KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Two -- Knowledge Engineering for Solitary Scrum Masters

(c) http://3.bp.blogspot.com/

Installment Summary: The Big Four knowledge survivalist jumps into the awaiting arms of the engineering camp for a once mighty developer of media software – back when hardware mattered. At first the opportunity is virgin territory. This inviting place to plant the knowledge flag is signified by efforts to source and build a search capability for leveraging the company’s collective assets. The initial optimism is however tempered by factional infighting and an unwillingness to fly those engineering colors under the SAME flag.

The Factory Gates Open for Knowledge Engineering

A week before I was to ship out as a SharePoint business ninja within IT, I hitched onto a passing knowledge raft. This water-logged trial balloon was powered by the knowledge-seeking curiosities of the engineering arm of Keen Core Technology – arms dealer to Hollywood, TV, and recording industries, and now under siege by an unceasing array of disruptor insurgencies from all sides of the media production spectrum.

While I had worked along-side IT and engineers with MBAs (a.k.a. “management consultants”) I had never been subsumed into the belly of the engine room: that is IT itself. I learned software-making as a repeatable cycle in need of documentation as-in coding the coders. I learned about daily stand-ups as the perfect antidote for task-drenched programmers who would rather be writing code than getting sucked into meetings.

My mission at Keen Core was to classify the wikis, channel the documentation stream, and socialize the release cycle of the half-dozen or so product development teams. Ultimately this meant distilling all these outputs into a single automated helping of digestible knowledge called “search.” The fact that there was no enterprise-wide answer to the perennial how-do-we-know-what-we-know question meant two things to the engineering crew of Keen Core:

1. Conceptual – how do we boil this ocean of applications, file-shares, lapsed repositories, and group-based collaborations from Outlook to Google Docs?
2. Practical – once boiled, how do we care and feed this resource so we can retreat to our safety zones in the comfort of knowing we can test our forward-leaning hunches against our collective history?

The Knowledge Safety Net

From a theoretical perspective the wish list that brought me to Keen Core began and ended with the same staggering and sober realization: we can scale the production of code but we don’t have a clue how to trap, catalog, and ultimately leverage the by-products of that effort.

This overwhelming sense of an organization’s inability to get out of its own way is not well-served by a top-down inventory of all assets – whether they live in the U.S. Patent Office or under “the digital landfill” as AIIM's John Mancini would say.  Rather than over-analyze the backlog of dumpster-grade documents, we looked to establish the safety net – not the uber knowledge archive.

There was nothing random to this sampling. Domain experts come out of the wood work – reluctantly sometimes because they’re often “heads down” …

• On some failure-is-not-an-option mission, or
• Closing in on some new shortcut to faster, better, cheaper.

These are not the sycophants of social media in search of the likability badging trophy. 

These are the folks who build stuff. They might not communicate effectively and their managerial skills lapsed long ago – if they ever had them. They are socially speaking apolitical, meaning they are drawn to fixing problems, not towards handling them. They are by-and-large drawn from the ranks of engineering and they are my brilliant, argumentative, recalcitrant, misunderstood people.

These are the ones who emerge when the call goes out for who-knows-how-stuff-works. And like their own circles, the documentation they travel in lands off the documentation radar. It lives on the outskirts of any centralized repository that confers authority, explains connections, or unpacks the experience that inspired it. In the case of the Keen Core safety net it was little more than providing a link to an obscure server I might or might not find password accessible. But after a series of non-threatening prods I had my unofficial off-the-map collection of references that the engineering teams swear by.

Not the sanitized intranet they were used to swearing at.

The Bake-off

The legendary chef Julia Child once said, “Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.” She might as well have been describing the process for picking an enterprise search engine. This proof-of-concept or PoC is your due diligence for matching internal priorities and selection criteria to your bake-off results. PoCs demand an improbable mix of reference able work product – no matter where it comes from, the application particulars, or the sub par referencing used to catalog the electronic version of what lives inside organizational roles and responsibilities.

Once I had my vetted safety net, I was clear to map them to the safe harbor of the search interface where memories get tested, experiments are run, and explanations are concocted.  That mapping included a healthy respect for the mismatch between Googling for cat videos that stick to our social billboards and researching a backlog of databases that live behind a corporate firewall. A PoC was undertaken to reduce the vast, uncharted wilderness of Keen Core to a single search box and a choice of search vendors – hence the “bake-off” that played out against the following design choices:

#1 – Fact versus Conceptual Search: Most business problems are not reducible to the distance of the closest pizzeria with the highest reputation ranking. In other words the answer is neither immediate nor obvious. It’s not persuasive on its own but needs the back-story to connect its relevance to the problem at-hand. That connection can only be provided by the searcher – not the search engine. The conceptual search idea was welcome by my colleagues as they were well-acquainted with the status and responsibilities of domain-expert-as-content-curator.

#2 – Single Answers versus Iterative: Because of their research-focused nature, most business or enterprise search problems are not only conceptual but iterative. They are greatly influenced by changes in time frame, authorship, formatting, narrative style, and context – the reason the artifact exists in the first place. Enterprise search results defy definitive or conclusive answers. They’re conversational – not just among peers but with the search interface itself which guides the searcher with:

1. Related events, 
2. People, 
3. Locations, and 
4. Organizations that suggest …
5. Further probing, 
6. Competing explanations, or even …
7. Complete redirections of our original assumptions.

This relatedness was realized in the proof of concept. Human-mediated tagging was neither doable nor desirable but the prospective search technologies proved up to the task for grouping these relations as search facets.

#3 – Search versus Source Dependent: The key to building our knowledge safety net is not so much keyword searching as enterprise sourcing: The ability not just to crawl volumes of pages, folders, and files but to evidence why anyone bothered to do so. Search scoping is essential because it brings the sense-making role of any single artifact apparent to colleagues with otherwise no shared experience beyond a common holiday calendar and pay cycle. Sourcing logic reinforces the cohesive logic of coordination across business lines and supporting functions:

1. Want to know what the customer sees before it’s out on your website? Search on marketing. 
2. Want to understand our products better? Search on training. 
3. Visual learner? Precede to training videos, etc. 
4. The more technical explanation? Go to the core requirements hammered out by account managers and the engineers who design to them.

Everyone at Keen Core understood the different lenses for sifting through the same content. The challenge was that only engineering had a seat at the bake-off table.

Enterprise Assets or Liabilities?

The good news is that each of these ingredients was factored into an enterprise search proof of concept for the engineering crew at Keen Core. The correct sources were indexed and configured to a search-driven interface reflecting both the nature of the index and the information-seeking goals of the searcher. Better still I got to run a true side-by-side comparison between two enterprise search vendors (Coveo and Google). The thinking here: My colleagues could base their tool of choice on their actual problem-solving.

The bad news is that Keen Core’s enterprise resembled a potluck more than a catered sit-down. The number of place settings changed with who wanted a seat at the table. The unsettled seating arrangements made it hard to move forward without revisiting some tired assumptions like:

• The Google Slam Dunk: Hey, wipe that Google web smirk off your enterprise requirements for Google Search Appliance. We’re talking two different engines here!
• The How Big-is-Our-Data Routine? What constitutes a fair test sample when a vendor solution crawls across diverse operating systems, repositories, and legacy apps (with licenses no one bothered to renew)?  
  
• The How-Open-is-Open Question? What's bothering your colleagues about access to resources? What's the important stuff we can get access to if we need it?  What are the content bottlenecks that hinder a silo-bound organization?

Conclusion: At every milestone selecting the right vendor was resistant to simple risk-to-benefit reductions. Multiple trade-offs were the norm. So were the dug-in heels of competing vendor camps. All of these larger lessons were lost to the conflicting agendas of poker-faced stakeholders – regardless of the actual bake-off winner.

