Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition: Part One – Explanation and Instructions

  

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We have decided to provide a series of themed Darwin Editions™ powered by the Awareness Engine that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost. You only have to go through a brief registration process and we promise you that no sales person will contact you as a result. 

The initial themes for our Darwin Edition include: general news (our original alpha), social media on the web, social media in the enterprise, US immigration news and discussions, and oil and gas industry news. They will be released over the next few weeks with the first three coming out this week. In this context we will also be pointing to our partner, Twortex, which uses aspects of the Darwin Awareness Engine to provide a free Twitter search tool.

These Darwin Editions provide a way to monitor the conversations within several focused areas. They offer many of the user capabilities that come with the complete Darwin Awareness Engine. Darwin looks at targeted content rather than spidering the whole Web. This targeted content approach provides greater control to define relevant content and can be focused within the Web or within the enterprise through such applications as SharePoint, Domino, and many of the other collaboration and content management platforms.  Determining and curating the target content is an administration function that comes with the commercial versions. In this Darwin Edition series we have picked the content sources and will continue to refine them.

As a user you have a number of capabilities for looking at this content and making adjustments to your discovery process. First, there are the two visualizations: the Buzz Tape™ and the Scan Cloud™.  The Buzz Tape runs across the top of the screen as seen below and displays themes of rising (green) or falling (red) interest within the target content. The Scan Cloud shows the top themes within the target content. Running the mouse over one theme highlights the others that are related to it. In the right column the actual content connected with themes is displayed. Clicking on this content will take you directly to the source.

 
As a user you can click on any of the themes within the Buzz Tape or the Scan Cloud and they become the focus of a new Scan Cloud that the system quickly generates.  Darwin works in real time.  As user you can quickly adjust the time period for the harvested content to be the last hour, last two hours, or last 24 hours using the selection options near the top of the screen. You can even expand it to 200 hours through the attractor creation process described below. Here is an orientation video we created on the user experience an dhow to set up attractors. 

Currently you will see up to the 31 most recent articles in the formal (news sites) and informal (blogs, etc.) sources in the right column. If you want to limit the scan cloud and returns to blogs then create an attractor that limits returns to blogs (see below on creating an attractor). 

The photos come through two sources. Some RSS feeds provide pictures. We also link to relevant Flickr images. You can even choose to collect videos through YouTube by choosing videos when you select sources as described below. The YouTube videos are listed under the informal sources in the right column. 

You can either simply look at the general buzz within the targeted content or create attractors, that serve as queries, to further refine you content discovery. For example, you can look at how your brand or some other topic of interest is being discussed. To create a new attractor, you fill in the attractor field in the top right.  For example, I put in Boston, my hometown, in the attractor field and received these results shown below.

 
Then you can further edit your attractor by clicking in the edit space next to where it appears in the upper left.  An edit field appears, such as the one shown below. You can adjust the time period for content collection up to 200 hours by using the slider. You can select which feeds to use by choosing from the drop down or simply allow for everything by not making a selection. It is best to start this way.  You can also select if you want to only see more formal (traditional news sources) or less formal sources (bloggers). Not selecting either provides all content sources.

Once you have refined your attractor you can save it in the lower right corner of the edit field. Then when you click on the plus sign in the upper left all of your saved attractors will appear for you selection. The colors in the Scan Cloud reflects different types of terms and can be configured as you want. In our Editions they are used as follows: people - red, organization - blue, place - green, category - grey and product - purple. We will continue to color code terms as they appear. The colors are an admin function.

Note: We will be updating the interface soon and will update these instructions when we do this. 

We hope that you find these Darwin Editions useful and will certainly appreciate any feedback. Let us know what you think. Please contact us at feedback@DarwinEco.com. We will also be happy to discussion the various business options for a fully functional Darwin Edition with all administration rights.  You can create your own Darwin Editions on the topics of your choice with the target content of your selection.  There are both individual and enterprise options.