Plumbing Below the Radar

[caption id="attachment_534" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Photo by Jim Henderson | jim@henderson.org.nz"][/caption]

"Never mistake your presence for the event."

- Roscoe Lee Brown

I'd like to say that the highlight of Tuesday's Open Mic Night was that I got to teach what I love in the manner I love doing it (teach). I'd like to affirm further that there was an airy effortlessness to the presentation. After all this was a captive, active group -- engaged, smart, skeptical -- all the requisite aptitudes. Finally I should clarify that the staging was in a stately conference facility with a robust wifi signal, no dial-in audience to accommodate, and most importantly ... no institutional middle man.

Truth is, the most gratification came from assembling two Boston-based information communities -- my PI/detectives and fellow SIKM colleagues -- then watching the collaboration fly across the conference table. The joy of discovery is one thing. But sharing that joy is pure rapture.

Kirstie Fiora filled in for my woeful event-planning deficits -- ushering in attendees past locked front doors and assorted roadblocks that escaped my logistical skills for bringing people together. I've been living off her Angie's Kettle Corn snack offering since the session ended. Pathetic.

In addition to Kirstie and brother Gordon, my improbable roundtable for round one included:

• Ann O'Connor (PI) -- Researcher, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers ("IBEW")


• Carrie LaRose (PI) -- Comptroller, H&H Delivery


• Dave Wallace (KM) -- Managing Partner, GameChange LLC


• Joe Cadillic (PI) -- Private Investigator, Murphy & Associates


• John Dalli (PI) -- Owner, Worcester Record Search


• Kate Pugh (KM) -- President, Align Consulting


• Paula Cohen (KM) -- Knowledge Manager, Information Enterprises

The premise of the News Radar theme was that we're fussing over stuff that should not rise to our radar levels. I demonstrated tools for flushing information waste products back down below the sewer line where they belong. On the attention scale we rake our mental bearings into three piles:

1. PURPOSE: What makes our lives worth living


2. OBJECTIVE: What do I do to make #1 happen


3. DISTRACTION: What gets int the way of #2

Way too much of the web is sheltered under the growth of pile #3. That's where I introduced the pruning shears of semantics, syntax, and search operators for pruning away the rubbish. I also tried to give them some bearings on when a scarcity of information actually calls for expanding the boundaries through keyword cultivation or the simpler queries that create more productive outcomes in ponds (specialty databases) in lieu of oceans (commercial search engines).

These examples were modeled on the saving graces of an XML-centric approach for having useful information find us -- assuming that web searches don't fall in the #1 pile camp. We used syntax to forge for RSS feeds. We used semantics to develop some word algebraics for trapping some common corporate event triggers (marketing, finance, regulatory, musical management chairs, etc.) We even set up watch lists to ensnare specific people we might call on that we can insinuate by the job titles in the announcements of their promotions.

We tested the relationship of push and pull sourcing by using Site Explorer to compare self-referring links to external ones as an even-handed basis to gauge the credibility of information providers by their web domains and pages. Finally we went shopping for higher level concepts like citizenship in Google Keywords and came away with the humbling conclusion that "Citizen Watches" were likelier to tell us Google time better than the Bill of Rights. Another discrepancy worth noting is the number of searches generated for terms versus the ad dollars they fetch, e.g. "SAS Document Management" yielded 73 searches last month despite its "competitive" appeal to Google advertisers.

The one underwhelming demo I thought was the section on rolling your own custom search engines. We grouped media sources back into their traditional pre-web categories. Remember the term "paid media" to describe the success of 20th century PR campaigns?" Didn't think so. The disappointment was in the lack of evidence that the keyword refinements did much to skew the results or tell the underlying story of the custom search theme. I also flew over the information pond completely. That means I didn't focus much on using Google as the search engine of record in order to qualify and build contact lists from social media sites.

I'm looking forward to the next several sessions in Western Mass and will try to localize them. Candidate projects on the agenda? Building alumni lists from LinkedIn of Five College graduates.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... and on Facebook.

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

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

Happy fishing.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... and on Facebook.

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

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

Happy fishing.

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.

Information Quality is Not a Myth

Ever since my little brother and I jostled in the backseat of the Oldsmobile for control of the power window I have wrestled with the question -- how do we get beyond subjective claims on truth and the universal limitations of self-preservation? As the "KM" guy at a global consulting firm this question is less personal -- but no less pressing: how to determine information quality...

* Is it on an incremental grading scale?
* Is it fact-based, answering to the accuracy of the details it reports?
* Was it written by someone you know representing a media brand exposed to the full force of any laws the author has otherwise violated?

I remember quoting Bill Moyers in a college term paper on media bias that the greatest myth about journalism was its stated mission of objectivity -- that the story tells itself, not the reporter who files it. Yes I still agree with this premise. No I don't think you can create an assembly line of qualified observations and shiny, error-free and verifiable news stories parading out the door on a world we share and shape. But relativism is no excuse not to try. Shades of gray in fact are much closer to a meaningful assessment of quality than how any absolute verdict rings in pursuit of any final truths and supporting facts -- no matter how selective or self-serving.

