This week it's time to start the New Year by clearing out the cobwebs from the corners of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker .

Late last year I wrote a four part series about my Twitter topical sentiment tracking project, The Sentimeter . I explained the technologies behind the system which included OpenAmplify, a semantic analysis engine.

OpenAmplify has just been enhanced and re-released as version 2.0 .

This release has some powerful additions and, if you are interested in stuff to do with semantic analysis, this will be fascinating. As Abraham Lincoln once wrote in a book review: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

[more ]

If you plan to make any serious use of Twitter for business purposes you're probably always on the look out for a better way to manage your presence. It's not that the likes of Tweetdeck or whatever you currently use aren't great, it's just that the whole world of social media is so new we have no idea what's the best tool for the job.

One area where there's been no choice until recently is the facility for multiple users to effectively share a single Twitter account; what you might call "collaborative tweeting".

A new online service, TweetFunnel published by Cloud10Apps, delivers just that with a number of features that support multiuser tweeting wrapped in a simple, managed publishing system.

[more... ]

Welcome to the New Year!

"So," my esteemed editor asked. "What's on the horizon for the next 12 months?" Hmmm, quite the question. After considerable cogitation, charging and discharging of the flux capacitors, and examining more chicken entrails than a man should ever have to, I have come up with the following predictions.

Generally, this will be the year of recovery, the year of realigning that which needs aligning, along with cleaning up what's dirty, polishing up what's tarnished, primping up what's, er, unprimped, and pimping up that which is unpimped. In short, generally getting ourselves out of the morass of negativity and gloom that was 2009.

All the signs are there that the general economy will slowly gather momentum over 2010 but confidence is going to be erratic. On the other hand, this will most likely be a good year for IT because, as I am wont to point out, all business is now information technology. Those organizations that have responsive and effective IT organizations will be competitive in 2010. Those that don't will risk becoming historical footnotes.

[Read More... ]