the first deck in the Cloud series for a meeting called Cloud1. This presentation lays down the principles for the open source Cloud of Knowing project. Chris Arning presented a deck about the semantic web. There were 4 of us who went! It was an inauspicious start for a group which drew in some seriously bright people and got asked some fundamental questions. There was no budget, no confidentiality clause. Any presentation made was put on a webjam so anyone could see it. That's how the project began.

1. Cloud of Knowing set up

2. Analysis and Interpretation: The cloud of knowing
how it started

3. Can they be brought together?
Text
Analytics
Research

4. E-Anthropology E-ethnography
Is it bricolage? Ie an acceptable
Methodology?
Or is it picking dead stuff
‘because it looks interesting’?

5. Textual analysis on the web – how good is it?
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RSS feeds
Tagging
Key words searches
Dodgy social media measurement techniques
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Eg deduct neutral tweets and subtract negative
tweets from positive ones. That’s the score!!

6. Some questions about the originators
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Who are they, where are they from and how did they
come to post this content?
What did they mean?
Which audience were they writing for?
What is the context?
Are they being paid?
Is this their genuine opinion or are they stooges –
marketing constructs?
Who do they represent?

7. Themes to resolve
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How to source and structure textual web
content (and other media forms as well)
How to validate it
What if we worked with other web users what
would we get them to do?
How do we sort and grade content?
How do we sort and grade web users?

8. Grab bag of issues
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Sourcing – RSS feeds
Hunting – recruiting webusers to go taggin
Grading – recruiting webusers to grade what
comes in
Profiling – using scoring models as in direct
marketing profiles

9. Open source approach
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Work on it together because the issues are
too big for any one research agency

10. Open source approach
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Work on it together because the issues are
too big for any one research agency