attentionSpin

Planning for the Last War

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:54:00 +0000

They say that military strategy is a slow learner. They say that the battlefield is the only classroom where any educating happens and any real learning passes into the lessons of history. The other truism is that the more palatable the war effort, the sooner the next conflict will follow.

This is the lowest hanging rationale for accepting the inevitability of Surge the Sequel (as opposed to Gulf War II) which we only officially won after a fake news host declared it so on an overseas telecast last summer.

This winter season GI Joe will once again be sporting the road jerseys against the hometown Taliban, suiting up in their olive drab fatigues and black turbans. Perhaps it's the war on terror under the guise of the rule of law. Maybe it's Obama eating a campaign pledge to the tune of a Dick Morris re-election strategy. Whatever the rationale it is an enemy of the rational. I am immune to its allure. I can't pretend to understand all the thoughtful partisan elites who throw up their hands and say: "there's no good option!"

Even the term "option" suggests that this is a question best massaged by delicate hands and answered by a middle ground between retreat and aggression -- the greatly nuanced least-objectionable path where no leader is completely wrong, close-minded, or surprised by what happens next.

I don't believe propping wobbly, pro-Western extortionists in what our military planners call our AfPak foreign policy is what our military families are counting on when we claim our future dead. Their bodies and their passions are buying us indecisive time. What we can't conclude is that a lost battle is not ours to lose.

I do believe that American civilians like myself find it far too comfortable to hide behind the friendly lines of our brave soldiers and special effects weaponry. That's the national security that an occupation of Afghanistan provides. That comfort is not a recipe for victory but the last defense against the slippage of our powers of reason for unleashing such force.

And that's the point. Is it about proving those eight deaths at Fort Hood were not in vain? Or is it making certain that we can carry the fight of our choosing to whoever stands to gain by hosting the war preparations they legitimize? The answer is more fickle and sinister than the no-good option folks have factored in.

Collaborators' Dilemma

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Have you ever been witness to a rear-end collaboration? It isn't pretty and the traffic slows to a crawl with no clear reason why a perfectly smooth ride turns into a gaggle of abandoned bumper cars in the breakdown lane.

The rear-end refers less to orifice that we use to insult the bad collaboration actors. It's not even about going stealth or secretive in the one-way exchange of participation-free online lurkers in the shadows of online collaborations. It's really more about fear of being perceived as an ass than any backwards thinking now in vogue. It's more about standing out for the wrong reasons. It's an anxious place where the reward for participation is the absence of penalties.

Some of us like to stand out. Most of us would rather pick the time and the place. In the age of closed circuit camera phone reality exceedingly few of us see any form of personal recognition as positive recognition.

It's that bridge from stilted collaboration to the exquisite melding of group minds that we crossed over at last Thursday's meeting of Boston's SIKM chapter. Sometimes it was about wikis or listservs or task-based or even competitive collaboration. But in each case we all took in the collective smell test and passed our own versions of what's applicable to our own teams and projects. We also played bumper cars in a freewheeling, agenda-defying forum. I don't remember any drivers slowing down to inspect the damage.

My favorite part of this meeting was that the majority had no prior SIKM meetings from their calendars. The notion that we could all steer the same rudder over two hours of unscripted ideation was the glue that held our experiences up to the light of peer review. Unimpeded by PowerPoint and the flimsiest of agendas, the most contestable of assertions was made by Ken Cundari: that the road to bad collaboration is paved with riffing on ideas untethered to concrete tasks and goal-setting.

My contention is that dynamic applies to teams but not individuals. That's because this model puts motive in the spotlight. Most clients desire outcomes devoid of their own personal reasons for wanting it. Yes, productivity unmasks the poker face when the same team is playing to win with the same playbook. But the productivity argument falters under the weight of the fuller disclosure that a stated purpose requires. Besides, I (client) will pay more if you (consultant) really know the worth of your deliverable.

Laurie Damianos and Lester Holtzblatt also contributed some firsthand feedback on their own user communities, including the insight that would-be wiki collaborators need to know the circulation numbers (ocean wiki or pond-sized wiki) before they take the plunge.

Based on the steady stream of inputs from our collective exchange it seems the improvised brainstorming and the orchestrated roadmapping blended into one. To my best recollection here are the testifiers:

Patti Anklam

Paula Cohen

Ken Cundari
Deborah Devine
Laurie Damianos
Lester Holtzblatt
Michael Koffman

Personal Knowledge Solos and Siloes -- the Uncooperative Side of Collaboration

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:46:00 +0000

The most accusational word in the language of KM is "hoarding." This is a label that us true KM believers afix to the folks on the periphery of our SharePoint deployments who don't call or write or reciprocate our calls to pool resources and know-how:

"Don't be a star, be a galaxy," we implore with our open minds and empty SharePoint sites.

Last week one of the directors at my firm posted a simple and direct request to his peers through the our community of practice lists. These email accounts are often called upon for information requests and rarely repatriated when some helpful responses materialize. In other words it's culturally okay to spam your colleagues. But it's not cool to close the loop with the learning you pick-up along the way.

The welcome change in this outcome was that the director saved each response and posted them to the same inbound email list within SharePoint. The result was that lots of undocumented experience was now referencable in a single folder and worth more than all the PowerPoint pile-ons one could ever dump off the deep-end of an abandoned fileshare.

The promises and the perils of community-based discussions are best summed up by Dave Snowden, KM deity and sense-maker of complex adaptive systems. Snowden seems to have the knowledge capital culture of small, elite professional service firms down cold when he posits the all-or-nothing proposition of knowledge requests versus knowledge requirements:

“If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.”

The lesson for knowledge-minders is to design their KM systems around the noninvasive ways that service professionals seek collegial guidance. Even the artifice of re-posting a response is preferable to broadcasting a list of "best response practices" or requiring participation. As Snowden intimates there's no more reliable way to deaden a live discussion.

Here's the link to some of Snowden's other renderings.

High Innovations and Misdemeanors

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:12:00 +0000

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
- John Maynard Keynes

As a card-carrying taxpayer I thought I should check in on my blindsides and trundle into the sense-making machine. I would hear the analysis needed to talk the next pendulum swing into a softer landing than the dead stop of last fall's meltdown. Something well-argued, reasonable. Unlike climbing out of a recession with unemployment cresting past 10 percent. On the day the Dow resurfaced above 10,000 I'm thinking -- better revise my reasoning downward -- and buy oil futures before tanking up for my next trip to Western Mass.

According to Paul Krugman his brethren (mild-mannered B-school professors) were launched into rocket science stardom by their serious math-making and sparkling financial models. Rare was the request for the macro-perspectives they were schooled in -- an assessment to compare asset prices to real world fundamentals, e.g. reality-based earnings?

