Didn't I Know of You?

I'm in the throes of reaching out to my adopted home of Western Massachusetts. It's a place that's welcomed me as a prodigal orphan who punched a one way ticket off Long Island, did my time in NYC, and never really warmed to Boston. The only sticking point is that I've never developed any business here in this "buy local" of all economies.

It's hard to imagine a more awkward introduction than drawing bands of would-be web developers and digital marketers into an FF vortex on Twitter to announce an open enrollment of my self-education program (Knowledge-ABLE) and the community for evolving it -- The Society for Useful Information (#SFUI). The SFUI introduction was held last month in Amherst and I'm continuing the same agenda at the Forbes Library this Monday.

Today I'm taking in the scene at the first ever Valley Summit where virtual personalities are materializing on our collective home turf. Eric Schmidt's parting observation before stepping down as Google CEO was that digital natives are never "online." Once they awake, their connected. I'm reminded of this as Karo Kilfeather is leading a social media marketing session on how the blurring together of the virtual and real world is a marriage that will stick. Honestly, my whole schtick (READ: thesis) is based on maintaining healthy boundaries between the two worlds. I've landed in the happy Valley -- the mayor of FourSquare be damned!

At least now I'm leveraging the less invasive and blander call to action of connecting on LinkedIn. It's no less impersonal than Twitter but at least my prospects can sniff me without feeling assaulted by non sequiturs. One of the folks I reached out to is a local WordPress developer named Terran Birrell. Terran was generous to share an insightful post on the finer points of the LinkedIn Soiree.

It doesn't make my pitch any less impersonal that the curriculum of Internet Research is inclusive to a fault. Outside of folks who would rather outsource their powers of reason it's hard to rule out an independently-minded individual who wouldn't benefit from a more disciplined approach to search engines, social bookmarking, RSS, and link analysis.

Here's my direct mail voice talking in the latest invites:

There are few allegiances I express with less reservation than a love for Pioneer Valley. Its natural beauty is keenly matched by the inner resourcefulness of those who call it home. We not only prefer to buy local. We insist on the ultimate demonstration of growing local – thinking for ourselves In that spirit I'm inviting you to join a community-minded group of local marketers, business owners, advocates, and educators who share this strong independent streak.

Honestly I have no idea what the turnout will be but I'm not holding my baited breath. This is a long term investment measured in community-building (sharing what I know). The fact I can hold a job and chew gum is what makes this enterprise feasible and me lucky to be sharing these skills. What I truly value is how web research augments the work of the advocates, educators, business owners, and marketers who I will grow to know in the coming years.

Happy spring, New England.

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?

 

We're Out of Internet Time

[caption id="attachment_589" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The sweet spot: No costs in next to no Internet time"]
 

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Remember the roaring nineties? E-verything  was e-commerce e-xuberence. A dotcom domain was a license to go public. Actual customers and products were exempted from establishing share prices on a uniquely American vintage of snake oil.

One of the other vestiges of the NASDAQ bubble was the notion of Internet time. This was the tagline update for an economy that never sleeps. No one wanted to have fallen prey to the old familiar PE ratios or even acknowledge that old school thinking had any sway on emerging business models.

The financial services supply chain was no longer tangible. But at least it was still intelligible -- no? Okay, we settled for legible back then in those bulging Internet-based portfolios. Then came the spook show of 2001 and these notions were beaten into weightlessness -- not by regulators but the laws of financial gravity. Only then did the Worldcoms, Enrons, Tycos, etal. spiral away from shareholders, employees, and other interdependent life forms on planet money.

Losing Track of Internet Time

In the Dotcom era, complacency became the new taboo. You could be going nowhere. You could be revving over-funded engines off cliffs of falling cash flows. Just no two-hour lunches, man. The alarm clock had rung and the snooze bar was jammed.  Every day we were told how “hot” companies and “cool” products were intensifying established markets or creating new ones:

• How hot?


• How cool?


• How intense?

It didn't much matter. There were so many winners in this most generous of competitions. Angel investors were flipping start-ups. The Feds sat in a corner. Stagnation was abolished. Companies simply grew or died. Both experiences were nearly instant.

