Phil Wolff pointed to DiceLaRed ("The Network Says"), a visualization application that allows users to understand the flow of data in various sources via visualization. According to Phil, "DiceLaRed creatively blends news crawling + lexical analysis + data mining + data visualization + customization + alerting." He points to an example real time graph on their home page, that shows Spain's political parties by share of the current news cycle. In real time. Clicking on a wedge lets you dive into the news stream. More thoughts from Phil on how this tool might be used.

Apply this to your customers' weblogs, your industry magazines, and local newspapers for an environmental scan.

Apply this to job board postings. Understand labor market demand across the usual dimensions. Then stretch to discover new buzzwords and "terms of art". Can you say competitive analysis? How about strategic recruiting?

Apply this to medical discussion boards. Look for spikes in conversation about symptoms to detect outbreaks and public health problems. Look for swings in interest to retarget investment in health education and social programs.

We are much closer to a dashboard that helps us understand and respond, sooner and with more precision. Thank goodness.