Microsoft Research tool sorts your email inbox by importance

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best – in this case automatically ‘triaging’ inbound email by user defined importance. SNARF allows the user to design their own personal email importance criteria such as the "number of emails sent to me in the last month". Such metrics can, in turn, be combined to create overall importance criteria for sorting your inbox.

Creative innovation needs social networks not just neural networks

We often have in our head the stereotype of the brilliant but solitary artist or writer who cannot, or will not, work with anyone else but is this the whole story on creativity and innovation?

An essay by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian shows why it is important to have good friendship rings as well as strong social/business networks and how to tell the difference between the two.

A crowd draws a crowd but you need to be fit too

Albert Laszlo Barabasi in his excellent book "Linked - the New Science of Networks" lets us into a secret about how networks grow. Relatively new research has shown that most networks are not random, as previously thought, but "Scale Free" . New nodes in a scale free networks attach themselves to other nodes based on a "preferrential attachment rule" .

Taking your most important relationships seriously

The current focus on ‘social networking’ might make you think you should spend most of your efforts warming up distant relationships and creating new ones. This focus on new relationships is good and healthly – however it would be a major mistake if it meant you neglected to nurture the strong relationships you already have.