Instead they did what any investor or CEO or Rotisserie League Commissioner would do. They compared assets to other assets (and the more you pay, the more it's worth so bubble-up, econ man...) How do you know it's overpriced? Whenever the appraiser's fees are set by the appraisal. Put another way -- the market holds a monopoly on what to price things. This is not just a blinking black eye for a job poorly done. It's an abdication of the job itself by a profession that prides itself in standing apart from fiscal gravity -- not from being pulled in by it.

What's that awesome and universal self-policing curb on prices? It's fear that trumps greed and pushes demand off the price-setting tables. This is not advanced macroeconomics talking. This is primordial worst case behavior kicking in at no extra charge.

When their macroscopes were placed under the full light of day and here's what Krugman saw:

* They concocted new recipes (fuzzy math, real dividends) to feed a hungry market. Their ratio-making rode atop the eyebrows of Greenspan as works of genius that perfected a recession proof set of market forces and pacified the social forces that might disrupt this state of perpetual growth.

* They rationalized away the insatiable appetite (the savage force of our material natures). So what if this equilibrium nudged the distribution of wealth off a precipitous ledger? The middle class still held down a job, even if it was two jobs. Now there is no easy credit. There is no steady work. And the world economy is learning how to run clear of the maxed-out American consumer, XXL edition.

* Trouble is, when your insights are underwritten by the too-big-to-fail team the too-precious-to-share scheme loses its luster. The bubble pops and the tent comes crashing down. Fear beats greed senseless in a race to zero sum as old as scarcity and as artificial as the house of cards built on the edifice of self-correcting markets.

Cool rationality was the temptation that seduced investors into back-to-back decades of buy orders on efficient, friction-free markets -- the zipless f*ck of wealth creation. I would like to see even-handedness return to the notion that economies are not casinos, that winners don't take all, and that the goal is not to create more rich people but a stable social order. Maybe if I swap out sustainable for stable I'll sound like less of a socialist-fascist and more like the great silent desperation majority now forced to choose between pitchfork populism and disenfranchised resignation.

However, if you read the latest HBR on risk you find that aspiration to be romantic, impractical, and dissed by the enduring power of unfettered innovation. A roundtable of risk elites assure each other that the standard risk return is measured in corporate balance sheets and that the needle must nose up to systemic levels where "firms and markets intersect" and the institutional deer and environmental buffaloes play. Regulation anyone?

Harvard B-school professor Peter Tufano says that we have too many club-footed regulators overstepping on overlapping jurisdictions. "Quite a lot of risk falls in the gaps," Tufano observes with the circular transparency of one who robs banks (because that's where the money is) or frequents K Street fundraisers (where the arms of the law end and the loopholes take over).

Robert Kaplan of Balanced Scorecard fame hints that the law will always be a step behind the law-breakers. Are the expectations that low? Could a step-behind be a step-ahead of asleep-at-the-switch? It's not even clear where the moral lies within the hazard when Kaplan assures us that "regulators will always be behind innovation -- certainly in finance -- and they're always going to be regulating the previous innovation." Ouch.

So the next innovator laces a derivatives bomb to the bottom of their shoes. Sounds like we're in for some barefooted banking. No liquidity exceeding 3 ounces of gold per inflation hedge? If Kaplan is right and regulators lack imagination as much as enforcement tools then maybe the government needs to fire a spoiler salvo at the alter of next cycle innovations. Given that: (1) the Dow is up 53% for the year, and (2) that Goldman's investment banking division is responsible for much of that a pre-emptive strike might be in order.

The Autistic Genius of Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:09:00 +0000

You’ll never lose an audience tearing down Microsoft, building them up, or equating their product strategy with most high functioning forms of autism. But this post is more personal. It's about Microsoft and me.

No, not "my" Microsoft or even mycrosoft. It was never about that. And we still don't share many interests. But we do share the same initials. We have spent our entire professional lives together. That's something. We don't travel in the same circles. But oh, that shared history! Not even the birth of the World Wide Web could cause us to break-up -- at least not yet.

Is it because in these cold days of flying bottomless on stimulus anxiety at least I can still toggle effortlessly between Excel and Word? Is it because I can wander into the slide shows of colleagues who respirate, fantasize, and fold their pizza box dreams into PowerPoints? Is it because my biggest trading credential is that I suit up on my virtual home turf as power SharePoint user? That's Microsoft and me. Pushing that MS office comfort zone out from the desktop to the enterprise. But not beyond. It was never about that.

Microsoft is the perpetuity of here and now. Before Microsoft perpetual motion was just a theory. But then Bill Gates changed the rules. He didn't design great products or even figure out what customers needed. He invented a new feature called "price" and he slapped one on every boxable shipment. He succeeded at this not because his products were better, faster, cheaper. They were bland, slow, and well ... pricey. They didn't even talk to one another without the next upgrade. But they were personal, like the machines that ran them. Gates franchised out the microprocessor. That's what the wealthiest person in the world does at the turn of this new century. But it's more than that.

When I first started attending programs hosted by the New England Asperger's Association (AANE) at the onset of the oh-ohs (2000s) one of the favorite guessing games was "celebrity Auspies." That's where someone would flag the New York Times article where comedians, actors, and captains of industry admitted to the diagnosis. The implicit conclusion in these confessions? That high-functioning autism was as much the driver in their success as an impediment to their playing nice with the rest of the species. Gates was always the biggest prize:

"Do you think he has Asperger's?" AANE's founder Dania Jeckel would speculate. We'd wonder about his languid speech and his stilted eye contact. We still do.

I'm still on the fence. But I'm not waiting for the lab results to come back on the culture he cultivates. I am certain that Microsoft is Asperger's certified. And I know that because as much as the web grows exponentially from one wireless village to the next there are even greater piles of documentation that will never see the light of 24/7 Internet Day. And those documents are written in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. Each one is a personal information silo designed to keep my ownership of each work free and clear of the unruly crowdsourcing that passes for wisdom on the web. It strengthens porous borders against the same hackers that live to disrupt Microsoft code. It guards personal knowledge territories against the globalist elites. It's always been about control. It's never been about communication.

Get inside the heads of users? Actually figure out what they're thinking? That would mean hitting the help key and not having to retell your story to the help index. That would mean that "search" would have never been supplanted by a word that didn't exist before Gates landed at the top of the Forbes list. That word is Google. That would mean expanding the customer base beyond the fringe of IT managers who look down on their internal customers as much as Microsoft does. Communicating like there's some kind of mutual dependency between users and vendors? That would be an original idea. Therefore it will never come from Microsoft.

Gates and me? We're like this. That's Microsoft on the top and me on the bottom.

We Hold These Truths to be Transparent

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:03:00 +0000

Last week the Boston chapter of the SIKMers riffed on a recent op-ed polemic by David Weinberger, one of KM's most lucid and original explainers. His case that transparency is the new objectivity argues that objectivity and objectives part company as soon as the subject climbs into the ring to greet the predicate.

