It has been nearly a month and a half since the latest installment of Webcom in Montreal; however, the study we did and passed around at K3 Media’s conference booth was just too interesting to let lie…

Working with Aleece Germano, we produced a report and found many insights into how people use and perceive BareMinerals makeup, a top-selling foundation in the US from BareEscentuals.

Aleece is an internet consultant with 8 years of experience in the cosmetics industry. She’s also a musician, an event organizer, and luckily for us, our neighbour at Station C. Yet more proof that Station C is more than just a beautiful co-working space - it is a spawning ground for new ideas and a crossroads of top notch Web 2.0 artisans.

The results of our research were very interesting, to say the least. A hint: just because something is organic doesn’t mean you should put it on your face.

Download our BareMinerals blogosphere graph and lexical analysis fact sheet here.

Last week, Chris Scott, a friend and an excellent Drupal and Ruby on Rails developer, (http://www.extonrails.com/) sent me this link. I have been constantly using it ever since.

Summize Labs has come up with a real-time twitter sentiment mapper and overall evaluator. http://labs.summize.com/sentiment. It is pretty simple: you type in a word or a person, and it searches all the tweets and evaluates the positive or negative strength of words associated to the search terms you entered - and then produces a color coded graph and overall sentiment measure!

Hours of fun, but this also opens a new door: Twitter text mining…

The world-famous DEMO conference has been held for the last couple of days in California, and as always, there have been dozens of interesting product launches. Most interesting to us is the launch of Silobreaker’s corporate ASP model (and, really, a relaunch of the site itself, which hasn’t attracted nearly the attention it deserves). Silobreaker is a search tool like no other - it not only provides a number of interesting search tools, but using their tools gives users the ability to contextualize news in very interesting and visually appealing ways.

One of my preoccupations since joining Exvisu has been how to use visual representations of data to provide valid and easy-to-explain recommendations to help our clients make strategic decisions. The most important element must always be the validity of the presentation of the data itself - eye candy that isn’t accurate is misleading - but that doesn’t mean it can’t look good as well. visualcomplexity.com is a great resource that clearly demonstrates the advances that have been made in this area.

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”.