Do you know the site nohomophobes.com? It’s a site that draws attention to the use of homophobic words by monitoring the use of 4 expressions: Faggot, Dyke, No Homo and So Gay. It was made by Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta and they could of course also have chosen other homophobic expressions to test.

If you want to test a few homophobic words yourself, try using xiive.com on a word like faggot in a few different forms:
http://xiive.com/topic/faggot,faggots,hashtag-faggot,hashtag-faggots

The people behind nohomophobes.com says:

We no longer tolerate racist language, we’re getting better at dealing with sexist language, but sadly we’re still not actively addressing homophobic and transphobic language in our society.

You can of course also use xiive.com to test if we’re getting better at not using misogynistic words.

We just have to warn you – it’s not exactly something that leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling… Maybe you want to follow it up with something lovable and beautiful: Babies, kittens, puppies, baby seals, sunflowers and baby gorillas.

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This feature looks at the last ~500 mentions of the topic and finds the top terms connected to that topic. We considered making a dull list of the terms but decided that it would be more fun and decorative to make the top terms into a retro-style tag cloud.

Just to give you an example the top terms right now for the topic Barack Obama are: President, Bill, Clinton, #NDC2012, Michelle and Romney. Just to compare that to another topic the top terms right now for Mitt Romney are: Slogan, Obama, America, KKK, Gay, Nicky, Minaj, President. Hopefully you think that these terms gives you an excellent overview of what is happening with that topic right now.

Just to show you what it looks like:

Now go play with it. Have fun!

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Imagine you go to an event – these days the Eurovision Song Contest is catching the eye of tv-viewers in Europe – and after that event you really want to see the pictures taken and videos shared from that event, but there are several hashtags involved. In this case, I’m sitting in Denmark where the hashtag for Eurovision is #escdk and the official hashtag is #esc2012. For the services who do not use hashtag (e.g. Flickr, Youtube) I would also like to capture everything with the word Eurovision in it. I simply make a page with the topics escdk, esc2012 and Eurovision on it and scroll down to the end where I can enjoy a wall of video and images from Eurovision and get a good overview of the event.

You could of course use this for many things other than events – I like to browse through the image wall with the topic LEGO every day and it inspires me to see all the creativity in that wall. Other good topics include the festival Holi (festival of colors), Rihanna, Brad Pitt, Firefox, Rome, volcanic eruption, Christian Lacroix, Oldsmobile… – I think you get the picture…

These pictures will be the ones shared by other users and are arranged by time with the newest at the top – so the wall can potentially change every time you visit a topic. If you own the rights to one of the pictures/videos and want it taken down from the website, simply press the delete-button on the picture/video and we will arrange that for you. Since the wall is put together though an automated process, we do not control which pictures/videos ends up on the site.

Our beta users will in generel be the ones to see our new features first and even though this feature is no longer an exclusive for them, they will not be cheated. We have a new feature ready for them to test before anybody else (but shhh – it’s a secret).

Enjoy!

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To celebrate our first month in public beta, we are now publishing a new feature: Sentiment Analysis. Simply put, we are analyzing what is said about a particular topic and categorizing it as positive, negative or neutral.

We do this on a day to day basis and can show you the results from the last week – if the topic is one we have a weeks worth of data on. If we haven’t seen the topic before we can’t show you the whole picture, but we will show you, what we’ve got.

This is how it looks like right now for republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

The positive mentions are represented above the 0-line and the negative are represented below the line.

We hope this is a feature you can use and we would love to hear your feedback. Please leave a comment here or use the feedback-button on the front page of the site.

Have fun!

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The feature is simple. We introduced a scale of 1-10 stars that a topic can get based on how many times a topic is mentioned. It’s a “site global” scale, which means that the rating is based on comparing a topic to all the other topics we monitor. The most mentioned topic will get 10 stars and stars will be awarded to other topics compared to this topic.

The scale is logarithmic just like the well-known Richter magnitude scale for earthquakes and can be seen as a measure of impact of a topic.

The least mentioned topics will get just 1 star. All numbers are based on the latest whole day based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

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I met Bob under completely different circumstances on the wall of a thai restaurant in the middle of nowhere in eastern Thailand near the city Surin. My husband and I were enjoying dinner with a local thai family when we noticed Bob. He just sat there with his beautiful colors and a small fly sitting boldly on his back. The locals wasn’t happy about him being there but there was a language barrier and we couldn’t quite understand what they were trying to tell us about Bob. We did understand that maybe we shouldn’t get too close, so we took a few pictures and then left Bob alone.