All comers were out for one thing: to please the 'mother-of-all networks' as the nurturing vessel and growth serum. That was no Goodyear Blimp. That was a gaggle of rippling packet switches so enmeshed it eclipsed all television, telephony, and satellite networks combined. Remember all meeting there for the first time? Meeting anywhere else would never be the same.

Who in 1994 could have predicted that within 5 years desktop "searching" would become as cheap and pervasive as mouse pads and screen savers?

What's a screen saver?

The truth is that Internet Time has done the unthinkable. It has frozen our cluttered calendars in their tracks. How do I know? I woke up from my millennial hangover this morning and witnessed a miracle. We now have all the time in the world. I say that because online is no longer a useful distinction for defining offline. There's now only the folks who have severed the signal and the rest of us.

We pay through the nose for free information with calendars that are anything but free.

And how about that most favored time = cost factor ... the biological father of all business metrics? On Internet Time information wants to be free. Our calendars are not free at all but we're willing to spend untrackable hours tackled by our own fruitless searches. The paradox is astonishing. Information from the web is as plentiful as it is free and we still pay through the nose. How?

All-you-can-drink access has gone from flirtation, to utility, to civil liberty. So too the search engine as social moderator means that we only pay cash for pushing merchandise or pulling it in. That leaves a whole lot of intangible inventory around shopping for ideas, buying arguments and paying with our limited attentions as well as wallets.  But it's easier to spend all that unlimited attention on people-watching than self-educating and acting on what we learn.

The last time I set my alarm clock I never heard it go off. Or perhaps it had never stopped ringing? Next time you research, Google like you paid for it.

[caption id="attachment_587" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Last week's kickoff of Online Investigations for Pioneer Valley Professionals"][/caption]

The Art of Crafting Natural Intelligence

[caption id="attachment_555" align="alignleft" width="190" caption=""When you use more than 5% of your brain, you don't want to be on Earth.""][/caption]

I've probably teared up more at an unfair hockey fight and I've had more emotionally-engulfing movie goings. But as far as a life philosophy that plays out on screen, no self-contained cinematic mythology holds my candles quite like Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life.

For most of the story Brooks' day of judgement is about to play out in the purgatorial trappings of a Disneyesque  lodging and office complex. Is the protagonist to advance on the eternal enlightenment path to some higher plain? Will he shuffle back on the next tram for a return date with "the little brains" on earth? That swipe at us live inhabitants is a line delivered by Rip Torn, Brooks' defense attorney who testifies to a 53% utilization of his own cranial capacity. Us little brains use 2-3% -- the remainder of our mind-shafts are crowded out by lethargy and fear.

When One Framework is Worth a Thousand Taxonomies

I've wondered what fears could be confronted and ultimately shed so that I could soar perhaps from 2-3% up to 5-6?  In that spirit I've recently stumbled across a framework called Bloom's Taxonomy. Like the defense lawyer slam at our low-performing mental capacities and fear-mongering, Bloom said that 80-90% of our highest brain function in the lowest realm of sense-making. He calls this "knowledge." Knowledge is accessed through the following retention portals:

remembering, memorizing, recognizing, recalling identification, recalling information, who, what, where, when, how, describing

Kinda oafish, no? It's deciphering 101. It's on or it's off. X=Y or fuggedaboutit.

The pattern-matching of keywords is not the face that launched a thousand ships but the probability gag that seated a thousand monkeys at their typewriters in order to write the great American novel or the great American Internet start-up -- what ever cashes out higher.  Just Ask Jeeves! These are the well-trodden grounds of that cloistered chamber you and I have come to know as web search. Its premise is still tuned to exact match good enough-ness. That's because we can be sold nouns even more easily than the notion our mental blanks are being filled in my omnipotent language engineers. We frugal consumers cave to deals on things -- not to actions about ideas. Nouns are the merchandise -- not the verbs that help us to backorder our understanding of what we actually do with our bill of goods. Unless we're potential suspects in a case, no one is interested in our trail 'o stuff -- unless they can sell it to us again.

