Twitter: Thought Bubbles Bursting into Messy Spaghetti

I've been on Twitter now for the past two weeks and here are my initial, unvarnished, naive impressions:

* I did not "get" that Twitter Search is deliberately bad and the whole point is to slog through the profiles of virtual passer-bys
* The effect of the speech bubble ambience is directly from the film Wings of Desire
* I am still hopeful that IM communion can happen but refuse to tether a Blackberry

On point 3 I tried the following statement:

Boston MA "days ago"

The parenthetical was designed to filter out casual or dormant twits and attract the more Type A participants. It doesn't work. So I qualified the location with...

consulting
jobs
investigations

Verdict: stemming is turned on.

One of my BU students is looking for a local handwriting analyst. I'm too focused on the 50 Boston area strangers I'm now "following" to even attempt a Googling of her request.

Even if the bubbles don't expand to include an actual dialog I can see the value around the patterns:

* Over-representations of non-Geek networkers (especially PR)
* Ability to store strings-of-consciousness for reuse in some future recipe
* Shear gestalt of surveilling the mental maelstroms of the twittering mobs on a "want" to know basis

Need-to-know-basis need not apply.

Twitter: Thought Bubbles Bursting into Messy Spaghetti

I've been on Twitter now for the past two weeks and here are my initial, unvarnished, naive impressions:

* I did not "get" that Twitter Search is deliberately bad and the whole point is to slog through the profiles of virtual passer-bys
* The effect of the speech bubble ambience is directly from the film Wings of Desire
* I am still hopeful that IM communion can happen but refuse to tether a Blackberry

On point 3 I tried the following statement:

Boston MA "days ago"

The parenthetical was designed to filter out casual or dormant twits and attract the more Type A participants. It doesn't work. So I qualified the location with...

consulting
jobs
investigations

Verdict: stemming is turned on.

One of my BU students is looking for a local handwriting analyst. I'm too focused on the 50 Boston area strangers I'm now "following" to even attempt a Googling of her request.

Even if the bubbles don't expand to include an actual dialog I can see the value around the patterns:

* Over-representations of non-Geek networkers (especially PR)
* Ability to store strings-of-consciousness for reuse in some future recipe
* Shear gestalt of surveilling the mental maelstroms of the twittering mobs on a "want" to know basis

Need-to-know-basis need not apply.

Use Case: RSS Readers as News Radars

Here's a current use case to track "events on the ground" through Feed Demon. There have been reported instances in the media recently of attempts to confuse or intimidate potential voters, particularly new or youth voters. College age voters are traditionally the most under-represented part of the electorate.

Whether it's due to cynicism or naivete a third more concrete factor (inexperience) makes this group prone to believing falsehoods and misleading statements aimed at creating doubt about their residential status. Ahem. So participation in their democracy will jeopardize their financial aid or even come back to haunt their parents during next year's tax season. What could be more American than not voting?

One way to monitor attempts at voter suppression around college campuses is to use a broadly descriptive search statement on Google News:

location:nh college students registration election

You'll find a piece of syntax snuck in here. It helps us focus exclusively on content sources on Google News originating from the Granite State. New Hampshire is my location of choice as the nearest swing state to me with area colleges signifying the swingiest of voting blocs.

You'll also note that the semantics of this search statement are not in anyway prejudicial or skewed towards a certain outcome. Any attempt to tune this search at the outset would overly constrain the result set (n=109) as of yesterday's test run. In other words a more effective content analysis occurs by introducing results-based logic once the feed appears in Feed Demon.

That's where you can construct "Watches" to pull instances of terms like:

* suppression
* fraud
* misleading
* confusion, etc.

...from the New Hampshire tracking folder where these hits reside.

Don't forget to sample several of the more questionable hits. They will acquaint you with terms you hadn't considered or steer you away from outcomes that are clearly off-the-mark from your search objectives.

The second stage of tweaking your RSS reader as news radar is to harvest the feeds sprouting from the sources included in your search results. Gathering up the list is easier than confirming each source's deployment or policy regarding RSS. The range is huge! Some papers package their outputs by sections of the paper. Some don't. Some dispense with RSS altogether, figuring that it will only cannibalize their beleaguered media empires.

There are a couple of alternatives to site hopping in search of the bright, orange RSS icon. One work-around is to include the inurl: syntax in the regular Google web search:

inurl:rss OR inurl:xml [insert semantics from Google News search] intitle:new intitle:hampshire

This workaround should get you a pre-confirmed list of feeds although it doesn't guarantee that they originate from ground zero live-free-or-eat-granite country.

