Evolving Web

The Measurement Meme & Twitter as Backchannel

I was sitting here actively measuring social media tools.  I'd been working for about two solid days on performance measures for a few of my Social Media clients.

Then in Twitter, someone mentioned the "measurement meme", but it was in passing and I didn't get the gist.

So, I used TerraMinds to get the gist.  Right after that, I checked my feed that follows social media tagged blog posts started spitting out measurement meme posts.  Of course, all this happened during my blogging hiatus.

So, I want to write about measuring social media, but I'm actually more interested right now in the measurement meme itself as a meme and how it came into my consciousness.

For me, I left the social media world for about 2 months - which sounds like a short time.  But it was at least long enough to miss this meme.

Today, someone mentions it in passing in a non-blog venue.  I take a look at the history of the conversation, seeing it stretch back a month or so.  I find out the players, check my del.icio.us tags, and very quickly have the entire meme unfold for me. 

Chronologically.

It appears that Twitter is quickly becoming a blogging backchannel.  This is different, I think, than "microblogging".  Microblogging has always had an air of its own matter stream.  i.e. things that happpen in a microblogging realm are in some way self-contained.

But now it seems that Twitter is a parallel tract to blogging.  As things are blogged, they are rapidly discussed in Twitter and responses are then blogged.  Almost like Twitter is saying, "Here's something to thing about, go think, then blog and let us all know when you're done."

Twitter mining makes this workable.  Before, you couldn't look back very far in Twitter land for meaningful information.  Now it's all there.  Who said what, when, and in response to whom?

Interesting.

Technorati Tags: twitter, terraminds, measurement meme, backchannel

Twitter as a Buzz Mine

Robert Scoble tweeted TerraMinds today, it's another Twitter searcher.

To test it, I took a look at how it dealt with "Spock".  Since I've recently had Spock on the brain.  What came out was a fairly interesting stream-of-buzz. 

This shows all the public tweets with the word "Spock" in them.  I chose not to show you all 1,251 of them.  What I really like here is you see praise, confusion, criticism, discovery, viral marketing, all in one quick easy tool.

You can also judge your level of buzz relative to other buzz-worthy objects:

So we can see that Spock is somewhere between Hello Kitty and LinkedIn in popularity amongst the general population of Twitter users.

You can also see that you can subscribe to the RSS, which means you can easily automate the mining and analysis of Tweets that relate to things you care about.  In this case, the Spock team could subscribe to all Spock posts and then do keyword sorts for positive, negative, or confused tweets.

Of course, this is only people who have made their Twitters public. But there is significant value in the information stream here.

Technorati Tags: twitter, terraminds, spock, blog analytics, analytics, data mining

A Bad Day at the Office or Never Attribute to Malice

Last week, the team at Spock had a very bad day at the office and it was largely my fault.

In my earlier post, It May be the Evil Spock, I invoked a powerful word.  Evil.  I passed this post amongst my tribe and they all blessed the word evil.  I wanted to make sure I hadn't gone too far.  When the tribunal had spoken, Spock was evil.

After thousands of page views and a bunch of comments and several posts by others, Spock is reeling in the court of public opinion.  And most of these opinions jump on the condemnation bandwagon.

One of the comments was from Jay Bhatti at Spock.  Surprisingly, Jay did not think of himself or Spock as evil.  Well, that's just crazy!  Of course he's evil. 

So, this made me wonder .. what exactly is evil?  And what, exactly would make Spock evil?  Is evil correctable?

What is evil?

In the search to learn about all things evil, of course, I went to the 21st century CliffsNotes - Wikipedia.  (Which makes Jimmy Wales the 21st Century Clifton Hillegass).

Wikipedia is a great memory jogger.  Soon synapses that had long ago been shoved to the back burner - memories of Spinoza and Nietzsche.  Memories of trudging across frozen Michigan snow on my way to early morning classes.

So ... here's the deal. 

Evil is a fluid concept and a loaded term.  In it's nitpicky form, an Evil act is a harmful act caused from ignorance.  Let's call this "Oops! Evil".

In it's more loaded form, an Evil act is caused by an Evil person with malicious intent.  Let's call this "Haha! Evil".

Practitioners of Oops! Evil learn from the evil act and do NOT do it again.  Practitioners of Haha! Evil learn from the evil act and DO do it again (hopefully in an even eviler way.)

Is the Evil Spock Oops! or Haha!?