In our clamoring for truth the most insatiable hunger we feed is the desire of knowing who to believe -- not the belief itself:

* Oh, her pedigree all graduated with honors from the Gospel School at Harvard
* So, he's on the board of Unassailable Opinion Group
* Hey, they've been selected to present their latest study to the leading lights of our Truth Squad eight years running.

In all instances we're not talking about truth, accuracy, actuality or even debate. We're talking about credentialing -- our need as individuals to wrap ourselves within the stature of the groups to which we're members or branded in some way. But while credentialing curves our quality cravings, it does nothing to pass the sniff test -- do these experts square on-the-ground realities with the actual consequences to their analysis, and where their recommendations may lead their disciples, clients, and subscribers?

* Are they detached observers?

* Do they get their hands dirty?

* Do they have their palms greased?

This dilemma is the core battle to determining information quality:

1. Do I want cool disinterest in my content supply? Or do I want a bona fide witness, maybe an advocate.

2. Do I want a referee with a degree? Or do I want a vested party whose passions can pierce the confusion and noise of the marketplace?

Information quality is not about removing defective sound bytes from the news radar. It's not about ridding the public information supply of erroneous conclusions. It is about presenting the perception of content producers so that we can reference information that meshes with our own quality standards. Every time we saddle the content supply with some new requirement...

* Accurate (and fact-based)

* Credible (and believable)

* Authentic (and real)

... we are really asking for qualities that are at cross-purposes.

We're no better off than rejecting objectivity as propaganda, the intoxicant of the news elites and the self-important. I would argue that we can scale, diagram, and yes measure the presence of these vital ingredients to our public discourse. But the first convention we need to drop is that the values are absolute. Authenticity and credibility represent a continuum of relative values and they are inversely proportionate. You surrender some authenticity -- you buy a little street cred. No authenticity to trade? Here's one absolute dictum: a fraud is a fraud.

Information Quality is Not a Myth

Ever since my little brother and I jostled in the backseat of the Oldsmobile for control of the power window I have wrestled with the question -- how do we get beyond subjective claims on truth and the universal limitations of self-preservation? As the "KM" guy at a global consulting firm this question is less personal -- but no less pressing: how to determine information quality...

* Is it on an incremental grading scale?
* Is it fact-based, answering to the accuracy of the details it reports?
* Was it written by someone you know representing a media brand exposed to the full force of any laws the author has otherwise violated?

I remember quoting Bill Moyers in a college term paper on media bias that the greatest myth about journalism was its stated mission of objectivity -- that the story tells itself, not the reporter who files it. Yes I still agree with this premise. No I don't think you can create an assembly line of qualified observations and shiny, error-free and verifiable news stories parading out the door on a world we share and shape. But relativism is no excuse not to try. Shades of gray in fact are much closer to a meaningful assessment of quality than how any absolute verdict rings in pursuit of any final truths and supporting facts -- no matter how selective or self-serving.

In our clamoring for truth the most insatiable hunger we feed is the desire of knowing who to believe -- not the belief itself:

* Oh, her pedigree all graduated with honors from the Gospel School at Harvard
* So, he's on the board of Unassailable Opinion Group
* Hey, they've been selected to present their latest study to the leading lights of our Truth Squad eight years running.

In all instances we're not talking about truth, accuracy, actuality or even debate. We're talking about credentialing -- our need as individuals to wrap ourselves within the stature of the groups to which we're members or branded in some way. But while credentialing curves our quality cravings, it does nothing to pass the sniff test -- do these experts square on-the-ground realities with the actual consequences to their analysis, and where their recommendations may lead their disciples, clients, and subscribers?

* Are they detached observers?

* Do they get their hands dirty?

* Do they have their palms greased?

This dilemma is the core battle to determining information quality:

1. Do I want cool disinterest in my content supply? Or do I want a bona fide witness, maybe an advocate.

2. Do I want a referee with a degree? Or do I want a vested party whose passions can pierce the confusion and noise of the marketplace?

Information quality is not about removing defective sound bytes from the news radar. It's not about ridding the public information supply of erroneous conclusions. It is about presenting the perception of content producers so that we can reference information that meshes with our own quality standards. Every time we saddle the content supply with some new requirement...

* Accurate (and fact-based)

* Credible (and believable)

* Authentic (and real)

... we are really asking for qualities that are at cross-purposes.

We're no better off than rejecting objectivity as propaganda, the intoxicant of the news elites and the self-important. I would argue that we can scale, diagram, and yes measure the presence of these vital ingredients to our public discourse. But the first convention we need to drop is that the values are absolute. Authenticity and credibility represent a continuum of relative values and they are inversely proportionate. You surrender some authenticity -- you buy a little street cred. No authenticity to trade? Here's one absolute dictum: a fraud is a fraud.