Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

A new acquaintance recently published a provocative piece addressing the subject of social enterprise in an influential business media outlet. He was curious what kind of post-publication life his article was commanding in terms of press pickup, social bookmarking, reader feedback, and the resulting footprint of organizations and peer-experts linking to it on their own sites.

Most of the territory covered is aimed at the vain anxiety our names and effects will go public but escape our notice. There's more than a few utilities designed to consolidate our social media profiles: "our interfaces don't miss a single interaction, blah, blah, blah."

What I liked about this exercise was that it wasn't email or password-based. The only detail was the article itself. This is actually plenty if we're pursuing the power of an idea (as opposed to the browser used by our site visitors).

As far as recipes go the easiest and most literal way to trace an article on the web is to perform a link analysis. To do this you save the URL and then see who's linked to it.

A second more effective way is to allow for your keywords to appear in the "anchor." Anchor means the words that the linking party uses to describe the page it's linking to. As you'll see this gives a more thorough result -- including some cheeky tweets.

Capturing the social media piece is a little more fleeting than garnering page links. As we saw in the Yahoo example we're limited to the exact URL. URLs are becoming less static over time -- especially as they age and publishers pull them offline. This largely limits the amount of conjecture you'll get. It's not that Dashboard to end all buzz factors.

Again it helps to be less specific but there is no definitive source. Here's another example of a selective media universe where first and last name are the only terms in play.

When the promise of comprehensive profiling turns into the scattershot footprints of puny indexes I do what any rationale researcher does. I retreat back to Google. This is a Google query that focuses only on a news aggregation tool called Digg.

... and on Facebook.

Finally, here are two novel visuals for depicting links. The first from Google captures all links into ft.com that mention the author's name.

The second is not a search interface but a multi-dimensional view of recent media generation on the topic called Silo Breaker -- not specific to the original article but a big picture view to rival the most panoramic thought piece.

Happy fishing.

Gender Specific

My wife and spent the fourth driving down from Boston to New Bedford for the decidedly low-key alternative-to-Newport folkie fest. There is always something redemptive about a sticker price within reach of those who get their Birkenstocks as knock-offs of high-end flip-flops. I had to squint through the high sun and low clouds to see a single corporate sponsor. I couldn't place any progressive causes piggy-backpacking to the summit trails of a crunchy, retro crusade. I'm not sure whether this was to keep the music pure or keep the marketing budget in line with the low entrance fee.

Still there's something oddly inspired about bringing a group of disconnected dinosaurs like us together to listen intently to words and music. And that's the point! No one was checking in on the half-dozen other glitzier events that they sacrificed for the trend-deaf folkies. And yes the average tent-hopper was white, smokeless, and a peroxide-free fifty plus.

The most interesting of the tents we attended was unified by the theme of songs for and about men. The songwriting panel included the likes of John Gorka, Stephen Fearing, Cliff Eberhardt, and Peter Mulvey. It was curious that with the exception of mock Zeppelin chord progression from Cliff we had to get through half the session before the manly theme wasn't seen through the female lens -- even the jokes. Mulvey recounted how Chris Smither had penned a song for Bonnie Raitt and thanked some woman who covered it at some club he was visiting. The woman, unaware of who the grateful guy was, corrected him. "You didn't write that," she said. "That song was written by some gal named Chris Smither!"

The part I find curious about the need for females to complete male stories is that the reverse is patently untrue. A round-table of women songwriters could go through cycles of sisterhoods, gal pals, and workplace versus homemaker dilemma-setting scenarios and never whiff the scent of a guy, even as a side dish. It reminds me of a recent factoid from Newsweek that talks about life expectancy: smoke and you lose 15 years right off the top. Floss and you gain two. But if you're a woman and you stay married the figure is zero, neutral. The editors chose to leave out the extra years that marriage puts on for men (this blog says it's +5).

One other addendum to this is just how major an entree lesbian folk is to the world of women singer-songwriters. Talk about a world without men. The telling parallel is this -- how many openly gay folkies are we talking about? My dimming memory can produce more right-wing folkies than gay ones.

Earth2100 -- A Pre Mortem

I've always regarded plausible disaster scenarios with the same blank check that the rubber-necking commuter cashes in at a roadside accordion pile-on.Whether I stared blankly into the infected futures in the fire bursts from 'The War Game' or the stillbirth of the bitten umbilical chord in 'Threads' I've never been able to look away from a fathomable end game on earth.

And while nuclear annihilation was the rockiest slope down the certain doom gateway environmental disasters lulled me into a catatonic fascination in our future blind dates with the destiny we have coming to us. (Gee, that sounds more like Pat Robertson indicting a very different form of denial of service).

