This is the end of August and the agendas are filled with "summer universities" like the French Entrepreneur's Federation MEDEF (see their live / cross blogging initiative I have been invited to take part on the blog Jouer le Jeu, aka Play the Game), and some companies like Capgemini Consulting for which I will host a workshop on some topics I am sharing with you today, going over some of my past year discoveries and learnings.

We live in an information world and the pure volume of information available is increasing exponentially (IDC/EMC 2007 and Berkeley 2003 studies). At the same time the number of interactions (as one-way or two-way ponctual information exchanges) between persons and/or computers is multiplying rapidly, thanks to the internet revolution and the globalization of our economy. Those « connections » (permanent associations or punctual contacts) are creating a number of opportunities to solve the everyday issues we are facing with.

Thanks to new tools (creation) and economical opportunities (incentives) the distinction between information producers and consumers is not static anymore, this is what has been called the revolution of social media (user generated content, folksonomics, wisdom of crowds, …) :

• Brands need to rethink their communication with their consumers, engage in a conversation with them, build and sustain communities of users ;
• Knowledge (long thought to be limited to encyclopedias, academic books, …) does not consist in « one-off », elitist and formal products anymore since Wikipedia democratized it’s creation and sharing ;
• Managers need to take more and more decisions within a shorter time frame, often with too much data to analyze, or too much « noise » and not enough pertinent information ;
• Major undertakings do not necessarily require major investments from one individual organization as « crowd sourcing » or distributed computing solutions have allowed to search for lost individuals or to analyze large quantities of data ;

This is an overview of experimental solutions to this issue, that I have separated in 2 aspects (some products are doing both, but this a minority) :

• Traceability : new tools that keep track of every information exchange in a standardized, searchable and « mashable » format :
• search engines and crawlers such as Google (Search History, Trends, and Co-Op tools like the Tracker and Customized Search Engine), and Technorati,
• social tagging tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Stickis,
• and crowdsourcing tools such as VisiblePath, Amazon’s ACF and Mechanical Turk, and Inkling Prediction Markets ;
• Visualization : new tools that allow easy analysis, interpretation of data to create knowledge and presentation / sharing to an audience :
• data display tools such as IBM’s ManyEyes, GapMinder's Trendalyzer, and Swivel,
• words / tags display tools such as VisualThesaurus, Delicious' Tagclouds,  and Kartoo,
• 3D visualization tools such as Microsoft’s Photosynth, and Google's Sketchup (included in Google Earth),
• social networks visualization tools such as LivePlasma, TouchGraph, Facebook’s FriendWheel, and VisiblePath,
• and online sharing versions of presentation tools such as mind mapping, and Powerpoint SlideShare.

On the definition and etymology of innovation and creativity, the differences between information types : click here

A gallery of the largest collection of visualization techniques and use examples : VisualComplexity

For fun : a nice application that links song lyrics to images randomly extracted from Flickr, and another analyzing breakups (called The Dumpster) between people from blog comments.