Aside from the announcement of Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s advertising platform, the most important thing coming out of Twitter’s Chirp developer’s conference was a hazy pre-announcement of Annotated Tweets.
In a nutshell, developer’s will be able to let users to attach up to (probably) 512bytes of structured metadata to a tweet (plans are to increase this to 2KB), which can be used in one or many ‘annotations’ with additional data. This can only be added at the time of the tweet, or it if is retweeted.
To put this in context, a character can be represented in a byte, so you can add over 3 times as much data as the 140 characters of a tweet, in whatever format you want.
It is very early yet, with estimates of being launch in two months, and many things to be ironed out, not least how people can untangle the plethora of annotation formats that are likely to be launched.
It is completely open what can be done with this. In its note to developers Twitter says: Think big. Blow our minds.
Ideas for what annotations could be used for, adapted from Twitter, Venture Beat, Scobleizer, plus quite a few of our own, include:
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Australian Open Innovation Competition: how about complete corporate transparency?
By Ross DawsonMy good friends and network experts Laurie Lock Lee and Cai Kjaer are the founders of Optimice, which has recently acquired Australian rights to the Enterprise 2.0 ideas management software Spigit. The platform is used to power, among other initiatives, the Cisco i-Prize, which gives prizes of up to $250,000 to external teams for generating ideas for Cisco’s next billion-dollar business, and Pfizer’s internal innnovation initiatives.
Features of the platform include reputation scores for contributors, ideas trading markets to buy and sell ideas, and participation-based currency with redemptions, all of which can create a real marketplace for ideas inside organisations.
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Mediagazer becomes the reference source for the media industry
By Ross DawsonI have long watched technology news aggregator Techmeme, first mentioning it in 2006 as an example of user-filtered content and then writing about how it helps to find interesting conversations, and later discussing how it’s sister site Memeorandum was the best place to watch the US presidential elections (and US politics in general). We were also delighted to get Gabe Rivera as a speaker at our Future of Media Summit 2007.
Mediagazer was launched early last month to provide the same insight into the most prominent discussions on the media industry. This Compete chart of Techmeme’s and Mediagazer’s traffic shows that in its first measured month the site has achieved 112,000 visitors, a fantastic start from scratch.
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Is 3D TV dangerous?
By Ross DawsonThis morning I bumped into neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce at our local cafe. He was on interviewed on the 7pm Project last night about the dangers of 3D TV (see the video here) so we chatted about that.
Mark has been involved in 3D for close to two decades, most famously in creating Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), and before that helping Sega to develop a head-mounted display in the 1990s. When it was sent for testing by Standord Research Institute, problems arose for users. Yet the research was never published.
In an article titled Keep doing that and you’ll go blind, (which was taken up by Boing Boing among others), Mark writes:
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Extending the scope of augmented reality to what you CAN’T see
By Ross DawsonTo many people, augmented reality is about annotating what you can see. Names of landmarks, reviews of restaurants, the sale price of houses, and so on.
However with a little imagination, augmented reality can allow us to see what is around us but invisible, or what our environment will be like at another time.
As a follow up to the award-winning augmented reality iPhone app SunSeeker, which shows the direction of sunlight at any time on any time, Graham Dawson has released See Breeze, an “Augmented Reality Wind Visualizer” which shows the direction of the wind. Graham has a detailed write-up of See Breeze on his blog. The video demo below gives a feel for what it can do.
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Use your imagination! The potential of Annotated Tweets
By Ross DawsonAside from the announcement of Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s advertising platform, the most important thing coming out of Twitter’s Chirp developer’s conference was a hazy pre-announcement of Annotated Tweets.
In a nutshell, developer’s will be able to let users to attach up to (probably) 512bytes of structured metadata to a tweet (plans are to increase this to 2KB), which can be used in one or many ‘annotations’ with additional data. This can only be added at the time of the tweet, or it if is retweeted.
To put this in context, a character can be represented in a byte, so you can add over 3 times as much data as the 140 characters of a tweet, in whatever format you want.
It is very early yet, with estimates of being launch in two months, and many things to be ironed out, not least how people can untangle the plethora of annotation formats that are likely to be launched.
It is completely open what can be done with this. In its note to developers Twitter says: Think big. Blow our minds.
Ideas for what annotations could be used for, adapted from Twitter, Venture Beat, Scobleizer, plus quite a few of our own, include:
Read more →
The rise of robot journalists
By Ross DawsonI have an abiding interest in robots and the role they play in our future. I am also a keen observer of where journalism is going. As it happens, the two domains are intersecting.
Robotic journalist conducting interview. Pic source: Singularity Hub, Charlie Catlett
Singularity Hub reports:
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Location-based dating is FINALLY hot, Hot, HOT!
By Ross DawsonSome ideas take a while to come to reality. Urban Signals is a New York-based company whose iPhone app notifies you when compatible singles are nearby and would like to meet. The iPhone app is free to download but requires a monthly subscription after the first month.
While some suggest that this was only a matter of time, this has in fact been happening for at least eight years.
Back in 2002 I wrote about proximity dating in my book Living Networks.
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A few thoughts on Twitter’s ‘Promoted Tweets’
By Ross DawsonJust over 4 years since the first Tweet was sent, Twitter has announced its plan to sell advertising on Twitter, by the name of ‘Promoted Tweets’.
A good interview of Twitter COO Dick Costolo on CNBC gives quite a bit of detail on the plan:
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A visit to Malaysia: perspective on technology, innovation, and growth
By Ross DawsonI recently spent three days in Kuala Lumpur, running a two-day workshop for a client and meeting a number of very interesting people. I hadn’t been to Malaysia for six years, so it was great to get back. I thought it was worth sharing a few top-of-mind impressions and thoughts from my brief time there.
The first impression is how rapidly KL has developed in the last years. The glamorous new airport, wide highways everywhere, and the extraordinary Putrajaya area, which houses the federal government, are testament to the massive investment in infrastructure over the last years.
However traffic in KL remains abominable at rush hour. People sometimes choose to wait a couple of hours before driving home, and expect to get home at the same time anyway.
Pic: CEO and PA of Malaysia Industry-Government Group for High Technology, Ross Dawson, Nik Hasyudeen, with Putrajaya landmarks in the background
I was very fortunate to have Nik Hasyudeen, the former president of the Malaysian Institute of Accountants and recently announced executive chairman of the Audit Oversight Board, as my guide for part of the trip. Nik is a connector extraordinaire, and adds to his broad experience in business strategy a great appetite for innovation.
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Outsourcing journalism – how far can you take it?
By Ross DawsonSeed.com, AOL’s venture in crowdsourced journalism, has just sent out a survey to its contributors, with some very interesting questions, notes Business Insider.
Source: Business Insider
A few interesting thoughts coming out of the issues raised in the survey:
* Seed.com is considering outsourcing fact-checking and copy-editing – given finding the right talent and quality control systems this should be feasible
* Contests and ratings systems could be a significant incentive to contributing, notes New York Observer. This is because aspiring journalists, through this kind of reputation, could more readily move on to more attractive opportunities. In a similar vein TopCoder uses contents to draw in the best developers.
* There could be real value in building communities for aspiring writers, as well as providing training and development. Attracting talent requires more than just providing an outlet.
Seed.com, Demand Media and others are in the vanguard of doing what they can to attract talented contributors who are motivated by things other than money. We are beginning to discover how far we can take outsourced journalism.