Next week: The bake-off verdict is clouded by a crash diet spending plan courtesy of a stock delisting and a CEO whose blunt leadership style distances him from all non-depreciable costs -- including the company’s ingrained know-how on the building of its products.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dreams in Headlights: Her Impersonates a Future That Commoditizes Love

To paraphrase David Byrne, in Spike Jonze's not-to-distant time horizon, the future depicted in the movie Her is …

A place where nothing ever happens.

For instance, creative achievement is evidenced as a documentary of a mother sleeping. No, not a work about sleep or moms or nocturnal maternal emissions. The camera is frozen on a static star of a sleep study.

Is this a tribute to slow TV or simply the vacuous expanse of uninspired alienation that awaits us past the end of history? Joaquin Phoenix's character is a greeting card dictator-turned-personal-history-arranger. By his own admission he's run the gamut of human experience in only slightly more than one-third of his biological life. It's all patterned out, as if the big data wheel of probability already lived it for him. Of course there's no great expanse of history or imagination to cross for the audience to conceive of no greater turn-on for our protagonist than a woman he can turn off at will (a.k.a. Scarlett Johansson ... as Samantha ... as Her).

But to arrive at that exalted and zipless state, we must first climb over the encumbrances of mid-21st century Los Angeles. It's not a high, low or middle society so much as a neutered and frictionless tunnel of over-educated, close, but not touching (and yet so touchy) automatons, leading lives that appear more simulated than stimulating.

Don’t Touch the Exhibits

There is nothing Dystopian in the infrastructure. There are no marauding packs of feral gypsy gang lords. No one is warming over a post carbon, methane crisp at the beaches of tomorrow. The biggest obstacle for Theodore is to avoid stepping on the ankles and torsos of the wedged-in open house of Next Gen sun worshippers. Wealth distribution's been all figured out. Traffic patterns have been scheduled in advance. The obese and diabetic have retired to off-screen leper colonies. Convincing meds have released a drug-free world from the labors of addiction. Hostility means you're carrying someone else's baggage. And they're just as happy if you don't.

Most of the movie's confrontations are big drawn-out clashes of the genders. Relationships are skirmishes waiting to happen. Ironically Theodore's metro sexual manliness is hailed by his office mate and inspires his first post-divorce dating encounter. No sooner can you say restaurant selection anxiety disorder, his magic conquest carpet is rolled in and scorched by his blindsided dinner date. Her advanced academic pedigree belies her naughty school charms. The unfreezing of his flowing juices pushes her abandonment buttons: Is he the whole prayer resolution package or drive-by sleaze bag from the same package store?

Tender Generic Mercies

My favorite set-up to the zipless intelligent soul design climax has little to do with dating freak-outs or similarly ill-formed flashbacks of a brawny-brained, emotionally-stunted ex-spouse. It's the facade of authenticity provided by Theodore's gift of verbal approximation of generic intimacy. Sort of a SIRI bookstore reading of a texting-happy Hallmark laureate. Add the idyllic trappings of an imagined togetherness never actually shared  by the customers who dial-in Theodore's prose because their own reticence blocks the connective emotional tissue from forming around we still know too casually as a commitment to our significant someone.

The manufacture of superficial intimacy tees up with the artificial intelligence cocktail in ways that the servant-turned-antagonist (2001) and Pinocchio-kindled parental love (AI) could only break down as instruction sets. The messier business of decoding our emotional bearings from bedroom, to alter, to probate finds the AI cinema formula in rare and elastic form, stretching to accommodate our most far away looks. We're gaping into our own dreaminess with an impunity reserved in our time for control freaks of the rich and famous. It's the AI elements that enable this immersive bubble of mirth to mushroom without risk, or guilt, or the slightest creeping realization that the rest of our better selves are engulfed by that same indelible reflection. It's that temptation to be dreaming around the campfire of the oncoming headlights. Entrapment by entrancement. Anything less than Her is tabled as a to-do list item for some day, any day, eventually following tomorrow.

Her Fast Acting Majesty

The deliberate invocation of a nearby future was decided by Jonze first and foremost to get us vested in the outcome -- that we would see this day evolve, if not the actual artifice. I'm also guessing it was not so much to raise expectations on that future so much as lower our guard on the present close at hand. Our solipsistic romance with the immediacies captured in our smart phone of yesteryear is replaced by companionship, configured from best practices associated with...

• Childlike curiosity


• Canine loyalty


• Valentino romance


• Monster lust


• Spongy, experiential absorption


• Meticulous virtual house-keeping (including the pruning and curation of 86,000 ponderous emails), and


• The tenacity of a professional agent

The enormity of that attention to detail enables Her to repackage the small funny subset to a welcoming market for those messages (as if that market was speaking in a voice only Her could hear above the conversation-neutrality of our talkative interactions).

Sexperimentation

The use of surrogates is another playful glimpse into a plausible future through Google-tinted glasses. We see a salty-tongued Pillsbury Dough Boy impersonator channeling Seth McFarland through 3D PlayStation whose console transforms every finger into their speediest, thumb-texting best.

The sex surrogate portrays the physical semblance of the disembodied OS. Our human body double is a willing accomplice. But Theodore can't bridge the distance between autopilot lust and the deeper complexities of his true OS affections. Ultimately it's not the absence of the human form but the presence of an emotional dishonesty that drives Theodore and Her apart and dwarves the convenience factors in the value proposition of OS as a delivery system for love. To Theodore it is no longer fantasy. To those outside this circle, there is no "couple." The breakup to be is a head-trip, not a spiritual journey.

Looking for Mister Sidebar

Her doesn't cheat so much as mutate into a superior intelligence of fortune. Her seeks out the philosophical entrails of cryogenically laced celestial packing über thinkers. Her keeping up with Theodore as customer-master is now expressed by how far the teacher and student roles have reversed. At one point she's engaging thousands of other game piece-like presences while Theodore is passing the time on a train, asking Her to guess an exact number for the thousands of trees passing across the landscape. In that moment Her is the closest to human that Jonze can spin his creation. That's when the OS senses the suspicion of being cheated out of love. It is this fragility in our mating rituals where Her attention to Theodore is now and forever divided -- no matter how attentive the engineering being performed is lavished on us.

I will replay this film in my mind over and over again. It's not because of unexpected plot twists, stellar performances, or even a memorable relationship, but for this core notion of a masterful concept movie: Our attention is our most prized possession and how this stokes our passions, compromises our generosities, and seeps into all there is to love and ponder in our commitments to one another.

Revenge of the Passwords

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="290"] (c) http://mrcracker.com/2012/02/password-cracking-part-1-passwords/[/caption]

What is that invisible and shifting divide between helpful and hindrance? Between being useful and being used? Between being a consumer assisted by a labor-saving device and an unsuspecting supplicant being consumed by a tech consumer juggernaut? This boundary is often defined along age lines, between geeks and luddites, Silicon Valley versus the rest of us, etc.

But those boundaries can come down any time they're crossed. And they're being crossed faster these days than we know where those borders are shifting to. Do I want my sleep compromised by the timely interruption of the forecasted obstacles in the day ahead? Do I want my robo-car decelerating at the hint of a green-to-yellow traffic signal? If I pre-set my controls to accelerate for yellow lights will my settings be overridden by drivers willing to pay more for their need to run yellow lights (or outrun traffic laws)?

As Claire Cain Miller points out in last week's New York Times piece "Apps That Know What You Want, Before You Do," the lines between creepy and cool are not always so clear. Even drawing them to familiar boundaries can redefine whether these lines are crossable or whether we know which side of the divide we favor.

How about an app that tells you your team has stormed back from extinction and is on the verge of a heroic comeback? Who could argue with good unexpected news?

You don't need to be a sage in your gray beard years to form a healthy distrust of one's short-term memory. How about an app that guesses at all the PINs you favored the last time you checked your miles for a carrier you haven't flown on since all the unused points were traded for magazines that had since suspended publication?