This false god of objectivity has a familiar din in the blogosphere where the only distinction between a PR hack and a venerated journalist is whether they count a media conglomerate on their pay stub or the client retains them directly. Weinberger moves smartly beyond the tired trashing of media elites to the more complex unpacking of what it means for: (1) defining the boundaries of context, and (2) ultimately the quality of information grown and cultivated on the public web.

He notes that "fair and balanced" is unattainable for reporters and all second-party relayers of primary events. From fact collectors to checkers and from theory rejectors to truth selectors we hold this truth to be transparent -- that all humans create subjective realities. But then Weinberger sources the downstream implications for retiring this myth: (1) Its tendency to overstep its own authority, and (2) its coercive power to mislead those it seeks to inform with its self-referential perspective.

Can reasonable people seeking the refuge of a higher ground still find their way to a common, middle ground? Weinberger goes onto conclude that the achievement of objectivity is not only widely questioned but dismissed as an agreed-upon goal between senders and receivers (or what used to be called "the media" and "the public.") Yet the myth lives on. Why?

Even our well-intended skepticism cannot conceal another gaping need once (and still) serviced by the myth. And it has little to do with column widths, how many people still read newspapers, or how many of us document what we say and think based on what we see and hear. That insistent need in the mind of the news beholder is credibility -- the emerging gold standard of information overload. Only through the lens of credibility can we buy arguments, accept a premise, or decide who's right between the fraying edges of our national discourse.

Now that the limits of objectivity are on full display in our search results and our cable systems Weinberger argues that transparency is the new surrogate for credibility, ready to step in and referee for the brave and free inquirers and deciders of all spectral stripes:

That’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to accept ideas as credible the way the claim of objectivity used to.

This change is epochal.

In this world the biases are stripped away. Don't take the reporter's word on it? Click through to their sources and question what was pursued and what went begging. The blind-spots blink right back at us. The truth is stripped down to its naked accessories, made all the more discomforting by conclusions reached before any reporting ever takes place. Of course that level of open documentation assumes an audience as active in their news consumption as the reporter in the production of their story. Only a third-party with a firsthand stake of an outcome proposed or influenced in the reporting would exercise their full transparency options.

It's also sobering to consider the lengths that reporters have gone to protect their sources in this new golden age of transparency -- precisely because the story could stand on its own through the testimony and firsthand experience of those troubled by their own confirming observations.

That's the sniff test for credibility whether it's delivered through myth or hyperlink. When we open ourselves up to persuasion how much of our heads run interference for our hearts? How scripted is the appeal? How self-serving to the caller is the call for all good humans to come to the aid of the unaided? Bottom-line: what is this costing them -- particularly among members of their own group in untold horse trading and political capital?

We see things not as they are but as we are. The greatest threat to public credibility is 'politics as usual' -- the extent to which power protects itself regardless of the laws, morals, public trust, and, loyalties it compromises. How our leaders behave in public is routinely compared to our perception of the way they act behind closed doors. The gap between what we 'see' and what we're 'told' forms the basis of 'character'. We know them so we accept what we cannot understand. Our leader is a jerk. But they are 'our' jerk.

Public leaders with strong character are said to resist politics as usual -- sacrificing their own grip on power for the greater public good, a higher principle, and/or, the belief that such a sacrifice will prompt greater beneficence among other participants, including adversaries. That kind of trading is called integrity. It is the highest form of credibility -- and the rarest.

My hope from Weinberger's insights is not that transparency will even the playing field or cast a redeeming light in a dark corner but simply 'be' the playing field. We will not all play by the same rules. But neither will the eyes of the world look away when we're drawn to that harsh, clarifying spotlight.

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:19:00 +0000

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

Giving Voice to Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:03:00 +0000

I just completed a first cycle of online instruction for a section of the Professional Investigations Program at Boston University. I've been teaching the classroom version for a few years now but it's always been a forced fit to teach an online class offline. The paradox was a real boon for my online PIoneers who were sandwiching their curriculum inbetween forced feedings of social networking, day jobs, working double shifts, financial acrobatics, and putting kids to bed.

But as much as the freedom from time and distance is a liberation I seriously needed to connect -- not passwords to logins or even names to faces but from experiences to voices. There is a reason there is no "text of experience" to replace that expressive voice for communicating the aspirations and endeavoring spirit. It's the voice of experience that each participant conveys in the faith that their investment in virtual learning will pay off in tangible, transformative ways.

I pushed the program administrators to consider adapting at least the option for an opt-in phone conference to clear the air about the voices -- even at the risk of having the stronger personalities dominate the discussion. There was also the concern that enthusiasm for the subject might push against the pressures carried by online adult learners. But given the tight deadlines everyone is under, I'm not sure that's a lasting concern of our students. They want to be heard -- especially in a forum of their peers.

Either way the voice is more than a phone call. It's also the willingness to parlay one's life experience into the program curriculum. That's not a theory of learning. That's an application of doing. The learning and the doing are one in the same. In my class that's called the PI blog. The basic blocking and tackling generates a container of news and commentary about the passions of our aspiring PIs. More importantly it's a chance for them to insert themselves into a conversation between those interests and the role they would play for shaping them.

Looking for a primer on getting into the PI field? Look no further than Robyn Kervick's Aspiring Sleuthhound.

Working the PI job leads? Brian Dodge factors in the exacting qualifications with PI or not to PI. Deb Burress addresses similar job-hunting turf with a more diary-like approach.

Reporting on the latest scandals in corruption-prone institutions? Nick Jamieson keeps the stakeholders honest in his Government Investigations.

Interested in the need for improved transparency and better forensics standards? Emmy Balon writes with eloquence and authority on Becoming Nancy Drew.

Fishing your way out of foreclosure and the rights and responsibilities of homeowners when their debt loads are clamoring for higher ground? Tune into Ligia Tanney's Real Estate Solutions Radio.

Looking to source anonymous and potentially malicious phishers and schemers? Check out Mark Williams Skip Tracing News.

Finally Allan Bowlin crosses state lines to put his GPS expertise to work in Digital Forensics.

All these niches blossomed in the last compressed week of the course. I look forward to seeing how each one of these seedlings take root in the Internet Research soil tilled by these insatiable investigators (or "truth tellers" as Program Director Tom Shamshak likes to call our students). Long may they testify.

An American Tradition -- Wasting Time on the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:23:00 +0000

In 22 years of being online I can tell you the number one time waste is guessing that the person you're searching on is really the individual who keeps coming up in your search results.

Even if you know where they went to high school or their middle initial, the incomplete details of a partially formed profile can open up more doors than it closes.

I created a confidence ratio for my PI students to gauge the accuracy that my pre-class Googling of them was really then. I told them that I put together this puzzle to show them:

Some examples of semantics and operators -- two of the components comprise the work we do in query formation

A fact-based way to gauge the likelihood that they'd nailed the right guy

But beyond the math and science there's also a lot of frustration spent on the nailing -- the obsessing over whether we have the right guy or not. In an investigation where our fact base is limited to the actions of one suspect then there is little choice.

