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Tuesday, 22 August 2006 |
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Lots of interesting, if unrelated, activities happening in the blogosphere at the moment so it seems suitable in the dog days of summer to offer a round-up.
- In another in a long line of current attempts to quantify and statistically model informal content on the Internet, the Homeland Security department in the US has awarded Rutgers University a grant to identify patterns and relationships in public information sources to "better detect possible terrorist activity", presumably in blogs. According to Fred Roberts, director of Rutgers’ Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science: "One of the goals of the consortium will be to develop real-time streaming algorithms to track information and detect patterns and relationships even among writers who try to hide their identities".
- The debate over the origin of an Al Gore spoof video on the Internet offers more grist for the mill that public relations firms and communication specialists are trying to appear "amateur" on the net to make a point with the potential for viral spread. It seems the masses are more inclined to take amateur political statements as credible so the professionals are trying to appear as anonymous little guys with a creative, if unprofessional, point to make.
- Finally universities are getting fed up with getting relatively ranked and are responding to such attempts by refusing to participate in studies: "To put it another way, yet another academic ranking exercise has itself been ranked - and found wanting. Everything academic gets ranked these days, so it seems natural that some of these international exercises should themselves fall under scrutiny."
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