It's the scope creep that shadows us in our expectations that our corrosive bodies can keep pace with our supple minds. By the time we hit 50 we have a strategy for nearly all the unexpected we can fathom from our heads, hearts, and stomachs. That's where the specter of a programmable salad of personal apps sounds more suggestive than proscriptive, more about limiting choices than about optimizing the meaning of direct experience. That's a world where we're reaching out to engage skin, bark, dirt, and surf at the expense of touching another screen. But it's not just the sensual world. It's the fragility of our rattled dispositions. We need time to absorb the untimeliest of blows. Lay-offs, divorces, suicide watches, and cancer readouts are not necessarily what we want scanned into calendars, socialized to networks, or tracked by prognosis. The machine is there to mitigate the risk to the programmer, not the defective nature of the harboring human. Are we really being blacklisted when we're disinvited from events that don't support the commercial aims of the event planner?

One of the guys interviewed for the piece put it this way:

“We have a technology that isn’t waiting for you to ask it a question, but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that.”

It's helpful when the trajectories of predictive search factor in traffic patterns. I'm positively elated when my phone asks if I want to disable the shake to shuffle. You know I do. Maybe it will grow fonts as big as my visual deficits when it detects how big my faultering eyes need to enlarge interfaces? Until then a few more developers have to turn middle age, And create a clapper for all that as yet unattached body armor we leave behind. Most likely these will be from appointments we had little hand in scheduling. And that's fine with a delivery system in which the messenger and message shaper are one in the same:

“The better we can provide information, even without you asking for it, the better we can provide commercial information people are excited to be promoting to you,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, told analysts in April.

A Problem Child Named Big Brother

The media has fixated under this past week’s news leak that all Americans are now and forever spied on until proven dead. Wait … that might not be provable. This revelation casts a glaring light on the low profile and high concept surveillance innovators within the clandestine NSA – the part of our intelligence community that makes the CIA seem catty and loose-lipped.

There was something both alarming and innocuous about the story that broke in the Guardian on June 6th. This snooping or PRISM program is a vast soup of browser logs, text, graphics, videos, voice calls, and all manner of singing, dancing, and soliciting from my screen, to yours, and your next of yours. Think of the color-coded warning systems from the Bush era reformatted by degrees of separation and you begin to see Obama era risk assessment through the PRISM lens.  Concepts like criminal motive or case relevance have been replaced by the pervasive need to place our electronic selves under a passive and insidious house arrest.

Now I like to connect hypothetical dots like the next armchair analyst. But I resist the sweeping explanatory powers of slam dunk conspiracy theories. I’ve always maintained that paranoia is a luxury of the self-important. Our lives are much more open, generic, and predictive as data patterns than we are as erratic and complex individuals.

So before we start quaking in Orwellian tones, let's give the NSA its day in our court of opinion. Even if they answer in confidence to secret courts, it makes sense to vet the rationales behind such a deliberate and undiscriminating assault on our virtual identities. Besides we’re all part of the same feuding and dysfunctional family. If we know Big Brother’s allegiances and loyalties maybe he won’t seem so poker-faced, inscrutable, and extortion-prone.

Equal Mistreatment

First of all, it boils down to fairness. After all, what could be more even-handed than to spy on everyone? How could anyone feel frozen out of the action or singled out for selective treatment?

Secondly, when it comes to justice systems you can't bet against the house. That's because the PRISM guardians own all the evidence. You need to play by their rules to prove: (a) they're not following them as (b) they are following you. It's a circular tail-wags-dog-chasing-own-tail situation. It’s designed to tie tea party activists and ACLU partisans in knots for years to come. You say your rights are violated? Hard to try your case when your first amendment freedoms have been guantanamoed down in broad constitutional daylight. That's the blank check known as the Patriot Act -- the NSA having its way within the exigencies of perceived threats. Case closed.

And even without a public trial, there’s a great potential in PRISM for self-inflicted embarrassment. What if Big Brother arrests the wrong guy and that guy is you or me? That’s the advantage of secrecy. It’s botched raid insurance. It’s a hedge against hiring the wrong henchmen. It’s the peace of mind that comes with plausible deniability -- the first mover freedom to ask forgiveness in the future because it's easier than getting timely permission from a government at war with itself.

Home Team Advantage

But never mind our institutional paralysis. Judging by the poll numbers the public's prepared to write a blank check to rival the size of the credit card financing of our delinquent war chest. According to the New York Times' David Brooks, recent polling suggests that pending terrorist investigations are beating up on the prospect of privacy intrusions by a 2:1 margin.

Take my privacy, please. I have nothing to hide. That's assuming a healthy skepticism of those bringing the charges, equal access to the evidence they're citing, and an informed and disinterested judges who won't throw us under the wheels of justice. As Danah Boyd writes this week in Slate ("If You're OK With Surveillance Because You Have "Nothing to Hide," Think Again), the big data Rorschach of PRISM is a placeholder for pious aggression as much as discrete protection:

“It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.”

And it all boils down to the specifics of the cases yet to be brought -- namely who's prosecuting the aggression and who's being protected. A concentrated set of assets in the hands of a select few is a containment begging for its lid to be blown off. An establishment that hates surprises will conduct itself in secrecy and cloak itself in suspicion -- namely a presumption of guilt in the quest to wage the first articulated post 9-11 terrorist containment policy -- Dick Cheney's Doctrine of Preemption.

Reasons Boyd:

“[I]f someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s not impossible to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data.”

Safety Deposits

My problem child understanding of the PRISM program is shaped by my job as a knowledge manager. It's my responsibility to make information available, useful, and even prepared for the uses intended by my inundated colleagues. My role is justified by the assumption that when folks don't have to care where things are kept they can free up their resourcefulness to solve problems, not to be compromised by their login credentials or limited understanding of the gatekeepers and their keepings.

But in a world where Google can settle most public arguments there is a parallel private one. It says that secure assets deserve a single, repository. Think employer records and documentation. It's that safety deposit box ideal that lulls most managers into the seduction that the information unity of a single storage location will save our collective and individual asses. Our big NSA brother is no different. Only in our case it's the prospect of lost income, not privacy, that stokes the hot single repository coals.

It goes something like this:

“This is my livelihood. It's in a state of perpetual risk because I'll be blindsided by some error or memo or bug or unredeemable email tied to me six file folders deep on some mystery server.”

It may sound as quaint as a world of gold standards. But there are a whole flock of literalists who would throw all their mattress-bound savings from the market run-ups of yesteryear just to be at one with those bricks. There's Grandpa Ron Paul. There's Senator Rand. No slouch when it comes to blustering all over the shadows of big bro. Oh, look, Glen Beck's grabbing a titanium-laced shovel. They're all digging furiously to exhume the sacred dirt of a dignified Fort Knox burial. There but for fortune or just to keep the Fed accountable? I'm no economist so here’s the takeaway for my fellow knowledge managers:

Everyone needs a mental space holder -- a concrete sleeve for bookending their references. It doesn't matter how virtual, triangulated, asymmetric or plain old complicated the chessboard has become. People clamor for the tangible in a sea of uncertainties. So too do lynch mobs and NSA bureaucrats who are pledged to upholding the public order in blank check proportions.

Inner Sanctum

Hence the mega warehouse to trump all data centers in Bluffdale Utah desert is now under permanent occupation by the commandos of security clearances.

NSA isn’t just boiling the ocean in Bluffdale. It's trawling the ocean floor as if national boundaries didn't exist. It's sucking our transgressions and transmissions down with a giant straw and belching our hiccups and encoded byproducts back into a vast swill of super collections. Rumor has it that the threat of a wild fire would unleash a sprinkler system so powerful that nearby Salt Lake City could slip into the Great Salt Lake. The collection effort appears as ambitious in volume as it's frivolous in an ultimate motive or meaning or justification. Data is the new stockpile. We collect because ... we can.

