OBXECTIVO OPERATIVO 8

Data mining tools that are currently in use include: • Statistical analysis tools (e.g. SAS). • Data mining suites (e.g. enterprise Miner).

• Consulting/outsourcing tools such as EDS, IBM, and Epsilon. (Note that these are models, not just software).

• Data visualization software that coherently presents a large amount of information in a small space. They make use of human information processing capabilities- your eyes- to detect patterns, for example, in a virtual reality or simulation environment where you can “walk around the data points”.

It is also possible to apply this technique and use these tools to mine content other than data-namely, text mining and thematic analysis and web mining-to look at what content, how often, for how long (e.g. number of hits), which is very helpful in content management. Similarly, skill mining or expertise profiling can be used to detect patterns in online curriculum vitae of organizational members. Expertise location systems can be automatically created based on the content that has been mined. Commercial software systems can also be used to mine e-mail data in order to determine who is answering what types of queries or themes. Organizational experts and expertise can be detected by looking at the patterns of questions and answers contained within the e-mails. The same caveat applies to all of these data mining applications: a human being is always needed in the loop in order to carry out “reality checks” (i.e. to verify and validate that the patterns do indeed exist and that they have been interpreted in a useful and valuable manner.)

(c) Blogs

A blog is a slang name for a web log. For the uninitiated, a web log is a popular and fairly personal content form on the Internet. A person’s web log is much like an open diary. It chronicles what a person wants to share with the world on an almost daily basis. A blog is a frequently updated, publicly accessible journal. Although the “blogosphere” started off as a medium for mostly personal musings, it has evolved into a tool that offers some of the most insightful information on the web. Furthermore, blogs are becoming much more common, as businesses, politicians, policy makers, and even libraries and library associations have begun to blog as a way of communicating with their patrons and constituents.

everal librarians publish blogs that offer a wealth of information about social software and its uses. SNTReport.com focuses on the social software industry and how social software tools are being used to help people collaborate. Blogs not only offers a new way to communicate with customers, but they have internal uses as well. For example, large organizations can use a well formed blog to exchange ideas and information about web

NOTES

development projects, training initiatives, or research issues. These questions and answers can be cross-indexed and archived, which helps build a knowledge network among the participating members. Most importantly, the price of setting up a well formed, secure blog and leverage it into a knowledge and content management tool is a pittance when compared to the cost of other, proprietary solutions.

At present, the majority of blogs are published exclusively in text. The next generation of blogs, however, will implement audio and video elements, bringing a sophisticated multimedia blend to the medium.

Blogs are collections of articles or stories arranged in reverse chronology and are generally updated more frequently than regular web pages. Just like any other information on the net, there is no guarantee of authority, accuracy, or lack of bias. In fact, personal blogs are frequently biased and can be good sources of opinion and information from the “man on the street”. Because blogs can be updated on the fly, they frequently have access to unfiltered information faster from war zones and sites of natural disasters than the mainstream media outlets. Blogs are also good sources of unfiltered information on either faulty or very useful products.

In the beginning, blogs appeared in search results alongside regular web pages. Since blogs are technologically any different from other web pages (that is, they are HTML, XML, java script, etc. - it is their format, not their coding that is different). Spiders and bots (or web crawlers, knowledge robots) automatically search for information online and collect posts (i.e. messages that are submitted to a computerized messaging system) the same way as they collect other online information. Search engines that place greater value on sites that are recently and frequently updated and are highly linked tend to rank blog posts very highly. Because the barrier to publication is so low in blogs, arguably much lower than that for standard web pages, these high rankings were introducing a lot of noise into online searches. The odds are that if you have searched on a controversial topic in the past year you have run across several archived blog posts. Recently, most major search engines have altered their algorithms to push blogs down in the search results. Engines that only return two results from any one site use this feature to limit the impact of blogs on the search results.

Blog searching breaks down into atleast two categories: (1) information from within blogs/across blogs or (2) addresses of feeds from blogs so that you may subscribe in your aggregator (i.e. a piece of software or a remotely hosted service that periodically reads a set of news sources, such as blogs, identifies what is new, and displays them on single page). Feeds and blogs are two different concepts, but they are closely linked because most blogs have feeds and many feeds are generated by blogs. Just as in other web search tools, there are search engines and directories. At this time, blog search engines are where general search engines were before the Google Age: there are many competing smaller products, but no product dominates the scene.