Jay's long comment on my Evil Spock post shows a few things that should be appreciated:

1. Jay and Spock understand the need to respond to flame with cool water. 

2. Jay and Spock are thoughtful and understand that Spock needs to be refined

3. Jay and Spock have spent considerable time thinking about the issues behind the collection and redistribution of personal information.

Currently, Spock is Oops! Evil.  They are not malicious.  But they do have a bit of work to do to make up for this.

Can they do it?  Certainly.  If Plaxo can dig their way out of their PR hole, anyone can.

Spock has potential

In my post that preceded the Evil Spock post, I said that Spock did some really needed things.  Most notably, it lets you really coordinate your network.  Recently (like late this week), Facebook started to allow the same thing - but Spock's implementation is better.  This would be a post in itself, so I'll just say that Spock is a better platform for this because Facebook's business model is so chaotic.  Spock is much cleaner.

Direct Response to Jay Bhatti

Please do go read Jay's long comment on the Evil Spock post.  Then come back and read my replies.  I don't want my quotes to remove any of his context.

Before I respond I also want to say that a blog post is like a text chat, so my aim here is to be perfectly clear to Jay and Spock what my issues are and how they can be mitigated.  If I seem a bit forceful, it is due to the medium.

So, here we go:

Jay's first comment: We don't trick people.

... we NEVER send unsolicited email ... I hope this can clarify the issue some people raised above that we trick people to send invites. I have been trying to improve the process  as much as possible to make it more clear.

I hear the earnestness behind these statements.  The issue here is that the system makes it seem that people are on Spock when they actually are not.  "Trick" like "Evil" is a loaded word ... I don't think that Spock or Jay specifically set out to mislead people, but the current architecture is misleading.

This is an Oops.  It's also the reason for the invite flood.  People are assuming they are linking to someone already in the system, not sending an invite.  I know the system may be presenting these as slightly different - but the user isn't getting the message.

Jay's second comment: Spock's other reasons for invite flooding.

(paraphrased) Spock assumed that people in your address book was known to you.  Unfortunately, many email clients save anyone you've ever emailed or received an email from - so lots of people in your mail client are total strangers.  ....

This is compounded by the fact that many early Spockers were recruiters, biz dev consultants and others who have a vested interest in a giant network.

I did paraphrase here, so please do read his original and judge my work.

I appreciate the fact that Jay is airing a bit of laundry here and acknowledging something very important about social networking tools.

Different people have different strategies for applying their social networks.

The type of people Jay mentions in the second paragraph have a vested interest in having gigantic weak networks.  Their business model is based on breadth and not depth. 

The email issue is also very important.  When I sign up for a system like Spock and it taps my email list to seed my network, I am always saying "Who the hell is that?"  It works against my personal social networking strategy to include weak or unknown contacts.  But for those other guys, they will add me no matter how tenuous the connection.

Oddly, Spock's tagging tool which lets you organize your contacts makes it the first tool to really let you self-filter your massive networks.  So, even though this is an invite problem - Spock's architecture allows you to deal with large networks after they form.  Organizationally, Spock has this covered - socially it was a bomb.

So, how do we deal with things like this?  How do we deal with friend-whores who go out to collect every name in humanity's phone book and, in the process, fill your inbox with invites from people you don't know?

That's a big one.

Jay's third comment:  We adhere to standard search engine rules.

We crawl the web the same way any other search engine does, we adhere to every robots.txt file from every site and we only crawl information in the public domain. ...

This is cool, but most people have no idea what a robots.txt file is.  And no one has any control over the robots.txt files on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. 

Here is a conversation that I am so confident in, I will type it as it happens right now:

Jim: On your Elocution Seattle site, how did you set your robots.txt file?

Jim's wife: I don't know.

So, I'm afraid I see this as a bit of a cop out.  Jon Udell has a great post today (much more succinct than me, I'm afraid) where he welcomes Spock's coming simply because it brings issue like this to light.

People's expectations of their data, while naive, is that it will not be used without their knowledge.  This will help people streamline their data.  But, as Jon points out, the crawlers are never accurate enough to filter out the difference between personal attributes and the topics of writing.

Also, as I noted before, names are not unique IDs, so building a massive database based on a non-unique ID is problematic.

Jay's fourth comment:  We present good information

In the process of crawling, we do gather a lot of information about people. We made a decision .. that we wanted to represent people in their best light, and not in a creepy way. We try to never display publicly identifiable information (email, address, phone number, im, etc), even if we gathered it from a public source. We just don't think it is cool to show PII.