Another way is to work from the colleges themselves as news sources. The very first hit I pulled yesterday yielded this list of Students for McCain backers by their academic institutions:

State Co-Chairs

Greg Boguslavsky -- Dartmouth College
Shaun Doherty -- Rivier College

University Chairs

Lianna French -- New England College
Joe Doiron -- New England College
Brendan Bickford -- New Hampshire Technical Institute
Trevor Chandler -- Plymouth State University
Brittany Puleo -- Rivier College

Julie Kraus -- Southern New Hampshire University
Regina Federico -- St. Anselm College
Allison Krause -- University of New Hampshire
Brandon Mancuso -- Franklin Pierce College
Dasha Bushmakin -- Keene State College
Ryan Dorris -- Daniel Webster College

In closing the follow-up would be to Google each college with the inurl syntax, filtering the pages that can be used to build your tracking folder in Feed Demon.

Use Case: RSS Readers as News Radars

Here's a current use case to track "events on the ground" through Feed Demon. There have been reported instances in the media recently of attempts to confuse or intimidate potential voters, particularly new or youth voters. College age voters are traditionally the most under-represented part of the electorate.

Whether it's due to cynicism or naivete a third more concrete factor (inexperience) makes this group prone to believing falsehoods and misleading statements aimed at creating doubt about their residential status. Ahem. So participation in their democracy will jeopardize their financial aid or even come back to haunt their parents during next year's tax season. What could be more American than not voting?

One way to monitor attempts at voter suppression around college campuses is to use a broadly descriptive search statement on Google News:

location:nh college students registration election

You'll find a piece of syntax snuck in here. It helps us focus exclusively on content sources on Google News originating from the Granite State. New Hampshire is my location of choice as the nearest swing state to me with area colleges signifying the swingiest of voting blocs.

You'll also note that the semantics of this search statement are not in anyway prejudicial or skewed towards a certain outcome. Any attempt to tune this search at the outset would overly constrain the result set (n=109) as of yesterday's test run. In other words a more effective content analysis occurs by introducing results-based logic once the feed appears in Feed Demon.

That's where you can construct "Watches" to pull instances of terms like:

* suppression
* fraud
* misleading
* confusion, etc.

...from the New Hampshire tracking folder where these hits reside.

Don't forget to sample several of the more questionable hits. They will acquaint you with terms you hadn't considered or steer you away from outcomes that are clearly off-the-mark from your search objectives.

The second stage of tweaking your RSS reader as news radar is to harvest the feeds sprouting from the sources included in your search results. Gathering up the list is easier than confirming each source's deployment or policy regarding RSS. The range is huge! Some papers package their outputs by sections of the paper. Some don't. Some dispense with RSS altogether, figuring that it will only cannibalize their beleaguered media empires.

There are a couple of alternatives to site hopping in search of the bright, orange RSS icon. One work-around is to include the inurl: syntax in the regular Google web search:

inurl:rss OR inurl:xml [insert semantics from Google News search] intitle:new intitle:hampshire

This workaround should get you a pre-confirmed list of feeds although it doesn't guarantee that they originate from ground zero live-free-or-eat-granite country.

Another way is to work from the colleges themselves as news sources. The very first hit I pulled yesterday yielded this list of Students for McCain backers by their academic institutions:

State Co-Chairs

Greg Boguslavsky -- Dartmouth College
Shaun Doherty -- Rivier College

University Chairs

Lianna French -- New England College
Joe Doiron -- New England College
Brendan Bickford -- New Hampshire Technical Institute
Trevor Chandler -- Plymouth State University
Brittany Puleo -- Rivier College

Julie Kraus -- Southern New Hampshire University
Regina Federico -- St. Anselm College
Allison Krause -- University of New Hampshire
Brandon Mancuso -- Franklin Pierce College
Dasha Bushmakin -- Keene State College
Ryan Dorris -- Daniel Webster College

In closing the follow-up would be to Google each college with the inurl syntax, filtering the pages that can be used to build your tracking folder in Feed Demon.

In Praise of Feed Demon

Feed Demon is an unfortunate name for an outstanding Information Management Tool. It's being sold (free download) as a personal organizer for RSS feeds. What it does really is create a pond of edible fish from an oceanful of loosely connected firehoses.

The key is to expand your comfort zone around what's RSS-enabled on the web and what's plain .html. It's easy enough to skim the Google ocean floor for appearances of RSS in URLs or the news sections of .com sites. Certainly acquainting your news queries with feeds and steering away from email alerts is a step in this direction.

What's there to prevent a warm fuzzy around RSS feeds? Lots of feeds (including blogs) have pre-defined defaults that push users toward one reader or another. The trick is to isolate the plain vanilla XML without the wrapper so you can feed your local copy of Feed Demon without hiccups, pop-ups, or passwords.