The next order of mental processing is to isolate noun phrases from their predicates. That means getting the search engine to distinguish actors from their actions, reducing outcomes to a range of questions we're ready to answer -- or at least lower our surprise should they arise. That kind of conditional logic exists in our mental reflexes whether we've had our morning shower or coffee.

It's interesting that in the pecking order of brain function the inverted pyramid of journalism ranks somewhere in the custodial closet of the ivy-coated shrines of higher learning. Not incidentally these are the unremarkable terms on which IBM's Watson, the question answering machine, beat its human Jeopardy contestants to the buzzer. It took a fact base so bottomless it would turn baseless in the gear shafts of the most fervently applied quiz show savant. Watson's algorithmic swagger chewed through mounds of trivia like a smoldering ash heap of documentation fertilizer.

Elementary School My Dear Watson

The conquest prompted one of the IBM partisans to reflect in the New York Times on finding Watson more meaningful work:

“I have been in medical education for 40 years and we’re still a very memory-based curriculum,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University... The power of Watson- like tools will cause us to reconsider what it is we want students to do.”

At the same time Watson's next gig as a physician's assistant begs a more immediate question: how do we humans need raise our learning games to Bloom's next levels of comprehension, application, analysis and synthesis? How do we aid and abet the healthy transfer of between us inquiring pea brains?

Knowing a lot about an academic discipline is at best, tangential to teaching it. Having a natural understanding of a subject can be an unnatural fit for passing that understanding along to others. Assuming that academics are better at publishing papers and attending conferences than in educating students, the question falls to the insatiable learners among us: how do we teach ourselves on a level beyond the aspirations of Watson's parents? How do we convince supple, young minds that a healthy dose of skepticism about humans is only the first of a storehouse of rational and instinctive reasons to doubt the merits and intentions of question answering machines?

The current cover story of the Atlantic Monthly offers up Mind Versus Machine. Here science writer Brian Christian serves in the oppositional role of the two Jeopardy adversaries to Watson. The objective of the annual Turing Test is for AI ("artificial intelligence") programmers to convince a sequestered panel via screen text that a machine could out-human its creator in a range of topics spanning from "celebrity gossip" to "heavy-duty philosophy." The advice Christian was given when cramming for this contest?

"Be yourself."

Gee, and I thought I knew how to body surf with the more cryptic sharks!

Five minutes of IM messages later Christian was crowned the winner of the Most Human Human Award -- chiefly for two reasons:

1. His dominating volleys (he's not waiting on Alex Trebek to pounce, pry, or provocate)


2. His insights into how the bottom feeder knowledge spoon-fed to his AI adversary highlights natural human intelligence in the experiential realm:

One of my best friends was a barista in high school. Over the course of a day, she would make countless subtle adjustments to the espresso being made, to account for everything from the freshness of the beans to the temperature of the machine to the barometric pressure’s effect on the steam volume, meanwhile manipulating the machine with an octopus’s dexterity and bantering with all manner of customers on whatever topics came up. Then she went to college and landed her first “real” job: rigidly procedural data entry. She thought longingly back to her barista days—when her job actually made demands of her intelligence.

That's a lesson well worth reteaching ourselves the next time we find ourselves needing to justify more question/answer sessions scheduled in the upper eschelons of Bloom's taxonomy.

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.

Our New WordPress Home

The Society for Useful Information
Home of Ututilis Consulting

See you there.

News Radars: Target Practice for Web Curators

What you don't know may hurt you.

What you don't need to know WILL distract you.

Content is no longer king. At least that's what I read in the news paupers.

There is no longer a premium on being the first to know. The future lies in being the first to understand in a way that draws others to that same understanding and their own conclusions. That's the manifesto for curators.

Content is a stammering, mucus-laden umm among the miscellany of unfiltered search results and anonymously authored web posts. In a world where pocket devices are publishing platforms, scarcity isn't measured in speed, access, or being connected but in making connections. Enter the sense-making territory of the web curator.

