The Genuine and Discredible Blog

To blog or just to have dinner conversation?

Chatting up one's own crowded company of ardent opinions and and defensible positions is the stage personality -- the celebrity of blog. But that's pretty bland. It's passive recessive. It's almost like a media reporter who leads with the wink/nod that the Blogosphere is what blogs are known for.

Do you blog for the sake of touting your blogging credentials? Do you wave your blog pass to get into sites and discussions otherwise off limits? Didn't think so.

Blogs are vessels. They hold our peeves and praises in an editorial without editors. It's a one-sided debate from all sides of the aisle. But the most hermetic blog is porous with links and collaborations inspired elsewhere. Blogs live on an island where the word "my" is implicit. Any other pronoun will not do.

As a communications medium blogs fall much closer to closed circuits than printing presses -- confessionals, not tabloids. The cover charge for entry is a medium ego or larger: Yes, that's your personality on my screen. Where "the media" revolves around third-party celebrities and consumed by third-person audiences, blogs are decidedly first-person, singular. The moment a second party is involved a blog loses its "come-as-I-am" authenticity. When you're dressing your blogger in bedclothes or tuxedos, you know the jig is up. Keeping up an appearance is no more heroic than leaving your journal out to be read.

It's not a pretense to long for that same third-party bonding shared by media creations and their legions. What could be more flattering than the attentions of a stranger? But it's less than sincere to pose as a broker, referee or huckster whose credentials rest on their own blogging rites. Blogs are devoid of credibility just as an individual cannot confer credibility onto themselves no matter how big their name, persuasive their fight, or widely held their blogging postures.

* Tagging productive reference sites
* Endorsing content and then commenting on its impact
* Using a blog roll to reflect on your own aspirations
* News feeds that synthesize the thinking of otherwise disconnected worlds

That's where blogs become bigger than the bloggers who blog them and the self-referential nature of first person communications.

The Genuine and Discredible Blog

To blog or just to have dinner conversation?

Chatting up one's own crowded company of ardent opinions and and defensible positions is the stage personality -- the celebrity of blog. But that's pretty bland. It's passive recessive. It's almost like a media reporter who leads with the wink/nod that the Blogosphere is what blogs are known for.

Do you blog for the sake of touting your blogging credentials? Do you wave your blog pass to get into sites and discussions otherwise off limits? Didn't think so.

Blogs are vessels. They hold our peeves and praises in an editorial without editors. It's a one-sided debate from all sides of the aisle. But the most hermetic blog is porous with links and collaborations inspired elsewhere. Blogs live on an island where the word "my" is implicit. Any other pronoun will not do.

As a communications medium blogs fall much closer to closed circuits than printing presses -- confessionals, not tabloids. The cover charge for entry is a medium ego or larger: Yes, that's your personality on my screen. Where "the media" revolves around third-party celebrities and consumed by third-person audiences, blogs are decidedly first-person, singular. The moment a second party is involved a blog loses its "come-as-I-am" authenticity. When you're dressing your blogger in bedclothes or tuxedos, you know the jig is up. Keeping up an appearance is no more heroic than leaving your journal out to be read.

It's not a pretense to long for that same third-party bonding shared by media creations and their legions. What could be more flattering than the attentions of a stranger? But it's less than sincere to pose as a broker, referee or huckster whose credentials rest on their own blogging rites. Blogs are devoid of credibility just as an individual cannot confer credibility onto themselves no matter how big their name, persuasive their fight, or widely held their blogging postures.

* Tagging productive reference sites
* Endorsing content and then commenting on its impact
* Using a blog roll to reflect on your own aspirations
* News feeds that synthesize the thinking of otherwise disconnected worlds

That's where blogs become bigger than the bloggers who blog them and the self-referential nature of first person communications.

The Web: Blind Spot Removal?

I watched Clay Shirky promote his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations on Colbert this week. Here's basically what he said: As a communications channel the web is credited with bringing media access to non-media elites. It is the soap box that doesn't depend on the timbre of your voice or the size of your budget. Ask the blogger in the street and you will hear how we've rifled past staple guns, leaflets, and petitions. We're no longer captive audiences awaiting the judgements of vested opinions.

I admire Shirky and his heretical views towards organized and disorganized classification systems. I'm mostly in agreement about the Smart Mobs mantra and the inclusiveness of our media climate changes:

* opt-in when you want to join
* publish when you clear your throat
* disband when the center does not hold

But if the web has found its voice through blogging where can we find its ears? There are equal opportunities for attentive snoops to pick up on signals not evident to less astute listeners.

The answer that inspires me is the Emotionality of Privacy. Written in 1997 in the ASIS&T Journal by Barbara Flood. Flood's theory is that privacy is based on belief that "big" trust can only be conferred in "small" situations:

Families are tied together by information about members. Friendships exchange personal information and cede a certain amount of privacy. The larger the social aggregate, however, the less the individual is willing to sacrifice privacy and the more the individual needs to retain privacy in order to maintain a sense of self.