I've seen, all too often though, that investigators tie themselves in knots because they don't allow for a range of outcomes that includes several possibilities -- be it witnesses, experts, interpretations, or even competing explanations for why the crime occurred.

I tell them that as we get deeper into the Internet realm of criminal research a range of productive outcomes is a lot more realistic (and healthier on your heart) than fixating on one suspect and nailing them to whatever ... they deserve.

Oh yeah, there's one other reason I dragged them through this. Second biggest time waste on the web? It's not Britany Spears or Michael Jackson. That's right -- it's vanity searches. And until we either make introductions or Google one another, that's all we have to go on.

A September to Dismember

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:57:00 +0000

Dear Garo,

My b-day alarm failed last week. I leave you with this empathetic call to Met adversities:

Bearing any hurricanes to be named later the Mets have to play 34 more games this season. That's almost 300 more innings of possible season-ending incurrences to the likes of:

Anderson Hernandez (.265 lifetime in minors)

Alex Cora ($2 million this year for being 'scrappy')

Ken Takahashi (40 year-old virgin ... rookie)

Pat Misch (recalled by the big club three times since clearing waivers in June)

Lance 'Bowtie' Broadway (escaped last week's pounding by the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs by coming to big citi)

Jose 'Cameo' Reyes (significant scar tissue won't keep him from sharing pinch-hitting duties)!

Here are some of the leading season finishing options still in contention...

* Introduce pay-to-play pricing for fans who can pass the team physical and sign away their liability claims. This would bring the needed revenues to seed the depleted farm system and the necessary bodies. After all, the last 15 spots in the expanded Sep-member roster are currently filled by the remnants we have.

* Contract out Moises Alou as a fitness instructor.

* Sign 70 year-old Phil Niekro and his knucksie. He can pitch every inning, lead the league in innings (going away) and give the bullpen a well-deserved month off. Says Minaya, "We need a warm body to eat innings. It's OK if he falls apart."

* Invite Vince Coleman back to orchestrate the fireworks show for fan appreciation day.

* Introduce lotto-flavored value pricing where ticket buyers are refunded a fraction of their tickets if the occasion qualifies as a "no save situation."

* Jump start health care reform by paying players to stay healthy, not to sign in 2010 on their inflated 2009 terms.

Says our blogosphere:

"My God, I have never seen such a downright fragile baseball team in my life."

"I shudder to think about this season's cratering becoming a much larger canyon."

"There's no truth to the rumor that I injured myself blogging about the Mets."

So there you have it, G-man. These are the wounds that give life. Because (or in spite) of your suffering I am expected to fully recover and be ready for Spring Training. Happy Birthday to you and for all the healing you bring us.

Pelf-conscious Sol

Newssift: Take No Surprises

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:23:00 +0000

In my professional estimation the leading cause of long walks off short search piers is a direct but elusive info-quest:

I speak not of panning for gold but dishing for dirt.

After all, the impulse being served here sits at the table of avoidance. And that dining guest we're trying to scratch off the guest list goes by the name of "surprise." We do not wish for surprise to be seated at our tables. If they arrive despite our best efforts we need to be sure we can respond to the dining conversation that surprise may throw our way.

Enter -- Newssift.

Newssift is a media coverage engine delivered on Nstein data mining technology and fueled and branded by the Financial Times. The sentiment analysis capabilities aren't new. It's been around now for about a decade and I date my own exposure back to extraction tools like Xerox Parc-bred Inxight and SRA's NetOwl.

Full disclosure: I consulted to Cymfony back in 2001 when the sentiment teams to beat were Biz360 and Intelliseek. All were search solutions seeking a business problem they could partner into a growth segment. All came with hefty price tags and too much tinkering to package them as standard fare business intelligence applications. Also, customers don't buy growth segments unless they're pre-IPO shareholders. The fact my contract came up for renewal on 9/11 closes that loop.

What's new here is that pricey is now free and this baby hums along without much help. In fact you could be out in some elliptical trance orbiting an obtuse subject and still hit pay dirt -- lots to dish and even a score quantifying the negativity that sparks that take-no-surprises impulse. For example I key in one choice four letter word:

corn

I find out that corn is not a place -- imagine that, no Corn, IA zip code to be had. I also scoop up a 'Cornelius' and a 'Cornwall' in the first and last name mappings and there are no business topics. But then I eye the themes tab and pause to slurp on the corn syrup oozing from the media pile-on for HFCS ("high fructose corn syrup"). Now my contextual moorings are chomping down on the correlated clusters of people, organizations, places, and related themes that wash out in the buzz (Cousin Michael leads the HFCS people hit parade with 7 mentions).

The most gluttonous outcome for a big corn hunter though is a click-through on the 21% of the media pie carved out to be negative coverage. A quick inventory of the body counts show slackening demand for the product, lawsuits on the horizon, and bent out-of-shape nutritionists planting doubtful stories like "Are grape jelly and chocolate milk bad for kids' brains?" In the movie version this is where the camera pans to the left and right of newspapers falling on doorsteps. Calendar pages become unhinged like the crumbling fortunes of corn empires near and far.

Newssift summation: I'm impressed with the narrative one can tell with little forethought or background knowledge on moving and complex search targets -- especially the ones we don't want to be dining on or with anytime soon.

Failure is an Option

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:50:00 +0000

In fact it's not only an option -- it's a requirement.

Make no mistake, failure has gotten a bad rap.

With visions of "success factors" and "best practices" dancing in the breakout sessions of our best mental slideware, there's nothing dishonest about wanting to put our best golden feet forward.

Here's the problem. Singing one's own praises is sincere. In fact it's the most authentic form of expression an individual can communicate in public. No degree of certified witnesses, credentialing, or group affiliations can disguise the impulse for self-promotion.

The snag occurs when the message sender thinks that the substance of the message takes precedence over the messenger. This broad based and unintended conceit has been with us since April, 1939 when television covered its first event -- the birth of itself, as noted by the noted Hadley historian Andrew Morris-Friedman.

Messengers get mistaken for messages all the time. The bigger mistake is the self-delusion: that the bigger, faster, cheaper rule applies to message production the same way it does to plasma screens and smart phones. Starring in your own message works when you know your recipients. But it doesn't scale -- especially when the messenger breaks the cardinal rule of public self-awareness:

Thou cannot confer credibility unto thou self ... unless of course one's goal is shrill, pious righteousness served up with a splash of self-importance.

That's why I insist that my students share their secrets of failure. The lessons that bear repeating because the experience of them does not. I tell them I'm not interested in their search results or favorite sites but what they do with them. I’m not going to satisfy that interest unless I tell then my own failure stories – not tales of woe but uphill climb we all have.

