Darwin Ecosystem Announces a Series of Free Darwin Editionsâ„¢
by Bill Ives
Operating in real time, the Darwin Awareness Engineâ„¢ allows for the efficient scanning of content to find both breaking news and underlying casual patterns in the topics of your interest. Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, their approach to awareness is based on Chaos Theory and allows the content to self organize. This approach eliminates the need for a predetermined taxonomy or the ability to use SEO techniques. It provides a visualization of results that enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next.
Darwin Ecosystem has recently announced a series of themed Darwin Editionsâ„¢ powered by the Awareness Engineâ„¢ that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost through a brief registration process. As a disclosure I am part of the Darwin Ecosystem team.
The initial themes for the Darwin Edition include: general news, social media on the web, social media in the enterprise, and oil and gas industry news. There is also another free version through their partner, Twortex, which uses aspects of the Darwin Awareness Engine to provide a Twitter search tool.
These Darwin Editions provide a way to monitor the conversations within several focused areas. They offer many of the user capabilities that come with the complete Darwin Awareness Engine. Darwin looks at targeted content rather than spidering the whole Web. This targeted content approach provides greater control to define relevant content and can be focused within the Web or within the enterprise through such applications as SharePoint, Domino, and many of the other collaboration and content management platforms.
Determining and curating the target content is an administration function that comes with the commercial versions. In this free Darwin Edition series Darwin Ecosystem has picked the content sources and will continue to refine them.
As a user you have a number of capabilities for looking at this content and making adjustments to your discovery process. First, there are the two visualizations: the Buzz Tape™ and the Scan Cloud™. The Buzz Tape runs across the top of the screen as seen below and displays themes of rising (green) or falling (red) interest within the target content. The Scan Cloud shows the top themes within the target content. Running the mouse over one theme highlights the others that are related to it. In the right column the actual content connected with themes is displayed. Clicking on this content will take you directly to the source.
The photos come through two sources. Some RSS feeds provide pictures. We also link to relevant Flickr images. You can also choose to collect videos through YouTube by choosing videos when you select sources as described below. The YouTube videos are listed under the informal sources in the right column.
You can either simply look at the general buzz within the targeted content or create attractors, that serve as queries, to further refine you content discovery. For example, you can look at how your brand or some other topic of interest is being discussed. To create a new attractor, you fill in the attractor field in the top right. For example, I put in Boston, my hometown, in the attractor field and received these results shown below.
Then you can further edit your attractor by clicking in the edit space next to where it appears in the upper left. An edit field appears, such as the one shown below. You can adjust the time period for content collection up to 200 hours by using the slider. You can select which feeds to use by choosing from the drop down or simply allow for everything by not making a selection. It is best to start this way. You can also select if you want to only see more formal (traditional news sources) or less formal sources (bloggers). Not selecting either provides all content sources.
Once you have refined your attractor you can save it in the lower right corner of the edit field. Then when you click on the plus sign in the upper left all of your saved attractors will appear for you selection.
The Awareness Engine is a Web browser application (Scan Cloudâ„¢) or it can become a custom solution through API access. It is delivered through a Web server with services and a database correlating the different Web 2.0 sources. For the enterprise there is an on-premise solution running on Ruby on Rails and making use of RSS feeds. Its Virtual Cortexâ„¢ database can be set on Oracle, MS-SQL or mySQL according to scalability needs.
