pulse

I've recently begun an experiment ... I've joined Twitter. Some have admonished me for being so late in joining the party, and others have responded with a quizzical look that says "is this the thing that geeks do?"

A week into it and I have found it to be quite a natural extension to the status updates I do on Facebook, but with an edge. Twitter interests me because of the unstructured way in which people can broadcast thoughts, activities, links to interesting material, and well, just about anything that can be converted into 140 characters of text. In short, each "tweet" is a fragment of narrative. It is, as Scott Stratten wrote, the conversation that's happening, right now. It is also a platform that exposes our human desire to broadcast and share our stories - the stories about who we are, where we are and what we are.

Now, lets turn the thinking from a social network towards how this might work in organisations ...

Broadly speaking, the heart of our business is about the gathering of stories (many stories) within organisations so that decision makers can better understand their organisation or problem they are facing. In a sense, we're story-aggregators.

Online content aggregators like Afrigator do a great job of funneling African generated web content into one easy-to-use place - that's a semi-official description. But what I think aggregators like Afrigator do, is to funnel stories, and fragments of stories. The challenge with dealing with this many stories is how to filter them so that one can make sense of what they collective is saying. This is done by searching for keywords and topics, but wouldn't it be cool if we could use Afrigator as a measure of the pulse of African stories?