Remember that the next time you get spammed about some upcoming webcast trumpeting a parade of unceasing success. If there's any substance there the talk will be focused on the missteps, sunk costs, and conflicting signals that their laurels are resting on.

Soylent Green Energy

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:49:00 +0000

Besides the chilling prospect of 21st-century America morphing into a cold war state — with Sheryl Crow in charge of toilet-paper rationing — there are also delusional fears about the government tapping bank accounts and convening “death panels,” as Sarah Palin dubbed them, to exploit the cost-saving potential of euthanizing the old and disabled.

- Maureen 'Cobra' Dowd, today's NYT op-ed

Gotta hand it to the GOP-stoppers and their cradle AND grave oldies show. Defend the unborn. Protect the undead. For everyone else there will be lower taxes and the question of whether the Granny-killing current President was born in the wrong country.

Maybe President Obama needs to speechify what the town hate debates are really about -- Chuck Heston's stunning realization that the life-sustaining wafer that keeps the depraved NYC of 2040 regular is ... is ... Barak, you've got to tell them that health insurance reform is ... people!

I'm guessing that the Dems think they have this thing locked up based on two calculations:

- Their sizable majorities
- Placate wavering centralists by foregoing Single Payer (not enough cashable campaign chips from Single Payer lobby as subtext)

What if the CBO's cred is greater than Obama's charm? What if it's just simply unAmerican to spread our CT-scans, ultrasounds, and stress tests around to the swelling margins of our most compromised citizens? And how did his location folks find six African-Americans to appear in the establishing shot in Portsmouth yesterday when there are seven in all New Hampshire?

What if American employers who never signed up to man the coverage lifeboats decide they would sooner let this legislation sink than swim? Is it really in their self-interest to de-privatize the risk pool? They can always shed a few more head counts. Otherwise social capitalism takes a hit the next time the boom goes bust. Then it's gonna be more than donut holes and infirmed elders falling through those safety nets.

I hope we Americans are not as confident as our Democractic majorities. This is not our father's silent majority that needs to clear its collective throat in the cry for health reform.

I called my congressional office to see what I could do about helping the cause and my attempt fell to the bottom of one staffer's VM box who skirts in-between district offices when the future of the economic world is not at stake. I think I'll ride by bike down to the site of his telephone today. I have no tissue story to tell. But I can show up in a public setting at an appointed time.

What's a Bad Question? Good Question.

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:37:00 +0000

You've heard it before -- especially in a public setting seeded with unfamiliar faces: "There are no stupid questions."

Mostly the moderator who says this is responding to a lack of feedback -- especially when the presentation they gave is either alien or controversial to at least some of the participants.

In all honesty the stupidity lies with the moderator for boxing themselves into an exchange-proof presentation. But if we were even more honest about the kinds of questions that drive search analysts and KM folks batty it's a misinformed question built on the premise of unfounded assertions, urban legends, and generalized assumptions that stretch the appropriateness of their fit too far.

For example it's entirely understandable that some rocket scientist raised on Google believes they could pepper their query with the names of propellants and launchers and then truncate on a few choice biological weapons. What's misinformed about that? Nothing if you're on the web. However if it's done on your firm's SharePoint server and rockets are not what you sell and maintain then you run into two walls right away:

1. Complex question +
2. Uncommon terms =
3. Dumb question

Of course the site admin who sees it is no likely point this out than the search tool itself. Can you imagine buying the Google appliance and for every "zero hit" set of search results the response is "Did you mean to search this on public Google?" The problem metaphorically is that Rocket Star is sticking to his guns by running an ocean-sized search request inside the information pond that is my intranet.

Here's a QA framework I developed that illustrates the response range in terms of the battles worth fighting (stay with the upper quadrants):

Short of remedial information literacy classes the best work-around is to focus on the use of one or two unique terms so that my user can see the lay of the Rocket land in my shop before plundering ahead with anything more esoteric or complex. I can also engineer a search outcome that breaks the question down in terms of the topic addressed. But that works best for blank, receptive brains -- not for domain experts.

Ultimately the best run around the no bad questions mindset is to connect people and dispense with relevancy scoring for documents. Once we're past that we can actually prove what a good question can be. But only by providing a sound answer and people deliver those better than PowerPoints.

From the Tyranny of Distance to the Monopoly of Now

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:41:00 +0000

If we could mount several lifetimes of recorded history and gaze down at its slopes and summits we might see the collapsing of distance into an instantaneous recall of each plodding rung and liberating leapfrog up the incline. From ships to cables to wires, and lightwaves time has been beaten senseless and removed from its former station between the send key and the ear piece. Nothing new about that altercation.

The mountain climb is a treacherous and tiresome metaphor for an ascent so unquestioned gravity catches its breath long enough to wonder: was a decision even made here? As if the speed of communication would ever be left alone long enough to grow static -- even for one recordable moment?

Far greater are the chances that our species would lose all interest in reproducing. Perhaps our numbers would dwindle from forces greater than our collective will? These are less remote possibilities than bringing a halt to faster evolving communications. We can't get the news soon enough. Not fast enough? No news there.

The newest clouds that have nestled beneath this nothing-new-sun have been tagged by a more contemporary name than any timeless nature. To techies it goes by the name of SMS ("short message service"). For the rest of us last week's IM was this morning's text cc'ed as a tweet that will evolve into some other signal by the time it floods my in-box.

In the late seventies I first experienced this ancient pang for a collective human respite (was it overnight delivery of air parcels? I've lost the clock watch on that one). I railed then against the competing claim that a piece of news could be both timely and analytical. Narrowing the gap between sending and receiving does nothing to speed up the vetting, assessing, or netting out what it means.

Is it better to be in the dark?

What you don't know "may" hurt you. What you don't need to know "will" distract you. Try that rationale on for size the next time an idle moment is engulfed by a flurry of Blackberry deletions. This abhorrence of a chatter free void is not about staying on top or keeping up. It's about not ending up on the bottom -- the very place we analytical types had once vowed to occupy until we could safely say "we know when up is up."

Oh how little majesty and how precipitous the trajectory of those towering achievements. Our views of technology are positively panoramic. But united we stand -- on the shoulders of midgets.

Parse-Snips: "And I Mean It"

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:13:00 +0000

Much has been made about the Skip Gates / Cambridge Police imbroglio. The biggest drama in the aftermath of the press conference is of its diffusion -- not the completely predictable, almost mechanical, escalation of indignation between two sparring partners (and they are partners). I tip my hat to Obama's calibrated apology: I'm not taking any of it back but I did get in over my head. In the moment where the fear-harboring swells into the shouting match Crowley, Gates and the President were all consumed by passion and that's the boundary-smasher.

The spectacle was ripe for picking because:

(1) It was unscripted -- it wasn't about health care. Obama could have been just as easily asked about the newest wave of settlements in the West Bank. He could have struck the same tender chord of authenticity by invoking his parental instincts about his own daughters in harm's way. And everyone would have gone on talking about how a veto-proof Senate needs bi-partisan support for health care reform to pass.