Earlier this month ABC News aired Earth2100. The producers played the apocalypse slow dance card, casting climate change in the starring role of why this new century could well prove to be the last one for civilization -- both as we know it and as we would come to accept it as). Most of the push back was that it was too negative to set a plausible series of events in motion. The scenario caved under the weight of too many improbabilities. Staggering to another June 2009 station break didn't help the credulity factor. Whatever happened to a commercial-free peak at unsustainable enterprises?

What spooked me the most was how unspectacular the unraveling was -- no special effects and shock factor inventions like suicidal pacts among rapture-starving fundamentalists or power-mad puppeteers that ready, launch, aim. Most of the drumbeats were ominous for their present day familiarity: pandemics, border riots, coastal flooding, acute water shortages, and endless gas lines? Not exactly "out there" prognostications when conjuring up what an accumulation of earthly debts will do to the worldly aspirations of an overgrown human population.

The most novel accessories to heeded warnings include a splash of bio-engineering to re-crown the soggy ice caps and a fortress of ocean-borne levies to guard New York City against the tidal stampede of runaway sea levels. The machinery jams much like the history we're doomed to repeat from Katrina (FEMA trailers a distant reminder of how good we had it when the century was young). The flooding sea produces the perfect cocktail storm, unleashing the plague to end all body counts. The grid fizzles. Frequencies die. There's no social future left to shape or future to imagine.

For me the most poignant aspect to this was the broadcast date of June 2 -- the birth date of Lucy whose biography spans the final century ahead. She is the tribal elder of 2100 and has a proud personal history that scales her grief to an epic and collapsible dimension that transcends any boundaries still standing. It is also the birth date of my late grandfather Robert Pollan who was born on June 2, 1906. I'm grateful there is something of Popa I still have the opportunity to teach and it's a lesson that can never be over taught and runs the constant risk of being undervalued:

* Treat people as their own person where they make the difference (not their breeding, gonads, hair size, or facial markings).

* Avoid at all cost the exclamatory stain of "you, your, them, or those ... people."

* Use the pattern-matching attributes of grouping humans as a way to show others how they stand out in ways that will help their communities.

These are values that endure any worst case scenario or the perverse fascination with their invention.

Where There's a Wil There's a .Wav

This just in from the prolific Fab Four archivist Wil Montgomery* of Bobolink Lane in leafy suburban Milwaukee -- a recipe for transferring videos to MP3s. In lay geek terms what kind of transformation are we talking about? Wil is addressing how to make an *.mp3 from a Youtube *.flv file ("flash video) or *.swf file (shockwave file).

The process has all the vicarious thrills of flying the good housekeeping seal over a pirated ship in choppy commercial waters.

Simple:

1. Right click Internet Explorer Icon


2. Choose: Internet properties


3. Select Settings


4. Select View Files


5. Click on column to sort by last accessed


6. There is the last file viewed on Youtube (usually 3-20 MB)


7. Drag that file to your music folder (if it is not *.flv file type, add that to the end of file name)

Last but not least:

1. Get a free "FLV file converter" from download.com
2. Use it on the file to convert to *.avi or *.mpeg
3. Get a music editor
4. Strip out the audio ** This happens automatically when file is loaded into to the music editor. Wil endorses Magix Music Editor
5. Save as *mp3
6. Transfer to your player

Pictured: Free flv converter

------------------------------------

* Not Wil M. of the Alabama Beekeeepers Association

Calling the lurkers from out of the woodwork

One of the accepted norms of social media behavior is that the ratio of producers to consumers is roughly in that same ratio as inspiration to sweat (something like 10:1). That means there are lots of folks who read our stuff but don't write back. Perhaps me and my logrolling doesn't earn a place on your own blogroll. But while you're not inspired to engage directly you may well respond in a more passive mode.

A new way to uncover the untold legions of closet taggers is a new gadget called Deliciousify. It activates in the results window by flagging own the number of instances where your blog is worthy of placeholder status. It doesn't give you the actual taggers and you need to drill down in native Delicious to meet your fan base.

Here are a few other means to find folks who connect with your opinions by tagging your posts:

I suppose that the shortest possible answer is Technorati. I've got to say that I'm consistently underwhelmed by its search capabilities and the slop that passes for its index. If you're not vigilant about your ranking your will be yesterday's news regardless of how timeless your views may be.