This is a good start, but doesn't seem to have served Spock well.  I know that if I went in and looked around again, I'd find more pages declaring me to be an astronaut.  I am very grateful that no Jim Bensons have done anything particularly nasty.

Unlike presidents.  Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton have taken the time to claim their Spock pages which are being systematically and ideologically defaced. 

When I did a search for pedophile, I found 156 results.  156 people directly labeled by Spock as a pedophile.  Somehow, I'm sure none of them stopped by and okay'ed that label. 

It doesn't do a person a whole lot of good to protect their IM account over their reputation.

 Jay's fifth comment:  You can change it

We also allow people to claim their search result and remove wrong information and add information that they want to be searched on. If people want data removed, we have a easy process for them to get that data removed.

I'm going out on a limb here ... "Allowing" me to join your site and edit my data that you have misinterpreted is not a luxury for me as a user.

My personal advice here ... seed your database with people's personal information - but do not broadcast it publicly until it has been claimed.  The seed data should be to help me, as a user, quickly set up my Spock account - it should not be a threat (even an unintentional one) that makes me come to the site and clean up the messy after affects of a crawler they never sanctioned.

This is the biggest issue, messy data on your side will quickly bring a response for an accepted and open-source reputation management system.  People will lose their faith in companies that play by the accepted corporate rules but appear not to respect the people impacted by those rules.

Summing up:

It is hard to provide detail about problems without seeming negative.  Problems are negative.  It's not my goal here to take Jay to the cleaners, but to help Spock get even better - and thereby increase the effectiveness of social networking and social media in general.

I'm sorry to have caused a few bad days at the Spock offices, but I hope that in the end it'll make the product better.

Technorati Tags: spock, jay bhatti, jon udell, social networking, social media, evil, wikipedia

How to: My Book on Windows 2003 Server

As your equipment ages, things break, hard drives crash, all sorts of fun.  You also end up with new equipment trying to interface with older OSs and programs.

Soon I will have a post about dealing with a boinked Bugzilla on an old Linux distro with a very old MySQL needing full updates before they can be of any use.

But for now, my colleague Allan Cady, recently had to try to figure out why the heck our Western Digital My Book USB drive wouldn't be recognized by Windows 2003 on an older server.  After he was done, I asked him to write up a how-to for me to toss on the blog to help future travelers.

Allan says:

How to use a Western Digital "My Book" drive (Home Edition, but I don't think that matters) in Windows 2003 Server:

1. Follow instructions for normal connection using USB, then:
2. Start -> My Computer -> (right-click) Manage Open Storage -> Disk Management  External drive will appear in list of partitions, but it will be inactive and will not have a drive letter assigned.
3. Right-click on the partition, select Mark Partition as Active
4. Right-click on the partition again,
5. select Change Drive Letter and Paths,
6. click Add.  Assign a drive letter.
7. The drive should now be accessible. 

This procedure should only be necessary the first time the drive is plugged in.

As with most OS wrangling ... fairly simple to explain, but fairly inexplicable when you first try to plug the thing in.

Technorati Tags: western digital, western digital my book, my book, windows 2003, how to

Sometimes It Seems Like Google Punts

Sometimes it seems like Google AdSense just plain punts.

I went through the e-mail that seeded these ads and could not find anything to warrant any of these.

Crazy

Technorati Tags: google, adsense, nonsense

It May Be the Evil Spock

Nancy White and Catherine Juon both wrote me simultaneously today to ask me the same question I asked Laurel Papworth the other day:

(Paraphrased) "Why do I want to join a new web site that has been peppering me with invites?"

Social networking adepts understand that any web site that bugs you too much about one thing, will probably annoy you in other ways as well.

A few things need some light. 

Q: Why are you getting tons of opt-in requests from your friends who should know better than to bulk invite people not already on a system?

A: Spock has pages for nearly everyone who has ever existed.  When you first log in to Spock it, like most sites, mines your email accounts and asks who you'd like to add that "already has a page on Spock."  But I had three pages on Spock before I ever logged on - Spock had crawled my business site, my blog, and my page on LinkedIn and created pages for me.

Then why my friends logged in, Spock told them I was already there - and THEN invited me.  My friends thought they were connecting to me in a system I had already opted-in for - but I had not.

I made this same "mistake".  So, Spock misrepresents their membership when you first log in.

Q: Why is this a problem?

A: Evil Spock has crawled the pages of a very large number of real people and created profiles for them that are based on totally unvetted and unauthorized information.  It is all machine made.

