Technocrati [1] is free web based service that allows its visitors to search and browse popularity indexes of user generated content. For registered users they can submit their blogs to be indexed by Technocrati. Blogs that are submitted need to have feeds in the Atom or RSS formats for Technocrati to aggregate and provide the link to the blog content to index. The content should also have appropriate tags and keywords to enable Technocrati to categorise the blog. On the Technocrati front page, there is a list of popular content, a list of main categories, a tagcloud of popular keywords, chart of the daily count of a specific keyword, and advertisements. You can view my Technorati Profile here. So what is the benefit of adding your blog to Technocrati ?

I don't normally blog this often but while I was browsing the tagcloud on the Internet Intelligence Data Application (i-IDA) [1], I noticed that the term Education (which came next to Economics on our taxonomy) had grown significantly larger - meaning that there were more content which carried terms associated with Education.

Clicking on the term 'Education' leads me to a web page produced by i-IDA listing contents which had words associated with Education sorted according to date. Within this list, there was a report on the Malaysian Higher Education Minister praising Malaysia’s top local universities’ improved ranking in the Times Higher Education-QS (THE-QS) World University Rankings 2008 [2]. I visited the THE-QS World University Rankings website [3] and was very happy to see that my alma mater, the University of Bristol [4], is ranked top 32 among the world's universities. My wife's Australian National University is ranked 16, whilst my former correspondence's Cornell University is ranked 15 and another's University of Manchester is ranked 29 and another's Imperial College London is ranked 6. My sister's University of St Andrews is ranked 83, whilst her twin's University of Nottingham is ranked 86. So what does it take for these universities to be ranked in the top 100 of the world ?

Many people have asked me what was the purpose of developing the internet Intelligence Data Application (i-IDA) [1] ? So that I can provide a straight answer every time, I have put this to blog. i-IDA is a tool for collecting information published on the internet, processing it and providing an analytical presentation so that experts in the field can provide strategic insight. This is part of the intelligence cycle process which roughly translates as knowing what other people know. The United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency [2] and Federal Bureau of Investigation [3] are users of the intelligence cycle. One of the key feature for i-IDA is the tagcloud [4]. Other intelligent people have used tagclouds to analyse the speeches of Senator McCain and Senator Barack Obama in the run up to the United States of America Presidential Elections.

An application of the Drupal open source content management framework for collecting data and analysing information from the internet. Includes a taxonomy of multilingual ontologies, automated content tagging, time-series marking, flash chart queries. A tool for people who need to analyse unstructured textual content. The web based application is developed using open source Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP technologies. Subscribed users can access the i-IDA Knowledge Base. Announcement : Alpha demo will be made available in October 2008.