Right then. Francesco's  presentation is on Slideshare the link is to the right. Hoping I will be able to post Tom Ewing's presentation very soon!  I thought I would press on and  post some notes about the discussion afterward

Francesco D'Orazio's stance was that there is so much data available that we really need to start making active choices about what data we analyse since by going in through the side of the API we have a lot more access to contextual data than the content - of which there is more than enough.

Francesco also mentioned www.weavrs.com country cousins of research robots and available for experimentation.

During the discussion after Francesco's paper someone commented that perhaps it was time that we took control of our own data and sold it back to brands. Tom Ewing's comment was that the internet is not free and data is the price we pay for not absorbing the full cost. Privacy and management of our own data would cost a lot more.

Tom Ewings presentation about the hidden life of the question challenged head on the idea that self reporting was sufficient-  there are still a lot of people asking questions online. Don't questions tell us a lot about the question asker as well as what they are looking for. The beauty of this approach is that questions are a lot shorter than answers and relatively easy to find.

Tom pointed out how different Google is from Facebook - one immediately puts you in competition with all the other people who share your name. Facebook puts you at the centre of your own network. Reinforcing your importance rather than your insignificance. Researchers are addicted to aggregation and making their dataset representative of everything.

After a brief interlude on gamification Tom added badgification (the collection of achievements to the pile) research has been very unimaginative in the questions we have asked and the framework in which we have asked them. Apparently Insites consulting has a panel of critics who score the survey questions versus questions asked elsewhere on the web. The tedium of online survey needs to be acknowledged and addressed.

Tom echoed Francesco in calling for the data that sits behind the content to be analysed as well as the content itself.

 

In the questions afterwards one of the discussion was about how to deal with power curves when a relatively minority were vocal but the majority silent.

 

Please feel free anybody to add more content if you remember more - I have notes but I want to aim off the presentations -the main reason for posting was to pick up on discussion after each of the papers.