Evil Spock's Robot has gone out and raped crawled my LinkedIn page, gathering up my information without my consent and then misrepresented this to people coming to the site. 

When you go to an unowned page, it does tell you that the page is unclaimed.  Going to an actual page comes long after the "link to friends" process.

This information harvesting has caused me work in cleaning up the Evil Spock database.  It has caused me some embarrassment by inviting people to a service I don't think they need or will use. 

But now, I feel compelled to tell everyone I know to JOIN SPOCK - simply so they can clean up their bios.

That is Evil.

UPDATE:  No, no wait!  They are even EVILER!

Technorati Tags: spock, nancy white, catherine juon, evil spock, information harvesting

An Initial Response to Spock

"Spock ... help me ... Spock."

This week I received a buncha invites to try Spock, which I'd sort of been avoiding simply because I was so buried by other life events.  But Sunday morning I felt the Jones to fill out forms and go through another web 2.0 process.

Here is my initial response to Spock. 

1. Weirdly Controlling

Spock gives you lots of tools to have robust data and then doesn't allow you to use them.   The biggest part of this for me is the box to the right.

My name is Jim Benson.  There are 80 Trillion Jim Benson's out there, or so it seems.  If people search for Jim or James Benson, they have a hell of a time finding me.

But everyone who knows me knows that I'm "ourfounder" on just about every social site out there.  But I cannot enter "ourfounder" in this box because it is not a full name.  But, you know what, it is a primary identifier of me.

Laurel Papworth, a woman who will never suffer from 80 Trillion people with her name, also goes by Silkcharm.  What did she do....

Yes, Ms Silkcharm.  Allowing her to be findable.  I tried "Ourfounder Ourfounder" and it said "That does not appear to be a real name".  Which makes me wonder if the large number of repetitive African names can be used in Spock.

Laurel had a larger fight with Spock over her imagery.  Part of her personal brand is her avatar / logo which they would not allow as a real picture of her.  (For some reason the Second Life shot you see here stayed).

2. What the heck is my trusted network?

This is really confusing.  The point of Spock is for you to build trusted networks and organize people you know into groups.

But, you cannot view your trusted network.  This is so bizarre that I spent about an hour just searching over and over for it.  There is a Network button, but it shows you everyone in your extended network!

While I was working on this, other people joined my trusted network.  But I didn't know - because I have no way to actually track my trusted relationships.

They give you an "advanced" search, I thought maybe it would be here, but no. 

Again, here, "Network" means your trusted relationships and everyone they know.  So I have dozens of pages of people in my Network that I do not know. 

If I am bothering to trust these people, it would be nice to be able to see them.

3. At last!  I can manage my network!  Sort of.

On your front page is a tool to list people you respect and to tag them.  Wonderful!  But ... where do these people come from?  Off the top of your head.

Can you stand it?

There is no pick list.  No ability to view your trusted network and select people for this treatment.  You just start typing names.

4. "Claim this page" and Scraped Information

 

This sort of freaked me out. I linked my page to Ed Vielmetti's ... but he hadn't even been on the site.  As you can see at the bottom here, it asks me to Invite Ed ... so that Ed can claim his own information.

I'm sure others will write long bits about this.  For Ed, this was fine.  Ed is an old pro at all things social software.  But for my other friend Bob, he represented on Spock because Spock went out and scraped his myspace page - a page not updated in quite a while.

So, because of this I thought .. wow, they must have a bunch of pages for me.  And I went searching.  Two more Jim Bensons and one James Benson pages that had my information in them - amongst hundreds of other Jim Benson and James Benson pages.

But for my own personal identity management, I had to chase these pages down and claim them.  I had to actually sit there and sift through their database in a very coarse way to gain my own personal information.

That wasn't fun.  At least if you are going to make me work, give me better tools.  But having to search their scraper-results to clean up my on-line identity is worrisome.

There was also a lot of effluvia from other Jim Bensons in my real profile that I had to disavow.   This information also came from their scrapers.

Conclusions

What we see here is that search engines and scrapers are too coarse to build identity profiles for third parties.  That's the easy part.

The ethics of scraping and claiming that's a profile for a person ... that's harder.

Requiring a rigid level of data input from users (photos, names) while having a frivolous data collection method is just plain bizarre.

Spock looks like it could evolve into a very useful tool.  But they'd better watch out that they don't alienate everyone before they get there.

