Archive for the 'information media' Category

The StackOverflow Rant

Published at 1 December 2009 in Tech Labours, cool, information media and web. 0 Comments

I should probably open my commentary on the SO community with a more wide-ranging piece on the effectiveness of self-moderation and social badge collecting in rapidly scaling a web community but hopefully by dumping this the second opinion will be more insightful whenever that may be.

forum junkieOk so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.

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The Emperor Has No Clothes

Published at 23 November 2009 in Facebook, delusion of crowds and information media. 0 Comments

Slacktivism has been exposed as a joke.

Angry MobHalf way through last week a nation erupted; the Republic of Ireland football team crashed out of the World Cup at the hand of Gaul, that of a certain Thierry Henry. A Facebook group was established. It took on something of a life of it’s own – over 300k users inside the first 24 hours.

“Something has to be done”.

FIFA made no mention of the incident in their official match report. It was edited several times, each time the Magnum PIs on Twitter reporting to the world the latest breach of instant populist moral values and punch-drunk notions of democracy. Avatars may not have been coloured green, but the online social network air was turning a particularly dark shade of blue and the feedback loop of increasingly agitated noise fed into itself, reaching a deafening cresendo online while steadily losing touch with reality.
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Indy Gaming & Destroying a Platform

Published at 11 July 2009 in Tech Labours, gaming and information media. 0 Comments

Zynga Twitter integration: Why on Earth?This post started off as a comparison of two of the most prominent methods of indy game distribution on the web today – app stores & social networks – but has morphed into something of a warning shot to platforms who allow their open networks to be ridden roughshot over by games ruthlessly seeking distribution above all else.

I had hoped to discuss some numbers taking both leading Facebook & App Store games as a jumping off point. But one look at my Twitter homepage this morning aroused some angst.

To their credit the realtime stream networks have opened up their far-reaching update networks to 3rd party developers without holding much back. Photos on facebook and throttling search on twitter are by and large minor holdups which would presumably have grave performance issues to overcome first anyway.

But this power in the hands of developers doesn’t come without responsibilities.

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Wave Theory

Published at 29 May 2009 in Google, information media and web. 0 Comments

Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.

This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP

On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.

It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.

First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…

Insight From the Lesser Travelled World

Published at 8 January 2009 in Backcountry and information media. 0 Comments

Sometimes a breath of fresh air comes from a source so unexpected it really does astound.  Yet it is a depressing wonder why something so simple and honest cannot emanate from the West?

 But there it is.  An Afghan blog (sadly not updated since ‘07) concentrating on issues of Herat and it’s hinterland – publishes reports submitted from various news agencies around the country.  What I am so impressed by is the simple addition of a ‘description of source’ footnote to the bottom of any external piece.  Contrast that with Western media treatment of current hot potato the Gaza Strip, where any random eye-witness appears to be taken at face value and any opinion an authoritive one.

[Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto -- Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans. The agency used to have good contacts with Taliban leadership; however, since the fall of the Taliban regime, it now describes itself as independent and self-financing. OSC IAP20071006950019 Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto 1916 GMT 06 Oct 07]

By my reckoning the BBC would do well to provide such explanatory warning notes with a good proportion of it’s foreign correspondents!  Tribal Afghanistan is a complex society whose divisions at first seem obvious but as more is learned what was black & white becomes ever greyer, something we have a taste for in NI too.  At least some of their press seem to know how to see the wood from the trees.

what is blogging?

Published at 3 November 2008 in information media and web. 0 Comments

This Wired article reminded me of a rant I saved as a draft a while back lamenting the inability of traditional media to get the difference between blogging & writing a one-way diary or news channel.  What the corporates and media online today call blogging is really a news page that comes with an rss feed.  The richness of conversation and interaction largely enabled by blogging features such as trackbacks, etc is lost as generally they are not supported by those merely using blogging as a buzzword to show they are hip with the internets.  Even Wired refuses to support trackback.

 The flip side is obviously they do not want to fall victim to the myraid of spamsters using blog posts or comments as the new medium of choice.  But between them they are sapping the web of an important part of it’s intrinsic value.

Further on the trend following thing

Published at 9 July 2008 in information media, machine learning and newsflow. 1 Comment

Yesterday I blogged about the use of online news aggregators such as Google News to map trends. Further surfing on the topic yielded the current state of the art in such aggregators – Silobreaker is at it’s most basic another news aggregator. But it’s added value lies in it’s ability to analyse, group & visualise related news stories in a way much more intelligent than the likes of Google’s related story results.

For an example of how this fits in with my idea of a trend alerting system, see one of it’s bespoke topics – profit warnings. Historic data seems to back anything up to a year, and what Silobreaker calls a ‘360 degree’ view, you get quotes, blogs, media trends as well as the news. The trends graph can be used to compare the relative media interest in news subjects, or ‘entities’ – a welcome nod in the direction of the Semantic Web there, with users having the ability to add entities not already recognised.

Further on the Semantic theme there is a network function that produces graphs of related entities. The obligatory news to map function is also available, and extremely useful it is too – I just learned of the US airstrikes against Al Qaeda on Somali soil because of it. As with the trend function, a time range can be specified.

There are always room for improvements on machine learning, and Silobreaker is no different – the above US airstrike news item was listed as of Baghdad origin, which in itself seemed fine as source of the article was a UPI journalist in Baghdad, but there was no mention of the Somali bombing run over Somalia itself on the world map.

Registering gives you the ability to personalise among other things your list of news sources. I guess what I’m saying from all this is that Silobreaker does much of the heavy lifting I’d envisage a financial trend forecasting tool to do. What now is needed is an API to access this analysis – something I’d be hopeful for, considering their background in ‘open source’ intelligence.

Who to trust?

Published at 16 June 2008 in information media and international. 0 Comments

This is the Wikipedia generation. Peer information is often considered more reliable and trustworthy than the top-down message. It’s far from wishful thinking: studies showed that the survivors of the World Trade Center tended to be the ones who relied on peer rather than official information. It may be anathema to the cult of the imperial leader in politics or the boardrooms of media corporations, but it is the future.

source: ft.com [sub required]

Disregarding the horrendous ‘Wikipedia generation’ coining attempt, I was struck by how much the p2p concept has pervaded into the mainstream.  I had a look around the net on this topic, but nothing really worthwhile at first glance.  Sure, there’s observations regarding the crowd-source type news networks built up around digg, the mobile phone to net video sites.  These though chiefly focus on information distribution, not necessarily information quality and subsequently it’s trustworthiness (particularly in my experience of Digg anyway, but that’s an aside).

The world-wide ridiculing of the current US president is surely the best example of this challenge to supposed superiors.  Cynicism in the system is pretty much ingrained these days – or maybe a new hierarchy of trust is replacing the old political one, the question then is what the new one consists of.  If it is largely a movement to a kind of meritocratic new media – p2p information still requires publication after all – does it mean we get International subject experts or cross-border idealism?  Is it really merit, or simply a self-fulfilling meme galvanised by a crowd willing to act as sheep?