Strategic Network Intelligence

My friend Tomek, a visual interface designer par excellence (http://www.pixelbox.com/), introduced me to this site a few weeks ago… it floored me with its insight and its visual display. It is similar in principal to our lexical text mapping tool here at Exvisu. What WeFeelFine lacks in flexibility and depth (we check word correlations for all words in blog postings) it makes up for in real time response and sheer beauty of the interface:

Check it out first http://www.wefeelfine.org/.

And then read how it works (from the we feel fine site):

The We Feel Fine data collection engine automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”.
Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”.

The core of the work we do at Exvisu is using network analysis tools to draw out interesting and (often) hidden relationships between concepts. There are a lot of companies doing similar work in different ways, including TextMap, which bills itself as “The Entity Search Engine”. Lots of great information there!

Exvisu unveiled its latest brand study at Webcom Montréal (http://www.webcom-montreal.com/) last week. Webcom was exciting to say the least, one could feel rise of the participative web in the conference halls. For a good summary of the Webcom conference check out Benoit Marcoux’s blog: http://www.benoit.marcoux.ca/blog/.

We (Exvisu and K3) looked at a day in the life of the Red Bull brand on the blogosphere… and found some pretty interesting correlations.

The study was realised with Exvisu’s Micheal Boyle (http://www.mikel.org/) and the head of K3 media’s web consulting group, Alain Lépine (http://www.k3media.com/1/Conseils).

The study summarized over 550 blogs that mention Red Bull with key words: health, party, sex, performance, sport, work. We actually found a strong correlation between Red Bull’s main active ingredient and depression… of course Red Bull’s sponsorship of sporting events greatly improved its brand presence on the blogosphere… to see more about our findings check out the one page pdf summary:

Red Bull one pager

Exvisu attended the fourth annual Tremblant Forum on Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability on the 19th and 20th of September.

The Forum presented an ideal setting for communicating vital ideas about the future of corporate sustainability. Clearly the future must take a turn for the sustainable.

The last session on Corporate sustainability and the media was the most animated. François Bugingo of Reporters Without Borders engaged with Marc Gunther of Fortune, Toby Heaps of Corporate Knights and Jeffrey Simpson of The Globe and Mail on such topics as climate change, the credibility of NGOs and reporter’s responsibilities. Exvisu opened a debate on how the web 2.0 will affect traditional print media by asking the panel how they view blogs as an opportunity for a new form of media-consumer-producer engagement.

For a good overview of the forum read:
http://www.cnw.ca/en/releases/archive/September2007/20/c3362.html
http://www.tremblantforum.org/

On August 28 and 29th, Exvisu was invited to the founding meeting of the NE3LS, a research network created by NanoQuébec, in collaboration with FQRNT, FQRSC, FRSQ and IRSST, focusing on ethical, environmental, economic, legal and social stakes linked to the development of nanotechnologies.

Presented last August 27th-28th, this symposium follows the actions plan NE3LS presented last fall and is an important step to the launch of a knowledge transfer network in nanotechnology.

With such an initiative, Quebec becomes the first Canadian province to adopt a NE3LS strategy based on a knowledge transfer network.

Exvisu’s past experience in Nano based scientimetrics was sought out and Exvisu’s heterogenous data analysis capabilities will play a role in understanding how this powerful new technological revolution will affect us all.

More on the NE3LS network:

http://www.frsq.gouv.qc.ca/fr/publications/autres_publications/communiques/pdf/nanotechnologie.pdf
http://nint-innt.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/research/neeels/index_e.html