I agree with the enthusiasts – form factor is all-important

For this reason I believe a netbook is superior when veging out in front of the tele – after all, I don’t hold the remote continuously while watching a programme so why should I have to hold a computer to surf the web?

Ok 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.

I get over the former as SO is a lightning quick method of accessing really knowledgeable people on demand – but I had to endure a case of the later a while back when someone obviously thought the answer to the question I asked was too blase and proceded to provide a solution for a completely separate issue. And this despite me explaining exactly why I didn’t want his solution in the preamble. So I went and got a workable answer myself, posted it and accepted it as the solution. Job done.

Except this caused numbnuts to vote down my answer without explanation. So I voted his down, and told him why. Despite this, he questioned why I’d want to know what I wanted to know in the first place and voted down the question. It was at that moment that I realised SO, while largely self-moderating, is still missing the last 20%^TM required to remove the clinically insane from the process. It gives me no pleasure to disclose the most efficient solution currently is to multiply your web leverage in traditional fashion; create multiple accounts and hit back with a bewildering array of counter-comments and down votes…

It is embarrassing though when apparently throwaway questions asked on your secondary accounts are rated higher than your allegedly thought-provoking and succinct real persona *whistles*

In true Bileblog style, programmers appear to be sarky contemptible bastards who like nothing more than jumping on the inaccuracies of accepted thought; hence phrasing a question along the lines of ‘My colleague says x is no longer a good way to do things…’ will likely stir the hornet’s nest of pedantry as each contributor seeks to provide a more arcane answer as to why x sucks than the previous response. Recurse until someone mentions lambda.

Half 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.

Of course the same old predictable new media rubbish was trotted out the next day. Sky Sports News ran with the facebook group, the Guardian ran with the usual ‘Twittersphere exposes FIFA duplicity’ bollocks and generally everything was very ‘the power of the web this’, ‘online social network that’.

And then… nothing happened. The irate fans presumably sobered up and went back to whatever they were doing had the South not qualified and the ludicrous calls from the FAI and bandwagon jumping politicians had officially fallen on deaf ears at FIFA.

This left the organiser of the original page on Facebook – by this stage 400k strong – to lead a merry band of 150 people with nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon to the French Embassy in Dublin. Ably assisted by Dustin the Turkey.

I guess I’m not doing a complete hatchet job on online campaigning here. There is a kind of potential value in online networks, but in each case until a method is found to unlock it, it remains just that – potential. After all the hullabaloo generated in the RoI football case a conversion rate of just .04% (with some generous rounding on my part) to partake in some form of action highlights what surely is the case for a majority of internet based issues – that they struggle to make the leap into anything meaningful in the physical world.

Certainly in PR terms it has a discrete value – albeit one that is more difficult to control. By saturday, realtime opinion regarding the protest march – the same medium that had elevated the issue to frontpage news only two days before – had largely reduced it to a laughing stock:

try living in Ireland – there’s a march on the French Embassy today. In this weather. I’m hoping all the idiots drown.
SpodoKomodo twitter update

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.

Unfortunately there has already been what I would call a serious breach of both the twitter and facebook reason d’etre – communication amongst the network. Check out this post from back in 2007 for a critique of what makes a good facebook app – and this from a marketeer of all things. Now fast forward to today’s Twitter and check out one of the trending topics – ‘pirates’. Not because of the ongoing web meme – no this Pirates refers to Zynga’s social network app available on FB & MySpace.

The lead graphic shows the gorey details – users are now encouraged to cross post their in-game achievements onto their twitter accounts. And because a bazillion of us play these games (& are willing to do anything to get special items, including filling out marketing forms on anything from insurance to mobile phones) this created enough buzz through either direct postings or the predictable but similarly idiotic “why is pirates trending?” postings now proping up numerous worthless ‘trends’ on Twitter these days.

But the value of trending topics once they have got onto the user’s twitter homepage is for another day. As is the dubious lengths some social gaming apps will go to in supplying advert networks with Facebook user data. These automated updates from gaming platforms need to be nipped in the bud right now.

One such tweet on the left here. When I think of why I have a Twitter account – to connect with interesting individuals whom I have nor might ever physically meet and to follow breaking news in near-realtime – this guff frankly does not appeal to me. It’s polluting twitter no doubt about it. As you can see Zynga have created their own special client to deliver inane bs direct to your homepage.

Personally I have a policy of immediately unfollowing anyone who feels it necessary to add such content to their account. Dealing with manual spam especially connected around trending topics is a more nuanced problem.

But mass auto distribution by gaming platforms can be nipped in the bud right now.

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…

 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.

 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.

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.

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?