Seems like an appropriate photo right now (yes, that's younger me in the picture!):

Have a good holiday, take care, see you in 2010, and thanks :)…

I'm excited by the current interest in both making government data available, and visualising it to help people make deliberative decisions. Jennifer Bell has posted a great set of slides about open government (produced by VisibleGovernment.ca). Visualisation is pretty shiny. Try a search for Government Data Visualisation for example - you'll find plenty of food for thought. I think this is a great way to involve people… read more

I've been researching sentiment analysis, and I think I've found pieces to suit a range of tastes and interests.

Tasters

First the notes from a 2008 talk given by Lillan Lee from Cornell University. Lee's topic is "...the flood of interest in: sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and the computational treatment of subjective language."

This is a good 'who, what, why, how', featuring:

• - background
• - useful stats
• - an exploration of the broader implications

Useful blog piece on hard metrics and anecdotal evidence for the value of social media. Via Power Shift - Social Media Blog

I am working today (who takes their own advice?), but most of our staff have the day off for our 'not-quite-statutory', self-declared unofficial bank-holiday, Bristol Day. Britain has not enough official holidays in our view. We can't change that across the country (Gordon Brown could, if he chose to), but we can give Team Rubber people (including Delib people) one extra 'statutory' holiday. So we did, and our staff looked frankly… read more

I was asked this week to write these few lines about how Connecting Bristol helped our business: "We've always taken time to involve ourselves in Bristol's creative culture, especially with Watershed. Connecting Bristol was a natural thing for us to support: it's directly related to what we do and it's great for Bristol. We didn't join Connecting Bristol to win business for ourselves, but it has helped us… read more