Actually the inanchor: syntax in Google is pretty exhaustive (unlike Google's reluctance to be a good social media citizen when it comes to supporting any meaningful form of link analysis research). If you enter your handle it looks like this:

inanchor:attspin

The problem is that if your blog is your twitter is your music site is your travel planner is your local business forum handle then you're no further along than a new point of maintenance for managing all your online identities vis-a-vis friendfeed. While its a capable platform for aggregating multiple streams it is also self-referential. You get your facial 'friendeds.' You get your network. But you miss the periphery. Those touch points that are united by the power of an idea, not a location, habit, or common affiliation.

On the aggregate level there many analytic tools that can decipher traffic patterns and run free diagnostics. One useful tool here is XINU Returns which performs a fairly thorough link analysis but nothin' doin' on the passive machine-to-human social media path.

One parting question here: do we engage directly the people our ideas connect to first? I think not. But depending on what else they're linking to you can always add them to your network on Delicious.

The Mets Warp Inside Citi Field Corp

At no point last week in my first visit to Citi Field did I connect to being a Met fan or being at a Met game. Based on the interchangable and coloreless feel of the place my Met host Garo and I boarded the 7 Train secure in the knowledge that unlike its naming rights-of-way this 47 year-old franchise is not too big not to fail.

Citi Field feels less like the new home of the Mets and more like a vist to a retro ballpark chain. You see it in the Disneyesque Main Street USA feel. The lighting is arranged in a bulb-like bouquet -- how quaint. How inappropriate. The homage to Jackie Robinson is fine as a traveling exhibit -- but not as a Met shrine. Considering the scale of his achievement it deserves a full entourage before coming to rest in Cooperstown, not Flushing.

Bal and I've actually visited two retro ballpark branches together --both which felt a lot more respectable and unique than this one (Camden Yards in '92 and PacBell in '99). Canuck praises Safeco and new Tiger Stadium for their local views both of the city and pride in their teams reminders. But if you ever believed in the "Orange and Blue" you can terminate this belief at the next Citi ATM.

I'm not nostalgic for Shea -- nothing that transparently reactive. But the pump-me-ups were complete artifice. And I'm lovesick mad for the community of Met legends that have been banished to the right field gate. Seaver, Piazza, Hernandez, etal. are not even in the building. They inhabit banners that suggest a passing reference to the backfold of an old game program:


National League Stars Coming Soon to Shea
-- but that means McCovey, Gibson, Aaron and Rose -- not the M-E-T-S Mets. Not the ways of Shea, indeed. Also, the end of the horseshoe design scheme brings two unwelcome changes:

1) You can't see out. There's no skyline. There's no bay. There's not even the Flushing junk yards to remind us of the ash heep that sprang into Phoenix-like action when the original fairgrounds were razed.

2) The PA announcements have the power to curb all spectator conversation like ... being indoors. Remember when we lamented the LaGuardia flyovers as rally deadoners? Well the park's been re-routed but there are no rallies left to deaden. Really.

The one fresh departure from symetrical stupor is an inverted richochet inducement in right field. If any live ball caught that carom, any self-respecting pinball point system would say 'game over.' Yes it's self-conscious. But a quirk is still a quirk no matter how storied the franchise or fertile the benefactors of new ballparks. No one's turning pre-retro any time soon.

At least not until the prequel but whose narrative will that be? Surely not the franchise I once knew.

The Clarifying Power of Verbs

I notice that whenever I give my S-Y-N-C talk the note-takers reach for their pens when the discussion comes to verbs. The action-based taxonomy that I advocate is a simple and effective way to anticipate (and eliminate) some common barriers to enterprise architecture before we crash into them:

* Hair-splitting -- The chances for semantic quibbling over what to call stuff are greatly reduced when things become actions. There are many fewer ways of describing a predicate than a subject. The likelihood for shared agreements increases.

* User-centric -- Instead of fighting over what to call things an action-based taxonomy helps us agree on how and why our customers draw on our content supply.

* Reporting -- You can't plot the outcomes you're supporting (new IP, project requirements, business development) without building an architecture atop the actions needed to trigger those developments.

* 80/20 Rule -- If every 80/20 rule lined up in single formation they would all be parading to the battle hymn of mother necessity; that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In our marching orders action is the most telling of all metadata elements because it reveals those deepest and fleeting mysteries of all uncharted KM waters -- who wrote this sucker and who was their intended audience? Figure out that side of the shipping manifesto and: (1) you're 80% of the way from content supply to knowledge demand; and (2) your cargo gets unpacked. Why? Because it has an identity that speaks to users.

* Disambiguation -- Probably there is no greater praise for verbs than giving some long-delayed respect they deserve for disambiguation. Next time you hear yourself mutter: "use it in a sentence" tell me the word that drives you to the home of understanding isn't a verb. And while it may be their job that's no reason to overlook their vast powers of clarification.