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Experiments in Corporate Intelligence: SunMeme

Sun Microsystems is if not unique then at least rare in the robustness of its internal blogging community, and the willingness of the corporate legal department to make that community public. Indeed, Sun has almost 5000 publicly readable blogs - from the CEO to the developers in the trenches, from all around the world.

I think its great - I’ve been a long term advocate of internal blogging and the knowledge sharing and growth spurs. There’s more though: a corporate blog community as robust as Sun’s presents a great opportunity for aggregation and memetic analysis: so, I copied and pasted TechWatching onto SunMeme.com and pointed the system to Sun’s blogosphere and let it off its leash.

So far its tracking 683 Sun blogs, of which its actively processing stories from the 182 most active. From what I can tell, it starting to produce some good output - story clusters building around the new UltraSparc processor, for instance, or a NetBeans talk that took place in SecondLife.

There are challenges in tackling the Sun blogosphere too, however; keyword analysis is difficult as some keywords (”java”) are omnipresent, and can’t be used to link together stories. I’m convinced that there’s workarounds though, and the deeper SunMeme gets into the Sun blogosphere, the better the output is looking.

Anyway, enjoy. And if you work at Sun, please feel free to share your thoughts!

memetrackers, sun sunmeme

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Verified by who??! A letter to VISA.

Dear Visa,

Over the last few days I’ve spent many frustrating hours trying to book an AirAsia ticket over an hsdpa connection from a sandy tropical island. Not fun. Once the lethargic AirAsia site actually allowed me to book a ticket, the payment process was interrupted by something called “Verified by Visa” - a mysterious page at “securesite.com” that demanded that I register for the service, re-entering all of my contact info, showing my credit card details, etc. I have a few problems with this:

1. The service died halfway through my “registration” leaving me at a blank screen with nowhere to go. No idea if the transaction went through and whether I had seats booked or not. I ended phoning from the mainland to find out.
2. SecureSite.com?? I don’t know securesite.com from a hole in the ground. From my standpoint, all I’ve done is given yet another third party site all of my credit card details. Oh - I should trust it because there are Visa jpgs all over the place? Perhaps not.
3. I can just imagine the dismal marketing meeting the resulted in the decision to use “securesite.com.”
4. There’s no way to opt out of securesite.com or the Verified by Visa program that I could see.

So, in a nutshell, Visa’s program to make me feel safe (a) killed my transaction, (b) did so in a way that required phone calls to fix, and (c) made me feel less secure by dumping all of my info to yet another site that I don’t trust. Dear Visa: Please shut down the program until its ready for public use.

security visa

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State of the Web: Bangladesh

I recently spent six weeks volunteering in the depths of rural Bangladesh. During that time, I lived in a town of 50,000 people (Rayenda) – of which about 30% had electricity (which went out for hours at a time, several times a day), few had running water, nobody had a landline, and the only car in the town was owned by a western NGO. I counted a total of 5 computers in the town, and not many more televisions or radios.

The only technological shining star in Bangladesh is the cellphone. While penetration is still relatively low, probably 15 – 20% of the people in rural Bangladesh had cellphones (a somewhat higher proportion in urban areas). Inexpensive Nokia phones are if not affordable, at least within reach for many of the poor via installment plans. Airtime and text messages are ridiculously cheap too: fractions of a cent. Its the archetypal leapfrog example: towns and people who’ve never had access to communications beyond word of mouth now have access to a cutting edge GSM cell network.

Shocking fact: cell coverage in Bangladesh is 100% - the laser-flat topography and ubiquitous towers mean that you can talk and text literally anywhere in the country, however ridiculously remote it may seem. Another interesting thing is that a cottage industry of charging stations has sprung up in villages with electricity or generators, allowing people from un-electrified areas to sit and enjoy tea or dinner while their phone is charged.

Through-out the country there is little knowledge of the web, and even less reason to acquire such knowledge. In rural areas, cellphones are the sum total of electronic interaction for the average person. Most people had not heard of the internet or email (or ATM’s, modern banking infrastructure, or any of the electronic services we take for granted), and the few who had had only sporadic and slow access. In urban areas awareness of the net/email/etc. was much higher, but access is limited. Because no Bangladeshi services (airlines, newspapers, banks, anything) have online components, there’s little reason to make the internet a part of day-to-day life either.

For as long as I can recall the western world has been maundering on about the mobile web and the shape it will take. While some countries (Korea, Japan) have started down the path of mobile payments and entertainment (dmb, etc.), I think that it is countries like Bangladesh who will truly point the way to the next generation of online, mobile targeted services. Consider:

1. There’s no legacy systems of sunk investment to slow the purchase or development and deployment of new systems.
2. There’s no interface expectations: well we who are used to the full internet find WAP browsers and clipped pages to be a frustrating exercise, its all net new and value added to the people of Bangladesh.
3. It makes financial sense for Bangla businesses to extend themselves via mobile and skip the bricks and mortar phase entirely (banks provide a good example here).
4. There’s plenty of resources (coders) available just over the border in India to bring services into existence.
5. The economics of micropayments for mobile services make sense in Bangladesh where (a) the population is large (150M) and concentrated in a geographically limited area that takes little infrastructure to service, and (b) the people are conceptually acquainted with micropayments from the tariffs that they encounter during their day-to-day lives.

Anyway – that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a new world of millions of web users coming that will have never known the “web” - no browsers, no email, no rss – just a 1 inch Nokia screen. Who’s positioned to profit from this surge? How can you or your business be a part of it?

