Our fascination with food and where it comes from is helping to drive somewhat of a revolution in food choices and our ability to connect with the farmers that grow them. Food-oriented blogs run by farmers, distributors, packers, and food aficionados and the content syndication infrastructure they allow are helping to better connect the dots from farm-to-fork. This has profound implications for food safety, improving brands, and increasing awareness of the use and nutritional properties of food. Rob Trice, an AgTech venture capitalist and Co-founder of The Mixing Bowl said: “Farm-to-fork is about understanding where your food is coming from […]

The growth of the Web has considerably lowered the barrier to gathering and sharing information. It has also made it far simpler for students and Websites to deliberately or accidentally copy text without proper citation or licensing. To address these concerns a wide variety of so-called plagiarism detection tools have emerged to help match new content with existing bodies of text. While they are not perfect, they do promise to help keep students and contributors honest, and to help businesses identify and rectify infringements of their work. Leading plagiarism detection tools in the academic space include Ephorus, PlagScan, Turnitin, URKUND. […]

A variety of technologies are emerging for tracking emotions via the Internet using techniques such as text-analytics, speech analysis, and video analysis of the face. Better tools for tracking emotions holds promise for bringing awareness to our inner state through outside feedback. This kind of technology also promises to make it easier to understand how websites, mobile applications, and ads impact the emotional state of users. “The end goal should be to reengineer business to be truly customer-centric, which was infeasible until emotional analytics entered the picture,” said Armen Berjikly, Founder and CEO of Kanjoya, a sentiment analysis service. Ken […]

The most troubling thing about the recent Facebook and OKCupid experiments may not be the experiments themselves. It may be the potential of the controversies surrounding their publication that discourages wider emotional experimentation. Ethical behavior implies acting in a way that cultivates the good life. Content providers and services that honestly seek to pursue this need to do more testing to see not only what sells products or engages users, but what leads toward the greater good. Until now, this kind of research has been impractical, but the rise of tools for automatically assessing emotions — like text analytics tools and […]

A variety of advertising platforms such as Google AdWords and AdSense play a key role in bringing fresh traffic to WordPress sites as well as in monetizing many types of blogs. As these platforms grow in complexity so do various ways of gaming them in ways that adversely affect consumers, publishers, and advertisers. There are lots of ways of gaming the system, which, though legal, still raises ethical issues. AdWords and advertising networks play different roles in helping to drive traffic and monetize blogs. Google AdWords allows a Website owner to post ads that are listed alongside relevant search results, and represents the […]

The publicity around Google Glass has brought new attention to the idea of augmented reality (AR), which connotes the idea of overlaying information onto the physical world.  These certainly are not the first glasses for doing so, and other products are technically superior. But Google’s size and interest in the field through other initiatives such as project Tango and Ingress are helping to bring new attention to the field. Glass-based displays promise to make it easier to do many things like navigation, fixing things, and recalling details easier. However, this kind of approach is still in its early stages and […]