ASIST SIG Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting

"Feds look to ants, wikis and blogs"

Interesting comments at the E-Gov KM conference last week in Washington, DC.

The intelligence community anticipates a quicker response and improved information sharing through the use of these collaborative tools.  "It's about letting employees be free to share and act," says Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer at the CIA's Center for Mission Innovation.  "Wikis and blogs allow us to stand on the shoulders of others and have brilliant ideas we would not have had otherwise in the service of protecting our country."

Let's see of the DNI can put break down barriers, eliminate policies that inhibit information sharing, and encourage information sharing in the National Intelligence community.

Federal Computer Week by Michael Arnone (April 21, 2006)

"Leave a Reply: An Analysis of Weblog Comments:

There will be a presentation at the WWW2006 conference that sounds fascinating.

Large scale analysis of blogs conclude among other things that

• comments constitute approximately 30% of blog posts
• comments are indicators of popularity of the page
• comments can be analyzed to determine the level of controversy of a topic

This is an interesting computational study classifying text for disputes

• frequency counts ("i don't think that", "you are wrong", and so on)
• extreme punctuation (!!!!!!!!!!!)
• polarity (disputes more likely to have a negative tone)
• referral (disagreements usually include references to previous content or authors)
• length of post (disagreement usually were in longer threads)

Link to Gary Price's ResourceShelf for the draft paper from Dr. gilad Mishne, University of Amsterdam and Natalie Glance from Buzzmetrics http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/04/new-research-paper-analyzes-weblog.html