(2) Obama departed from his game -- rather than the arbitrage he favors over the triangulations of the Clinton/Bush era, he put himself squarely in the middle -- not as arbitrator but victim. The third-person ID on "any one of us would have been angry" begged a color-based stencil. Yes, racial profiling is a fact of American life. So is pigment justice as the surest race to the bottom of any policy debate on race.

(3) Narrative tells itself -- The race card is runner-up only to the cult of celebrity and sex for marquee media value -- "if you want a crowd, start a fight" [and] keep the camera rolling long enough for the barkers to mount their soap boxes. There's no nuance necessary when the questions are so black and so white. Or are they?

In one corner we have the institutional clout of law enforcement teamed with the sensitivity training of a post white supremacist world view. In the other the venerable brand of glittering brains and policy-speak of towering Harvard backed with every unfinished agenda on the social left that gives voice to the "world's most opinionated zip code." Yes, try undressing those vagaries and then convince the scorekeeper there's a scoreboard big enough to hold all the debating points.

Full disclosure -- Obama and Skip go back together? Well the Cambridge cops should be on a first name basis with the streets they patrol. The block of the reported break-in is lined with the residences of sleep-deprived, prestigous, self-important Harvard professors.

The more substantive misstep to my thinking was Obama's stretch of self-conferring credibility. Here's the line:

"I have also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade - and I mean it."

Without delving into GAO reports, GAAP principles, or lies and damn lies let's look at the face of this: Part of the reason the man is so comfortable in his skin is that he can perform a feat that evades the vanity of elected officials. He can identify himself as a third party -- a major survival skill for anyone needing to function in a leadership role without compromising their own integrity. When Bob Dole referred to himself as Dole it sounded like we weren't going to have Nixon to kick around any longer. When Obama does it we float to the ceiling of the press room and undergo an out-of-body experience.

That's what's so shocking about the "and I mean it" part. That's the kind of defensive posturing I'd expect from a more shrill and less assured pol. It begs the question: what if you don't really mean it. The health care deficit water should be carried more presumably by HHS Secretary Kathy Sebelius or Joe the Biden: "And he means it," might have taken Obama's pledge one step closer to echo chamber gospel. But the 'crats are a squirmy choir regardless of the sheet music or the talking points.

For the good of the country I hope the next time the health care debate is not about Obama that the President doesn't personalize his candor or have those Senate lions let their donor base decide on the compromises that are baked into the final signing of the 2009/10 Universal Health Recovery Act.

On second thought I hope Obama reconsiders and does make the battle about himself. Like Reagan he's more popular than his policies. But no one but himself will be asking to face this kind of crucible; his allies because they believe he's irreplacable and his enemies because he scares them so.

For a punishment-happy republic as ours it is ironic and sobering how little sacrifice we have come to expect from our leaders. But is their cowardice that hard to question in the pursuit of our own narrow interests?

KM is a Process and Not a Destination

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:05:00 +0000

I was visiting with Michael Mufson, a fellow Hampshire College grad who I haven't been in close touch with but always thought of as close-by in terms of cultural artifacts, life views, moral compass, etc. He mentioned how a former Hampshire Drama Professor (and marginal mentor) of his had thrown cold water on the idea that theater students receive any strong vocational backing for their tuition investments. Her point was a numbers game: how many theater majors become full-time actors. Now scale that argument to any creative profession in the age of cost-free content and we know where we stand. All the pithy patter in the world won't keep the lights on without the rationale that we leave more value than we take away.

On one hand it's an open-shut argument and it's a closed loop that predates starving artists. There are word people and numbers people and it's the liberal arts folks who put all their marbles on those graduate programs for crawling back into the job market. The engineers and the number-crunchers? They speak the language of cause-and-effect. Communications schmoomications -- the numbers tell the story.

But not all learning answers to the lessons of self preservation -- regardless of our personal economics. My son, for instance, just completed his second summer of theater camp with the US Performing Arts group out of San Francisco. He spent the entire year in between sessions reliving what a great first experience he had with an eye towards going back. The verdict? The second year eclipsed the first. It's not about boosting his professional prospects for acting. It's not even about the 5:1 girl to guy ratio, proving that the age of alpha males has passed for basking in a harem of girl power. It's not even about the breath of independence he takes in when needing to make spot decisions on his own.

The real power of his theatrical experience is about his belief in himself. His theater experience has combined with his own interests, passions and experiences to form his speaking voice, vocal tenor, dance steps, and non-verbal gestures -- that decoding instrument that gets left out of the receptor kits of so many Aspergers students. The point I was trying to make is that theatrical success is not limited to filling up auditoriums or credits in an actor's casting card. It's about finding the balance between a considered pose and an emotionally-charged script with the structure-resistant transitions we all make to adulthood.

In that version Michael Mufson gets to portray the brilliant director he had the confidence in becoming when I first met him. My son too will now have that chance in large part because of his theatrical training -- regardless of whether he ever "works" in the theater or not.

The same could be said for settling my piece with what Andy Partridge calls "rehearsing for the big, square world." I work as a word guy in an office park cube with the knowledge that my brain is calibrated to a song that few can hear and even fewer can monetize -- hence the cube! However for anyone who hates to search the pattern matching prowess of a solid KM guy delivers immediate payback. That benefit is part of a learning process -- not part of a final outcome, i.e. new customer -- I win! My new boss refers to KM as "a channel." This is enlightened leadership tag for functional support two or more steps removed from closing the next deal that we'll still be needing in the deal after that.

I've noticed that process-centric view of knowledge propagation in some recent SIKM discussions where practitioners were bolting their prior KM successes with more fashionable and established corridors of commerce. Carl Frapaolo and Dan Keldsen of Architected are now fusing their domain expertise with workshops targeted to innovation management. Kate Pugh is leveraging her expertise at knowledge harvesting to the legal community as a dispute mediator.

The central theme from all these examples is this -- us word people should take our natural talents to the next level. That's where theater majors, budding novelists, and knowledge expressionists of all abstractions and stripes can paint the big, square world into a corner we can all meet on.

Measuring the Impact of Thought Pieces

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:40:00 +0000

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.

Gender Specific

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:30:00 +0000

My wife and spent the fourth driving down from Boston to New Bedford for the decidedly low-key alternative-to-Newport folkie fest. There is always something redemptive about a sticker price within reach of those who get their Birkenstocks as knock-offs of high-end flip-flops. I had to squint through the high sun and low clouds to see a single corporate sponsor. I couldn't place any progressive causes piggy-backpacking to the summit trails of a crunchy, retro crusade. I'm not sure whether this was to keep the music pure or keep the marketing budget in line with the low entrance fee.