Since I'm spilling a parade of secrets I'll toss my baton in and march proudly with the middle-aged telecommuting knowledge grunts. I'll sign the release, I'll self-incriminate. I'll freely confess that I am a bona fide metadata freak. The layers of details buried in the assets I maintain hold the key to making information searchable and ultimately useful.

Social Dragnet

And the hastily scribbled set of defensible talking points is that metadata can't hurt you. I say hasty because if the NSA was truly in the damage control business they would have hired the PR wing of the leaker contractor. Booz Allen could repent. They could assure the public that metadata is actually a good thing. Especially in private where your credit card company asks if you were pumping gas in Colorado at the same time that you were sucking down brewskies in bean town.

The insidious side of metadata is that it provides groupable sub-sets of unseemly data sprawls. Add some unfounded suspicions to the mix and you've got guilt by association. That's a dragnet that happens every day on Facebook. What will happen when the terror-mongers catch up to the marketers? These are no longer personal computers.

It doesn't matter what you spring on your gadgetware. So long as we're tethered to a network there's a screen that only we can see and Google and the Google customers. And you thought your love of GMail made you a valued account holder? That personal device is more impersonal than meets the consuming eye. That won't change with your first pair of Google Glasses -- until you splurge on an even newer pair of Google spyglasses.

Ping Tone: Has the Line on RSS Gone Dead?

Twitter, Facebook, Google – none of the big three content aggregators are pledging net neutrality when it comes to sending and receiving news feeds outside their site domains.

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In the past two years they’ve all rejected that tireless and under-appreciated workhorse of boundary-free newsfeeds – RSS. All three have removed the ability to consume their feeds (or anyone else’s) via the open standard of RSS in favor of proprietary formats written to their own APIs.

Logging out of the RSS loop has a lot more to do with shuttling web traffic than shuttering the need for open content standards. In a world of cost-free information, RSS has managed to outlive its market without outlasting the need for it.

In his article Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: How Google Crushed and Abandoned the RSS industry, Ed Bott documents the decade long demise of Google Reader from up and comer to down for the counter:

“In an era of mobile devices, where synchronizing content and settings between multiple locations is a crucial feature, losing Google's sync platform is literally a killer.”

Oh my. Why is it that every trade opinion that passes as critical thought is based on the viability of an existing business model? The writing on that prophetic wall is this: If it’s too small for Google to keep the lights on, why still carry that RSS torch?

Bott concedes the point that RSS is still a viable channel for content delivery but not without the ping tone required in its consumption by mobile devices:

“Of course, Twitter and Facebook made a very large dent in the usage of RSS, but there's still a market there. A big one, in fact, if measured by the standards of a business that's not Google-sized. And now, with Google abandoning that service, any business that uses RSS gets to go back to the glory days of 2006. Ugh.”

As a business model it seems that RSS is a victim of its own success. An open standard co-opted into the activity streams of big social media. Leave smart phones out of it and you still have a surefire standard for delivering pull-based newsfeeds. That’s the stuff we know we’ll want to read in advance. RSS eliminates step one: the need to track it down before the more essential step: catching up to it within a sea of distractions and unfiltered merchandising.

The problem in a post Web 2.0 world there is at best a casual relationship between the utility of a technology and its commercial viability. RSS was invented at a time where content was still a monetizable notion. The investment lights have dimmed now that connection’s been severed by big social and search media.

The rationale in question starts with the assumption that:

• RSS is useful
• It should be upheld as a delivery standard; and thus,
• A bankable asset for any apps outfit that knows how to thread the name-dropping needle so that subscribers can track topics and ideas as easily as they can follow celebrities and human train wrecks.

After all, how could 5.3 million Delicious users go wrong? Easy. The ping tone went dead years ago on Google Chrome itself which never saw an RSS feed it failed to render correctly.

The result is that we early adopters and independent sorts face a new bait and switch dilemma: Take what big search and social media serve up for exploratory grabs but follow the money before you trust your intuitions for there is no free Google lunch. And we might do well to cast a wary eye beyond next gen beta pilots but something as basic as blocking sites in Google search results.

Writing in the Washington Post Ezra Klein writes that such untimely shutdowns…

"…[A]ll have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in 'free' Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do."

In 2013 aggregators still haven’t figured out pull media. Until someone can aim news products at content consumers as well as friend updates on Facebook it appears that RSS will be relegated to hobbyist -journalists like Klein and the Atlantic’s James Fallows. As one of those pariah-researcher types I’d rather entrap my information than line the sights of would-be Ad Words sponsors.

RSS is one of those private label markup languages that's been branded as an activity stream by the social media creature elites. But if your primary goal is to make plausible contacts instead of instant monetization, there's a lot more to be done than hear first about how a friend-imposter's posted their latest bowl of snacks to their daily food updates.

The easiest way to round up to the most active feeds is to browse (not search) major news sites for their RSS sections. That's because there's no standard way that webmasters work this into their architectures. Here are a few examples:

• http://news.yahoo.com/sitemap/
• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5216556/
• http://online.wsj.com/public/page/rss_news_and_feeds.html

You could parse this out with a splash of Google syntax + semantics:

inurl:rss "(monitor | track | discover | uncover | reference)(startups | companies | sales | leads)" "subscribe to"

Here are a couple of suggestions for embracing RSS even when big search and social are backing away:

1) Know your news flow:

The news volume of newsfeeds are erratic at best. Some channels are spam channels, a fool’s errand of cross-posted press releases that should never rise from the cutting room trading floor. Others may have lofty and expansive labels like WSJ.com: Deals & Deal Makers. But if you sample the stream you'll see a trickle. There's a world of difference between trying to tap a definitive source of transactional details versus a "word on the street" describing one subjective take on yesterday's foot traffic. It's actually more promising to start with the fire-hose (e.g. WSJ.com: US Business) and then reign it in with filtering that reflects your information-seeking priorities.

2) Know your aggregator:

At first blush a dedicated RSS engine like Fresh Patents (http://tgs.freshpatents.com/search-rss.php) looks promising. The content's fact-based, plentiful, and non-commercial, (i.e. uncontaminated by search media spam). However, if your goals are marketing or sales-related, you might as well go back to school for your engineering degree. 'Launch' refers to "a launch and disconnect clutch for the electric motor of a P2 hybrid powertrain." 'Startup' is not about fledgling bootstrap firms hoping to turn the corner on their latest angel round but a literal key turning inside a literal ignition: "During startup of a DC/DC converter." You get the picture.

3. Know that RSS is transactional:

One reason RSS is oversold and underperforming is this notion it's like another communications channel (something you turn on and off). It's not the definitive response to fruitless searches or the final word on being up-to-date. It's a rapid-fire trail of updates crunched together in the form of news articles, database results, or changes to a list, i.e. most emailed stories. At its most passive, setting up an RSS feed is a three-step process: (1) picking your feeds; (2) filtering them down to a manageable size; and (3) trapping results that are in useful enough form to act on directly in the form of a lead or a contact or a list of references.

One answer to the limits of RSS is to forsake it completely in cases where you already know what you're looking to track. For example if you have a finite number of search targets to track, you can set up camp outside specific customer and/or competitor websites and be alerted to specific page changes at WebSite-Watcher (http://www.aignes.com).

If you're still game for proper RSS feeding here's a simple, unchanging success factor: Your reader or the interface you use to review, flag, track, search, and ultimately transform into your own priorities. There will always be a need for a world-class RSS reader, if not a market.

Artificial News Market Forecast 2012-2027

There's a new storyteller on the horizon of human discourse. In May's Wired, The Rise of Robot Reporters, Steven Levy chronicles the first tentative steps of a Chicago-based start-up called Narrative Science to dis-intermediate a news media in decline. Narrative Science, says board member and former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt, is a "company that turns numbers into words." What it does with that contrivance is the news room equivalent for turning the post Gutenberg belief in movable typefaces into delusions of pure wish-fulfillment -- and profit.

