There’s a lot going on around the world – and being highly connected means we have the potential to know a lot more than we would if we were less connected. The Darwin Awareness Engine is a new way of discovering things that should / could interest us:

“Internet events, such as news articles, blog postings, discussion board postings, are pulled from the Web on the basis of search queries and/or RSS feeds in order to build the Awareness Engine’s Body of Knowledge.

The algorithms of the Engine then process the collected data using the techniques associated with Chaos Theory presenting Web events in both a temporal perspective as well as in a manner revealing the correlation of those events with each other.“

The Darwin web site says it supports updates from the Web, SharePoint, and Lotus Domino (should probably specifically include Lotus Connections though).

The material collated by the Darwin Awareness Engine is aggregated in what they call a “scan cloud” – which looks like a tag cloud, but offers extra capability when you hover over key words to link the word or phrase back to a particular event. For example, see the scan cloud here for the Darwin Enterprise Social Media Edition.

The Darwin Awareness Engine Blog recently discussed the technology and approach:
– How the scan cloud provides a better temporal visualization of events.
– The technology downplays popularity in favour of correlation with other events. Time is more important than popularity.
– The technology shows the relationship between terms over time, which helps users to see recurring patterns.

To learn more, apart from visiting the web site, you need to fill out the contact form.