Still there's something oddly inspired about bringing a group of disconnected dinosaurs like us together to listen intently to words and music. And that's the point! No one was checking in on the half-dozen other glitzier events that they sacrificed for the trend-deaf folkies. And yes the average tent-hopper was white, smokeless, and a peroxide-free fifty plus.

The most interesting of the tents we attended was unified by the theme of songs for and about men. The songwriting panel included the likes of John Gorka, Stephen Fearing, Cliff Eberhardt, and Peter Mulvey. It was curious that with the exception of mock Zeppelin chord progression from Cliff we had to get through half the session before the manly theme wasn't seen through the female lens -- even the jokes. Mulvey recounted how Chris Smither had penned a song for Bonnie Raitt and thanked some woman who covered it at some club he was visiting. The woman, unaware of who the grateful guy was, corrected him. "You didn't write that," she said. "That song was written by some gal named Chris Smither!"

The part I find curious about the need for females to complete male stories is that the reverse is patently untrue. A round-table of women songwriters could go through cycles of sisterhoods, gal pals, and workplace versus homemaker dilemma-setting scenarios and never whiff the scent of a guy, even as a side dish. It reminds me of a recent factoid from Newsweek that talks about life expectancy: smoke and you lose 15 years right off the top. Floss and you gain two. But if you're a woman and you stay married the figure is zero, neutral. The editors chose to leave out the extra years that marriage puts on for men (this blog says it's +5).

One other addendum to this is just how major an entree lesbian folk is to the world of women singer-songwriters. Talk about a world without men. The telling parallel is this -- how many openly gay folkies are we talking about? My dimming memory can produce more right-wing folkies than gay ones.

Earth2100 -- A Pre Mortem

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:57:00 +0000

I've always regarded plausible disaster scenarios with the same blank check that the rubber-necking commuter cashes in at a roadside accordion pile-on.Whether I stared blankly into the infected futures in the fire bursts from 'The War Game' or the stillbirth of the bitten umbilical chord in 'Threads' I've never been able to look away from a fathomable end game on earth.

And while nuclear annihilation was the rockiest slope down the certain doom gateway environmental disasters lulled me into a catatonic fascination in our future blind dates with the destiny we have coming to us. (Gee, that sounds more like Pat Robertson indicting a very different form of denial of service).

Earlier this month ABC News aired Earth2100. The producers played the apocalypse slow dance card, casting climate change in the starring role of why this new century could well prove to be the last one for civilization -- both as we know it and as we would come to accept it as). Most of the push back was that it was too negative to set a plausible series of events in motion. The scenario caved under the weight of too many improbabilities. Staggering to another June 2009 station break didn't help the credulity factor. Whatever happened to a commercial-free peak at unsustainable enterprises?

What spooked me the most was how unspectacular the unraveling was -- no special effects and shock factor inventions like suicidal pacts among rapture-starving fundamentalists or power-mad puppeteers that ready, launch, aim. Most of the drumbeats were ominous for their present day familiarity: pandemics, border riots, coastal flooding, acute water shortages, and endless gas lines? Not exactly "out there" prognostications when conjuring up what an accumulation of earthly debts will do to the worldly aspirations of an overgrown human population.

The most novel accessories to heeded warnings include a splash of bio-engineering to re-crown the soggy ice caps and a fortress of ocean-borne levies to guard New York City against the tidal stampede of runaway sea levels. The machinery jams much like the history we're doomed to repeat from Katrina (FEMA trailers a distant reminder of how good we had it when the century was young). The flooding sea produces the perfect cocktail storm, unleashing the plague to end all body counts. The grid fizzles. Frequencies die. There's no social future left to shape or future to imagine.

For me the most poignant aspect to this was the broadcast date of June 2 -- the birth date of Lucy whose biography spans the final century ahead. She is the tribal elder of 2100 and has a proud personal history that scales her grief to an epic and collapsible dimension that transcends any boundaries still standing. It is also the birth date of my late grandfather Robert Pollan who was born on June 2, 1906. I'm grateful there is something of Popa I still have the opportunity to teach and it's a lesson that can never be over taught and runs the constant risk of being undervalued:

* Treat people as their own person where they make the difference (not their breeding, gonads, hair size, or facial markings).

* Avoid at all cost the exclamatory stain of "you, your, them, or those ... people."

* Use the pattern-matching attributes of grouping humans as a way to show others how they stand out in ways that will help their communities.

These are values that endure any worst case scenario or the perverse fascination with their invention.

Where There's a Wil There's a .Wav

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:36:00 +0000

This just in from the prolific Fab Four archivist Wil Montgomery* of Bobolink Lane in leafy suburban Milwaukee -- a recipe for transferring videos to MP3s. In lay geek terms what kind of transformation are we talking about? Wil is addressing how to make an *.mp3 from a Youtube *.flv file ("flash video) or *.swf file (shockwave file).

The process has all the vicarious thrills of flying the good housekeeping seal over a pirated ship in choppy commercial waters.

Simple:

Right click Internet Explorer Icon

Choose: Internet properties

Select Settings

Select View Files

Click on column to sort by last accessed

There is the last file viewed on Youtube (usually 3-20 MB)

Drag that file to your music folder (if it is not *.flv file type, add that to the end of file name)

Last but not least:

Get a free "FLV file converter" from download.com
Use it on the file to convert to *.avi or *.mpeg
Get a music editor
Strip out the audio ** This happens automatically when file is loaded into to the music editor. Wil endorses Magix Music Editor
Save as *mp3
Transfer to your player

Pictured: Free flv converter

------------------------------------

* Not Wil M. of the Alabama Beekeeepers Association

Calling the Lurkers from Out of the Woodwork

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:46:00 +0000

One of the accepted norms of social media behavior is that the ratio of producers to consumers is roughly in that same ratio as inspiration to sweat (something like 10:1). That means there are lots of folks who read our stuff but don't write back. Perhaps me and my logrolling doesn't earn a place on your own blogroll. But while you're not inspired to engage directly you may well respond in a more passive mode.

A new way to uncover the untold legions of closet taggers is a new gadget called Deliciousify. It activates in the results window by flagging own the number of instances where your blog is worthy of placeholder status. It doesn't give you the actual taggers and you need to drill down in native Delicious to meet your fan base.

Here are a few other means to find folks who connect with your opinions by tagging your posts:

I suppose that the shortest possible answer is Technorati. I've got to say that I'm consistently underwhelmed by its search capabilities and the slop that passes for its index. If you're not vigilant about your ranking your will be yesterday's news regardless of how timeless your views may be.

Actually the inanchor: syntax in Google is pretty exhaustive (unlike Google's reluctance to be a good social media citizen when it comes to supporting any meaningful form of link analysis research). If you enter your handle it looks like this:

inanchor:attspin

The problem is that if your blog is your twitter is your music site is your travel planner is your local business forum handle then you're no further along than a new point of maintenance for managing all your online identities vis-a-vis friendfeed. While its a capable platform for aggregating multiple streams it is also self-referential. You get your facial 'friendeds.' You get your network. But you miss the periphery. Those touch points that are united by the power of an idea, not a location, habit, or common affiliation.