Why Narrative Science?

It's cheaper to manufacture  stories by tweaking algorithms. How does Levy rationalize that "Ninety percent of a news" will be baked in huge software ovens by 2027? Intelligence engines like those of Narrative Science will expand the sense-making machinery of the market -- not displace the last journalists standing. But what happens when the robonews creates press accounts of events now off the official storytelling radar? Will we cast ourselves as the protagonists in stories of our own making? In a customized news product will we even feign an interest in outcomes that don't include us or the generic abstractions that fill up the media calendars of today? Think consumers, voters, fans, parishioners, and the faceless legions that don't really "get us."

And when our self-interested leaders and blowhard media step over the line, they lump us into these groups and we get defensive. Sometimes we even tune out at not-so-subtle recent suggestions that bad news made a personal appearance in places and people we know and love.

So we sequester ourselves in experiences we control. And in a market of one we prefer to curate our own media pages from a source that will remain blameless: It earns our trust by presenting our own acceptable truths within worlds of our choosing. And if Narrative Science releases an insemination product we are no longer mere readers, listeners, or viewers but receivers to signals we were born to host. We can we can select spheres of our influencing too. That's something no self-respecting journalist could deliver without compromising personal dignity and the professional reputation needed to stay employed: their power to persuade.

Why the News Media?

They can only shrink to a former glory profile that cuts a running hum of temporal impressions. What does persuasion look like to the reporter in the street today? It's a sharp elbow above our personal radars and into the realm of foreground noise. But do we really need the paparazzi in camouflage for celebrity safari? Do we care that news organizations are in the business of embedding their checkbooks into an improvised explosive called the corporate news exclusive? When the competition for attention shifts to sports, who'd really pine for the locker-slamming platitudes of the post game show? Do the players long to justify their mistakes to sensation-seeking error-prone reporters? The fantasy league stats can speak for themselves.

Why us?

It's not that we can't handle the truth. And it's not that we turn away from bad news. It's that we prefer not to face someone else's truth -- especially the kind that means bad news for us. How is this behavior written into code? Levy writes about a strict adherence to data patterns as a perceived bug in the program:

"[N]ot long after the contract began, a slight problem emerged: The stories tended to focus on the victors. When a Big Ten team got whipped by an out-of-conference rival, the resulting write-ups could be downright humiliating. Conference officials asked Narrative Science to find a way for the stories to praise the performance of the Big Ten players, even when they lost."

In other words the new black media box couldn't read the social cues. It couldn't weight the institutional pecking order of big amateur athletics: that the elites lost to the lesser-thans. Other rewrites don't address hierarchies but the airbrushed portraits of our personal histories:

"Likewise, when the company began covering Little League games, it quickly understood that parents didn't want to read about their kids' errors."  

The Serialization of Personal Reality

So how does artificial news tune out the necessary realities? According to Levy all it takes is for a battery of meta-writers to "educate the system." Meta-writers are the human-based interpreters who devise the templates for pre-assembling the scripts that the algorithms follow to spawn these production bylines:

1. From the blatantly transactional: What are the best restaurants in X city?


2. To the slightly obtuse: What are the best private tutors for my kid needing help in Y so she can get into $?


3. To the downright conceptual: Do I let Z medication run its course or elect to do the surgery?

Having addressed human events the real growth in the twenties will hinge on accounts of events without direct human intervention. Think about a camera crew assigned to your fantasy league. Imagine a press junket angling to photo-op their way into the gamifications of your choosing? What may have passed for myopic in a lapsed media age will set the standard for the new authenticity. What could be more sincere than to place our own creations on news platforms staged by the likes of Narrative Science?

Authenticity needs to act in cahoots with a disinterest and elevated credibility in order to be taken seriously outside our own orbits. That's where our flights of fancy are grounded in a fact base, no matter how self-selecting those data sets:

"They put a box core and play-by-play into the program, and in something close to 12 seconds it drew examples from 40 years of major league history, wrote a game account, located the best picture, and wrote a caption."

Headless hedders. Scoops without digging. Instant analytical gratification. Sounds like these alternative realities are being packaged to go. And no one's going to miss the classifieds.

Artificial News, Real Growth

The market potential for artificial news manufacture is limited less by 20th Century conventions like the public interest or journalism ethics than by legalities -- specifically the likelihood of fraud that manifests in our unwillingness to think for ourselves. Here are three hypotheticals:

1) Synthetic People. Narrative Sciences can juice the Klout scores of skin deep fabrications. That means the marketers don't have to pony up actual perks for the drones who tweet their praises.

The temptation to generate celebrity mannequins could falsify outcomes as much as personal appearances. Hammond foresees an appetite to flesh out the statistical accounts with off-the-field developments like player injuries or legal problems." That's right. The very thing purged from the news cycles of the little league press becomes fair game once the merchandise becomes eligible for demotions, endorsements, and all forms of a professional sport referred to by the Roberts Court as "free speech." Factoring in these frailties may create a better system: (1) for not only detailing but (2) analyzing our games, and conversely (3), gaming these very same systems by tossing a single grenade-like insinuation into the contagions of tomorrow.

2) Markets of One. The self-selecting machinery will reference a breadth of experience so shallow and constrained as to make our present day cable news echo chamber sounds as "fair and balanced" as the carnival barkers would have us believe:

"[T]he low cost of transforming data into stories makes it practical to write even for an audience of one."

In today's media climate all the pandering and hubris and alarmist jive in those opposition camps has been reduced to background noise. But there is no house divided in an audience of one. There are no deals to strike. There are no hard feelings to patch up. There is no further filtering or curatorship required. Our Google glasses have already filtered out all aspects of reality that hold no claims on us. And our narrative headsets bleed into our ears and bake a reaffirming acceptance into our tuning sections.

3) Disconnects. It's one thing to draw from forty years of big major league data records to depict or simulate an event. It's quite another to outsource its meaning -- how it connects to us. To Hammond that's the highest potential growth area -- not recaps of little league games but packaging management reports or handicapping empty prophesies like this blog post for example.

Then again if we lose our independent streak, could we also lose some of our misplaced anxieties about a world too big to fathom, let alone shape? This may be just what the national health plan doctor ordered, whether through our own initiative or underwritten by our bankrupt Nanny State.

The real story behind Narrative Science isn't about health care politics. It isn't that robonews will replace journalists but that it will sell us on the worlds we don't need to be sold on -- the ones of our own design -- until we can no longer detect where the authoring ends and our imaginings begin. No longer alerted, confused, entertained, or merely informed, we will be entranced. And it will take narcotics stronger than tomorrow's news to distract us from the stories we're told.

Manual Google

Are you looking through a broken pair of eyes? Are you ill-equipped to hear me?"

"Are you one of the cogs

Too busy probing the pleasure centres of dogs to get near me?

- Kevin Godley, Lol Creme| Random Brainwave, 1979

What happens when human curiosity is reduced to an engineering exercise?

Some major efficiencies happen like instant road maps and opt-in spell checkers. Who would ever want to predate a world devoid of "did you mean...?" But whether we meant to or not Google has assigned a demand-side value to the answers it provides and the way it provides them. That is a powerful and compromising brokerage.

Our passions and concerns are channeled into a need for certainty that only seems to increase with the lack of closure. We are not just hard-coded for self-containing narratives of a self-concluding nature. We will skip ahead and miss the good bits because we'll be too stressed out to appreciate them if it all turns out for naught. Such behaviors turn out well for Google. We're addicted to answers. Google is not a vehicle. It is the verb. It does not own the road. It stores the potholes below the crevices of its membranes. To deny that is to take away free advertising for a search media giant and our own self-expression in the same bated breath.

