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Parsing real-time information that streams down a screen as a list of short text updates isn't easy. Thanks to two new visualization tools from PostRank , however, the company's users can now use PostRank's new entity extraction feature to see real-time updates in your stream on a map and through a tree map interface. These two new features will be available to developers through Postrank's real-time API . You can also find demos of PostRanks real-time geo and entity trends here and here . Sponsor The tree map view gives news organizations the ability to quickly see which of topics and stories they are tracking are currently trending. PostRank analyzes the updates it receives in real-time and extracts proper names, places and things. The tree map, which updates in real-time, then displays these updates and ranks them according to "share of voice." PostRank also performs sentiment analysis on these updates and colors the updates accordingly. The geo map works similarly, but instead of extracting proper names, places and things, this algorithm just focuses on places. Thanks to this, a PostRank customer can easily see which cities, countries and regions are currently being mentioned online. The demos are now available in PostRank's new Labs section - which opened earlier this month. Discuss
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PostRank Launches New Tools to Visualize the Real-Time Web
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Anyone who's run afoul of Facebook's, um, fluid rules for user behaviour can tell you it's like a Kafka novel. (Remember the one where nobody would friend the giant cockroach? Shudder. ) Here's one of the latest lucky contestants : Social Media Today, a Web venture with an active presence on Facebook, was posting URLs twice a day, until one day they discovered they'd run afoul of the site's rules and had their ability to post links blocked. Sponsor So how often is too often? Facebook won't say. How infrequently would they have to post to stay safe? Facebook won't say. Look, I get that Facebook's a private company and if I don't like it I can just move somewhere else - although when you're dealing with a platform that has 400 million users, half of whom log on in any given day, that's a little like saying you can always go find yourself another human civilization. But there's something wrong if we're expected to treat Facebook like Dinsdale Piranha - forgiving them for nailing our heads to the floor because we'd transgressed the unwritten law. (Which law? "Er... Well he never told me that. But he gave me his word that it was the case, and that's good enough for me with old Dinsy.") More Noise to Signal. Discuss
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Cartoon: This User Has Been Suspended
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Two important legal decisions were made this week that could have significant impact on technology startups. On Tuesday, Fred Wilson argues in a post on his blog today that perhaps it is time to reframe the terms of the debate, moving away from the phrase "net neutrality" and instead to argue on behalf of "internet freedom." He writes "Internet Freedom is about sustaining the era of permissionless innovation that has characterized the first fifteen years of the commercial Internet in this country and brought us thousands of new big profitable companies, millions of jobs, and a vast array of new services and devices that have changed our lives and made them better." As courts, legislatures, and agencies try to create policies around digital technologies, how will new startups be effected? Discuss
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New Legal Decisions Will Impact Net Neutrality and Startups
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Google and 45 other organizations have sent a public letter to President Barack Obama calling for federal support for technology and education that would give consumers access to information about their energy consumption and give companies the ability to build applications on top of that information. Google, AT&T, General Electric, Intel, The Climate Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council and others will hold an event tomorrow titled " Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use ." Sponsor "By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption, for instance, via their computers, phones or other devices," the group wrote in its letter to the President, "we can unleash the forces of innovation in homes and businesses." Substantial challenges stand in the way of widespread smart-grid innovation. We highlighted a write-up by green tech reporter Katie Fehrenbacher last year that discussed the foot dragging going on in the world of local utility providers. ( Why Smart Grids Could Be Slow to Beat Web 2.0 ) Fehrenbacher argued that utility companies don't get it, are afraid of the costs, and are thus unlikely to offer the kind of "real time" data delivery that could serve as a foundation for eye-opening innovation like we've seen from the networked world of the Internet. Fehrenbacher wrote last year. Many people (myself included) have painted a picture of how the consumer piece of the smart grid could develop into a real-time, two-way communication network that looks a lot like the Internet. In that world, consumers would be able to see variable pricing change in real time, while smart meters and energy management devices read and visualize energy consumption data every second, leading to changes in consumer behavior. The ultimate vision of that landscape is that real-time energy data unleashes innovations and applications that we haven't yet thought of, which will deliver substantial behavior changes. Well, that's the outcome for which entrepreneurs and innovators are hoping. The reality is that the consumer piece of the smart grid will look very different for many years to come. Perhaps a large coalition of organizations can prompt meaningful government support that will engage with these and other obstacles to energy data innovation. Discuss
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Google Asks Obama to Support Home Energy App Platform
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The British novelist Ian McEwan said, "The naming of what is there is what is important." But there is a thing, or an idea, a system or network, that we live with every day, that we live in , that we, in point of fact, are , which has no name. When apprehending and recognizing something new, we humans name it. Some say we name things in order to control them and there might be some truth to that. But who would not elect to control an earthquake than be controlled by one? Our information gathering network has changed out of recognition, but its taxonomy has lagged behind. We need to name this new network, and we would like the readership of ReadWriteWeb to help us. Sponsor In the Big Room, our editorial chat room, we were speaking about the earthquake that struck Baja this afternoon. Before the media, even the new media, got it, we had read it on Twitter . ReadWriteWeb has written before on the ability of this new tool, and others like it, to gather and disseminate information. In the course of this discussion, we came to a surprising realization. Twitter was no more the issue than the so-called mainstream media was. We were beyond all of that now. Our network was not restricted to three news channels, or the cable news networks, or a handful of social media websites or thousands of Facebook accounts, or even all of those things taken as a whole. Our access to information, our ability to exchange it, was no longer bound by anything at all, with the possible exception of time. The reason for this sea-change is that we ourselves have in part become the system formerly we only used . We have become the fulcrum of our own network. Prometheus is well and truly unbound. This network, the one that connects us to virtually every part of the world, to every person on the globe, branches like a Mandelbrot set . It consists of computing devices from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to phones; it consists of every program written to run those devices, every website and service that helps us to process and move the truths we witness or create; it consists of cell towers and server farms; it consists of social media tools and word processing programs; but above all it consists of, it is powered by, human beings, both singularly and in aggregate, minds and mind. Our network is alive. But it needs a name, and we don't have one. Jokingly, one of us called it The Culture . It isn't. It isn't even a culture. Just a network. But a vast one, a possibly game-changing one and, above all, a nameless one, one which we should control rather than allow to control us. Help us assert control over an exciting, but daunting reality. What should this global network, this lace of machine and human, location, data and feeling, thought and thing, observer and observed, speaker and listener, be called? Discuss
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Our Network is Alive
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