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Video of our stint in Bangladesh

From extraordinary photographer Jeff Johns in Los Angeles, who came out to Bangladesh for his two weeks of vacation to help out:

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Follow me through Asia on Twitter

I’m finding Twitter to be alarmingly useful for quick posts from the road or my phone, so you’ll see my Twitter volume increase, and (as you may have noticed!) my TechFold blog be updated intermittently (apologies).

Anyway, you can follow me on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/dreadsword
or read our travel blog: http://venturefar.wordpress.com
and follow our pics: http://flickr.com/photos/dreadsword

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TechWatching.com v1.5 is Live

I mentioned earlier that I might spin off my relevance algorithm as a standalone site - which I’ve now gone ahead and done at TechWatching.com. TechWatching is a blog/news aggregator that competes squarely with TechMeme.

TW is divided into 4 sections:

1. Hot Topics: TW maintains a keyword index of the blogs it follows. When a keyword shows up more frequently than average, it can be promoted to a Hot Topic - in which case it will show up at the top of the page with closely related keywords and relevant stories.
2. New Stories: Immediately under the Hot Topics resides “new stories” - stories that are getting attention in the tech blogosphere, but that don’t fit into a specific Hot Topic. This area is analogous to the TechMeme presentation.
3. Below the Fold: Under New Stories resides BTF: Stories that have fallen out of the New Stories area because they are aging and haven’t gotten enough momentum behind them to stay “new” or to be promoted to a Hot Topic.
4. Must Read: The right-hand column contains a list of the most-clicked on stories of the last 24 hours, collected from the site and RSS readers. Presumably lots of people are reading these - and thus, so should you.

That’s it in a nutshell. Its only refreshing hourly right now, but I’ll be ramping up the rate tonite.

Below is a screenshot, or click over to http://techwatching.com to see the real thing. Feedback is welcome and appreciated!

aggregators, blogs, techmeme techwatching

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My spare time TechMeme competitor

I have a rudimentary knowledge of a lot of things: statistics, programming theory, php, mysql, consumer behaviour, and so on. Individually, I’m an expert in none, and could not do any professionally to save my life. Taken as a package though, I know just enough info about just enough disciplines to have a little bit of fun.

In that vein, over the last week, while recovering from a flu/cold/lackofsleep, I glued together a clunky TechMeme competitor as a conceptual exercise for myself to see if I could apply the bits and pieces that I know to generate relevant results.

You can see the system’s (live) output here: http://hddb.net/techstream_index.html

(hddb.net is a different venture of mine, and a convenient development box)
(”techstream” is just my internal development prefix, not branding)

It refreshes every half hour, and as of right now, is actively following 167 blogs in the technology sector. It uses MagpieRSS to cache and check feeds, so hopefully if you’re on the list you’re not seeing weird spikes from hddb.net.

Once it picks up your post, it does a bunch of brute force, ugly stuff to it to try and place it in a larger context. It looks for other posts that yours links to, and other posts that link to yours. It splits up your post title into tags, and searches for other posts that share common tags. When all is said and done, it stitches together tag relevance, links to and from, how long the post has been kicking around, click-through popularity, etc, and through magic that I can’t even really follow any more, its spits out the output that you see.

The algorithm takes about a minute to run during low post volume times (like Sunday evenings), and swells to up to 5 minutes when the blogosphere is cooking.

The result? Not bad, IMHO. Its not as balanced as TechMeme, in that hot items will cling to the top of the page for longer than they should. The page is also longer than it should be. It also doesn’t have the breadth of TechMeme - I imagine Gabe’s algorithm is following more that 167 posts. I’m also manually adding feeds - one of TechMeme’s greatest strengths is that it (I think) picks up new blogs to follow automatically, based on link volumes that it sees. I’d like to get there eventually. I’m also missing any RSS output - there’s nothing to subscribe to yet, and I’m not even sure what form such a subscription would take (I’ve never really followed TechMeme’s bulk feed output).

Anyway, enjoy. Your thoughts/comments/etc. are welcome. If you’d like your blog added to the index, let me know.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs techmeme

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Outlook Policies

This is a question that I’m investigating that I could use your help for.

I’m trying to find out if its possible to force Outlook to use a specific email template; the twist is an enterprise setting: I need to do this across 3000 desktop Outlook installations, and centrally administer the template. The goal is to get an entire company communicating in a visually consistent, professional fashion.

So - does anyone know? Does MS have an application-level policy system that could be used to do this? Or is there another approach?

Also: I’ve posted this same question to Yahoo Answers to see how well that service works for a relatively technical query.

email, outlook, templates, yahoo! yahoo+answers

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I’m Back and Busy

I’m back from a fantastic 10 day roadtrip from Winnipeg, to Calgary, to Banff, then Jasper, and back to Winnipeg. Spectacular scenery, great multi-day backcountry treks, killer mountainbiking around Jasper - good times all around.

Posting is going to be light for a few days, however, as I catch up with things, and learn how to transition a custom built content site to Wordpress - stay tuned for an article series on that.

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On the Road Again

Off for summer vacation - back by July 11! In the meantime, I hope everyone has a great Canada Day, July Long, or whatever, and a nice couple of weeks.

This blog is going to be pretty quiet ’till the 11th - I don’t have any expectation of internet access in the backcountry trails and campgrounds we’ll be frequenting, and I’m not even bringing a laptop on this trip - so if I don’t reply to your comment or respond to your email, don’t take it personally -I’ll be on it as soon as I’m back!

Happy trails,
–R

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