On the aggregate level there many analytic tools that can decipher traffic patterns and run free diagnostics. One useful tool here is XINU Returns which performs a fairly thorough link analysis but nothin' doin' on the passive machine-to-human social media path.

One parting question here: do we engage directly the people our ideas connect to first? I think not. But depending on what else they're linking to you can always add them to your network on Delicious.

The Mets Warp Inside Citi Field Corp

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:40:00 +0000

At no point last week in my first visit to Citi Field did I connect to being a Met fan or being at a Met game. Based on the interchangable and coloreless feel of the place my Met host Garo and I boarded the 7 Train secure in the knowledge that unlike its naming rights-of-way this 47 year-old franchise is not too big not to fail.

Citi Field feels less like the new home of the Mets and more like a vist to a retro ballpark chain. You see it in the Disneyesque Main Street USA feel. The lighting is arranged in a bulb-like bouquet -- how quaint. How inappropriate. The homage to Jackie Robinson is fine as a traveling exhibit -- but not as a Met shrine. Considering the scale of his achievement it deserves a full entourage before coming to rest in Cooperstown, not Flushing.

Bal and I've actually visited two retro ballpark branches together --both which felt a lot more respectable and unique than this one (Camden Yards in '92 and PacBell in '99). Canuck praises Safeco and new Tiger Stadium for their local views both of the city and pride in their teams reminders. But if you ever believed in the "Orange and Blue" you can terminate this belief at the next Citi ATM.

I'm not nostalgic for Shea -- nothing that transparently reactive. But the pump-me-ups were complete artifice. And I'm lovesick mad for the community of Met legends that have been banished to the right field gate. Seaver, Piazza, Hernandez, etal. are not even in the building. They inhabit banners that suggest a passing reference to the backfold of an old game program:

National League Stars Coming Soon to Shea
-- but that means McCovey, Gibson, Aaron and Rose -- not the M-E-T-S Mets. Not the ways of Shea, indeed. Also, the end of the horseshoe design scheme brings two unwelcome changes:

1) You can't see out. There's no skyline. There's no bay. There's not even the Flushing junk yards to remind us of the ash heep that sprang into Phoenix-like action when the original fairgrounds were razed.

2) The PA announcements have the power to curb all spectator conversation like ... being indoors. Remember when we lamented the LaGuardia flyovers as rally deadoners? Well the park's been re-routed but there are no rallies left to deaden. Really.

The one fresh departure from symetrical stupor is an inverted richochet inducement in right field. If any live ball caught that carom, any self-respecting pinball point system would say 'game over.' Yes it's self-conscious. But a quirk is still a quirk no matter how storied the franchise or fertile the benefactors of new ballparks. No one's turning pre-retro any time soon.

At least not until the prequel but whose narrative will that be? Surely not the franchise I once knew.

The Clarifying Power of Verbs

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:49:00 +0000

I notice that whenever I give my S-Y-N-C talk the note-takers reach for their pens when the discussion comes to verbs. The action-based taxonomy that I advocate is a simple and effective way to anticipate (and eliminate) some common barriers to enterprise architecture before we crash into them:

* Hair-splitting -- The chances for semantic quibbling over what to call stuff are greatly reduced when things become actions. There are many fewer ways of describing a predicate than a subject. The likelihood for shared agreements increases.

* User-centric -- Instead of fighting over what to call things an action-based taxonomy helps us agree on how and why our customers draw on our content supply.

* Reporting -- You can't plot the outcomes you're supporting (new IP, project requirements, business development) without building an architecture atop the actions needed to trigger those developments.

* 80/20 Rule -- If every 80/20 rule lined up in single formation they would all be parading to the battle hymn of mother necessity; that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In our marching orders action is the most telling of all metadata elements because it reveals those deepest and fleeting mysteries of all uncharted KM waters -- who wrote this sucker and who was their intended audience? Figure out that side of the shipping manifesto and: (1) you're 80% of the way from content supply to knowledge demand; and (2) your cargo gets unpacked. Why? Because it has an identity that speaks to users.

* Disambiguation -- Probably there is no greater praise for verbs than giving some long-delayed respect they deserve for disambiguation. Next time you hear yourself mutter: "use it in a sentence" tell me the word that drives you to the home of understanding isn't a verb. And while it may be their job that's no reason to overlook their vast powers of clarification.

Enterprise Search Plummet

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:28:00 +0000

I take no satisfaction to in repeating back what one CEO from an Israeli startup told me but I had to agree: "complete meltdown."

He was referring to the lack of imagination, attendees, and reasons for showing up at Information Today's Enterprise Search Summit. Much of the dour story is told through realities that no event planner can possibly correct. I saw the low numbers at the Boston Gilbane show last December and that was sobering. Still given the strong concentration of media/finance/law/consulting communities in and around NYC I thought enough of a core group existed to attract the vendors and analysts -- maybe even some splashy announcements.

Nothin' doin'. No luminaries -- The Steve Arnolds, Sue Feldmans, Oz Benjamins -- all no shows. Even the vendor speakers seemed in a hurry to finish their sessions so that we'd have more time to mix. Precious little was said or speculated on concerning FAST and its place in the Microsoft search arsenal. Even less was offered in terms of SharePoint customizations, 3rd party tools, and what's worth planning for in the new release.

As an Information Today subscriber, contributor and speaker I have no incentive to trash their earnest efforts to stage an influential and instructive conference. It's equally true that I did get value from going. Even in a lean year I benefitted much from exposure to Lou Rosenfeld who I had interviewed but never seen shine in a conference setting. One of the keynoters, a guy named Jared Spool gave a spot-on repudiation to the vendors; that the search bar is not the common ally of the uninformed masses but actually a tool of last resort. The guy I was teamed with on the interface track, John Ferrara, laid out an astute and telling case for the suggest function.

That said perhaps it's time to rethink why we used to come each year. Maybe its time to consider how those reasons might be wearing thin while others that go begging could be answered in future forums?

For starters there's very little give-and-take between attendees in terms of first-hand feedback on their specific deployments. Why not an open mic night version for info-geeks? We could kick the vendors out (or they could forget booth-sitting and pay the sponsor for eavesdropping privileges.

Another improvement would be to attempt some prototyping among breakout groups that try to advocate on behalf of their mock project. Another team could shoot it down on numerous grounds and both teams could learn a thing or two about implementation politics that are not so obvious when sequestered behind your own firewall. Dave Snowden does a far better job of describing and staging this exercise in the Art of Ritual Dissent.

Finally if I put on my dust-laden vendor cap I can imagine how these gatherings could be used to test drive my MRD requirements: what user pains are consensus-forming and which ones only apply to fringe customers? Where should I aim my priorities for upcoming releases? A face-to-face test lab might do the trick.