Political figures surrender this right the moment they announce their candidacies. But what about the rest of us?

What we decide to put out there on the web bears only passing reference to the stage-managed profile we would have our web snoops first come to know about us. (Remember that's assuming the total stranger is completely positive we've been accurately identified). Of course agents of control like my LinkedIn profile is a world of perception removed from what my computer reveals about how I use it. These are the awards, achievements, and even endorsements that we display in our virtual trophy cases. But less invasive than a government sting or a virtual surveillance ring is the far greater probability that our blind spots are out there. There for the taking.

Blind spots are the unknown unknowns to us that are known to others. As Donald Rumsfeld famously gandered in the most revealing press conference held during two Bush terms, "there are the ones we don’t know we don’t know." In the case of the missing OMD he could not have been more candid!

Ms. Flood's framework for describing the blind zone is the Johari Window:

* What's known to others and not known to others
* What's known to the self both publicly and privately
* What's not known to the self through the blind self or the unknown self (subconscious)


The goal of any effective researcher is to focus on the blind self. The blind self contains our respective zones of ignorance (the impact my actions have on you beyond my own awareness). It is the world of former colleagues, spouses, and witnesses on the scenes of past wreckages -- the outcomes that don't find their way to the trophy case. On the web our delusions, supressions, misguided faith, willful ignorance, and past admissions of guilt are now open to question if not actual publication. We would be well served to self-educate and research our own vulnerabilities before we cast our investigative nets out to others.

The Web: Blind Spot Removal?

I watched Clay Shirky promote his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations on Colbert this week. Here's basically what he said: As a communications channel the web is credited with bringing media access to non-media elites. It is the soap box that doesn't depend on the timbre of your voice or the size of your budget. Ask the blogger in the street and you will hear how we've rifled past staple guns, leaflets, and petitions. We're no longer captive audiences awaiting the judgements of vested opinions.

I admire Shirky and his heretical views towards organized and disorganized classification systems. I'm mostly in agreement about the Smart Mobs mantra and the inclusiveness of our media climate changes:

* opt-in when you want to join
* publish when you clear your throat
* disband when the center does not hold

But if the web has found its voice through blogging where can we find its ears? There are equal opportunities for attentive snoops to pick up on signals not evident to less astute listeners.

The answer that inspires me is the Emotionality of Privacy. Written in 1997 in the ASIS&T Journal by Barbara Flood. Flood's theory is that privacy is based on belief that "big" trust can only be conferred in "small" situations:

Families are tied together by information about members. Friendships exchange personal information and cede a certain amount of privacy. The larger the social aggregate, however, the less the individual is willing to sacrifice privacy and the more the individual needs to retain privacy in order to maintain a sense of self.

Political figures surrender this right the moment they announce their candidacies. But what about the rest of us?

What we decide to put out there on the web bears only passing reference to the stage-managed profile we would have our web snoops first come to know about us. (Remember that's assuming the total stranger is completely positive we've been accurately identified). Of course agents of control like my LinkedIn profile is a world of perception removed from what my computer reveals about how I use it. These are the awards, achievements, and even endorsements that we display in our virtual trophy cases. But less invasive than a government sting or a virtual surveillance ring is the far greater probability that our blind spots are out there. There for the taking.

Blind spots are the unknown unknowns to us that are known to others. As Donald Rumsfeld famously gandered in the most revealing press conference held during two Bush terms, "there are the ones we don’t know we don’t know." In the case of the missing OMD he could not have been more candid!

Ms. Flood's framework for describing the blind zone is the Johari Window:

* What's known to others and not known to others
* What's known to the self both publicly and privately
* What's not known to the self through the blind self or the unknown self (subconscious)


The goal of any effective researcher is to focus on the blind self. The blind self contains our respective zones of ignorance (the impact my actions have on you beyond my own awareness). It is the world of former colleagues, spouses, and witnesses on the scenes of past wreckages -- the outcomes that don't find their way to the trophy case. On the web our delusions, supressions, misguided faith, willful ignorance, and past admissions of guilt are now open to question if not actual publication. We would be well served to self-educate and research our own vulnerabilities before we cast our investigative nets out to others.

Word Algebra

It was Steve Arnold who fathered the ABI Inform taxonomy. And we thank him. In it he created two telecommunications categories -- one as an industry and another as an operational function. And we owe him big time. Why?

Arnold understood that taxonomies had to be strongest where search is weakest -- separating objects from predicates, actions from actors, the simple mechanics of grammar. His decision to isolate industries from operations was an elegant way to map verticals and horizontals within what the pre-web world used to call full-text databases.

So now we've got big, messy data sets whose only barrier to entry is hitting the key. How do we create clarity around the events we anticipate? How do we increase the certainty that we can identify who is driving those events and who's on the receiving end?

