Putting the Game into Shopping

I observed my first Smack­Shop­ping live inter­net game show today. Build­ing on the last minute bid­ding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of com­mit­ted pur­chasers, Jelly­Fish offers an intriguing exper­i­ence. As a semi-standard demand con­sol­id­ator, Jelly­Fish has agree­ments with a wide range of nor­mal retail­ers who con­tract to provide …

the real social

I have spent the last dec­ade nat­ur­ally evolving towards a work day that largely takes place in cof­fee shops. Hav­ing writ­ten my MA largely at the Second Cup in Guelph and turned to the Star­bucks before that to do busi­ness plan­ning, I cur­rently spend the bulk of my time at the Second Cup in Westdale. …

An Interesting Take on del.icio.us

Brows­ing about through one of my Blue Dot friend’s addi­tions, I read through an inter­est­ing art­icle list­ing some edu­ca­tion 2.0 sites. One of them is called stud.icio.us a site tied in with Face­book that provides a place to share notes with fel­low stu­dents. The site makes good use of AJAX and is in the process …

Taking Data Visualisation to New Heights

A few weeks ago I blogged about Swivel, a cool place for kids to play with data and com­ment on oth­ers data­sets and visu­al­isa­tions. Today Geof­frey blogged about an IBM Alphaworks site that takes this concept in a dif­fer­ent direction.

A Fascinating Constellation

This con­stel­la­tion of research­ers work­ing in over­lap­ping fields of know­ledge, inform­a­tion, soft­ware and data visu­al­iz­a­tion is a great jump­ing off spot. <a href=“http://www.visual-literacy.org/” target=“_blank””>Visual-Literacy.org is a col­lect­ive course span­ning sev­eral insti­tu­tions and involving a num­ber of lead­ers in the field of visu­al­isa­tion. Sounds rather cool. As part of their pro­spectus they have con­struc­ted ‘maps’ of …

Another Best of List

It’s that time of the year when we are bom­barded with these, and like all of us I am try­ing to develop the appro­pri­ate strategies for win­now­ing out the chaff. The list of Web 2.0 Com­pan­ies I Couldn’t Live Without is one that kept my interest. Michael Arring­ton has com­piled an intriguing list of service-based …

Social Lending — Empowerment?

Is this an up and com­ing phe­nom? Zopa and Prosper are two two star­tups offer­ing to bring together bor­row­ers and lenders and offer . The sense of ‘Sim­ness’ (as in simcity/sim this sim that) is an inter­est­ing note. … As the author of this sur­vey on these two ser­vices note, they even add fun to …

Mining Social Networks For Profit

Every­one knows that the value is in the net­work. SNA is a won­der­ful tool for aca­demic and I am using it to map my local webs of com­merce. The folks at Spoke how­ever are doing this one step bet­ter. They have the typ­ic­ally enorm­ous and touted list of key decision makers and influ­en­cers at companies …