The difference between querying a search tool and a feed reader is the difference between rolling the dice and staying on top of what you need to know. Anyone with a pile-on of automated emails knows how tedious and time-consuming it is to dig out from under a pile of alerts.

There's no way to overlay your own need-to-know priorities around screaming urgencies or passing fancies. Every alert looks like a priority -- until you open it. Yes, you can create multiple email accounts but then you've opened up another receptacle without reducing the garbage piling up in your in-box.

One of the other unsold factors about RSS Readers is that the very term presumes you actually have the time to plow through the thousands of hits that will find their way into your reader. You don't. The information is waiting for you but it won't burn a hole in your pocket if you fight off the temptation to be on top of everything at once. First take a deep breath. Now replenish your feeds without acknowledging every update that lands within your reach.

Okay. So now I'm going to gush about the pond factor as it relates to catchable fish in Feed Demon:

First of all when you're about to freak out because your pond is threatening to become the size of a toxic, unswimmable lake you can press the anxiety button and any article over the prescribed limit will be marked as "read" -- that doesn't mean it goes away. You can still search it. You can even create automated filters that channel keywords into specific feeds and folders. It simply won't be considered fresh or new.

The search component works two ways: (1) you can search ad hoc among the thousands of feeds -- imminently preferable to doing the same among 8 billion pages indexed on Google. (2) you can set up filters in anticipation of hot topics you need to pulse (usually exact matches for a person or small entity within a larger group).

The folder concept is nothing unique. But folder designations are important for organizing the types of content that spans the feed streams. For instance it's one thing to use a To-Do list schema: gotta get a job, gotta push out a blog post based on what's latest, great. It's quite another to organize according to how the feed finds its way in: is it a series of job postings? Latest slew of news articles? Twitterings from top-of-mind text strings?

To pretend that these vastly different forms are all part of the same content soup is to conceed an important advantage of Feed Demon. Knowing who generates content and who it's intended for is the single most important attribute for understanding the context of any feed, regardless of the facts, views expressed, and the form for doing so. That understanding is what we're losing with the disappearance of traditional media. One way to reclaim this is to set up your folders according to media types be they newspapers, jobsites, blogs, social nets, etc.

I guess one aspect of Feed Demon that is more a solid feature than a best practice is the Dinosaur report that lists subscriptions which haven't been updated in the past 30 days. It's helpful to combine this feature with the "Find New Feeds" option that indexes a collective grouping of feeds among Feed Demon users. Sometimes this is helpful for determining correct terms and tags surrounding topics of interest. Other times it's more a distraction -- particulary when the feed remains turned on but the lights are out -- the feed's dried up.

In Praise of Feed Demon

Feed Demon is an unfortunate name for an outstanding Information Management Tool. It's being sold (free download) as a personal organizer for RSS feeds. What it does really is create a pond of edible fish from an oceanful of loosely connected firehoses.

The key is to expand your comfort zone around what's RSS-enabled on the web and what's plain .html. It's easy enough to skim the Google ocean floor for appearances of RSS in URLs or the news sections of .com sites. Certainly acquainting your news queries with feeds and steering away from email alerts is a step in this direction.

What's there to prevent a warm fuzzy around RSS feeds? Lots of feeds (including blogs) have pre-defined defaults that push users toward one reader or another. The trick is to isolate the plain vanilla XML without the wrapper so you can feed your local copy of Feed Demon without hiccups, pop-ups, or passwords.

The difference between querying a search tool and a feed reader is the difference between rolling the dice and staying on top of what you need to know. Anyone with a pile-on of automated emails knows how tedious and time-consuming it is to dig out from under a pile of alerts.

There's no way to overlay your own need-to-know priorities around screaming urgencies or passing fancies. Every alert looks like a priority -- until you open it. Yes, you can create multiple email accounts but then you've opened up another receptacle without reducing the garbage piling up in your in-box.

One of the other unsold factors about RSS Readers is that the very term presumes you actually have the time to plow through the thousands of hits that will find their way into your reader. You don't. The information is waiting for you but it won't burn a hole in your pocket if you fight off the temptation to be on top of everything at once. First take a deep breath. Now replenish your feeds without acknowledging every update that lands within your reach.

Okay. So now I'm going to gush about the pond factor as it relates to catchable fish in Feed Demon:

First of all when you're about to freak out because your pond is threatening to become the size of a toxic, unswimmable lake you can press the anxiety button and any article over the prescribed limit will be marked as "read" -- that doesn't mean it goes away. You can still search it. You can even create automated filters that channel keywords into specific feeds and folders. It simply won't be considered fresh or new.

