Twitter is the top medium being used to spread information regarding the devastating events happening in Libya right now. Here are some of the results we have found:

Overall, the words indicate strong indicators of violence in the region, and also mirror the support that countries such as Germany and Britain are providing to the people of Libya. The overall sentiment is positive, which is indicative of how people are reporting in neutral terms, or are expressing their positive outlook on the impending collapse of a long-standing regime. The emotional word cloud gives more insight into emotions used in these tweets:

Some of the most influential tweets of today include the following:

The top occupations if people spreading the message on Twitter indicate there is a professional bias towards journalists and writers, with photographers also covering the events as they unfold:

The top locations indicate which countries are spreading Libyan based information the most. Egypt, the Netherlands and Britain or among the top sources.

The top hashtags (Twitter keywords) are focused on key areas of the struggle, namely to do with Gaddafi and the events that occured on February 17th, 2011.

Currently, we only support realtime trends for South Africa, but we will soon release free real-time trends for many more countries. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Fuseware has always been about social media research and analysis, and now we are proud to announce our market research technology product. This product is the culmination of everything Fuseware has represented over its lifespan into something that companies can use to better understand their customers.

It is a self-administered online platform that helps companies and agencies perform market research in real-time. You can enter any keywords of your choice (for example, a brand name or product, or even a market such as “cape town” or “gothic shirts”), and our platform scours the web to bring back researched results about those keywords. We offer insightful visualizations into this data through charts, word clouds and a sleek interface that shows only the most relevant results for your searches.

This is a product that we use in-house to aid our own clients, and believe the world should be able to get access to this innovative tool at the same time. We offer a 1 week trial for any company that wants to see how this tool can benefit their business. Besides decreasing traditional market research costs, it allows rapid analysis of what is being said about any topic, fuelling product development, marketing campaigns and customer awareness initiatives.

Take a test drive for yourself at insights.fuseware.net. We always look forward to feedback from our clients, and are always open to partnership opportunities.

Go to www.fuseware.net/careers to see the requirements and apply.

In the previous version of the site, users were all given equal opportunities to share content that they created and found on the Internet. With the new change, people find it unacceptable that large publishers have been given so much power, and are abandoning the website in their masses.

August 30th, 2010, was designated “Abandon Digg” day, where the user base of Digg would migrate to Reddit and delete their accounts. As this unfolds, it is interesting to monitor the behavioural patterns of the tens of thousands of people that are unhappy with the site. Almost every post on Digg has as its top comments something to do with how bad the site has become. Digg’s redesign has fueled a very negative viral downward spiral which has caught on with a large portion of the community. Whether the massive boycotts are adequate punishment for the redesign is not important, but what is important is how quickly information and an idea can spread on the Internet between large masses of users.

Brands must be extremely careful as they engage in the Internet space, because one slip-up can indeed fuel a worldwide viral outbreak of commentary that may be highly negative. The recent Nestle fiasco shed some light on this, and showed how much a brand can be damaged if the wrong type of news slips out.

Minimum two years experience in developing C# and ASP.Net applications
Excellent knowledge of relational databases (MS Sql / Mysql) a must.
Some background in data analysis or data mining is necessary.
PHP knowledge is a plus, but not necessary.

Our offices are based in Parow in Cape Town, and on site development is a requirement. If you or someone you know matches this profile, send their contact details through to contact [at] fuseware [dot] net.

The City of Cape Town today announced the launch of the Cape Town Entrepreneurship Competition 2010, which will not only reward the City’s best entrepreneur, but also help to further expand entrepreneurship in Cape Town.

Funding of R1,8 million was approved by the Council at its meeting today. Of this R600 000-00 will be used to fund the competition and the balance of R1,2 million will be utilised for the long-term development of Cape Town’s entrepreneur networks.

The competition will focus on technology and innovation in the fields of Biotechnology, Telecom and Media, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Clean Technology, Healthcare and Social Entrepreneurship. The winner of the Cape Town competition will have an opportunity to participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Competition in Barcelona in June later this year.

Google states that these optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of their pages better, but also to improve their users’ experience when visiting their sites. Even though Google.com is the most visited domain in the world, even they understand the power of SEO.

Even the simplest changes in a website structure and contents can lead to great benefits in how search engines see you, and how many people eventually click on your website link in the results pages. If you aren’t sure what SEO actually is, there is a great SEO starter guide available here (also a post from Google).

Of course, if you don’t want to go through all the trouble of analyzing and optimizing your website, Fuseware does SEO as one of its core competencies.