Imagine you're on the exhibition floor of the social media event of the century: information surplus? Meet knowledge deficit! That introduction is being brokered by a knowledge planner -- someone who can reconcile information supply with knowledge demand by anticipating:

• how news travels


• in what circles, and


• where that impacts most

The cultivations of web curators are based on the three pillars of interpretation: context, context, and context. Tell me who said it, who heard it, and where and what they said becomes immaterial. Tell me the way in which an appeal was made and the call to action falls by the wayside. Show me the eye-witness who lived through the event she's recounting and I get her authenticity implicitly as well as the emotional investments that would lead me to question her disinterested bystander status. An accomplished curator is not simply a message interceptor or retransmitter but a temperature gauger who positions the bursts and slowdowns of message traffic within the frame of reference of the personal radar.

We operate on a need-to-know-basis. If it lands off radar, our attentions don't shift.

In this tree-falls-in-the-forest scenario a Web curator is the best defense against the maladies of information fog such as A.D.D., insomnia, the blurring of professional and personal affairs, and absent presence -- the anxiety of device-enabled availability. That doesn't mean you farm your calendar out to a personal attention manager. That happens in a decade or two. But it does mean answering to the contextual value of our personal mental space: WIIFM (What's in it for me)?

The Market for Curators

So how does the curator find their niche? Being all things to all content consumers is about as relevant as trying to bury a subjective point of view. The new transparency isn't about leveling the playing fields of opinion. It's about linking to sources.  Unlike the ad-supported models of SEO campaigns a curator is not a human lynchpin for converting click-happy consumers. Idea people are not buying merchandise so much as arguments -- the kind that support the rationales for the advice they sell. Perhaps the killer app here is rediscovering the art of disengagement: finding no surprises when we reconnect because the curator has your back at all times:

She tries to communicate a need for balance to employees who report to her, too. “I worry about the speed at which they are going,” she says, adding that she wants them to “shut down” when needed, for the sake of their families and their health.

- Mickey Meese, Who's the Boss, You or Your Gadget? New York Times, February 5, 2011

Assuming we know what keeps our clients up at night, what kind of radar-building equipment serves the needs of curators?

That's where a grounding in advanced search commands and even some grasp of tired, ol' traditional media segments can come in handy. If you use a custom search tool like Google Coop Search to bundle sources you can see highly differentiated takes on your pet peeves, hot stock tips, and celebrated rumors on the news horizon.

Run those queries in the form of event-based trip wires and the daily counts form the aggregated patterns of what blows hot and cold in terms of news coverage. Google Trends runs the media pick-up patterns in tandem with the same terms in Google searches -- in effect we have that same handshake from the trade expo: media supply meets (or misses) user demand.

These radar constructs are good for high visibility issues that soar and plummet from year-to-year. But many of our search targets would go undetected on such a public radar. For that we need to scale down to a more street level view through localities, community members, and more niche or locally based organizations. That's where an RSS reader like Feed Demon shines as a personalized approach to event tracking and the aggregated coverage patterns -- the IPhone of Google Trends, if you will.

The Value of Curatorship

Finally curators should sell their quantifiable benefits to a confused and distracted market. That sales pitch starts with single examples:

Abstractions like what the best-known are best known for might be a starting point for idea people. For more grounded folks it boils down to this -- one purposeful, unitary artifact that reveals the telling quote, table, framework or footnote -- diamonds in the ... umm ... content rough.

The bigger picture benefits will emerge once these evidentiary building blocks become ingrained in our web-based discovery process. That might be sweet music to sleep-deprived crisis managers. It may be a threat as well to the scientists of external risk assessment who traffic in the language of hysteria; the paranoid leading the parablind down an alley of would-be prowlers and invaders. No one likes to depart from the script. No one makes time for interruptions. They arrive unannounced. Their departure comes in its own time.

The impulse to panic is an age-old temptation not restricted to unsuspecting widows or defenseless victims. Is the concentration level thick with anticipation or diffused through false alarms and unmet expectations? Is it a wave of consensus or a squeaky wheel? A whistle in the dark or a charging stampede? What are the measured responses that address tangible perceptions -- not last night’s nightmares but tomorrow’s business realities.

A curator can discern the strength of association and tell you where you are in your crisis – floating near the bottom of a deep-sea or being washed into shore escorted by the storm surge itself.

Sound like answers you're not getting from today's Google? If you want a crowd, start a fight. And when you do, hire a curator who can point out who's in the audience.