The search component works two ways: (1) you can search ad hoc among the thousands of feeds -- imminently preferable to doing the same among 8 billion pages indexed on Google. (2) you can set up filters in anticipation of hot topics you need to pulse (usually exact matches for a person or small entity within a larger group).

The folder concept is nothing unique. But folder designations are important for organizing the types of content that spans the feed streams. For instance it's one thing to use a To-Do list schema: gotta get a job, gotta push out a blog post based on what's latest, great. It's quite another to organize according to how the feed finds its way in: is it a series of job postings? Latest slew of news articles? Twitterings from top-of-mind text strings?

To pretend that these vastly different forms are all part of the same content soup is to conceed an important advantage of Feed Demon. Knowing who generates content and who it's intended for is the single most important attribute for understanding the context of any feed, regardless of the facts, views expressed, and the form for doing so. That understanding is what we're losing with the disappearance of traditional media. One way to reclaim this is to set up your folders according to media types be they newspapers, jobsites, blogs, social nets, etc.

I guess one aspect of Feed Demon that is more a solid feature than a best practice is the Dinosaur report that lists subscriptions which haven't been updated in the past 30 days. It's helpful to combine this feature with the "Find New Feeds" option that indexes a collective grouping of feeds among Feed Demon users. Sometimes this is helpful for determining correct terms and tags surrounding topics of interest. Other times it's more a distraction -- particulary when the feed remains turned on but the lights are out -- the feed's dried up.

Tag, We're It

Yesterday I attended Laurie Damianos's discussion at the Boston KM Forum ("Tag Me -- Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise"). I had the good fortune of meeting Laurie first at last spring's Enterprise Search Summit.

I found that my number of questions for Laurie has increased since our last interview for the Provider Base piece set to go in the Nov/Dec Searcher. That increase is not because Laurie dodges good questions. It is inspired by the topic -- the richness of the subject itself.

To her credit as a speaker Laurie led an attentive and engaging group whose inputs were both numerous and broadly distributed. Here are some of the more engrossing threads of our dynamic session:

Life in Email --

The immediate remedy at Mitre began as the antidote to a ton of email sitting on some restricted fileserver archive. Increasing access points to content was the business case. A persuasive case was made that there was an over-reliance on 1:1 communication (email) whose knowledge might prove useful to others. Interestingly the Mitre approach includes bookmarking email message based on embedded links in the message.

Anatomy of a Tag --

Do the users make up their own terms? Apparently they have the choice between a pre-formed set of suggested tags or their own. The form includes the original bookmarker and others who've bookmarked their entries. Laurie refers to the comment feature as "a reverse blog."

Links to Nowhere --

Pointers need owners or the link goes stale. The broken link icon shows benefits of a link scan process that tests for 404 errors. Each owner is notified of the bookmarks they develop which they can choose to ignore, fix, or delete. Hovering over a padlock tells the user how to pick the lock (i.e. what password to use or group to contact). Users can mouse over faces and get lots of detail at a glance. When they leave the company the residual bookmarks are placed in separate account -- they can be copied for 90 days or let expire.

Social Tags (Supply) and Search Terms (Demand) --

The terms that bubble to the top of the results pages are not repesented in Mitre's subject taxonomy. According to Laurie the taxonomy is growing ... slowly. The search term is creating equivalencies between search terms and tags. Governance rules are in place to maintain the folksonomy so it is not altered by an intermediary. Laurie's team allows the differences to remain, not trying to normalize different forms of the same expression.

Expert Finders --

Administrators and gatekeepers had all the topic-related documents so they've been falsely deemed as experts. The same fiction occurs when a top-tagger is confused with being an expert in the subject they're tagging. There's no gaming of the system because there's no built-in incentive to compete head-on or outrank the next prolific tagger.

Social Bookmark Reporting --

There's a seven day window of the most recent popular tags. This breaks the dominance of librarian taggers as most prolific contributors. Tagging activity shows how users are related by interest area. Users can view bookmarks by department. Different sorting options including tags, bookmarks, bookmarks by department. Laurie noted some surprisingly bad taggers even as the firm's KM enablers or "knowledge stewards." Lynda Moulton noted that it takes mindset to do it consistently and effectively. People are getting it.

Tagging by the Numbers --

The system holds...

* 21,000 bookmarks
* 99,000 tags with 12.5K unique to the system (-- doesn't account for spelling and punctuation discrepancies)
* Average number of tags have doubled from 2.7 to 5.4
* The past three years the average is that bookmarks are 83% external

Performance Benchmarks --

According to Caterina Fake of Flickr 9-15% of population are contributors in social communities. This equates to 85-90% of users as lurkers. Fourteen percent of user population contributes at Mitre among those with access. Half of employees use the system.