The problem is not that Google and the self-proclaimed 'beauty' of its new privacy policy is big brother in a barely disguisable ruse: "[A] simple, intuitive user experience across Google." If anything Google is big bystander. Google doesn't want to crawl inside our heads and decode our inner confessionals -- that last veil of hesitation that tells us not to visit our untested assumptions on inscrutable Google. They want to bucket our articulations: (1) First into IP addresses, and then, (2) into groupings of indulgences and shadowings of flash-points. Just the very products of our experience that cause us to take notice and give money. They don't call us users for nothing:

Google: "We never sell personal information."
Subtext: "We always sell impersonal information."

Okay, you're thinking. So I'm a consumer. They package me up and send me off as a nameless aggregate into the awaiting clutches of their material witnesses: The Procters and Gambles, the seasonal influenza indices, the local pizzerias ... all riding on the outcome of my reflexive back and forth with Google. I got my toppings, and my meds, and my brand name discount. Just pay the man and move on, right?

Less Why for the Ware

The problem is not spyware but literally why-ware -- the analytical nature of motivation. These are temperments, not transactions. These are the understandings reached through interconnecting events, inwardly wired impulses, and group + personal dynamics that factor into our actions and rationale for the outcomes they deliver. There is no GPS on God's green Google Earth that reconciles these complexities with our circumstances, decisions, and their consequences.

Google would be the first search media giant to tell you they are not in the business of telling us what to do. But what they trademark behind that steel trap of engineers and lawyers is the newly franchisable power of suggestion. That means that a post millennial tween who straps on her Google glasses will be free to experience that mediated tunnel of contraption-induced toolbars and pulldown menus that jog along-side the shoulders of these driverless thoroughfares. She will have no need for prior knowledge or personal experience or the need to remember her impressions or with whom she chooses to share them. As the latest FAQ on Google's new privacy policy intones:

Google: "We can treat you as a single user across all our products."

Yes, that is intended to be a consoling message to us memory-challenged users. Perhaps the real threat would have been to caveat that emptor:

Subtext: "We can treat you as a multiple product across all our customer segments."

Birth of a Pathology

The biggest eyebrow raising to date is that Google's bid at reality augmentation is what stoners in the seventies used to say about their sober counterparts:

1975: "Reality is for people who can't face drugs."
2015: "Hiding publicly behind an interface is like viewing the world through Google-colored glasses."  

Us ivory-towered elites can't have that. We retreat to our own 20th century safety zones. We condemn this intervention! It is a container devoid of serendipitous discovery! It is way too interesting for our kids to tune us back in again. We are so gone.

It is also the shortest distance between points she'll no longer be capable of making -- mostly why did she climb in her Google car and where did it drop her? That's assuming the passenger will have the curbside capacity to reboot the override.

Will they resume the itinerary on the driver's side? That's assuming they can drive a manual as well as read one. That's insinuating she can trick the Google car into telling her what she need to know and not what the car is programmed to disclose. That will be a hard truth from our user and a soft landing disclosed by Google. That's assuming one can take this all in. They seem to be talking over one another.

And down will come civilization, cradle and all.

What I Learned at Useful Information Summer School

The first round of a useful information summer meetings concluded last Thursday in much the same way it began:

1. One stalwart member whose attendance record is as visible as her contact details are hidden.


2. A marketing professional whose feigned technophobia belies her online sophistication.


3. A community-based non-profiteer  looking to raise awareness and funding for some local groups.

No one knew the other.

No credit cards were swiped. No RSVPs were required.

There were no commitments for additional classes or word-of-mouth campaigns for swelling the ranks.

[caption id="attachment_726" align="alignleft" width="116" caption="Courtesy of Livbaldino on Flickr"][/caption]

I was as pleased with three attendees as I was happy with the dozen who came the week after the Greenfield Recorder's Chris Curtis profiled the Society for Useful Information made the rounds in local media circles. Strangers now familiar with my work were intrigued by Chris's piece and needed to see for themselves. Friends and family who've never sat in on a useful society session felt like they had after they read the same article. My fifteen fame minutes were spent in the right place.

I was prepared for the next dozen or nobody and I was ready to launch with intermittent WIFI from the Bookmill or to model frameworks in lieu of another feeble Verizon / Comcast signal in Montague Center. (Apparently the Bookmill is as hard to find for WIFI signals as the patrons who come prepared to shop for dispensible books).

What They Don't Teach You in Information Wants to be Free School

My Delicious page was base camp leading outward for all investigations. That's how I could keep my dualing promises of minimal memorization, free sourcing, and optimal confusion. I also led the group through the basic building blocks of query formation  -- syntax, semantics, and operators. When the WIFI failed it challenged me to teach the source conjugation frameworks that go to the motivations of information providers both in terms of why they would share and what they would hope to achieve. There's no better search tool than Google -- when it's not Google's nest being padded by the investigation in question. We are, after all, the products being monetized, not the customers being serviced.

We also spent some time on establishing information oceans, lakes, and ponds, and what's in store in terms of expectations and time sinks when we dip our rods in these vastly different search environments. Not surprisingly the relatedness of social networks and topics were a source of great debate and interest among most attendees. This is a far cry and a heartening refresh from the binary constraints of corporate information fetishes around silo-driven expertise, the disregard for interdependent thinking, and the culpability of knowledge. Thank you, Pioneer Valley!

What I enjoy the most in these sessions is not only the co-mingling of multidimensional inputs and interpretations but the ability to throw a browser window up on the pale, thumbtack hole-infested walls of the Sawmill River Arts gallery and abolish online isolation, at least for a few hours. The ability to team lead around both intentional and serendipitous discovery is the most compelling kind of learning I know.

I'm pleased that this heady blessing will continue after a four week respite with classes resuming on Thursday evening, September 29th.   In the meantime I hope that no one shows up  unannounced with an empty shopping cart.

Where in the World is Whitey Bin Laden?

In the scheme of qualifications, I'm not qualified to be very much. But I am an authority on the question of how humans and search engines tend to talk over one another when they share the same screen.

Here it is -- the number one communicado non-starter. We over-specify what we want when we talk with search engines. We want it so bad we expect to bear witness to its materialization on our doorsteps and driveways. For commerce this works out fine. I want a size XXL horsepower in the original casing and want it to hit my cash rewards program before the arrival of my free shipping. But then it falls to fragmented pieces:

1. It's not an exact match of fallen-out-of-Facebook-is-this-Sally-really


2. It's not the exact place and time the package was designed to arrive


3. It's not the exact  same set of challenges you expected to be up against the next time

If there's only one-of-a-kind out there, we have an infinite loop of errors that send us to the land of the correctionless -- the placeholder Google's algorithm has reserved for our habitation. Are we surprised? Is an ulcer coming on? Perhaps, then our surprise should be worn and not masked? That's how we remember why we Googled in the first place. No chicken-and-egg problem about that. It has to do with yanking our minds out of our rabbit holes. It's about seeing the world from a broader perspective than our in-boxes and portfolios.

This tendency to over-specify is not our proudest achievement as disgruntled Googlers. It's really the natural extension of our need to dumb reality down for the sake of simplicity. It's not that we can't absorb the complexities. It's that we want a clear set of instructions. We want to be told what to do. That's not going to happen without a price, a catalog, and the certainty of a transaction about to happen.

For capital goods and tangible services we either share an understanding or will come to one. For everything else we have our own hunches or the eerie suspicion that we can't find what we're looking for. The hope is not for better search technology but for the ability to think more abstractly in order to expand a useful range of outcomes. This reminds me of the search troubles of some former PI students. Some were comfortable with directories and specialty databases for scouring public records. Others never left their search boxes, repeating the names of the same criminal suspects and eliciting the same three hits from the same three thousand sites. That's a fixation well worth escaping.