The framework I use for teaching this to my BU students is through "word algebra." In word algebra the Boolean construct would be:

actor1 OR actor2 "(verb1 OR verb2)(outcome1 OR outcome2)"

Plug this into Google as a future crime fighter and you get:

police OR cops "(taking OR took OR take)*(bribe OR bribes)"

The beauty of the formula is that you're tuning your results to the consequence of actions. This is nearly always a more interesting result than a topic-based query string consisting of keywords and subject classifications.

Better still, consider an entire index of query-based strings that chronicle a common set of outcomes -- say police corruption. The result is a formula more productive as an indexing agent for information-gathering than any static taxonomy related to criminal justice.

Word Algebra

It was Steve Arnold who fathered the ABI Inform taxonomy. And we thank him. In it he created two telecommunications categories -- one as an industry and another as an operational function. And we owe him big time. Why?

Arnold understood that taxonomies had to be strongest where search is weakest -- separating objects from predicates, actions from actors, the simple mechanics of grammar. His decision to isolate industries from operations was an elegant way to map verticals and horizontals within what the pre-web world used to call full-text databases.

So now we've got big, messy data sets whose only barrier to entry is hitting the key. How do we create clarity around the events we anticipate? How do we increase the certainty that we can identify who is driving those events and who's on the receiving end?

The framework I use for teaching this to my BU students is through "word algebra." In word algebra the Boolean construct would be:

actor1 OR actor2 "(verb1 OR verb2)(outcome1 OR outcome2)"

Plug this into Google as a future crime fighter and you get:

police OR cops "(taking OR took OR take)*(bribe OR bribes)"

The beauty of the formula is that you're tuning your results to the consequence of actions. This is nearly always a more interesting result than a topic-based query string consisting of keywords and subject classifications.

Better still, consider an entire index of query-based strings that chronicle a common set of outcomes -- say police corruption. The result is a formula more productive as an indexing agent for information-gathering than any static taxonomy related to criminal justice.

Information Trapping and Information Traps

There are information hunters that have only one answer in mind and will torture the databases they interrogate until the correct response comes out. Then there are information farmers who are more interested in seeding potential hotbeds of knowledge through social nets and communities of practice. Then there are information scavengers or what are more diplomatically termed information "trappers."

Trappers are searchers who have seen enough search results to build their queries in advance of probable outcomes -- especially likely scenarios that pack a passing storm of relatable events. A common trigger for such events could be hirings and firings in anticipation of a job search. Another could be more environmentally-charged --say that newly proposed wind farm, toll hike, or carbon tax.

The eruptions of protest over a project approval, bid denial, or decision in the balance is bound to attract two outcomes:

1. News -- defined as consequences (awards, penalties), or, binding changes to policies and the fact base (selectively drawn from each side of the debate)

2. Conjecture -- the opinions of partisan supporters and opponents (typically in much greater page volumes than actual news)

Properly calibrated an information trap can tell you which side is winning the larger PR war -- newscycle by newscycle.

Tara Calishain dedicated her most recent in a series of search guides to setting traps. Her rationale is that you don't have to boil the ocean with ad hoc queries. Instead you can use RSS feeds and page alerts to reduce the fire-hose effects of voluminous results. You get targeted updates. You log off on top of what could otherwise feel like a bottomless situation. Best of all it's prompted by changes to your areas of interest -- not the subjects themselves which threaten to re-introduce you to already familiar themes and topics.

In the past we referred to this as the standing query. Lee Eichelberger, a usability guru with search engine vendor FAST deemed them Taxonomies of Use in this past winter's piece on Information Supply/Demand patterns and the growing requirements for enterprise Knowledge Planners. Whatever your terminology the major value add of setting traps is that they are triggered by events. But if you extend your query builds into the full richness of the aggregate, the wider patterns in your event stream emerge:

* Complaints are up!
* Viruses are leveling off!!
* My momentous press release went out last Tuesday -- yawn!!!

Calishain's effort should be lauded as one of the first efforts to seriously chronicle the notion of news flow as it relates to search returns. She provides serious guidance on which trap to set based on prior volumes of coverage and expected rates of change.

The trap here is that the actual use cases of actual trappers are buried under the details of the products in the toolbox -- the feature function sets of email services, content aggregators, and search engines. Many of these capabilities are susceptible to change by the time any reader would commit these details to their own trapping efforts -- especially the free utilities that most readers would try before investing in ore than the book. It's a time-tested recipe for selling updated editions of technology guides.

To Calishain's credit her task sequencing and engaging style enables her to cover far more ground than any web-based tutorial. It's certainly more hands-on and credible that what any vendor could ghost write through a technology press or research group. That said, it would be even more useful for students and practitioners alike to focus next time on use cases -- the actual trappings.