Next Steps for Tagging --

Laurie mentioned an organization called LCC ("Language Computer Corporation") that examines semantic construction of document to relate tags to each other by generating "did-you-mean-this prompts" to the content provider. It also make recommendations to other users: "you need to talk to this person." It's based on common interests they're sharing beyond the recognition that their interests are shared.

Other Tagging Resources --

FURL caches the bookmarked resources. Users request feature but can't provide it internally because of copyright restrictions. Scuttle is easy to deploy and extend. Twine is another solution with an interesting social component. ConnectBeam and DogEar were also mentioned as self-contained tagging platforms.

Tag, We're It

Yesterday I attended Laurie Damianos's discussion at the Boston KM Forum ("Tag Me -- Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise"). I had the good fortune of meeting Laurie first at last spring's Enterprise Search Summit.

I found that my number of questions for Laurie has increased since our last interview for the Provider Base piece set to go in the Nov/Dec Searcher. That increase is not because Laurie dodges good questions. It is inspired by the topic -- the richness of the subject itself.

To her credit as a speaker Laurie led an attentive and engaging group whose inputs were both numerous and broadly distributed. Here are some of the more engrossing threads of our dynamic session:

Life in Email --

The immediate remedy at Mitre began as the antidote to a ton of email sitting on some restricted fileserver archive. Increasing access points to content was the business case. A persuasive case was made that there was an over-reliance on 1:1 communication (email) whose knowledge might prove useful to others. Interestingly the Mitre approach includes bookmarking email message based on embedded links in the message.

Anatomy of a Tag --

Do the users make up their own terms? Apparently they have the choice between a pre-formed set of suggested tags or their own. The form includes the original bookmarker and others who've bookmarked their entries. Laurie refers to the comment feature as "a reverse blog."

Links to Nowhere --

Pointers need owners or the link goes stale. The broken link icon shows benefits of a link scan process that tests for 404 errors. Each owner is notified of the bookmarks they develop which they can choose to ignore, fix, or delete. Hovering over a padlock tells the user how to pick the lock (i.e. what password to use or group to contact). Users can mouse over faces and get lots of detail at a glance. When they leave the company the residual bookmarks are placed in separate account -- they can be copied for 90 days or let expire.

Social Tags (Supply) and Search Terms (Demand) --

The terms that bubble to the top of the results pages are not repesented in Mitre's subject taxonomy. According to Laurie the taxonomy is growing ... slowly. The search term is creating equivalencies between search terms and tags. Governance rules are in place to maintain the folksonomy so it is not altered by an intermediary. Laurie's team allows the differences to remain, not trying to normalize different forms of the same expression.

Expert Finders --

Administrators and gatekeepers had all the topic-related documents so they've been falsely deemed as experts. The same fiction occurs when a top-tagger is confused with being an expert in the subject they're tagging. There's no gaming of the system because there's no built-in incentive to compete head-on or outrank the next prolific tagger.

Social Bookmark Reporting --

There's a seven day window of the most recent popular tags. This breaks the dominance of librarian taggers as most prolific contributors. Tagging activity shows how users are related by interest area. Users can view bookmarks by department. Different sorting options including tags, bookmarks, bookmarks by department. Laurie noted some surprisingly bad taggers even as the firm's KM enablers or "knowledge stewards." Lynda Moulton noted that it takes mindset to do it consistently and effectively. People are getting it.

Tagging by the Numbers --

The system holds...

* 21,000 bookmarks
* 99,000 tags with 12.5K unique to the system (-- doesn't account for spelling and punctuation discrepancies)
* Average number of tags have doubled from 2.7 to 5.4
* The past three years the average is that bookmarks are 83% external

Performance Benchmarks --

According to Caterina Fake of Flickr 9-15% of population are contributors in social communities. This equates to 85-90% of users as lurkers. Fourteen percent of user population contributes at Mitre among those with access. Half of employees use the system.

Next Steps for Tagging --

Laurie mentioned an organization called LCC ("Language Computer Corporation") that examines semantic construction of document to relate tags to each other by generating "did-you-mean-this prompts" to the content provider. It also make recommendations to other users: "you need to talk to this person." It's based on common interests they're sharing beyond the recognition that their interests are shared.

Other Tagging Resources --

FURL caches the bookmarked resources. Users request feature but can't provide it internally because of copyright restrictions. Scuttle is easy to deploy and extend. Twine is another solution with an interesting social component. ConnectBeam and DogEar were also mentioned as self-contained tagging platforms.