have subscribed, to Foreign Affairs; another might absorb devotees of Wired or Men’s Health or Glamour. The au…

NYTimes.com on how legacy organisations failed to go digital, leaving field open to tech-first startups: "Vox is a digitally native business, a technology company that produces media, as opposed to a media company that uses technology. Everything at Vox, from the way it covers subjects, the journalists it hires and the content management systems …

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…

"whole new publishing and technology system ... continually iterate on the site and take advantage of new technology trends ... instead of seeing major redesigns in the future, users will see more incremental changes" Key question: are the native ads clearly ads? - New York Times redesign points to future of online publishing - Jan. 8, 2014

Great advice for web data analysis everywhere: "We don’t live in a perfect world. Vague requests are going to get floated. ... that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize and strive to minimize how often that happens. Here’s how: - Condition yourself to go to full alert whenever the word “interesting” is used ... - probe for clarification as much …

One guy, a camera and a whiteboard (and millions of views and a book and lots more). Sigh. I miss my super huge whiteboard.

An alternative to Popular Science's approach: "Climate change articles trigger some of the most heated discussions on Ars Technica... a scientific matter with political ramifications, it's also the focus of astroturfers (fake grassroots movements), trolls, and the willfully scientifically illiterate. At Ars, we take trolling very seriously... we…

To think I almost worked on their dotcom project 12 years ago (shiver): "Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their…

A neat approach to using social media to "improve science communication & make it more direct, responsive, and accurate". Given the huge parallels with EU communications ... "Nature editors & reporters get little status markers (aka flairs) to identify their role at Nature ... About a half-dozen keep an eye on r/science to see if any of the top …

Scientific publishing increasingly open to blogs & social media: "An important step towards this goal will be that researchers no longer view dissemination as a separate activity that takes place when research has been concluded. Instead, the research community must consider it as an inherent part of research ... the line between academic and n…

"everyone is keen to board the Big Data bandwagon, yet a comparative few really understand why. " I don't know a huge amount about big data, but I can spot a bandwagon from a light year away, and this one is coming in at very high speed, judging by some of the stuff I'm starting to see. Expecting more entertainment in the years ahead ;)

Came out just after my post on applying network theory and the EU online public sphere: "For those of us who are interested in understanding and participating in the EU digital public sphere(s), social network analysis offers a useful way to identify key influencers and map different communities. I can see plenty of practical applications (for e…