Technorati Tags: laurel papworth, spock, ed vielmetti, twitteriffic, social media, social networking

I Spy With My Wry Little Eye

Today Facebook changed the status line so you can write whatever you want.  They have slackened the leash just a little bit, allowing us to be more than present tense.

No longer am I confined to the confining confines of "is".  Now, we can use words like "can" or "shall" or verbs like "hates", "loves" or "conjugates."

So, I'm more than a little worried that I noticed this and that I even care in the first place.

With this massive freedom, who knows what I will do?  And who knows what other bits of the party line Facebook is going to chip away with in their move towards democratization?

Technorati Tags: facebook, articles, verbs, freedom, democracy, chip

I Hate My Friends

There's nothing like a good social networking site to make you feel like you absolutely hate all your friends.  Today I crushed the hopes and dreams of many of my dear friends by not wanting to overload my Facebook page.

Rather than "opting out" or "deciding not to" do certain things, Facebook lets me know that I have callously chosen to ignore them. 

Somehow I think that almost anything would have made me feel better than the word ignore.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, hatred, hate crimes, social media, social networking, ignoring, i hate all my friends as proven by Facebook

Windows Live Writer Goes Live

We all know that I am a big fan of Microsoft's Live Writer product.  This week it went to Version 1.0.  I look forward to many more blog posts made in this tight, well designed tool.  It is, and always has been, excellent.

The Google adSense ad for WLW perfectly states why:

It is just amazingly easy and it works flawlessly.

I went to the site to download it and wanted release notes.  What's new in 1.0?  What's different?  Neither in the software nor on the site was there any mention.  In fact, the very reasons why WLW is useful are downplayed on the download site, in favor of listing how it works with Live Spaces and other Microsoft offerings.

Its true value is in how it works with other tools, not with Microsoft's Live sites. It lists the other services you can use in really small type.  It should scream "THIS WORKS WITH EVERYTHING!!"

To me, WLW represents that first little inkling at Microsoft that there is life outside of the Redmond campus.  That's really exciting to see.  But when you click on that Google adSense ad above ... you go here:

There is no clear path to get Windows Live Writer on this page.  Instead, it's a mish mash of Windows Vista and Windows Live offerings.  Again, rather than playing to the strengths of Windows Live Writer, we are sucked into the entirety of Vista and the overall Live platform.

Microsoft web sites will take you to the moon and back again before you find the information you want.   Trying to navigate the world of Microsoft Business Partner land or the Microsoft Developer Network is a remarkably frustrating experience.  Trying to price Microsoft production level server products is nearly impossible without paying someone to do it for you.

How do I find things on the Microsoft web site?  I Google what I need.

Why is this relevant?  Because Windows Live Writer is still an amazing product and still outward reaching.  Where do you learn about it?  On their blog.  That's where you find the actual information about what WLW does now:

Easier Spaces creation and configuration
Whether or not you already have a blog on Windows Live Spaces, now all you need is a Windows Live ID username and password to configure Writer to your Spaces blog.

Spell checking in four languages
This includes three flavors of English dictionaries:

1. English (US, UK, Canadian)
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish

Generic AtomPub Support
Configuration and publishing to services that implement Atom Publishing Protocol 1.0.

We have heard from many of you about the pain and frustration in the last beta release when support for installing on x64 systems was not supported.  We're happy to share that this has also been fixed and now installation on Windows Vista x64 is fully supported.

As always, we're eager to hear feedback and learn about what you like and what you don't like.

This builds on support for Google's Picassa, Flickr, and integration of nearly every major blogging platform.  Windows Live Writer's strength is that it makes blogging a highly manageable process.

(An interesting tidbit, I believe the largest population on Windows Spaces is Japanese.  Yet, WLW doesn't support any Asian languages.  Funny.)

In the blog for WLW, you get actual information, the real value proposition for the product, and access to feedback.

Luckily, you can see that the blog appears at the top of a Google of Windows Live Writer - but it's undermined by the ad from Microsoft for Windows Live Writer that, as you will recall, went to the general Vista / Live page:

If you came here as a new user, which would you click on if your goal was to get Windows Live Writer? 

Does this blog post seem muddled?  That's the way I feel when I come away from this whole experience.  As a user, I feel like I can't get the information I want about a product I feel strongly about.  There seems to be systemic reasons for this and I don't want Windows Live Writer to get lost in Microsoft's muddy information architecture.

Go download Windows Live Writer now and give it some love!

Technorati Tags: windows live writer, windows live, microsoft, blogging