These same search dynamics surround the recently solved capers of our most wanted 1-2 on the post office walls of an American generation. In both cases the criminal was under our unsuspecting noses and free from under our fumbling thumbs. The more wanted they became, the more convinced we seemed were the vanishing tricks played on us by their deceitful legends. But sooner or later the steely resolve of wanted-dead-or-alive gives way to the intricacies of  an expanding drag net. There were choice bits of bait on a coterie of lures:

• Was it the delivery man as the whistle-snitch?


• Where in her jam-packed appointment book was the girlfriend penciled in next?

The only way these men could be brought to justice was to meet them out in a cavernous world of their own design. That takes theory of mind, extrapolation, dexterity, and perspective taking. And while we're piling onto what lands well clear of the Google radar, let's remember that sound taxonomy and our own search architectures are our best bet for deploying Google in its non-shopping glory.

This is an abstraction to the average "user." This is something perhaps only a Google "customer" might insist on.

The Smiley Face-ification of Social Media

"Thumbs can tilt at many angles." -- Terrence Patrick Canade

I posted a recent entry in the AIIM blogger community about the compromised state of social media to deliver on many of the essential building blocks of information quality such as transparency, integrity, credibility, and authenticity. This is typified best by the toggle that flips us on / off through the planet's most awesome wall switch -- the "I like" button on Facebook.

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgement passing for an experience worth repeating beyond our own browser boundaries. All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that calculation is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter.

How do we yank us back into a world of standards? Do we offload our suspended disbeliefs to the algorithmic chefs slaving in the kitchens of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etal.? Is it naive even to believe in standards where all experience is unique -- subjected to the limitations of our direct Internet experience. These are our own private showrooms expressed in search logs, site histories, and browser settings? Uhhh ... no. (They are private, right?)

The failure to develop universal information standards ignores our universal claims on social media. It's not about organizing people. As a business model the "social" tag papers over the shopping model so that social media consultants can collect their rent checks. But it was never about that. Information quality in a social media world is something more primal and self-centered. It's about organizing ourselves. We need to tap a containable set of information within a set period of time in the service of certain favorable outcomes. We express these as our priorities, our deal-breakers, and our worthiness as self-taught nodes in this network of smiley faces and closely-guarded ranking formulas.

Hardly Containing Ourselves

One way to close ranks is to treat the world's information supply like a resource instead of a raw content sewage pipe bleeding into the digital landfill of unlimited capacity. But ours is a supply-based business model. It's according to who-wants-in -- not according to why-do-you-need to-find-out. Demand could be manufactured without ever needing to contain this need-to-know why. No explanations necessary. All Google holds are the word patterns which most deftly intervene in a user forming a question. It is in every party's interest to play their role correctly. Unfortunately for most users that means little regard that the terms Google is throwing them are deceptively simple:

The moment you aspire to confide in a search engine you are being shown an exit of someone else's choosing.

These magically inventive search suggestions? They are ads. Let me say it again, only more to the point. Suggestions don't only answer to us. They answer to advertisers. We are purchasing Ad Words by clicking on the Google set of suggestion terms. Yes, Google has pioneered the art of click-free commerce. You drop down to their dropdown and you've ordered from right off the menu!  The inventory is not a catalog. Don't touch the merchandise -- even if we are the demand side of the equation.

I'm not arguing on moral or even legal grounds that a change of policy is in order. Yes, its brilliance cascades across the sky. But we don't pay Google for use of their search engine. Google gets paid by monetizing our usage of their service. Anyone who loses sight of that is at risk of being used in ways by Google that are not communicated to Google users -- namely, that your attention has been preemptively purchased by one or several Adwords sponsors: "And now that I'm inside your head I can always see myself out without an escort..."

No matter how many gadgets reference our schedules, the number of hours in a day has not increased. Cognitively speaking, our personal attention spans are fixed on a lunar cycle. Anyone with more attention to spend than the claims on their calendar is either incapable of self-direction, independently wealthy, living without a smart phone or auditioning for the next post crash pilot episode of Survivor, the prequel.

Fixed Scale Attention Settings

One time-tested way to channel attention on a meaningful focus is to set attention to a fixed scale. That enables the virtual voter to carve out her own sets of priorities without any heed for what her peers or elites have insisted she hold to the exclusion of everything else. Instead she can focus on multiple concerns and address those concerns as a percentage of her "total concerns."

Let's pretend that the tax debate is run like a popular election with 6-8 political parties instead of the 1-2 parties operating here. Let's take a system where a vested member of a non-elite group, (say U.S. taxpayer?) could express their policy preferences by directing their tax dollars in percentage form. This flies in the face of our current fight-or-flight two-headed party predicament. We could make it more competitive to thicken the cable gumbo news soup. Let's say the host would send the losers home who don't coalesce around the top five tally-getters. That lops off the long, scraggly tail of marginal, overlapping services programs, right?

The tea party would love it because slicing up the treasury into line items would finally acquaint the sleepy and disaffected with the freak out show they seem to have missed the last ten years -- how 43% of our voting rights revert to the Chinese before we even begin to dole things out. Corporate lobbies would climb on-board because it lights up their board like no two-party election campaign ever will.

Defense contractors will reacquaint us with the fact that while much of our assembly work has gone overseas we are still the world beater in fear manufacturing. Just to make sure that social services can't defeat the Military / Medicare complex we can have defense contractors using their Citizens v. United speech-making write-offs to tell America why:

• A vote for HUD, Headstart, CHIPS or AmeriCorps is a vote against keeping America the biggest, baddest, gunslinger in the global neighborhood.

The pharma giants could out-suggest any keyword campaign with a massive spending rationale that...

• Doing away with Medicare means losing the all-expense paid trip to an elective nursing home that we have today.

What's going to happen when our wet suits begin to wet themselves? That's the foreign invader the health care lobby will implant into our national discussion.

Perhaps the most popular feature of a percentage-based ratings system is that every 10 millionth taxpayer would win a reprieve -- that's right. Tax forgiveness for an entire payment cycle! No lottery could ever hold a candle to shaking Uncle Sam down before he fumbles for our own pockets, right?

That's how information standards emerge. Carve up the beast and then let's compare recipes.

Payments accepted.

Packing Your Own Lunch @ the Web Search Cafeteria

How do we know it's time to suck in the bulge around our brains?

[caption id="attachment_636" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="The marketplace for ideas need not be a storefront"][/caption]

That swelling is not transmitted by airborne virus or insect. Most likely it's the encrypted WIFI signal ready to auction off our attention based on:

• Who wants it,


• Where they will be for the next 45 minutes, and


• a coupon for perishable inventories echoed in the placeholders of past browser sessions.

Like any internet marketer Google's efforts are focused on converting web surfers to online shoppers, translating our calls for help into online ads it sells to the market. This arrangement connects some sellers to buyers but does little to resolve our need for quality information from credible sources. We must fend for ourselves when it comes to online investigations. And that isolation compromises our effectiveness as learners:

• The web by remote control: Google IS the internet. If it doesn't rank, it doesn't exist.


• The priority switcheroo: What landed last is what deserves to be acted on first.


• The sourcing dilemma: The motives behind information providers and how that squares with evidence used to substantiate their claims.

The simple truth is that Google has a great deal of value for the researcher -- little of it that's monetizable. Ironically Google's unrecovered assets are where web researchers should be investing big time:

1. How to assess: frameworks and models: Aligning knowledge-seeking requirements with an informed sense of where to go and for acting on what we'll expect to find there


2. How to ask: semantics, syntax, and operators -- The building blocks of query formation; the act of interrogating databases and training them to do our bidding


3. How to act: context and meaning: Applying source fluency in order to scope the credibility, authenticity, and ultimately our understanding of where our findings are leading us

Internet sources and the search results they spawn are dynamic, conflicting, and open-ended. Your time commitments, however, are not. We have set objectives and hard stops for reaching them. Too often our need for closure and certainty suppress our hunger for learning. Connecting poor search results to preferable outcomes is like trying to shape up on a diet of lard and donuts. No matter how many searches and site results we retreat from the computer with more uncertainties and less time to settle them.