Back at the hotel we did a internet search for Bob and in that light the warnings made sense. Some locals think that Bob can tear your skin off with his feet, but more likely he just has a really nasty bite. The advice we got from the locals was that if Bob bites, he’s too strong to get off, but he can be convinced to let go, if you put oil on his nose so he can’t breathe through it. Then he has to let go if he wants to live. Another trick is to hold him under water until he lets go.

I don’t know if these tricks work, but we enjoyed the way the locals told us this story with body language, props and a few English words.

We hope that if you meet Bob on this site, you will let us know what happened through the feedback button or through mail (feedback@xiive.com) – then you can help us make sure that other users will not get to meet Bob in the same situation.

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Going from the closed to open beta was made so much easier by our helpful beta testers. Thank you so much for all the great feedback and bug reports. We hope you will continue to report any bugs or make suggestions via the feedback-button or mail (feedback@xiive.com).

We also want to thank all the people that gave us valuable feedback to help us choose 3 designs for launch day.

If you were part of the beta test you will notice that a few things have changed from the closed version to the open beta version. There is a new design on the front page and we replaced the graph “xrank” with a new star rating system, that rates the number of times a topic is mentioned on a scale 1-10 stars.

These are small changes but we have a big change as well. In the closed beta, you could only view topics that we had defined and though there were about 4000 topics to choose from, we decided that we had to allow our users to look at any topic they wanted. This is our big new feature. For every search we will put together a page with what we know about that topic – you can now share this page with your friends.

Though we have launched what we think is a pretty cool version of this site, keep expecting new features from us. We are far from finished.

Have fun!

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Xiive needs a new look and a redesign of the front page is coming up!

We have decided to add some life to the front page with our favorite pictures. So far we have made 18 versions of the front page and some of these will alternate – hopefully making the front page a bit more interesting.

As a bit of fun we want to give you a sneak peek into the new designs and we would love to hear which one is your favorite – or least favorite.

As is fashionable these days we are using Pinterest – so here are the new designs on a Pinterest board! You can vote for your favorite by repinning, commenting on Pinterest or commenting here. Our facebook fanpage is also always open for comments.

There are no prices other than getting a nice front page on launch day – we will choose 3 designs to alternate on that day (which incidentally is not so far in the future).

Have fun!

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We are working on:

• Sentiment analysis (or mood analysis). We will dig though the mentions on a topic and find out if what is said is positive or negative. This is useful for a lot of things: things like knowing if a thing is mentioned because people love it or hate it and this can help in predicting who will be the choice for the american republican presidential nomination, who will win the TV show X Factor and maybe it can even be used to help you figure out which stocks to put your money into (we accept no liability ).
• Mention filters. We will be able to filter out what kind of mentions we show you on a topic – do you only want to see the good things or the bad things (or maybe the neutral)? Want to filter out spam? Let us identify the language and let you view only those mentions written in your native tongue.
• Embedding in your blog or website. Show graphs from xiive.com on your blog or website.
• Visual overview.Giving you a summary of a topic with visual clues.
• Related topics.Suggestions for topics to check out similar to topics you have visited before.
• Polished user experience. We are going to tweak the site according to the feedback we get from you and the other beta testers.

And these are just the things at the top of our priority list…

We will also be opening up the site so that you no longer need to sign up to use the service. Those who do sign up will get special features and there will be a paid option, but the basics stay completely FREE for everyone. One of the strenghts of Xiive will be that you can share a Xiive page about a topic or a comparison of topics and discuss it with your friends or co-workers.

If you have any feedback, suggestions or problems, please don’t hesitate to write us. You can use feedback (at) xiive.com  (just replace (at) with @) or you can use the feedback button on the front page of xiive.com.

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The last few weeks since we opened up for beta test of xiive.com has been busy but great! I want to thank everyone who has helped us test the site for all the great feedback we have gotten. Keep up the good work!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Joyous Kwanzaa to you and all of your family – or if you prefer; have a great Festivus or other celebration of the holiday season and winter solstice.

Happy Holidays!

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