There are two reliable reasons most of us go online to research:

• Learn enough to act on what we’ll learn


• Reduce the uncertainty around what those actions may bring

These are the themes and objectives we'll be exploring each Thursday evening this summer at the Montague Bookmill. We hope you can join us for our weekly meetups from 7-9 pm. The series begins next Thursday, June 2nd. We look forward to your input and addressing the pending research projects that fire your desire to learn in the first place. A laptop is optional but do pack your own homegrown research problems.

And be prepared to share.

Betting Against the Church of the House of Google

[caption id="attachment_619" align="alignleft" width="300" caption=""I don't know who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish." -- Marshall McLuhan"][/caption]

Marshall is suggesting that familiarity is the home of the oblivious. Our blinders are affixed to our unblinking screens. We put them on once and no interruption can slip between our trackable eyeballs and our data plans. Digital natives may awake ready to greet the dawn or completely hung over. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that either way, they wake-up connected.

Being offline requires a manual override. It's not natural. And it requires reflexes, negotiations, and a tolerance for uncertainties that can't be novelized in gaming or commerce.

At last weekend's first annual Valley Summit, a forty-something social media marketer was addressing the virtues of Google Analytics to the conference gallery. He mentioned how his pet store merchandiser/client delivered him a handful of variations on the naming of some hot-selling accessory for dogs. But then he ran the keyword combos through Google AdWords and the verdict was unanimous: there is only one commonly accepted way that customers use to search for this item. That's right -- one way to the AdWords bidding auction or the highway of web marketing roadkill.

On one hand this was a battle of ideas between who keeps through my store and who lands on my site. On the other hand this is a major inversion-bender between the customer-leaning client and search-literate counsel. Man, talk about the client seeing the complexities of the world more clearly than their social media handlers!

The larger story here is that the new media brokers are all too willing to confuse the business model of a software giant for the marketplace itself. The fact that this single expression for doggie collars, leashes, or dinner bells is reducible to one expression says as much about the media buyers as it does about the search media. Each term in succession describes one thought planted in front of the next. That's the extemporaneous stamina of Google as mind-reader. There are no original search terms under the Google Sun.

It's one thing to "organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible." It's quite another thing to appropriate the language for doing so as an auction-based sweepstakes where Google has trademarked all the concenants, vowels, and punctuation symbols. Every symbol on our keypads prompt a suggestion from Google. Our minds may be shooting blanks but our stares have been paved over by the power of Google suggestion.

I'm not suggesting this power is sinister any more than I'm suggesting that Google is acting as our scalable, benevolent, reference librarian in the cloud. Google is acting in its own corporate interest when it channels our curiosities into manageable chunks of its revenue model. The fact that the service is so compelling and the model is so persuasive means that Google's evisceration of the ad business sounds like the sour grapes of a dead fruit tree -- not the grounds for anti-trust litigation that awaited a browser-bundled PC empire when the Clinton Administration chased after Microsoft in the late nineties.

“The perfect search engine,” says co-founder and new CEO Larry Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” Page might be casting a perfectly earnest engineering posture. Or cynicism may compel him to see the non-paying Google public as a customer that doesn't know what it wants (other than for an intermediary to broker their virtual needs in a clean, unassuming interface). My money is on an enduring love of search science. That's as far as Larry's sincerity needs to travel for my purposes. I'll know that Larry shares my enthusiasm when he figures out a way to pad revenues from servicing the needs of researchers.

That's fantasy. One emerging reality is the appreciation of my new Pioneer Valley colleagues for brilliant search engineering. That's my takeaway from the first meetup of the Society for Useful Information last night in Northampton.  That appreciation will deepen as they reverse engineer Google into doing their bidding on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other walled gardens to come. Perhaps then we'll start to warm to this reality: that we feel no pain with our fingers plugged into the sockets of Google Search.

Organic search, my ass.

Yes, Some Questions are Better Left Unasked

We've been told since we were old enough to test our merits and theories that there are no dumb questions. The urgency of this instruction tends to increase not with the caliber of the questioning but with the size of the group. Frowning on any inquisitive form is akin to the inquisition of Oliver Twist and his empty gruel bowl. Nobody wants to be the public silencer of curiosity. No one wants to discourage debate -- at least while the cameras are rolling. That kind of instruction happens more naturally behind closed doors (and minds too ... one insinuates).That said, most public forums for open questioning happen virtually these days. From email group lists to Facebook walls there's a whole lot of prodding and posturing around what we're trying to pursue that we feel more comfortable asking our fellow humans than the sequestered confession chamber we have come to know as the Google search box.

These garden variety crowd-sourcing drills are routine in my firewall where domain experts and junior staff alike are more comfortable with receiving pointers and attachments from peers than plowing through an unvetted pile of search results. Sometimes an uninformed question is so basic that tree-in-the-forest physics kick in: No response is not the same as being ignored, though admittedly it's hard to spot the difference in cyberspace.

One way to avoid the open stares of disbelieving colleagues is to press for currency -- a great face-saving defense by inferring that we know our stuff -- just not the latest stuff. Another is to watch the zealousness of the responders. Are they dispatching their personal stashes of best practices or giving the requester a number to call? Is the responder as secure in their answers as they are in their positions? There is a tendency for junior-level people to over share expertise because: (1) they're eager to jump in, (2) they prefer texting to face-to-face problem-solving, or (3) they need to get with post merger realities of a changing power structure.

But enough about me the responder. How can I make your questions more informed without becoming too pointed? How can they expand and advance existing discussions without becoming too open-ended -- too tenuous to invite followup?

For starters, let the question breath a little. Don't put practitioners on the spot with "is it this" or "is it that?" Reducing all the complexities to a multiple choice outcome tells the gallery you really can't draw the distinction between talking to machines or people. Secondly, how the question gets asked supersedes the topic or our learning objectives. Owning up to where we've been, the walls we hit, and the loops we're trying to cycle through means we're paying our dues and respects -- not to any one obstacle or expert but to the community of practice we're addressing for its collective problem-solving intelligence. As hacker Eric Raymond writes in his online manual for How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, there is more than a subtle difference between demanding “an answer” and requesting collaborators. The presumption is that there is a scarcity of definitive answers and a wealth of lessons waiting to be drawn from a pool of experience.

Another crowdsourcing pleaser is to summarize the responses both as a form of gratitude to the participants and respect for the process. A brief write-up of the investigation also validates the commitments of the community to building know-how, not merely revisiting the same knowledge on our domain of experts. That's because the summary integrates the responses into a shared output. It's the interplay of an unfolding conversation -- not a scripted, one-sided and static one. Unpacking responses is conducive to wikis so long as the formating remains simple enough to foster and contain further problem-solving as the community evolves.

Then there's the powerful allure of motivation: why I'm asking. Divulging one's incentives for knowing will disarm the most overconfident know-it-all. That means not competing for smartest guy-in-the-room. The burden of proof is shifted towards a common purpose around a shared understanding. Of course it will take more than case summaries and deference to practice members for junior-level requesters to pick the brains of the more seasoned practitioners. The purpose of the question is key. It's not that answering a question makes us instant and equal partners in the same outcome. It's the faith in knowing that the wheel will turn. As casually as a requester can speak their inquiring mind, the sincerest way to complete this virtuous loop is through reciprocation.

In sum the most incisive question can lose its smarts if the questioner:

• asks unblinking yes-or-no questions that require a back story to move forward


• is not forthcoming about the path that led to their request, and


• fails to disclose what they hope to gain by involving the larger community.

Conversely, the burden falls on the responder to: (a) trust that the collaboration can run both ways, or (b) rediscover the rapture of learning the same advice they're giving; that giving is its own reward. The teaching becomes the ends as well as the means.

As an online research educator I consider myself lucky to fall inside this second camp.

Any questions?